Peter Greenaway "The Pillow Book"
In 1996, Peter Greenaway came Center Stage to discuss his film “The Pillow Book.” Greenaway is looking to redefine the way we create and understand the art of moving images in cinema. “I’m looking for ways and means of finding notions of reinventing an idea of imagistic cinema."
Greenaway is critical of text driven cinema. “Why is it that we feel so culturally, somehow unhappy about the notion of cinema creating its own subject matter? Why do we have to have such a text driven cinema. So, my examination, not only in this film but many others is to see if it’s possible to find a much better equivocation between the notion of what the French would pompously call the primacy of the text versus the primacy of the image."
"The Pillow Book" is an excellent example of Greenaway merging image and text. "I became fascinated about the notion of the calligraphy, the idea of the ideogram which is both, at the same time, an image and a text. So, when you read the text in this film, you see the image. When you see the image you very much read the text."
About the film.
The film's title, "The Pillow Book", refers to an ancient Japanese diary, the book of observations by Sei Shōnagon. The film is narrated by Nagiko (Vivian Wu), a Japanese born model living in Hong Kong. Nagiko seeks a lover who can match her desire for carnal pleasure with her admiration for poetry and calligraphy. The roots of this obsession lie in her youth in Kyoto, when her father (Ken Ogata) would write characters of good fortune on her face. Nagiko's father celebrates her birthday retelling the Japanese creation myth and writing on her flesh in beautiful calligraphy, while her aunt (Hideko Yoshida) reads a list of "beautiful things" from Sei Shōnagon's the book of observations. Nagiko's aunt tells her that when she is twenty-eight years old, the official book of observations will be officially 1000 years old, and that she, Nagiko, will be the same age as Sei Shōnagon when she had written the book (in addition to sharing her first name). Nagiko also learns around this time that her father is in thrall to his publisher, "Yaji-san" (Yoshi Oida), who demands sexual favors from her father in exchange for publishing his work.
Source for the plot synopsis taken from wikipedia
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