This film condenses the seven hour film of THE TULSE LUPER SUITCASES into a two-hour feature film, and in doing so, accentuates the project as a filmic essay in multiple narratives, listings, side-bars, footnotes, commentaries and anecdotes, a mixture of fact, fiction, history and documentary, full of reprises and alternatives, a project for an Information Age, learning to treat narrative as an adjunct to experience relative to browsing rather than to reading, and ready to understand that there never is a phenomenon called History, there can only be Historians, who are always gatekeepers to vested interests.

The project’s content deals with the last sixty years of the 20th century, what could be called the years of the first chapter of uranium, the symbolic element behind so much of this period of history, the bomb, the nuclear deterrent, the Second World War that lead to the Cold War, that, from Hiroshima to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, has created so much of this centuries history. Consequently the project uses the number 92, the atomic number of Uranium, as the structure for its ubiquitous hero, Tulse Luper, who travels the world from Utah to Manchuria over a period of more than sixty years, involved in 92 adventures with 92 suitcases and 92 characters. So much information stretches the boundaries of the vocabulary of conventional cinema, and will be further and much more lengthily explored in the project’s other manifestations of websites, DVDs, plays, books, exhibitions and installations.
-Peter Greenaway

DirectorPeter GreenawayProd. CoKasander Film CompanyYear2005Servicesediting