The new volume of an experimental series on historiography, about toys.
"At the turn of the Millennium Historians attempted to make a fresh start at keeping a record
of a rejuvenated world. They promised to write a full history of the years of the coming century.
To start with they needed a new population.
Once they had recorded their knowledge of post-war human conceptions in Book Zero,
the Historians could go on to record the New Births in Book One, and Names in Book Two, and then perhaps Childhood Diseases in Book Three and then perhaps Toys in Book Four.
In the last decade of the century there would be Historians to compile Book Ninety-Six on Fatal Illnesses,
Book Ninety-Seven would record Deaths, Book Ninety-Eight would record Funerals & Memorials,
Book Ninety-Nine would record Last Wills & Testaments and Book One Hundred would record Ghosts.
Here is Book Four to record Toys."
Peter Greenaway (born, 1942 in Newport, Wales, lives and works in Amsterdam) trained as a painter for four years, and started making his own films in 1966. He has continued to make
cinema in a great variety of ways, which has also informed his curatorial work and the making of exhibitions and installations in Europe from the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice and the Joan Miro Gallery in Barcelona to the Boijmans van Beuningen Gallery in Rotterdam and the Louvre in Paris. He has made 12 feature films and some 50 short-films and documentaries, been regularly nominated for the Film Festival Competitions of Cannes, Venice and Berlin, published books, written opera librettos, and collaborated with composers Michael Nyman, Glen Branca, Wim Mertens, Jean-Baptiste Barriere, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, Borut Krzisnik and David Lang. His first narrative feature film,
The Draughtsman's Contract, completed in 1982, received great critical acclaim and established him internationally as an original film maker, a reputation consolidated by the films,
The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover,
The Pillow Book, and
The Tulse Luper Suitcases.
