Conceived and written by Peter Greenaway, the series "The Historians"--to be published in a literary form, in its entirety, in 100 volumes, over the next ten years--creates and examines in exhausting detail the 100 year history of a great continent as an encyclopedic compendium of everything in the world gathered together in one place. The novel "The Rise and Fall of Gestures Drama, Book 39" announces itself as the first in this 100-book series of histories: "Book 39 of "The Historians" traces a history of Gestures Theater on the Continent from its very simple beginnings to the sophistications of 39 years later when the genre across the 50 continental countries has expanded to a phenomenal degree and virtually engaged the imaginations of the entire continent's population of 300 million. The theory and practice of Silent Gestures Theater excites intense debate and controversy when it expands its characteristics to embrace text and sound and murder, to bring down censorship pressures that ultimately destroy it. "

Inspired by Shakespeare's famous words, "If music be the food of love, play on," "The Food of Love," by British director Peter Greenaway (born 1942), is a story of amorous obsession set in Venice and London.

On May 7, 1945, 92 gold bars are discovered in a crashed car at Bolzano, where it is said they cannot cook a good spaghetti. The watch on the dead driver's wrist stopped at 2:41 a.m., the precise time of the end of the Second World War in Europe. Every gold bar in the crash is made from gold confiscated from the victims of the Third Reich and its allies across Europe, from prisoners of war, gypsies, political enemies, and the mentally and physically handicapped, but mainly from Jews. Each gold bar has a history. "Gold" relates those 92 histories, along with a postscript of the histories of nine more gold bars that should have been in that crash.

Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka's love for Alma Mahler was so great that he had a life-sized model of her made. "The OK Doll," by Peter Greenaway (born 1942), is the script for an unrealized film about the doll that Kokoschka lived with for three years.

This script by British director Peter Greenaway (born 1942) follows Russian director Eisenstein to Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1930, where he worked for ten days on a never-completed film called "Que Viva Mexico."

Eight and a Half Women accompanies Peter Greenaway's latest movie of that name (referring to Fellini's film), to be released in 1999. A laconic black comedy, the film examines the age-old phenomenon of male sexual fantasy. Its characteristically surreal and Byzantine story involves a rich Swiss businessman who owns Japanese pachinko parlours, and whose son lives in Kyoto and is fascinated by earthquakes. In grieving upon the death of his wife, the father withdraws and his son attempts to console him -- and to reawaken his interest in other women. The two create their own domestic bordello, and the story ends in a surprising twist. This volume is part of a series of books dedicated to the scripts of Peter Greenaway and are especially useful For anyone interested in penetrating deeper into the universe created by the filmmaker before making the film. Revealing a talent for creating images which are later to be turned into film, these books can also be considered an original literary work by one of the 20th century's most original artists.

In these twenty-one interviews, filmmaker Peter Greenaway expresses his film aesthetic and discusses his combat with the dominant Hollywood style of filmmaking. His films have run unmistakably against the main current of present cinematic practice, from the short film Windows in the mid-seventies, to his more popular but nonetheless challenging films such as A Zed and Two Noughts and The Pillow Book in the nineties.

In this collection the ever-controversial Greenaway discusses his philosophies of film, art, aesthetics, literature, and reality, criticizing and even condemning the standard fare of what he calls Hollywood cinema. For him such films tell stories or they translate literature with its linear narrative onto a medium that he feels should be preeminently visual. He finds that, instead of foregrounding the image and the composition of visual elements as in the long history of painting, Hollywood-style directors seem mesmerized by the "and then and then" narrative.

In these provocative interviews Greenaway tells of his ambition to make cinema a medium based more on image than on narrative. He explains his painterly approach in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, defends his use of total nudity of both sexes, and declares that traditional literary-based cinema is dead. He believes that the most creative imaginations, the most innovative technologies, and the greatest financial resources are being devoted to television and the Internet and that Hollywood moviemaking is no longer in the vanguard.

Peter Greenaway's "Goltzius" is the second installment in his "Dutch Masters" series. Its story runs thus: sometime during the winter of 1590, the Dutch printmaker Hendrik Goltzius holds an interview with Margrave of Alsace, in the grand library at his castle on the Rhine. Goltzius needs money in order to build a printing press to print erotic illustrated books, and he entices Margrave of Alsace into paying for an extraordinary book of pictures of Old Testament Biblical stories, by dramatizing the erotic stories of Lot and his daughters, David and Bathsheba, Samson and Delilah and John the Baptist and Salome--stories in which themes of incest, adultery, female entrapment and necrophilia abound. Margrave's court is completely seduced by Goltzius' titillating storytelling, and swiftly sinks into a pit of lechery and religious politics, until the court is forced to buy its way out, and Goltzius can begin his ambitious endeavor.
Peter Greenaway was born in Wales in 1942. His films include "The Falls," "The Belly of an Architect," "Drowning By Numbers," "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover," "Prospero's Books," "The Pillow Book, " "Nightwatching" and others.

Two more short films from Peter Greenaway. In 'Vertical Falls Remake' academics argue about the work of Tulse Luper while 'The Falls' is divided into 92 biographies of people who have all been affected by the 'VUE', the Violent Unknown Event and a phenomenom in some way connected with birds and flying.

Flights of fancy and fear, ecstatic highs, dreadful falls, and beckoning skies: these are the images British filmmaker Peter Greenaway collects and dissects in "Flying out of This World," the second volume in a series developed by the Louvre and devoted to innovative writing on the visual arts.
As guest curator, Greenaway selected from the Louvre's collection of European prints and drawings ninety-one masterpieces that illustrate the human longing for flight. Greenaway's text, a compilation of brief commentaries that combine description, allusion, and interpretation, illuminate the images as depictions of flight desired and denied. Including works by Redon, Goya, Brueghel, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Rubens, Poussin, and Delacroix, this volume offers a combination of literary and visual art, of sight and insight.
A pursuit through the Bible, classical mythology, cosmology, theology, etymology, ornithology, and meteorology, "Flying out of This World" is not just an illustrated history of imagined flight, but a meditation on its meaning as a metaphor for the human condition, caught between a weighty body and a soaring spirit.

Flights of fancy and fear, ecstatic highs, dreadful falls and beckoning skies: these are the images British film-maker Peter Greenaway collects and dissects in "Flying out of This World", the second volume in a series developed by the Louvre and devoted to innovative writing on the visual arts. As guest curator, Greenaway selected from the Louvre's collection of European prints and drawings 91 masterpieces that illustrate the human longing for flight. Greenaway's text, a compilation of brief commentaries that combine description, allusion and interpretation, illuminates the images as depictions of flight desired and denied. Including works by Redon, Goya, Brueghel, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Rubens, Poussin and Delacroix, this volume offers a combination of literary and visual art, of sight and insight. A pursuit through the Bible, classical mythology, cosmology, theology, etymology, ornithology and meteorology, "Flying out of This World" is not just an illustrated history of imagined flight, but a meditation on its meaning as a metaphor for the human condition, caught between a weighty body and a soaring spirit.