"Over the last fifty years I have gathered together my short stories. They are invariably considerations of fascinations that never found a home elsewhere.
They were often written as provocations or possibilities for unmade films, unfinished films, ideas for paintings, for theatre, for exhibitions – or simply contemplations in their own right. Since the earliest days of my filmmaking, I wrote such short stories, indeed very short stories: sometimes two or three sentences, perhaps a paragraph.
There are now close to a thousand stories, and I have the distinct sense they will not stop coming. Some found their way into my early short films – stories spoken directly to the camera in H is for House and Vertical Features Remake – and sometimes they provided the very architecture of a film, as in Dear Phone.
They also spill, extravagantly, into the encyclopaedic three hours of The Falls.
Over time, the stories have multiplied, touching on almost everything that occupies me. Certain subjects return insistently: painters and paintings, birds and natural history, anatomy, Rome and the Romans, the Netherlands and the Dutch. Darwin, Rembrandt, and Henry VIII reoccur. And stories about stories are endless. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover was built on the courses of a dinner, while another script imagines an old man writing a hundred stories about the towers of a city – a structure that allows me to speak of death, loss, human hubris, ageing, mortality, and euthanasia.
Whether this will ever find its way into film remains uncertain.
Together with the artist, painter, and illustrator Stefano Bessoni, we present a collection of my stories accompanied by his drawings.
And so, we have begun."
Peter Greenaway
Stefano Bessoni (born 1965 in Rome) is an Italian filmmaker, writer, illustrator, and stop-motion animator. His work is driven by a passion for entomology, anatomy, fairy tales, and the history of science. Bessoni draws inspiration from eerie suggestions that evoke the uncanny, delving into the concept of the wunderkammer. At the heart of Bessoni's creations lies the technique of stop-motion, the dark essence of animation. His artistry, often infused with gothic mystery and utilizing unconventional materials such as bones, rags, vintage toys, and attic finds, exudes a haunting allure.
Peter Greenaway (born, 1942 in Newport, Wales, lives and works in Amsterdam) trained as a painter for four years, and started making his own films in 1966. He has continued to make
cinema in a great variety of ways, which has also informed his curatorial work and the making of exhibitions and installations in Europe from the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice and the Joan Miro Gallery in Barcelona to the Boijmans van Beuningen Gallery in Rotterdam and the Louvre in Paris. He has made 12 feature films and some 50 short-films and documentaries, been regularly nominated for the Film Festival Competitions of Cannes, Venice and Berlin, published books, written opera librettos, and collaborated with composers Michael Nyman, Glen Branca, Wim Mertens, Jean-Baptiste Barriere,
Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, Borut Krzisnik and David Lang. His first narrative feature film,
The Draughtsman's Contract, completed in 1982, received great critical acclaim and established him internationally as an original film maker, a reputation consolidated by the films,
The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover,
The Pillow Book, and
The Tulse Luper Suitcases.
