SOURCE: Greenaway, Peter, and Hugh Aldersey-Williams. “Peter Greenaway: Against the Tyranny of Cinema.” Graphis, no. 2 (March 2000): 96–104.

In the following interview, Greenaway discusses what he sees as the four “tyrannies of cinema”—the text, the actors, the camera, and the frame.

Peter Greenaway's work typically provokes mainstream critics into revealing their cozy preference for all films to be essentially the same: “dramatic” stories, told in dialogue form, with famous actors playing clear roles. Greenaway sees different potentials. His films for the cinema and television, helped in recent years by the prolific use of digital media technology, achieve a density of visual imagery that can only invite comparisons with painting. This richness allows him to construct films that do not rely on actor-led drama, but instead work with ideas of symmetry and number, the solving of puzzles, the reading of lists—games that would be impossibly bookish on the silver...