The Tulse Luper Suitcases reconstructs the life of Tulse Luper, a professional writer and project-maker, caught up in a life of prisons. He was born in 1911 in Newport, South Wales and presumably last heard of in 1989. His life is reconstructed from the evidence of 92 suitcases found around the world - 92 being the atomic number of the element Uranium. 

The project includes three feature films, a TV series, 92 DVDs, CD-ROMs, and books.  

"One description of The Tulse Luper Suitcases is to describe it as the autobiography of a professional prisoner. It may be that we are all prisoners of something - love, money, sex, fame, religious belief, power, ambition, greed, debt, a job, a garden, a dog, train-time-tables, a mortgage, perhaps just the grocery bill. Consequently most prisons are not rooms with a barred window and a locked door. And a second truism - every prisoner needs a jailer just as every jailer needs a prisoner to legitimise his job description. The resultant relationship is a balance of power situation, and now always weighted in favour of the jailer. The above list is no idle list, for my hero, Tulse Luper, not so many million miles from me, his author, suffers from being imprisioned by most of these characteristics. Of course as author, I am Tulse Luper's jailer, just as I am his prisoner. But I get to choose the prisons. The whole of The Tulse Luper Suitcases project could be said to be an indulgence for me to film in many of those most exciting architectural situations I have enjoyed. The Mole Antonelliana in Turin is one of those situations. The building was not conceived as a prison, but consider its origins, its history and its present function, from a place of worship to another place of worship. From a synagogue to a Museum of the Moving Image. Dedicated to a Jewish God and secondly to Cinema, maybe two sorts of prison. Tulse Luper certainly, in the total project of The Tulse Luper Suitcases, spends energy fighting battles relevant to the Jewish God and his fight is certainly relevant to the conditions of Cinema. But the mole is a tower and from the top of the tower you can see for miles and miles - a sort of metaphor that needs perhaps no further explanation - it is a prison with a view - perhaps that is what - spiritually - prisons can be. Tulse Luper tries to make all the prisons of The Tulse Luper Suitcases, prisons with a view." - Peter Greenaway, introduction to the Tulse Luper in Turin book

"The Tulse Luper Suitcases endeavours to utilise and develop a multi-screen language in the various ways Abel Gance anticipated and certainly to take it beyond. Superb steadiness, immaculate framed edges are digitally edited on High Definition tape at increasing near real-time editing speeds. Before, during, after; past present future; fast, slow, slowest, repetitions, reprises, across screen devices of innumerable continuities, developing a language that equates more with human experience in its interactions between reality, memory and imagination." - Peter Greenaway, Cinema Militans lecture, 2003 

Listen to a Peter Greenaway interview here

View images from all three films here

Download music from the films here

Watch The Moab Story trailer here

Access an interactive webler here

The Moab Story DVD

Tulse Luper at Compton Verney

92 SUITCASES

LUPER'S LOST FILMS - SUITCASE 16

WATCHING WATER
SUNDAY CITY-MAN
EROSION
FIRST POSITION
GESANG DER JUGEND
FLYING OVER WATER
TRAIN
TREE
ARE EN CIEL
THE VUE
BRIDZOR ALLEY
WARDOUR
INTERVALS
VATHEK REVISITED
THE MAN WHO MET HIMSELF
BACK-UP
FOOTHILL ABBEY
THE RACE
MAKING A SPLASH
BECKFORD'S FOLLY
APPLE ORCHARD
MARIOTS OF THE WHITE SHEET HILLS
WATER
THE NIGHT EDGE
BRIDZOR
POST AND VEIL
SHAVE
CHRIST'S HORSEMAN
FALSE START
DEAR PHONE
STAYING PRESENT
PARALLEL
WATER WRACKETS
THE LAST MAP
RED PIGMENT
THE FALLS
IRISH GULLS
EIFFEL TOWER SUICIDES
FIVE POSTCARDS OF CAPITAL CITIES
VERTICAL FEATURES
GOOLE BY NUMBERS
THE WATER-TOWERS
CORNTOPIA
THE IRR
FONTENAY
THE GROOMBRIDGE STAR

J.J. Feild, Peter Greenaway and Valentina Cervi at the Cannes Film Festival, May 2003

Peter Greenaway on set with Anna Galiena (left) and Franka Potente (right)

