The Pillow Book

Yves Jaques
Daily Staff

The word is made flesh in Peter Greenaway's latest film, The Pillow Book. A young woman scribes and is inscribed. Nagiko, played by Vivian Wu, offers her body as a living scroll in her search for the perfect calligrapher. Taking for his structural backbone a 1,000-year-old journal by the Japanese courtesan Sei Shonagon, Greenaway has fashioned a film that uses the body as canvas and the calligraphic text as image to blur the distinction between artist and product, subject and object, message and medium.

The opening scene of The Pillow Book, one that functions as a touchstone for the film, is a haunting birthday ritual in which Nagiko's father, a writer, slowly paints upon her face while intoning, “When God made the first clay model of a human being, he painted in the eyes, the lips and the sex.” This ritual, which ends with her father signing his name upon her neck, is the beginning of her obsession with having her flesh used as paper. The layered symbols become more complex as the young Nagiko watches her father exchange sex for publication. The artist is posited as the creator, but it is the publisher who controls access to his creation.

The publisher, as the one who mass-produces text with no consideration for its value as art or image, is cast as the antagonist by Greenaway, whose deliberate painterly style thrusts narrative technique aside to emphasize the visual nature of film. For him, cinema truly is a moving picture, and as such should respond to a different set of demands. As he sees it, “There is a way that cinema has ended up to be incredibly conventional, very, very slow-moving. It has a tremendous vested interest in this business of selling stories, which I think in some ways is a total waste of cinematic practice,” said Greenaway in an interview. Greenaway feels there's no reason why film, a visual medium, should ape the structure of the novel. Instead, he prefers to borrow from the language of theater, of opera, of painting.

In The Pillow Book there is the frequent use of multiple frames, each containing a different scene, a technique that begins to approach the kind of simultaneity that the three-dimensional theater stage handles with ease. The danger here is that the technique will be seen as empty spectacle, but Greenaway carefully organizes his frames, not around a temporal logic, but around a logic of emotion and memory.

“If we're going to use this multiplicity and this new vocabulary,” he said, “I think it has to be used structurally so that you can begin to tell the notions of place and drama in a complex way.” For Greenaway, this structure is linked to the language of painting “like the introduction of Cubism, the notion that you can see both sides of the wall at the same time.”

This is not his first foray into multiplicity. Prospero's Books, his last film to find distribution in the United States, was a color-drenched, many-layered reformulation of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Critical reactions were mixed, some claiming that John Gielgud in the title role had wasted his chance for a career-capping performance. Opinion aside, the film was the first wide-release feature to take advantage of the then-new Japanese high-definition video technology. The surprisingly high-quality medium offered Greenaway a plasticity during the editing process for which he'd always longed. Shots could be laid one over the other with a variety of transparencies to give the viewer many images at once, the hue and chroma of the palette toyed with at will.

In contrast to the realist techniques used by most filmmakers, who do everything in their power to suspend the audience's disbelief, Greenaway takes the more honest post-modern approach of sticking the medium's artificiality in your face.

The multiple frames give the viewer more control over the film. With The Pillow Book, “There's a way in which, when you watch the film, you can look at the different frames in the order that you choose,” says Greenaway.

Questions of interplay between image and text have always been one of his central concerns. “This is the second movie I've made which deliberately has got 'book' in the title,” he says, “if only to drag you screaming to the acceptance of what the French would pompously call 'the primacy of the text.' What is this really about? Is it about text? Is it about image? How do they relate? What are the associations of ideas, of transference of thought?” In The Pillow Book, Greenaway presents calligraphy as a marriage of the two. “The hieroglyph is a seen and a read image,” he says. “When you see the image, you read the text. When you read the text, you see the image.”

