“I suppose, my general sense of anxiety and disquiet about the cinema we’ve got after 100 years — a cinema which is predicated on text. So whether your name is Spielberg or Scorsese or Godard, there’s always a necessity to start with text and finish with image. I don’t think that’s particularly where we should organize an autonomous art form. That’s why I think that, in a way, we haven’t seen the cinema yet, all we’ve seen is 100 years of illustrated text. My films are very much based on the notion of the grid. The grid has determined the paintings of Mondrian, Jasper Johns, and is relative to the notion of 20th-century art, which is intimately related to the edges of the frame, it’s a very frame-conscious notion. That’s another whole ballgame, which I would like to continue to explore. The screen is only a screen is only a screen; it’s only an illusionary space and I would quarrel seriously with Bazan on the knowledge that cinema is a window on the world. It is not. It is an artificial construct which is contained within its own conventions and devices, and I think we should acknowledge that in a very self-conscious way.”
Peter Greenaway, from an interview on The Pillow Book