Almost two years of (mostly) Germany now and the love/hate relationship with the language goes on. From a non-native speaker's perspective German is in its complexity a frightening instrument of power, but also an infinite source of linguistic pleasures. In my case, especially in its written form.

Frustrations mostly deal with the spoken word, especially on TV, on stage or such. To battle this, I had taken up a tradition to go see the latest transmission of Tatort with a friend every Sunday. These 90-minute murder mysteries have been on air since 1970 and have become quite an institution. I've come to believe, that Sunday Tatorts have taken the place of Sunday Sauna in my weekly rhythm. Both are somewhat purifying and masochistic experiences.

I discovered help from an unlikely source. Recently I voluntarily watched an English language film dubbed into German – not Die Hard 4.0 but V for Vendetta. No problem whatsoever, everything was loud and clear. With the mandate given by the results of the revered PISA study, I've had a bit of a stuck-up outlook on the culture of dubbing, but now the tables turned. There, I may have found the missing link.

Coinciding with Berlinale festival, filmmaker Peter Greenaway recently gave an open lecture at the Humboldt University. I was there and took some notes, which I'm going to unwind here.

If you've seen him in the last few years (like in Helsinki in 2004) you've probably heard his main points already. For a quick recap, user Armeror has clips on Youtube.

As a presenter he's arrogant, elitistic and unsympathetic as ever but highly articulate and the amount of information is enormous. Therefore, a kind of a uncertainty principle applied – I could concetrate either on listening or writing, but not both. Ok, but now I just get on with it…

Cinema is dead, long live the cinema (working title)

• Greenaway's aim has been to create a pretext for cinema, because...
• 7000 years of visual culture has been forgotten and...
• So far, since 1895, we've only seen "illustrated text"
• It takes decades, before new art movements become understood and accepted. As of today, most people have only come in terms with impressionism - and that was over hundred years ago.
• "Bill Viola is worth ten Scorseses"
• Since D.W Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" (1915) there's hardly been progress.

What's wrong with the cinema

The four tyrannies
• Tyranny of the frame
  The frame was introduced in the renaissance, when paining and architecture diffrentiated themselves, and it has stayed ever since. However, it is a man made construcion, thus it can be unmade.
• Tyranny of the text
  We've been thorougly educated and conditioned to operate text. We lack similar visual training. Most of the films can be turned back to text. Just think about The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Western alphabet also "denies the imagistic possibilities" of text.
• Tyranny of the actor
  Actors are "people who are trained to pretend, that they're not being watched". Cinema is not a playground for Sharon Stone, and vice versa, they both deserve better.
• Tyranny of the camera
  The most difficult of the tyrannies. How to break free from the reality mimicking eye of the camera. Disney produced films from ground zero, by making animation. Ditching the camera also helps getting rid of the frame.

Some quotations

• John Cage: If you invent more than 20% of novelty in any artifact, you immediately loose 80% of your audience.
• Picasso: I paint what think, not what I see.
• Eisenstein: Walt Disney is the greatest filmmaker. He made films from ground zero, free from the "tyranny of the camera".

31.9.1983

• On the day TV remote control was introduced, cinema died
• If cinema wants to survive, it has to acknowledge two things: multimediality and interactivity
• In a filmtheatre situation, interactivity is impossible. The context and situation need to be changed
• In the nineties Greenaway almost gave up filmmaking, but got excited about new technologies

Education

• if he got a second life, he'd become an architect, whose education is the most versatile and comprehensive, an architect must know aesthetics, philosophy, organisations, society, politics and so on
• Filmmaker's training comes second. One needs to master the aesthetics, yet be practical

What is he going to do about the situation?

• In every artform there are groundbreaking "benchmark" works. Dante's "The Divine Comedy" and Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" being examples of such works
• He proposes his ongoing project "Tulse Luper Suitcases" as a benchmark work for future cinema. It is a vast cross-media production encompassing films, dvds, games, exhibitions and websites. He shows a segment from one of the films.
• He's working on installations that re-create and re-interpret famous paintings in time-based form. The first experiment was Rembrandt's "Nightwatch" and Picasso's "Guernica" and DaVinci's "Last Supper" are to follow
• Greenaway has taken up VJing, which he defines as "present-time non-narrative, non-repeatable cinema". (Curiously, as far as I know, David Lynch and Anton Corbijn have taken up VJing too)
• His most successful film "The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover" will be recreated in Second Life. He encourages us to visit virtual worlds again, even if we did ten years ago and got disappointed

Age of Uranium

The atomic number 92 of uranium features heavily in Greenaway's work. We are living the age of uranium that began in Hiroshima 1945. Uranium connotates both Armageddon/Paradise. It promises vast amount of energy and progress, but it also has doomsday potential.

Greenaway hints that we should reconsider nuclear energy. As fossil fuel reserves draw empty and alternative energy sources come short of supplying the demand - uranium could become an option again. One cannot be sure if Greenaway really promotes nuclear energy or does he say that just because of his long affair with number 92.