Peter Greenaway with actresses Isabella Rossellini (left) and Ana Torrent (right) in Barcelona

Peter Greenaway and Franka Potente at the Berlin Film Festival, February 2004

Links on the Project

The Official Site

Tulse Luper in Turin

Tulse Luper in Venice

Tulse Luper Manual

Tulse Luper Journey

Suitcases Art

Kasander Film

Cannes Film Festival

Tulse Luper 92 Suitcases

PG Encyclopedia

tulseluper.net

Cineeuropa

ABS Production

Bolzano Gold

Spietati

Allmovie

Trailer

Webler

IMDb

Essays

Gray Kochhar-Lindgren

Heidi Peeters

Zoe Constantinides

The Tulse Luper Suitcases Contest Results

1st: Suitcase 24 - Honey

2nd: Suitcase 27 - Dog Bones

3rd: Suitcase 85 - Blood and Ink

Other Entries

Vermeer and the Dentist

55 Men on Horseback

Numbers & Letters

Drawing Reality

Keys & Locks

Place-Names

Erotic Prints

Manuscripts

Clean Linen

Body Parts

Rainbows

Candles

Needles

Brushes

Water

The Peter Greenaway Tulse Luper Suitcases Interview

92 Suitcases

"What becomes important now is the suitcases that Tulse Luper has been packing throughout his life become more important than the man. So we begin to piece together Tulse Luper's history through his suitcases. And this, I hope, is where all the interactive media take place. We have, I hope, six hours of film time in terms of three feature films all relating narratively, and I hope very comprehensively, these exciting adventures with all these hundreds of characters, and all these suitcases will be introduced narratively and conventionally in the feature films. But I don't want audiences to spend time packing and unpacking these suitcases, they can pack them and unpack on alternative media, like the phenomenon of the CD-ROM and certainly DVD. And these suitcases themselves are very complicated. Like one of the suitcases for example is full of 92 bars of Nazi gold, and every single bar has where the gold came from. We can pack and unpack this suitcase of Nazi gold bar by bar, so in a sense the whole suitcase is the actual length of one feature film retracing where all this gold came from, where it was confiscated from, according to the possessions of holocaust Jews whose possession they where once upon a time. There's a suitcase of Vatican pornography which all has to be examined. There's simply suitcases of shoes, 92 shoes, and we examine all the characters who used to wear those shoes. There's a suitcase of cork frogs, which are signatures of a group of European assassins. There's suitcases of burnt dog burns; female underwear belonging to famous American film stars. And all this information has to be examined and re-examined, and it can be either on the website or certainly on CD-ROMs or DVDs, be somehow interactive. And the information that you get from these ancillary activities compliments what you see in the feature films."

Alter Ego

"Well the title of this huge ambitious project is called The Tulse Luper Suitcase. What's, I suppose, initially important is we should hang on to the word Suitcase rather than Tulse Luper. For me it's an opportunity to go back to a whole series of private mythological characters that I invented at the very beginning of my film career, and we're talking now, I suppose, about first films I ever made in the late 1960s, beginning to get a lot more serious throughout the 1970s, and they culminated in 1978 with, I suppose, my first feature film I made, it was called The Falls. It was called that because all the characters, their surnames all began with the letters F A L L. It was a time of examination of film structuralism and there was a lot of organisation of material that was related to the business of non-narrative structures. This was my attempt to put together a huge encyclopedia of material, which was essentially about one of my fascinations, which was ornithology and notions of flight, the ultimate human dream is the desire to fly. And amongst all the characters I invented for this three-and-a-half hour film was a man called Tulse Luper - Tulse rhymes with Pulse, a vegetable fed to cattle; Luper is vaguely a translation from the Latin for the wolf. But for me he was a character who, I suppose, was like an alter ego. I was a very shy young man in those days and I found it very, very difficult to say Peter Greenaway said, so I blamed all my extravagances, obsessions and fascinations on this man called Tulse Luper."

