The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story
(2003)

Country: UK

Genre: Adventure, Drama, Pseudo-Biography

Synopsis

The first part of Peter Greenaway's chronicle of the legendary Tulse Luper, told through his collection of 92 suitcases which illustrate his life as a naturalist, artist, voyeur and 'professional prisoner'.

Notes

• Richard Pask plays the young Tulse Luper for approximately the first 15 minutes of this film, which has a total running time of just over 2 hours.
• The story of Tulse Luper (a figment of Greenaway's imagination) is continued by Greenaway in two further films, and "The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 3: From Sark to the Finish" (2003) (the films being released out of their correct sequence). The style of the three films has been described as highly unorthodox, even compared to other Peter Greenaway films.
• According to information supplied in Greenaway's films, Tulse Luper - writer, collector, cataloguer and obsessive list-maker - was born in 1911 in Newport, South Wales and disappeared into ever more obscure prisons and jails in Russia and the Far East in the 1970s. His life is shrouded in mystery, but it seems that Luper was present at some of the key historical events of the 20th century, including the first nuclear tests in New Mexico, the 1968 Paris student protests and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Although Luper spent most of his life being a professional prisoner, he still managed to collect a large number of objects, which he stored in 92 suitcases. After his last mysterious disappearance in 1989, Tulse Luper was presumed to be still alive somewhere in the world - probably in a prison somewhere. His ultimate fate is completely unknown.