1962–1999 (1987) In 1962, Greenaway began studies at
Walthamstow College of Art, where a fellow student was musician
Ian Dury (later cast in
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover). Greenaway trained as a muralist for three years; he made his first film,
Death of Sentiment, a churchyard furniture essay filmed in four large London cemeteries. In 1965, he joined the
Central Office of Information (COI), where he went on to work for fifteen years as a film editor and director. In that time he made a series of experimental films, starting with
Train (1966), footage of the last steam trains at
Waterloo station (situated behind the COI), edited to a
musique concrète composition.
Tree (1966) is a homage to the embattled tree growing in concrete outside the
Royal Festival Hall on the
South Bank in London. In the late 1970s, he made
Vertical Features Remake and
A Walk Through H. The former is an examination of various arithmetical editing structures, and the latter is a journey through the maps of a fictitious country. In 1980, Greenaway delivered
The Falls (his first feature-length film) – a mammoth, fantastical, absurdist encyclopaedia of flight-associated material all relating to ninety-two victims of what is referred to as the Violent Unknown Event (VUE). In the 1980s his cinema flowered in his best-known films, ''
The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), The Belly of an Architect (1987), Drowning by Numbers (1988), and his most successful film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover'' (1989). Greenaway's most familiar musical collaborator during this period is composer
Michael Nyman, who has scored several films. In 1989, Greenaway collaborated with artist
Tom Phillips on a television serial
A TV Dante, dramatising the first few cantos of
Dante's
Inferno. In the 1990s he presented ''
Prospero's Books (1991), the controversial The Baby of Mâcon (1993), The Pillow Book (1996), and 8½ Women'' (1999). In the early 1990s Greenaway wrote ten opera
libretti known as the
Death of a Composer series, dealing with the commonalities of the deaths of ten composers from
Anton Webern to
John Lennon; however, the other composers are fictitious, and one is a character from
The Falls. In 1995,
Louis Andriessen completed the sixth libretto,
Rosa – A Horse Drama. He is currently professor of cinema studies at the
European Graduate School in
Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
2000–present Greenaway presented the ambitious
The Tulse Luper Suitcases, a multimedia project that resulted in three films, a website, two books, a touring exhibition, and a shorter feature which reworked the material of the first three films. He also contributed to
Visions of Europe, a short film collection by different European Union directors; his British entry is
The European Showerbath.
Nightwatching and ''
Rembrandt's J'Accuse are two films on Rembrandt, released respectively in 2007 and 2008. Nightwatching
is the first feature in the series "Dutch Masters", with the second project titled as Goltzius and the Pelican Company''. On 17 June 2005, Greenaway appeared for his first
VJ performance during an art club evening in Amsterdam, Netherlands, with music by DJ Serge Dodwell (aka Radar), as a backdrop, 'VJ' Greenaway used for his set a special system consisting of a large plasma screen with laser controlled touchscreen to project the ninety-two
Tulse Luper stories on the twelve screens of "Club 11", mixing the images live. This was later reprised at the Optronica festival, London. On 12 October 2007, he created the multimedia installation
Peopling the Palaces at Venaria Reale at the
Royal Palace of Venaria, which animated the Palace with 100 videoprojectors. Greenaway was interviewed for Clive Meyer's
Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice (2011), and voiced strong criticisms of film theory as distinct from discussions of other media: "Are you sufficiently happy with cinema as a thinking medium if you are only talking to one person?" On 3 May 2016, he received a Honoris Causa doctorate from the University of San Martín, Argentina.
Nine Classical Paintings Revisited In 2006, Greenaway began a series of digital
video installations,
Nine Classical Paintings Revisited, with his exploration of
Rembrandt's
Night Watch in the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. On 30 June 2008, after much negotiation, Greenaway staged a one-night performance 'remixing'
da Vinci's
The Last Supper in the
refectory of
Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan to a select audience of dignitaries. The performance consisted of superimposing digital imagery and projections onto the painting with music from the composer Marco Robino. File:La ronda de noche, por Rembrandt van Rijn.jpg|
Night Watch by
Rembrandt File:Paolo Veronese 008.jpg|
The Wedding at Cana by
Paolo Veronese (mid-16th century) Greenaway exhibited his digital exploration of
The Wedding at Cana by
Paolo Veronese as part of the 2009
Venice Biennial. An arts writer for
The New York Times called it "possibly the best unmanned art history lecture you'll ever experience," while acknowledging that some viewers might respond to it as "mediocre art,
Disneyfied kitsch or a flamboyant denigration of
site-specific video installation." The 50-minute presentation, set to a soundtrack, incorporates closeup images of faces from the painting along with animated diagrams revealing compositional relations among the figures. These images are projected onto and around the replica of the painting that now stands at the original site, within the
Palladian architecture of the
Benedictine refectory on
San Giorgio Maggiore. The soundtrack features music and imagined dialogue scripted by Greenaway for the 126 "wedding guests, servants, onlookers and wedding crashers" depicted in the painting, consisting of
small talk and banal chatter that culminates in reaction to the
miraculous transformation of water to wine, according to the
Gospels the
first miracle performed by Jesus.
Picasso's
Guernica,
Seurat's
Grande Jatte, works by
Jackson Pollock and
Claude Monet,
Velázquez's
Las Meninas and
Michelangelo's
The Last Judgment are possible series subjects. ==Personal life==