Blue. By Peter Greenaway

Saturday, December 01, 2001

Vi chiederete che cosa ci faccia Peter Greenaway, regista di misteri nei giardini, di ultime tempeste, di geishe e di sfolgoranti ossessioni, qui, a introdurre il mio "Blu", il romanzo di uno sconosciuto. A volte me lo chiedo anch’io. A Peter il mio grazie più stupefatto e sincero. g.b.





Blue

by Peter Greenaway

I was antagonistic to Blue.

I distrusted its Ubiquity.

I was anti-Klein.

He was such a self-regarding poseur.

I used to argue that there was no such colour as blue. Blue in the sky is an illusion. The sky is not an object, but an empty space which, as everyone knows from the phenomenon of night and countless space odysseys, is black. Since the sea is a reflection of the sky, its blueness too is an illusion - worse - an illusion of an illusion.

Blueness in the eye is a trick of the light, organised to support German eugenics. If you tried to extract blueness from the eye, you could not do it.

You cannot end up with blue crystals or blue liquid in your hand. For-get-me-nots are blue. Forget it. The flower itself is crying out not to be remembered.

Lapis lazuli? Now we are beginning to get into difficulties. A colour made exclusive to the Virgin Mary mined faraway in the Russian Ural mountains.

The stuff of a religious imagination. Cornflowers, delphiniums, the blue shark - anomalies, hybrids, mongrels?

It is difficult to continue to be antagonistic forever. I kept trying.

I made a film in Rome called The Belly of an Architect. I wanted to play a contrary game. I wanted to plan the film to be solely devoted to two sets of colour concepts, which in the end was the same concept. First of all, the colours of the film could only be found on the human body - black, white, brown, pink, grey, sienna, - no green and no blue. And second, the colours of the film should be strictly related to the colours of the architecture of Rome - the walls and the roofs, the tiles and the marble. The same set of colours.

We used special filters to kill the colour of the sky and kill the colour of the trees. I permitted green on rare occasions because green was the colour of the enemy. The villains wore green ties and drove green cars. And when the human body decays it can turn green. But the flood-gates of

blue

were opening.


What was I to do with a blue jay’s wing accompanied by George Harrisons’s Blue Jay Way, or a blue cockatoo tail feather, and KLM, Royal Dutch Airlines, all blue for flying. Or a blue chin for six o’clock shadow and blue blood for nobility for physiological parameters. Or Gorgonzola, the blue cheese, substituted with the English Blue Stilton and blueberries, for blue eating.

Or Sinatra as Old Blue Eyes, Presley’s Blue Suede Shoes, Strauss’s The Blue Danube, a blue note, a blue mood, Bella Bartok’s Bluebeard, the Blues and the Blews, a blue memory,and ‘Blue moon, I saw you standing alone’, for singing and dancing. Blue chips at San Remo, blue ice for South African diamonds, a blue scream and blue movies, a blue pencil for negative displeasure. Jarman and Amish Kapoor and Jan Fabre’s biro-blue scribblings for blue art. The Deep Blue and The Blue Lagoon for cinema. Blue-tipped, the 10 guilder note featuring Frans Hals all in blue. Why do the Italians put big painters on big currency notes, and the Dutch put big painters on small currency notes?

And innumerable cliches and proverbs – It’s a blue wind that blows nobody any good, the quick blue fox jumps over the lazy blue dog, people who live in blue houses should not throw stones, look before you blew, and a blue-job, blue mongoose, bloom and Harry Bloom, and Bloomingdales, blue cat, blue ice, blue-speak, the blue bomb, blue ghost, blue room, and the blue train. I am beaten


blue



Alas (a very blue word) - there is apparently enough blue to go around. My antagonism to blue cannot be countenanced. And Giovanni Bogani has found some more.



I wish you, Giovanni, an expecially azure new year.



Peter Greenaway



Go to the website of the novel "Blu" by Giovanni Bogani







giovanni 4:56 PM [+] ::
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