Peter Greenaway

One of Britain's leading auteurs, Greenaway trained as a painter before spending eleven years, beginning in 1965, as a film editor. During this period he began making short, highly formalist films influenced by structural linguistics, ethnography and philosophy. After shorts such as "Window" (1975), which displayed his fondness for lists (in this case cataloguing all the people who died in a small village by falling out of windows), Greenaway attracted some attention for such vivid medium-length works as "Vertical Features Remake" and the humorous "A Walk through H" (both 1978). He began to garner considerable acclaim on the international festival circuit, and in 1980 made his first feature-length film, a "documentary" set in the future, "The Falls" (1980), chock-full of his trademark riddles and conundrums as he relates the lives of 92 victims of the "Violent Unexplained Event." Greenaway hit the limelight in 1982 with the release of his feature, "The Draughtsman's Contract."