Le valigie di Tulse Luper

Le valigie di Tulse Luper



Prigioni e valigie sono simboli della vita in Le valigie di Tulse Luper di Peter Greenaway: le carceri rappresentano le successive privazioni di libertà a cui può ridursi l'esistenza umana; le valigie sono il bagaglio culturale e di memoria portato con sè da ciascuna delle persone che oggi vanno per il mondo a milioni in viaggi volontari o coatti.
Tulse Luper, scrittore e artista, alter ego di Greenaway, dall'infanzia in poi è al centro d'una storia che abbraccia sessant'anni del XX secolo: dal 1928, anno della potenziale scoperta dell'uranio nelle miniere del Colorado, sino al 1989.
In questo periodo le avventure di Tulse Luper si svolgono sempre in prigione, in sedici diverse prigioni: Galles, Lisbona, Casablanca, Genova, Torino (i fascisti lo rinchiudono nella Mole Antonelliana).
Viaggi immaginari, sosia, 92 valigie colme di carta da parati insanguinata, carbone, depositarie di testimonianze di ambizioni e di colpevolezza, di sogni, ossessioni e storie illecite.



This film makes Mulholland drive look simplistic, the Tulse Luper Suitcases is Tristan Shandy gone haywire, or Monty Python taken to even more absurd depths.



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