Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway

1) One of the most intellectual British directors

The Draughtsman's Contract  (1982)
1) Elicited many attempts at explanation.
2)The film is a murder mystery set in 1964
3)The resolution of the mystery is not important
4)Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins), a young artist is contracted by
    Mrs. Virginia Herbert (Janet Suzman) to produce a series of
    twelve landscape drawings of her country house, its
    outbuildings and gardens, for her absent and estranged
    husband. 
5)Michael Nyman's score and the film's costume design contribute
    to the tone and mood of the setting
6) Greenaway is not concerned with conventional narrative
7)Much of the film has autobiographical roots as Greenaway
    worked as an artist before filmmaking

The director explains, 

"The whole film is very much a landscape film, which would relate to the traditions of Claude Lorraine and Poussin, two Frenchmen who spent most of their lives and their painting careers in Italy and had an enormous influence, not only on French landscape but on English landscape. The three predominant colours of this film are black, white and green. The black and white essentially of the costumes, and the green of the English countryside. So there is an overall colour-coding characteristic that is certainly true of all the exterior shots of the film.

Maybe for an artist it's more damaging not simply to be killed but to actually have one's works destroyed. I was the draughtsman of those drawings and I had absolutely no intention of destroying them. What you see burnt on celluloid are just extremely good photocopies."

The Draughtsman’s Contract (Peter Greenaway, 1982):

An analysis of the film:Click Here