Peter Greenaway's most important films

"A film must separate itself from the camera if it wants to liberate itself from slavery," Greenaway once said in a statement that was as bewildering as it was typical for him. After all, he did accomplish some unusual things in his artistic career — except one thing, and that was a particular film with which the masses could have identified on a permanent basis.

After starting out with several experimental short films and the three-hour avant-garde film "The Fall" (1980), Peter Greenaway achieved his breakthrough with "The Draughtsman's Contract" (1982). The movie that became an immediate box office hit established Greenaway as an unconventional director who was courageous enough to distance himself from the mainstream.

Greenaway's second movie also received a lot of attention. In "A Zed & Two Noughts" (1985), he confronted viewers with a story that appeared conventional — but only on the surface. After their wives get killed in an accident, two brothers explore the course of the world. Hidden behind the plot of the movie is a game with numbers, figures and letters.

One year later, the director amazed his audiences with a film that was more amenable to viewers than they would have expected from him. In "The Belly of an Architect," Brian Dennehy stars as an architect whose attempts to organize an exhibition in Rome are hampered by cancer. The movie was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, where viewers were surprised to discover a deeply emotional story.

The world's most important film festival also saw the premiere of Greenaway's "Drowning by Numbers" (1988). The movie, both ironic and serene, tells the story of three women — a mother, her daughter and her granddaughter — who conspire with a coroner in order to assassinate their husbands. The film comes across as a game with absurd, comical and enigmatic motives.

With his fifth movie, "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover," Peter Greenaway hit the peak of his career. Helen Mirren plays the wife of a criminal restaurant owner in the film that intermingles sexuality and cannibalism in beautifully constructed images. Not surprisingly, it was considered a scandal by quite a few viewers.

Sooner or later, British filmmakers can be expected to turn to Shakespeare — and not even Peter Greenaway was an exception to this unwritten rule. In 1991, he produced "Prospero's Books," a film adaptation of the Shakespeare drama "The Tempest" — a very free adaptation. At the same time, Greenaway started to experiment with new film techniques.

Greenaway's films were never easy to grasp for mainstream audiences. But in the 1990s, they became even more intellectualized and sophomoric. "The Baby of Macon" (1993) gives proof of Greenaway's tendency to see film mainly as a playground for his technical experiments, and as a platform for expressing his world views.

Peter Greenaway's films of those years certainly posed difficult challenges to the viewers. That also holds true for "The Pillow Book" (1996) focusing on a significant work of classical Japanese literature with the same title. It was written by Sei Shonagon approximately one thousand years ago.

Greenaway increasingly lost interest in film. "Film is dying, both in a social and technical sense," he stated, prognosticating the very end of the medium. As a trained artist, he turned to multimedia projects like "The Tulse Luper Suitcases" (2002) which combined film and television, video and art installation.

From then on, Greenaway busied himself with other art genres. The 45-minute film installation "Leonardo's Last Supper" (2011) was intended as an homage to the Italian Renaissance and Leonardo da Vinci. Although some film elements came into play, the work was predominantly a complete work of art produced by a globally active artist.

It turned out that Greenaway wasn't capable of living without film. In 2015, he presented "Eisenstein in Guanajuato" at the Berlin Film Festival competition. The movie tells the story of Russian film pioneer Sergei M. Eisenstein, who made Mexico his home in the early 1930s. Greenaway did, however, remain true to his principles in that the film is anything but conventional.