An illustrated novel about the spoliation of property by the Nazi regime, working as an extension of the film trilogy The Tulse Luper Suitcases.
On May 7, 1945, 92 gold bars are discovered in a crashed car at Bolzano, where it is said they cannot cook a good spaghetti. The watch on the dead driver's wrist stopped at 2:41 a.m., the precise time of the end of the Second World War in Europe. Every gold bar in the crash is made from gold confiscated from the victims of the Third Reich and its allies across Europe, from prisoners of war, gypsies, political enemies, and the mentally and physically handicapped, but mainly from Jews. Each gold bar has a history. Gold relates those 92 histories, along with a postscript of the histories of nine more gold bars that should have been in that crash.
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.
