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 devisor 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 as well as the conditions of production and the filming of the media project itself. The 92 suitcases are fixed points within this collage; in both the film and the website that accompanies the project (http://www.tulselupernetwork.com) they refer to a level of information behind the events portrayed.The second part of the film begins with the Second World War, during which Tulse Luper is being held in a country house, and the section ends in the middle of the Cold War.