From Library Journal
The path from director's chair to curator's desk is a natural one for British filmmaker Greenaway, whose films (Prospero's Books; The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover) frequently allude to artists. This work is the English translation of Le Bruit des nuages, the catalog of an exhibition at the Louvre in 1992 and the second volume in the Louvre's series "devoted to innovative writing on the visual arts by intellectuals outside the museum world" (the first was Jacques Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind, 1993). Greenaway's highly theatrical presentation is divided into three major sections-gravity, flying, and descent-and includes 93 drawings by 70 predominately Italian and French 15th-to 19th-century artists. Candidly personal and imaginative musings accompany each drawing, ending with Victor Hugo's "Hanged Man," who is killed by gravity. A delightful medley for film and art historians and theorists alike.
Russell T. Clement, Brigham Young Univ. Lib., Provo, Ut.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
Flights of fancy and fear, ecstatic highs, dreadful falls, and beckoning skies: these are the images British filmmaker Peter Greenaway collects and dissects in
Flying out of This World, the second volume in a series developed by the Louvre and devoted to innovative writing on the visual arts.
As guest curator, Greenaway selected from the Louvre's collection of European prints and drawings ninety-one masterpieces that illustrate the human longing for flight. Greenaway's text, a compilation of brief commentaries that combine description, allusion, and interpretation, illuminate the images as depictions of flight desired and denied. Including works by Redon, Goya, Brueghel, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Rubens, Poussin, and Delacroix, this volume offers a combination of literary and visual art, of sight and insight.
A pursuit through the Bible, classical mythology, cosmology, theology, etymology, ornithology, and meteorology, Flying out of This World is not just an illustrated history of imagined flight, but a meditation on its meaning as a metaphor for the human condition, caught between a weighty body and a soaring spirit.
