"Cinema is dead, long live the screen!" Peter Greenaway, whose postmodernist apocrypha Rembrandt's J'accuse is shown in the films about art competition, has pronounced his iconoclastic theories on the death of cinema for several years. During the ENH festival, he will give an original multi-media lecture about the connections between painting and cinema. Greenaway asserts that European painting, which has existed for more than 5000 years, and cinematography, for only 113 years, are two domains of art which have shaped the vocabulary and grammar of our visual language. The language one has to know to move fluently within the historical and contemporary civilisation of images, because "we have eyes, but it doesn't necessarily mean that we understand what we see". In order to dive beneath the substance coded on the surface, on canvas or screen, one has to compare the two media - and this is Greenaway's latest passion. Starting with The Night Watch by Rembrandt, on which the director, invited by the Dutch Rijksmuseum, created a light installation, Peter Greenaway begins a series of conversations between classical pieces of European painting and cinema. In Wrocław, the filmmaker will interpret the canon of modern and contemporary painting: from The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci to Las Meninas by Velasquez, Guernica by Picasso and Water Lilies by Monet to the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock.
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