Author's Note: This was written in early 1994 for Rabelais, the infamous La Trobe University student newspaper. I learned more in an hour with Peter Greenaway about film directing and handling the media, than at any other time. Unfortunately the full transcript vanished into a parallel universe when my hard-drive crashed at the end of 1994. Greenaway's discussion of cinematic/televisual propaganda was prescient in the wake of Big Brother and scientific studies. My framing of Greenaway as "G." shows the influence of Peter Ouspensky's book In Search of the Miraculous (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949).

Whoever fights monsters should also in the process ensure that he doesn't become a monster himself. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche

On Black Friday 1994 Peter Greenaway choose to face the inquisitorial hearings to defend his new film Baby of Macon. He had flown from his ancestral homeland of Wales to Terra Nullius where the critics had still not outgrown their convict mentality of blindly labelling films "vile" and charging that G. was corrupting the youth. The critics had expected him to recant his heretical views, secretly they were hoping he would drink hemlock like Socrates, centuries before.

Amongst the critics was a young, naïve reporter from >Rabelais. But even he saw when G. strode into the hearing room to face the nine critics that he was no minotaur trapped in a reality labyrinth of his own making. G. had a personal magnetism that he had rarely seen before.

The hearing got off to a bad start. G. agreed wholeheartedly that he was deliberately provocative in his films. When asked why he was obsessed with death and sex he sarcastically replied, "Well, what other subjects are there?"

The reporter realized that G. was daring to confront major obsessions of human life, previously controlled by the State and the Church when G. revealed, "The people who took the most heretical view of the film were Protestant middle class Americans, the Seventh Day Adventists, and extreme Evangelical Christians because Roman Catholicism can very easily embrace blasphemers like me. Look at the relationship of Fellini ? he was so critical of the Roman Catholic Church, but they said he had encouraged more people to go back to it than any other way. I'm not into a conversion program here; remember that expression that Voltaire or Rousseau said, "I am an atheist, thank God!" . . ."

But wasn't this film symptomatic of a Decline in Western Civilization?

"Wow! There is a way in which of course the film is very pessimistic. It's part two of a trilogy that started with Prospero's Books, the second one is this one, and the third one gets even more pessmistic. It's called Augbergenfeldt. The second film Baby of Macon is about faith, religion, superstition, propaganda. I have a feeling that the cinema as a contemporary religion is propagandizing capitalism, happy endings, associations with wealth, all for the best and the best of all possible worlds. It's giving a fairly obscene picture that everything is OK even though you are being incredibly exploited, Third World ecology, all these sorts of things. Francis Bacon the painter--he deals in eschatology, blood, and death--was asked did he think the world was in any worse place now?

"And he said of course not, the only difference is that it's now all reported. I do believe there is lots and lots of evidence to suggest that there is a massive lack of nerve now ? we don't have any systems to support us any-more, whether they are real or not real. If you are a primary creator and you are working in a public medium like cinema, these things need to be taken into account. It's not the position of cinema to offer condolences or comfort--it seems to me to be hypocritical--there are other ways and means of expression that I would certainly draw legitimacy from: 2000 years of European art, so that you would have to include things like Goya with Michaelangelo, Bosch with Raphael, so that there is always a negative and positive side."

Rather than cut through the Gordian Knot, G. preferred to unravel the mysteries of the film. This was apparent when his most controversial creation, the final rape scene, was discussed.

"The cinema, for reasons that we've already glossed on, is a fantastic, powerful medium for propaganda and manipulation and I think that filmmakers should use it with great responsibility. The serious arts use language with the ability to affect imaginations, so you ought to do it with a full awareness of what you are doing. In this film I've deliberately pushed those representations to the very edge, to exhaust them, to show look, OK, you want to play with this dangerous subject matter, this is what happens. I want to also continually demonstrate that cinema is phony, it's illusion, unreal, not a slice of life, not a window on the world, it's highly subjective as an exercise which is putting forward deeply prejudicial views according to the cultural baggage of the maker.

"If I could say how that was exemplified in the actual rape sequence, we are presented with a crime and punishment effect, judicial murder on behalf of the Church. While we were making this film, the Moslem women were being raped in Yugoslavia, so it's dangerous to make comparisons between terrifying situations in real life and mere filmic representation, but it was all in the back of our minds when we were making this film, and the rest of the world did nothing, just turned away and as a gesture I've used they ate cake, like Marie Antoinette at the end of the French Revolution when the world was in chaos. The phenomenon is there to remind you that how can you possibly believe in the suspension of disbelief and yet the cinema is so powerful that you are constantly manipulated. In the situation where the Daughter is about to be raped ? it's taken away from you, everybody breathes a sigh of relief because you know it isn't going to happen and then with a kick in the stomach we shift gears and say it's not the Daughter is going to be raped, but it's the actress.

"And then the terrifying scene goes on deliberately organized ? a filmic single continuity shot so that you are never let off the hook but are forced to watch. There are no gynaecological details, no close-ups ? it's all done in shadow-play and the powers of the soundtrack, and we know that the sound was probably done six months later by a different actress, so already we are into illusions, since we all know so much about the cinema whether we make it or not: that these are, in a sense, games. You know when you watch or are put in front of this sensation of the representation of gang rape that I haven't asked those actors to rape the woman.

"Often it's the Church who is using the phenomenon of terror and horror in a deeply voyeuristic way to parade its own propaganda ? we are prepared to cathartically take ourselves to the edge of human experience, but without responsibility. Television sets every night show us all sorts of terrifying things that happen in Rwanda, South Africa, the Middle East and we don't all have sufficient information and intelligence to separate what is fact from so-called truth and pictorial representation. Those edges become blurred as our anxiety about the education and involvement of children revolves around the perception of what is representation and what isn't. So I make a self-conscious cinema that is saying, "I can play with illusionism, you can be a voyeur, but let's take responsibility of it," because my film doesn't exist without you--the audience--and you are just as much a participant in this as I am."

So G. was operating in the same field as Bunuel, Pasolini or Resnais, broadening the concept of film responsibility. During the hearings G. criticized the current characterization favored by the Hollywood cabal.

"I am interested in archetypes and stereotypes because that does relate me to 2000 years of drama and not just the post-Freudian tradition which is very local and is already being corrupted very rapidly ? our relief from trying to understand the human condition by psychoanalytical procedures is being eroded that God, we're much too sophisticated for it's simplistic view."

Of the Hollywood tradition, G. spoke favorably of directors like David Cronenberg, David Lynch's Blue Velvet, and Derek Jarman. He praised leading actress Julia Ormond, despite the later revelations by the critics that she didn't like the film. He defended his cinematographer Sacha Vierny against similar charges, revealing his humble character, knowledge of art, and technical ability ? he lit the cathedral setting in a single morning (it would usually take three days). Despite his impeachment during the hearings, G. revealed plans for future exhibitions of his paintings, developing HDTV with Japanese company NHK, and writing CD-ROM programs for Phillips.