The Filmmaker's Contract

Peter Greenaway is a successful painter, and a leading writer and director of independent British films. His approach to filmmaking owes much to the influence of European films produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s, “probably focused most on Antonioni, Pasolini, Godard and Resnais,” whose films he watched as soon as they opened in England. ¹ His early experiences in the distribution department of the British Film Institute (BFI) and as an editor for the Central Office of Information (COI) were also significant in broadening his awareness of the possibilities of cinema, ² although as Amy Lawrence states, some of his early short films were “virtual parodies of the kind of work done at the COI,” owing to “a growing disillusionment with the concept of ‘documentary truth.’” ³ Greenaway’s first funded pictures, A Walk through H and Vertical Features Remake (both 1978, backed by the BFI and the Arts Council, respectively), were produced toward the end of his time at the COI, and they laid the foundations for what is probably his most prolific and popular period of filmmaking.