Roy, this is my wife, Georgina Spica -- she has a heart of gold and a body to match... and I am Albert Spica and I have a heart of gold and a great d… - Peter Greenaway

There is nothing more splendid than the prospect of sitting in the morning before a new ink-stone and a sheet of white paper. The smell of the white paper is like the scent of the skin of a new lover who has just paid a surprise visit out of a rainy garden. And the black ink is like lacquered hair. And the quill? Well the quill is like the instrument of pleasure whose purpose is never in doubt but whose surprising efficiency one always -- always forgets.

I invariably, after great familiarity with a film, concoct a personal way of reading it that relies entirely on information which a public audience would, I feel, have scant interest. I might travel from a casual unrehearsed glance of a minor character to a detail of folded cloth, from a rhyme in the dialogue to an over-excited high note in the music, from a misplaced shadow to a patch of rogue colour, from a shine on a furniture leg to a curious accidental photographic haze around a street lamp, from the examination of a cloud that looks like a snail to the discomfort of an actress who I know is stifling a sneeze.

Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.