SOURCE: Greenaway, Peter, and Ruth Perlmutter. “Peter Greenaway: An Inter-Review.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities (winter 1989): 56–63.

In the following interview, Greenaway discusses his filmmaking techniques and the place of cinema in the world of art.

In his new film Drowning by Numbers, Peter Greenaway resumes the preoccupations of his previous films that often earned him accusations of mannerism, elitism, and intellectual exhibitionism. As in his earlier feature films, The Falls (1980), The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), A Zed and Two Noughts (1986), and The Belly of an Architect (1987), Greenaway shows an extraordinary ability to orchestrate multiple discourses and modes—fantasy, painting traditions, British history—and an English propensity to play with language.

Greenaway's work constitutes a major contribution to his country's resurgent film industry. Often sponsored by the British Film Institute and Channel Four BBC-TV, British filmmakers have been seeking new forms of cinematic expression—from feminist-oriented films by...