The Pillow Book
Screening on Film
Directed by Peter Greenaway.
France/UK/Netherlands, 1996, 35mm, color and b&w, 126 min.
Cantonese, English, Japanese and Mandarin with English subtitles.
France/UK/Netherlands, 1996, 35mm, color and b&w, 126 min.
Cantonese, English, Japanese and Mandarin with English subtitles.
Greenaway deploys a broad arsenal of formal effects (varying screen widths, multiple imagery, textual inscription) to impart the complex story of a beautiful fashion model-turned-writer who is obsessed with calligraphy and the flesh. Based on the classic tenth-century text of the same title by Sei Shonagon, radically transposed by Greenaway to modern-day Japan and the information age, The Pillow Book melds a timeless eroticism and a fascination with language that is at once erudite and libidinal into a dreamlike, startlingly beautiful, and sometimes shocking narrative.