Greenaway's use of the body as a canvas makes the surface as unique as the marks placed upon it. Not only does this incorporate the performance aspects of theater into the calligraphic process, it also creates a product that is irreproducible. The same text written elsewhere would have a profoundly different effect. “From a Japanese point of view, the unique manuscript is far more a part of their experience than it is over here,” he says. “It is the West that invented the printing press, after all. In Japan, the one-off was held as a sacred sort of talisman, the basic icon of which was the actual physical mark of the author, and its form was as significant as what that author had to say.”

As the central character Nagiko matures, she begins to travel outside of her culture to sample new alphabetic traditions, seducing calligrapher after calligrapher by offering her body as a page. As the alphabets pile up, she becomes a sort of living Tower of Babel, with the babble of 20 tongues about her. As the director said, “In a sense I really have gone to the edge in terms of total comprehension, because I would demand of my audience that they could speak 10th-century Japanese, contemporary Japanese, a little Filipino, some Vietnamese, Manchu, Mandarin, Cantonese, Latin, Sanskrit, etc. Now, that audience doesn't exist.”

For Greenaway, this is not only a statement about the problems of communication, but is also “a social and political act” coming out of his feelings that, “Before long the world's cinema will all be made in English. It's happening now. In Spain for example, 50 percent of all the productions are being filmed in English. A language is a culture, and if you lose it, it's a bit like cutting down the South American rainforest; it's totally unreclaimable.”

Greenaway is also very interested in having the audience pay attention to the language as a sound. “I deliberately did not translate the Japanese,” he says. “So you as an audience are forced to listen to the cadences, the rhythms, the characteristics of the language.”

The figure that acts as a cross-lingual mediator and a catalyst for Nagiko's metamorphosis is a young English translator played by Ewan McGregor. Greenaway aptly names him Jerome, “after the monk who brought together all the texts in the Old World and more or less created Western civilization through the offices of the Roman Catholic Church.” Jerome is a crossroad for Nagiko. He's the first man to inscribe her with phonetic text. He's also the first to encourage her to use his body as a canvas.

So begins a lengthy journey in which Nagiko moves from passive canvas to active calligrapher. When she learns that Jerome is the lover of her father's publisher, she decides to use Jerome to get her work printed. Beginning with him, she writes a series of books on men's bodies, and has the 'books' present themselves to her father's publisher. As the pace of the film heats up, the dizzying set of themes that Greenaway has constructed all begin to braid together, propelled by “this yin and yang about the notions of sex and text,” as he says. “On a sheer pleasure-principle level, this for me is a film about two of the most exciting phenomena of being human; the ability to create ideas through text, through literature, and the notions of our own physicality, our own sexuality,” says Greenaway.

Ultimately, body and text combine, driven by the reenactment of a classic dramatic tragedy. Greenaway uses a strategy to be found in several of his other films, that of “discussing a metaphor in all sorts of different ways before we must take on the responsibility for it.” In his most commercially successful film, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, “The metaphors and considerations of cannibalism become very real in a grisly sense,” Greenaway said. In The Pillow Book, the metaphor of the body as a book becomes an actuality. Greenaway noted, “We have all these phrases in English such as 'I can read you like a book.' 'Your life is an open page.' 'There's one novel in all of us.' And then that all comes home to roost because that actual 'there's one novel' turns into a shocking reality because the physicality of the body itself is turned into a book.”

The Pillow Book is among his most successful films, one that is so perfectly structured around the logic of memory and emotion that its disrupted chronology is not confusing to the viewer. Greenaway's heavy use of multiple images and double frames functions to emphasize the artificiality of the cinematic experience and embrace a simultaneity of events that gleefully defies realism. His work ignores the pedantic demands of verité film in favor of a highly ornate structuralism that at its best is both smart and sexy. With this film, Greenaway has managed to center a simple revenge plot within a heady blend of arcane theory, social commentary and artful montage, creating a film that chips away at his own assertion that “we haven't seen any cinema yet. We've only seen a hundred years of illustrated text.”

Opens Friday, June 13th at The Egyptian