Analysis of The Tulse Luper Suitcases Trilogy

History and time are considered to be cultural formations since a History cannot be detached from the culture in which it is produced and received. It is through culture that a historical sense is achieved and in fact, each culture experiences History in a different way leading us to the current perception of History as not being one, but many histories depending on the cultural groups involved. Historians have fought throughout the centuries on whether such thing as “objective History” can exist but in the end, even materialist historians will admit that the reality of History is so complicated and contradictory that no single version could possibly represent the truth; consequently different interpretations are inevitable.

This is where Peter Greenaway comes in with his trilogy The Tulse Luper Suitcases in which the eponymous suitcases (of which there are 92) contain the collected memories of Tulse Luper, a manic collector of forgotten records and other evidence of the twentieth century. Devised as a trilogy, Peter Greenaway’s multimedia project concentrates on a period between 1928, the year in which the element uranium was discovered in Colorado, and 1989, the year when the Berlin wall came down and the Cold War came to an end. The two central events of the past one hundred years – the confrontation between East and West and the threat of atomic warfare – have left their mark on writer and realizer of projects Tulse Luper, who spends most of his time detained in some form of prison or another. Luper’s role is hard to define: his many encounters, the injuries he has sustained and fragments of sentences that surface from his memory, all combine to produce a complex weave or structure that includes both various periods in time a...

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...aware of in his film, through the opposition between the reality of History on the one hand and the fiction of the Luper project on the other, the truth and stability of what really happened and the playful construction presented by Greenaway, the unincarnated omniscience of reality and the awkward contextualization provided by the Luper point-of-view. According to Greenaway, History does not exist in an absolute, unmediated form, but will always be filtered through the perceptions, interpretations and values of subjects as experiencers, filing instances, historians and readers. The event "as it was" thus can never be recovered in an absolute form and that is why “there is no such thing as History, [but] only historians” whose collective work only, can serve as a somewhat effective record of History.