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Peter Greenaway’s Encyclopaedism

2006; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 23; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/0263276406065113

1460-3616

María Esther Maciel,

Digital Games and Media

This article focuses, through a transdisciplinary perspective, on Peter Greenaway’s films, operas, installations and artworks, exploring the elements that characterize this oeuvre as encyclopaedic. In order to do so, it investigates possible concepts of encyclopaedia, the rhizomatic character of the contemporary encyclopaedic model and its consonance with the demands of plurality and heterogeneity of the globalized world. This article approaches, moreover, the critical-creative appropriation that the director makes of the scientific systems of classification, showing that the use of taxonomies in his work aims at not only revealing the insufficiency and arbitrariness of such systems, but also subverting the ordering logic that defines them. The article also links Greenaway to some of his literary precursors like Jorge Luis Borges and Georges Perec, who also brought together in their encyclopaedic works the rules of classification and the parodic laws of fiction.