Dis Voir – förlag

This book explores the secret territories that formed the City of Thelema, from which Rudy Ricciotti - an internationally renowned architect - built his work. Echoing through this labyrinth, we hear the architect's voice, often steeped in distant memories imbued with the smell of sulphur and blood, sharing the words of Jean-Louis Poitevin and opening the doors to the many secret territories hidden within this city.

It is documented that the Chinese Empress Cixi, who lived from 1838 to 1908 fell in love with a eunuch in the Forbidden Palace in Peking. A very unlikely event indeed. This eunuch who excessively catered to the Empress's fantasies with poetic scenarios, then metaphysical fantasies that excited and stimulated her intelligence and temporarily distracted her from her very active political life, resulted in a mutual love affair. Due to their enormous differences in status and the rigid conservatism of Chinese society this relationship was considered impossible, unlawful and subversive. In this film the complex real-life story of the tragic love affair that really happened has been reduced to its essential elements, consolidating several historical figures into single characters, and treating the events somewhat as a 19th century violent tragic fairy tale with many of the characteristics you might find in the stories of Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grim. There are poisoned apples here, exploited children, human remains buried in plant pots, appalling violence, excessive love, luxuriant landscapes backed by the enigmas of the Natural World that is entirely indifferent to the whims of mankind whose existence in the world is ephemeral and no doubt will soon be passing away.

Since the earliest days of my filmmaking, I wrote such short stories, indeed very short stories: sometimes two or three sentences, perhaps a paragraph. There are now close to a thousand stories, and I have the distinct sense they will not stop coming. Some found their way into my early short films - stories spoken directly to the camera in H is for House and Vertical Features Remake - and sometimes they provided the very architecture of a film, as in Dear Phone. They also spill, extravagantly, into the encyclopaedic three hours of The Falls. Over ;me, the stories have multiplied, touching on almost everything that occupies me. Certain subjects return insistently: painters and paintings, birds and natural history, anatomy, Rome and the Romans, the Netherlands and the Dutch. Darwin, Rembrandt, and Henry VIII reoccur. And stories about stories are endless. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover was built on the courses of a dinner, while another script imagines an old man writing a hundred stories about the towers of a city - a structure that allows me to speak of death, loss, human hubris, ageing, mortality, and euthanasia. Whether this will ever find its way into film remains uncertain. Together with the artist, painter, and illustrator Stefano Bessoni, we present a collection of my stories accompanied by his drawings. And so, we have begun. Peter Greenaway.