Style
The visual style of the three feature films is unorthodox, even compared to other Greenaway films. This is most likely because they were meant to provide "source material" and "background story" for the Flash-based "suitcases" and hence are not truly meant to be watched as a film with typical fashion, but more of an audio/video pastiche.
In many scenes multiple takes, different angles, or identical copies of the same footage are displayed simultaneously within the frame, either superimposed or in discrete "boxes" taking up a small part of the screen. Multiple images are typically offset in time from one another, with a corresponding delay in audio. At times, a written representation of the script also scrolls across the screen as it is performed. The overall effect is similar to that of The Pillow Book, but because these effects are largely devoted to "narrator"-type characters providing exposition, or primary characters themselves commenting on or responding to the action, the overall effect is more like a visual encyclopedia or a form of interactive media (minus the actual interaction).
The character Tulse Luper has been featured (though rarely seen) in several of Peter Greenaway's earlier film works, and in The Tulse Luper Suitcases a substantial portion of Greenaway's output is briefly presented as if it had been filmed by Luper. Other connections to previous Greenaway films include the character Cissie Colpitts, who also appeared in the 1988 feature Drowning By Numbers and the 1978 short Vertical Features Remake as well as in The Falls from the same year. Tulse Luper, like Greenaway himself, is a keeper of extensive lists and catalogues, which serve as a sort of prism through which everything is seen. The most notable instance of this in the project is a collection of 1,001 stories which parallel The Book of One Thousand and One Nights in Arabic literature. The character Martino Knockavelli makes his first appearance here as a plump Italian schoolboy.
Read more about this topic: The Tulse Luper Suitcases
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To translate, one must have a style of his own, for otherwise the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one’s own style and creatively adjust this to one’s author.”
—Paul Goodman (1911–1972)
“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)