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Director's Statement
"It may be that there are two stimulations in life that can be, sooner or later, guaranteed to excite and please - sex and text, flesh and literature. Perhaps it is a commendable ambition to try to bring both these two stimulations together, so close together in fact that they can be considered, at least for a time - perhaps for the length of a film - as inseparable".
Peter Greenaway's 1996 Film, THE PILLOW BOOK, is a contemporary story set in Kyoto and Hong Kong at the very end of the twentieth century, but it homages a Japanese pillow book written at the very end of the tenth century, exactly a thousand years before. The original was written by Sei Shonagon, a female courtier at the Japanese Heian Dynasty Imperial Court. It was a collection of reminiscences, of lists, of literary quotes and amormis adventures related in a distance and the especial privilege of the characters, like a piece of paradisiacal science-fiction.
Greenaway has borrowed much of the form, the sensibility and the artificiality of his source in a wholly new fiction that teils of a contemporary Sei Shonagon whose imagination is shaped by the original classic Japanese text until it could be truly said that the book makes the woman. "You are what you read".
This story is driven by a fetish and an Oedipal complexity. The fetish is written text on the body, the desire to use flesh as a writing surface, to use human skin as paper, to consider that the body should be treated as a book to be written on, to make explicit "I can read you like a book".
And the Oedipal complexity is guaranteed when the texts are written by a father onto the skin of his young daughter. When the daughter becomes a woman, the desire to have her lovers write text on her body is so obsessive she cannot decide whether she chooses lovers because they are good calligraphers, or calligraphers because they are good lovers.
Since this is Japan, the texts are beautifully calligraphed in characters that elegantly fit the shapes and curves of the body - female first and then male - for the story has a dramatic gender shift at its centre when the woman ceases to be the paper and becomes the pen. But having found the ideal lover-calligrapher, she loses him, and what was a comforting metaphor - making a book of the body, seeing the body as a book - becomes a grisly reality.
As they do in Japanese painting, word and image constantly interweave in this love story - as does colour and black and white, the Past and the Present, fact and fiction. The history of Japanese painting, they say, is also the history of Japanese calligraphy. To draw a text in Japan is also to write an image. How appropriate the Japanese hieroglyph would be for cinema - a perfect marriage of text and image.
It is true in the West that the image always has the last word, then is it also true in the East, where word, especially the Japanese word, is already always an image?