The Intermedial Reworking of History in Peter Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases Trilogy

This chapter focuses on Peter Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases trilogy as a Historical saga encompassing the years of World War II, but recounted in the highly abstract and formally postcinematic aesthetic advocated by the director. In this work, Greenaway establishes a correlation between cinema and other art forms, as if he were a metaphorical media archaeologist retracing the recurrence of technical, artistic, and narrative properties of media. Thus, old media are represented and refashioned in a way that addresses three of Francesco Casetti’s contentions in his book The Lumière Galaxy. The first film of the trilogy highlights the technical properties of old media; the second concentrates on art forms perceived as certain types of sensory configurations; the third relies more heavily on digital technology and the flux of multiple narratives in an audiovisually performative way. Greenaway’s observation that “Every medium needs to constantly re-invent itself” resonates with the fallacy of History, which is never stable, never objective, never ending. If “there is no history, only historians,” and “all historians are liars,” as Greenaway contends, then perhaps from a media archaeologic perspective, Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that “the medium is the message” is still true today, highlighting the trilogy’s metamediality.