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In his varied cinematic and artistic output now spanning four decades, Peter Greenaway has remained a provocative and sometimes controversial filmmaker and visual artist. Nearly all of Greenaway s films employ artist-figures as central characters; his work often foregrounds the struggles that visual artists, writers, or architects have with patrons, publishers, museums, and the like. With these ongoing concerns, it is no surprise that Greenaway chose to bring Shakespeare's The Tempest to film in Prospero's Books (1991). While this film is perhaps one of Greenaway 's most well-known, The Tulse Luper Suitcases (2003-2004), a trilogy of films with additional online components, has not been as much discussed by critics. This more recent project, which consists of a trilogy of feature-length films, a video game, an online digital archive (plus an opera and a novel) invited ordinary web users to contribute "content" like graphic art, some of which was later incorporated into the trilogy. The Tulse Luper Suitcases project questions authorship and artistic production in new ways; these works ask how art might be produced on the Internet in the so-called Web 2.0 and social networking websites, which allow ordinary web users to distribute and share digital films, photos, and writing. Indeed, these technologies have challenged the idea of artistic creation by the solo, visionary artist; in Web 2.0 the notion of an all-powerful auteur gives way to a democratized, collaborative way of creating and sharing "content" and stories. While the subject matter of Prospero's Books seems to be an almost ideal fit for Greenaway s way of making film and art, which has been pre-occupied with the role of the artist in society, it is surprising to see Greenaway take on the Web 2.0 phenomenon directly in The Tulse Luper Suitcases.
By examining Prospero's Books and several components of The Tulse Luper Suitcases, I will address the following questions: What happens when a latetwentieth- century artist-figure (like Greenaway) who has identified himself with Prospero lets go and surrenders the creation of meaning to the viewer or the Internet user? Going further, can a high-art filmmaker like Greenaway give up an allegiance to cinema for the brave new world of Web 2.0 and its "collaborative" nature? These questions describe not only the relationship of cinema to...