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Directors' Directory

GREENAWAY, Peter

The middle-brow’s middle-brow. Creates visual enigmas rather than films in the conventional, Hollywood sense. Has a knowledge of the classical painters so all-encompassing it would be pure Philistinism to adulterate his own work with such low-brow trifles as “characterisation”, “plot” and – the very word itself hangs like a blob of Daddies sauce from the greasy lips of cretinism – “action”. Barracked in his own country for running off with pots of arts council cash and returning nine months later with a ninety- minute static tableau of dead babies, outsize door numbers and Helen Mirren in her scanties. Only the French and Barry Norman truly understand him. ‘To those who accuse him of portentous humourlessness, mark this: would Kubrick have had the playful wit to cast Jim Davidson as a zookeeper?’ ‘A first class argument! I withdraw my accusation!’ See KUBRICK, Stanley.

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