Tulse Luper Suitcase

[John Bailey]

Sorry if any of this has been mentioned before...
I'm not a big fan of Peter Greenaway, but just now reading about his current 
project made me wonder if some here might not be interested...

The Tulse Luper Suitcase is will include three feature films, a TV series, 
CD-ROMs and DVDs, which chronicle the life of one Tulse Luper, and spiral 
out in all sorts of directions (especially the CR-ROMs & DVDs). The project 
is subtitled a History of Uranium and covers a period of (I think) about 60 
years of the twentieth century. More interesting to Pynchonites may be the 
structuring of the project according to the Atomic Table, the cast of 92 
characters, 92 major events, and 92 suitcases, the contents of which are 
accessible via the websites and DVD content, which head off on tangents very 
Pynchonian I would say...
"one of the suitcases for example is full of 92 bars of Nazi gold, and every 
single bar has where the gold came from. We can pack and unpack this 
suitcase of Nazi gold bar by bar, so in a sense the whole suitcase is the 
actual length of one feature film retracing where all this gold came from, 
where it was confiscated from, according to the possessions of holocaust 
Jews whose possession they where once upon a time. There's a suitcase of 
Vatican pornography which all has to be examined. There's simply suitcases 
of shoes, 92 shoes, and we examine all the characters who used to wear those 
shoes. There's a suitcase of cork frogs, which are signatures of a group of 
European assassins. There's suitcases of burnt dog burns; female underwear 
belonging to famous American film stars....

"It's a bit like opening windows, so although you're upfront with the 
history of Tulse Luper you realize there are films beyond films beyond films 
beyond films, so you can take another one of these 92 characters and open up 
a huge panorama of windows beyond windows stretching to infinity. Some of 
the devices you want to play at the information is so deeply buried that 
nobody will ever find it, an indication, I suppose, of the way that history 
is organised. An ideal history of the world is a history of every single one 
of its members, but we know that's a mocking proposition, which could never 
be entertained. All forms, I suppose, of encyclopedias have to be very 
brief, they have to be resumes, but I was always fascinated by Borges, that 
the map of the world is the same size of the world, so you have to invent a 
parallel world to run alongside a real one."

http://petergreenaway.co.uk/tulse.htm

Suitcases are at http://petergreenaway.co.uk/suitcases.htm

Also has links to his similar film from 1980 'The Falls' which I haven't 
seen, but gets a Pynchon mention..."It was really a dustbin, to be blunt, 
for all the thousands of films I've never made - 92 films I've somehow not 
finished. In some ways in was about 92 different ways the world may end - a 
very current sociological problem at the time. It was also about bird lore, 
it worked out all sorts of systems and conspiracies - I suppose I was 
influenced by Pynchon, Calvino, and Garcìa Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude - 
all those grandiose, encyclopedic works. It was 92 different ways to make a 
film.

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