Tulse Luper 

Language

"I suppose over the last ten years I’ve been exploring the sort of cinema language which I now feel very confident about, I suppose most exemplified in a film like The Pillow Book. And now very much I want to be certain of utilising all the new forms of language. My general interests are non-realistic, are to do with ideas of non-narrative, non-chronological perception. I started my career off has a painter, and I would still very much use painterly attitudes, essentially non-narrative single statement attitudes about picture-making has being the core and predominant interests of my activity. But I think now that I really must get to very serious grips with all the potential of this vast encyclopedic picture-making process. So The Tulse Luper Suitcase is not just going to be three feature films, it’s also going to spill over into all the ancillary cousins and relatives of the moving picture business. I want to be able again to go back to manipulate the world in a peculiar way in which the painter is able to manipulate the world. And finally, what is it, 105 years of cinema? I feel that cinema is now in extremely good position to change its character and get away from all mimicy characteristics, which very much fixed long tradition of cinematic activity to what I would basically call illustration of the nineteenth century novel, and in some ways the prologue of cinema is over and now we can really begin. So this is a vehicle for me to be able to explore all those different languages, because I think anybody who has observed my cinema I’m very much interested in language. French philosophers of the last forty, fifty years have told us there’s no such thing as content anymore, content very rapidly atrophies and all you’re left with is a language, but the language is the content and it’s these sorts of ideas that I now really want to push home." 

Atomic Table  

Uranium Baby

"The whole project has a secondary title, which is A History of Uranium in the Twentieth Century. I think future historians might very well look at the twentieth century and regard it as being the century of Uranium. Uranium discovered in the Colorado deserts, I suppose in the 1920s, misunderstood until the prerogatives of the Second World War became to make it somehow necessary to make the ultimate weapon, responsible for great symbolic disasters like Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. And then begins the long Cold War which, I suppose, runs exactly parallel to my later childhood and all the period I was a student, so in a sense I am a Uranium baby. The history of Uranium, politically and psychologically, somehow has run parallel to my life. Ultimately, they say 1989 when the Berlin Wall comes down that's the end of the Cold War, but we still know that, for example, Pakistan and India are still aggressively sparring with one another about the notion still of atomic power. So Uranium standing in for Armageddon, the great disaster has being responsible for so much of the middle period, middle and late period history." 

Baggage

"It’s interesting that the title, I hope it’s interesting, that the title is The Tulse Luper Suitcase, and the suitcase is a very important metaphor for the end of the twentieth century. The world’s population is very mobile, everybody’s on the move. If you discuss with American adults now, very few of them ever live in the place where they were born - that’s very largely to do with voluntary movement. But if you look at Central Europe and Russia with the collapse of Communism and the history of the end of the twentieth century, there are vast amounts of people on the move. 25,000 young people are supposed to move into Beijing and Shanghai every day and stay there. And we know what’s happening in Central Europe and Africa. So the idea of your house and possessions all wrapped-up in a suitcase is a very good metaphor, both literally – carry your toothbrush with you - but also in terms of cultural baggage, you carry your metaphorical, symbolic baggage with you. You manoeuvre and become this highly mobile, eclectic personality, gathering in the world’s information in an age of information. So I think it’s a very good metaphor at the end of the twentieth century. And the packing and unpacking and the significance of suitcases is going to be very, very important in this movie."

Deeply Buried

"It's a bit like opening windows, so although you're upfront with the history of Tulse Luper you realize there are films beyond films beyond films beyond films, so you can take another one of these 92 characters and open up a huge panorama of windows beyond windows stretching to infinity. Some of the devices you want to play at the information is so deeply buried that nobody will ever find it, an indication, I suppose, of the way that history is organised. An ideal history of the world is a history of every single one of its members, but we know that's a mocking proposition, which could never be entertained. All forms, I suppose, of encyclopedias have to be very brief, they have to be resumes, but I was always fascinated by Borges, that the map of the world is the same size of the world, so you have to invent a parallel world to run alongside a real one."

Blown Open 

Manifesto

"Well I think there is so much information, has I think we have already intimated, that not all of it will be able to be contained within the six hour period of three times two hour feature films. There have been precedents of course in cinema history, I'm thinking of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, which has two manifestations; Fassbinder also had an attempt; I suppose you even could talk about David Lynch's Twin Peaks. There are ways and means in which manifestations can happen, contain the same information, but reorganise in a different way for a different audience perception."

Fascination

"So I hope in this project to give you excitement, to give you fascination, but also to talk very seriously about ideas of moving picture language."