The Pillow Book

Screening on Film

Directed by Peter Greenaway.
With Vivian Wu, Ewan McGregor.
France/UK/Netherlands, 1996, 35mm, color and b&w, 126 min.
Cantonese, English, Japanese, and Mandarin with English subtitles.

The controversial British filmmaker and artist Peter Greenaway deploys a broad arsenal of formal effects (varying screen widths, multiple imagery, textual inscription) to construct this complex story of a beautiful fashion model-turned-writer, who is obsessed with calligraphy and the flesh. Based on the classic tenth-century Japanese text by Sei Shonagon of the same title, radically transposed by Greenaway to modern day Japan and the information age, The Pillow Book melds a timeless erotics and a fascination with language that is at once erudite and libidinal into a dreamlike, startlingly beautiful, and sometimes shocking narrative.