The Tulse Luper Suitcases: a personal history of Uranium
Peter Greenaway

Sarah Snider
posted 26 April 2007

The Tulse Luper Suitcases purports to show us the future of ‘pure cinema’. But Peter Greenaway’s is a cinema of the present, his audience constantly aware of time as it slips by. With Tulse Luper, Greenaway has moved into a new format, using multiple layers of technology, albeit curated from but one layer of history – he is showing us the possibilities of the present. Were he to look back on his Tulse Luper series at the end of cinema, it would seem an unlikely platform for a futuristic project.

Ninety-two suitcases packed over six hours of film constitute the adventurous life of one Tulse Henry Purcell Luper. His activities as naturalist, lover, artist, writer, observer and, perhaps, spy, take us from his childhood during World War I to 1989, passing through Utah, Kyoto, Manchuria and Siberia on the way. In classic Greenaway style, the film is littered with sex, nudity, food, violence and numbers. Tulse plays as a child on a Dogville-esque backyard, he poses as a writer in Belgium during the rise of fascism, he replays French history at Vaux-le-Vicomte under the Vichy regime, and he meets a panoply of characters while in hiding as a cinema attendant. Tulse’s life story is inevitably tied to the destiny of someone or something else, which generates not one but multiple biographies. The objective biography of uranium is but the tip of the iceberg.

The crafting of the narrative according to the different prisons that held Tulse Luper, from a backyard shed to a château, slyly alludes to the tropes cinema has fallen prisoner to. Subtitled ‘A personal history of Uranium’, the film transcends these traditional screen constraints to integrate mixed media, invoking contemporary ideas such as screen culture, multi-tasking and visual culture. Vertical and horizontal split-screens, repetition of both audio and video, and the proliferation of objects everywhere mesh with superimposed archival imagery, frames within frames, inlays, postcards and text to weave together the life story of the hero.

What is more innovative is Greenaway’s preferred method of presenting this material: it is not to be seen in the cinema, in the dark, with an arcane relation between a framed screen and the docile viewer’s eyes; rather he has chosen to show the film as a performance, enacted by at least two video and disc jockeys projecting sound and visual material in the 360-degree space of the IMAX theater. Greenaway hopes that his veejay-deejay performances will allow for the creation of spontaneous, imagistic cinema in non-traditional spaces, providing films that change every time they are shown and engaging with a new cinematic language. An online archive, as well as books and a televised series act as further extensions of the space of interaction with the film. Greenaway has even produced a DVD for each of Tulse’s 92 suitcases. Marketing concerns aside, this multimedia extravaganza has existed around several cult films and series – think David Lynch, MST3K, etc – but this engagement has always been peripheral to the film; never has it been seen as an integral part of the film experience itself.

There is an impetus here to depart from traditional cinematic forms, which have merely produced ‘illustrated texts’, and move cinema into a space liberated from what he calls the ‘tyrannies’ of film, which he enumerates simplistically as the concepts of screen, frame, actor, text and novel, camera and even director. Characterising traditional features of film production as tyrannical assumes a passive audience that does not actively question the techniques involved in the production process – a notion which has been debunked time and again by literary theory and audience studies. However, the greater problematic in Greenaway’s critique of cinema is his rejection of the fruitfulness of traditional cinematic techniques. What he sees as the socially constructed constraints of cinema also constituted the material and technological possibilities of film. These structural features came to be known as what film was, the essence of film, and indeed continue to be the defining features of cinematic production and experience today. To understand this process of black-boxing or framing is to possess a cultural biography of cinema, which is not necessarily the evil tyrant Greenaway makes it out to be – it’s more of a benevolent dictator.

On the other hand, Greenaway is right in his depiction of this rich filmic history as being – and always having been – the main danger to future cinematic production. Experimental film and video projects have sought, since 1896, to escape fixing themselves in established film tropes. A lively and thriving experimental scene has played off and influenced mainstream modes of making movies. This constant innovation has fuelled the debate on films and their production processes. Greenaway departs from purely film-based histories of cinema and sees these attempts at experimental cinema reaching all the way back to Rembrandt, the first filmmaker. Relying on the visual literacy of the Dutch, thematic representation, drama and light, Rembrandt created tableaux to engage with contemporary socio-visual dialogue, invoking hot social issues ranging from plague and war to international conspiracy.

Greenaway wants to push cinema, in the sense of thematic stories told along visual lines, to its fullest capacity – rather than see the Eisenstein-Godard trajectory as the life story of film, Greenaway hopes that the medium is still in its infancy. However, reinventing cinema along the lines of 20th and 21st century visual cultures and visual literacy has proven more difficult than he anticipated: The Tulse Luper Suitcases, like anything, loses its sense of visual immediacy after six hours. The naïve manipulation of the new technique, the intertextual (or self-referential?) moments – it is all quite reminiscent of early attempts at the nouveau roman, whose legacy itself was largely formal. Furthermore, Greenaway’s method of making cinema is altered to fit our ways of receiving cinema, dragging performance backwards into repetition through the compilation of DVDs and reels suitable for proper cinemas.

What remains for fruitful investigation is the topic of the possibilities and constraints of Greenaway’s work. What is it in the present that dictates the terms of his films? Flatness comes to mind: Tulse Luper may be in surround sound, but the images, no matter how intertextualised, are still flat. A cinema of images is predicated on flatness and, despite forays into 3D imagery, this will be seen as a downfall of ‘primitive’ cinema by future Greenaways. Clarity is another factor that attests to our idea of cinema as something seen through a standardised lens. Last but not least, Greenaway is obviously still hobbling on the narrative crutch, as is his narrator Martino Knockavelli who, we find out after over six hours of film, has invented the fictional character of Tulse Luper.

Pushed to its limits, pure cinema might unintentionally become manufactured reality, telling every single story in real time. The limits of such a project can be mapped along the lines of human sensory perception and experience. Don’t we want more from cinema? Isn’t the creative capacity of the human being exemplified by its ability to step outside of actual experience and invent possibilities and alternative ways of thinking and doing? Peter Greenaway may present the extended possibilities of the way cinema could be, but his vision of humanity is resolutely stuck on the way we are.