Peter Greenaway studied painting at Walthamstow, a small London art college, and shortly after was employed by the Central Office of Information as an editor and eventually as a filmmaker. As a result, in early Greenaway you see a merging of his occupations or primary activities - painting and editing - with his obsessions - nature or landscape, the watery English countryside and methods of organisation: maps, diagrams, grids, systems of classification. In the late 1960s, at the height of the popularity of structuralism in experimental filmmaking, Greenaway purchased an inexpensive Bolex camera with a shot length of around 17 seconds and began, in a project of self-education, to make rather simple but very self-conscious films. This was a period when much attention was paid to organising film strategies around equations, and Greenaway, already fascinated by number counts, cataloguing and all sorts of methods of organising information and ideas in a non-narrative form, was perfectly poised to make his contribution to this movement. Greenaway's earlier films are, as a result, essays and examinations of his many fascinations. And while in many ways these early films are somewhat naïve, the fundamental characteristics that have since been associated with Greenaway's filmmaking are already evident. Laurel Warbrick-Keay
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