ABSTRACT
The Tulse Luper Suitcases project, which ran at full throttle from 2003 to 2005, is a lesser-known transmedial enterprise than most, due in part to its intrinsic characteristics and the concomitant nature of its authorship. Conceived by the art house film director and Welsh artist Peter Greenaway, it was always meant to be a multitudinous outlet for his work across a profusion of media channels. In 1997, long before Henry Jenkins’s theory of media convergence and transmedia storytelling, Greenaway stated that he wanted to reach other audiences on several media (namely the internet) by making a project with works that could operate autonomously but also interact in crossover situations. This ambitious project, which spells transmediality avant la lettre ended up being composed of only part of the intended material, but it still included five films (among them a trilogy, that here goes by the abridged subtitles Part I, Part II, Part III ), original books, a computer game and many webpages. Other materials were added over the years, not part of the original structure but complying with the overall intent of dissemination in the most diverse media possible: more books, art installations and exhibitions, theatrical plays and VJ performances. Using Henry Jenkins’s two necessary conditions for the production of “good” transmedia storytelling – world building and seriality – I want to give this project its long overdue accolade. Yet, the real importance of this project for transmedia storytelling is to be found less in its chronological precedency over others than in its art house status, which stands in contradiction to what both Henry Jenkins and Marie-Laure Ryan claim about such (blockbuster) projects and their commercial orientation. Indeed, Greenaway’s transmedia project belongs, explicitly, to the “artistic” variety that Ryan considers non-existent in practice. The Tulse Luper Suitcases, while obeying the condition of repetition with variation, which calls both for the constant resurfacing of some core narrative elements and the existence of narrative gaps, is a perfect example of a top-down transmedia storytelling project, attributable to a single creative personality. It exemplifies this so well that I contend the most effective operation of The Tulse Luper Suitcases project is the successful marketing of Greenaway’s authoritative voice, his own artistic persona spread over his own multifaceted artistic oeuvre. Regardless of the project’s point of entry, the users’ efforts always lead them to Greenaway, in a centrifugal manner.
