I Would Like to See It: The Pillow Book

Double exposure, spliced images, and some of cinema’s most masterfully confident fades render Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book as much collage as film, so saturated in overlapping and interbled images that at times it employs picture-in-picture to further complicate its visual language. The effect is startling at first, as though some sort of rogue slide show has invaded the auteur’s famously meticulous shot compositions, but once the eye adjusts to the technique’s audacity and the film’s thoughtful, intentional mingling of Chinese and Japanese symbolism, language, and iconography as an externalization of Nagiko’s (Vivian Wu) mixed heritage and polyglot upbringing, the greater image snaps into focus. Greenaway also isolates his images as often as he overlays them, creating fleeting icons of loneliness, grief, and awe against fields of black and white, images which emulate in both form and essence the calligraphy around which much of the film revolves.

Greenaway attends each depiction of calligraphy in action with the focus of a master craftsman. In close-up we see penmanship develop, watch characters take form, and observe the play of ink on surfaces as diverse as skin and parchment. The  process, in Greenaway’s vision, is as crucial as the product, and the director devotes ample time to subpar handwriting, water damage, and other blunders, the astonishingly perfect living texts at the heart of the film further contextualized by these dark artistic mirrors. Literal mirrors also play an important role in the film’s visual language. Reflection forms the initial basis of Nagiko’s sexualized practice of writing on herself, and Greenaway often uses mirrored surfaces to reflect script formed out of light sources or in negative space onto bodies, and to act as sort of naturalist picture-in-picture frames in which sets and actors are artfully arranged to create the illusion of nested spaces.

The books Nagiko composes by writing on partners and admirers are themselves a sort of nested space, as are all books — the organization and sealing of imagery and speech in code recorded on paper — and refract the act of human creativity back on itself. The body which creates becomes, as in the Japanese creation myth Nagiko’s mother recited to her as a child while her father wrote it down on her face, the creation itself. Function follows form, as when Nagiko composes her Book of Silence on a man’s tongue and her Book of Secrets in the hidden spaces of a body, between its fingers and toes, behind its ears, on its eyelids. Even Nagiko’s own life echoes its source of inspiration. She is named for Sei Shōnagon, the real historical author of The Pillow Book and so folds her self-expression into the two facets of Shōnagon’s life: the bodies of her lovers and her mastery over script. Greenaway’s film is a profound commentary on the telling of stories not as some grand and meaningful endeavor but as the quotidian and sometimes transcendent means by which we might come to understand ourselves, if only a little.