The Tulse Luper Suitcases

The Tulse Luper Suitcases is a multimedia project by Peter Greenaway, initially intended to comprise four films, three "source" and one feature, a 16-episode TV series, and 92 DVDs, as well as Web sites, CD-ROMs and books. Once the online Web-based portion of the project was completed, the "winner" having taken a trip following Tulse Luper's travels (and often imprisonment) during his first writings about the discovery of uranium in Moab, Utah in 1928 to his mysterious disappearance at the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the final, feature film was released.

Two books and three feature films were released to supply material to the Flash/Web designers who competed in a contest to make one of the 92 Flash-based "suitcase" games featured on the interactive, online site The Tulse Luper Journey.

Films / DVDs

Three films, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story, The Tulse Luper Suitcases,Part 2: Vaux to the Sea, and The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 3: From Sark to the Finish were released in 2003, although they were shown out of order, with Part 1 shown in 2003, Part 3 in early 2004 and Part 2 in summer 2004. Part 1 was entered into the 2003 Cannes Film Festival.[1]

All three were initially released only on DVDs made in Spain to provide "back-story material" for the designers working on the online site's "suitcases", chosen from submissions in a contest held in 2004. The trilogy was later released as a box set in Australia in 2008. There are also two books, Tulse Luper in Turin and Tulse Luper in Venice, published in 2004, for the same purpose.

In 2005, after the winner of the online game finished a free trip following the travels of Luper, an additional final feature, A Life In Suitcases (subtitled The Tulse Luper Journey) was released.

Cast

Structure

The project has been described by Greenaway as "a personal history of uranium" and the "autobiography of a professional prisoner". It is structured around 92 suitcases allegedly belonging to Luper, 92 being the atomic number of uranium as well as a number used by Greenaway in the formal structure of his earlier work (most notably The Falls). Each suitcase contains an object "to represent the world", which advances or comments upon the story in some way, although in many cases the contents are more metaphorical than real.

The world according to Tulse Luper

Luper was born in 1911 in Newport, South Wales and disappeared into ever more obscure prisons and jails in Russia and the Far East in the 1970s. He would have been 100 in 2011. In the last century, this extraordinary man archived his entire life in 92 suitcases. His life is shrouded in mystery, but it seems that Luper has been present at some of the key historical events of the 20th century, including the first nuclear tests in New Mexico, the 1968 Paris student protests and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Although Luper spent most of his life being a professional prisoner, he still managed to collect a large number of objects and store them in suitcases. In a way, these suitcases represent the world according to Tulse Luper. Tulse Luper is still presumed to be alive somewhere in the world – probably in a prison somewhere.

Luper's fascination

As a writer, collector, cataloguer and professional list-maker Luper is fascinated by traces, systems, maps, numbers and artifacts. The exhibition explores the connections between objects, events and ideas, re-peopling the house and bringing the collections and building to life. At the heart of the exhibition is the collection of 92 suitcases that Luper has supposedly abandoned on his travels. Tickling all senses, their content can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted and felt, providing intriguing clues to his existence, his obsessions, the people he has met, and the places he has visited.

Style

The visual style of the three feature films is unorthodox, even compared to other Greenaway films. This is most likely because they were meant to provide "source material" and "background story" for the Flash-based "suitcases" and hence are not truly meant to be watched as a film with typical fashion, but more of an audio/video pastiche.

In many scenes multiple takes, different angles, or identical copies of the same footage are displayed simultaneously within the frame, either superimposed or in discrete "boxes" taking up a small part of the screen. Multiple images are typically offset in time from one another, with a corresponding delay in audio. At times, a written representation of the script also scrolls across the screen as it is performed. The overall effect is similar to that of The Pillow Book, but because these effects are largely devoted to "narrator"-type characters providing exposition, or primary characters themselves commenting on or responding to the action, the overall effect is more like a visual encyclopedia or a form of interactive media (minus the actual interaction).

The character Tulse Luper has been featured (though rarely seen) in several of Peter Greenaway's earlier film works, and in The Tulse Luper Suitcases a substantial portion of Greenaway's output is briefly presented as if it had been filmed by Luper. Other connections to previous Greenaway films include the character Cissie Colpitts, who also appeared in the 1988 feature Drowning By Numbers and the 1978 short Vertical Features Remake as well as in The Falls from the same year. Tulse Luper, like Greenaway himself, is a keeper of extensive lists and catalogues, which serve as a sort of prism through which everything is seen. The most notable instance of this in the project is a collection of 1,001 stories which parallel The Book of One Thousand and One Nights in Arabic literature. The character Martino Knockavelli makes his first appearance here as a plump Italian schoolboy.

Analysis

An entire issue of the online journal Image and Narrative: The Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative, Issue #12 is dedicated to study, analyze, deconstruct, and explain Greenaway's project.

Tulse Luper Suitcases Exhibition

Tulse Luper Suitcases was also explored as a multimedia exhibition. From 2007 to 2011, the exhibition took place in several cities around the world, such as Ghent (Belgium), Compton Verney, Warwickshire (United Kingdom), Fort Asperen (Netherlands) and São Paulo (Brazil).

92 Suitcases Greenaway's exhibition brought all the drama of cinema to life through objects, music, video, and special effects. At the heart of the exhibition was a collection of 92 suitcases that Luper had supposedly abandoned on his travels. The exhibition explored these interests and documents the life of the elusive Luper. It wove an intriguing story which linked objects, lists and events into a narrative, bringing the collections and building it to life. The contents provided clues to his existence, his obsessions, the people he has met and the places he has visited. The complete multimedia encyclopedia emerges through objects and audiovisual representations of all the determining elements of life in the atomic age. Each exhibition was made in a unique way for each museum/country, offering the audience, through modern technology, a unique look at Luper's perceptions during his travels.

The project was structured as an open work, which incorporated collaborations from different places such as websites made by fans. In 2007, in São Paulo, at the Videobrasil Festival, an artist (Thaís de Almeida Prado) created a performance, especially for the Tulse Luper Suitcases exhibition. The project called "The Sleeper who ..." (A Adormecida que ...]) generated new manifestations such as a diary, a blog, videos, and photographs of the performer, as well as interaction with the public through letters.

References
  1. "Festival de Cannes: The Tulse Luper Suitcases". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 7 November 2009.
  2. Douglas Keesey (2006). The Films of Peter Greenaway: Sex, Death and Provocation. McFarland. p. 214. ISBN 978-0-786-48100-2.

Further reading
  • Braun, Micha (July 2013). "But underneath I think we are in a very exciting melting pot. The Re-Invention of Mannerist Style and the Historicity of Cinema in Peter Greenaway's Artwork". International Journal of Cinema (1): 167–77.
  • Braun, Micha (2012). In Figuren erzählen. Zu Geschichte und Erzählung bei Peter Greenaway [Telling in Figures. On History and Storytelling in Peter Greenaway's Films] (in German). Bielefeld: transcript. ISBN 978-3-8376-2123-5.
  • Gardner, Jared (2008). "Greenaway's Suitcase Cinema and New Media Archaeology". Studies in European Cinema. 5 (2): 143–153. doi:10.1386/seci.5.2.143_1. S2CID 192204386.
  • Leslie, John; Ward, Alan, eds. (2004). Luper at Compton Verney. Compton Verney: Compton Verney House Trust. ISBN 978-0954654542.
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