What used to be paper, is now just skin
[ed note: This article was originally published in 1998]
An open book with blank white paper makes the same shadow in the middle as two thighs pressed together. Thoughts like this pulse through my mind while watching Peter Greenaway’s movie, The Pillow Book. It’s a masterpiece of graphic design, hypertext, linguistic theory, aesthetics theories all utilized to an extent that I’ve never seen before in the cinema -- one of the rare movies that doesn’t make me feel like the cinema is a medium wasting its potential.
The setting is primarily Hong Kong, and where better to show the hypertexts of everyday life? Along with grand aerial views and breathtaking panoramas of Hong Kong, street level shots reveal a city dense with text -- advertisements everywhere and bold store signs project far out into the street. Bright lights, big text. And in the Pillow Book, all these sights can appear at the same time in the film’s split screens (not an actual split, but the main image box, with other ones planted on top -- sometimes transparent, sometimes opaque). It’s a movie with multiple levels in every sense of the word. Hong Kong may appear by day from the air, and by ground at night at the same time. Sometimes, the image boxes are blank white spaces where information seems to pass into voids. Cinema has always been about a transcendence of time and space, but rarely has it been so obvious yet so logical. At once, two different scenes from the past will appear at the same time. We thought in hypertext, before hypertext became a word. It’s just another instance where the cinema is getting falser, but stepping closer to the truth. All images have their echoes and shadows once they are recalled in the mind.
Most of all, The Pillow Book is a movie where mediums blend together. The antagonistic publisher is seen in one scene reading a book off the computer screen. In another, Nagiko, is being photographed on a Hong Kong roof, and the scene devolves from color into black and white photo stills with “1997” appearing in the top left, and Chinese calligraphy appearing in the top right -- as if the film is suddenly jumping ahead in time beyond the film’s release date to show the calendar these pictures get used for. When Nagiko reads her pillow book at the end of the movie, phrases like “warm rain falling from the mountain clouds” or “walking slow dressed in crimson thinking of Kyoto” are smoothly underlain by their visual counterparts. It’s like this perfect synthesis of literature and film.
The body, too, becomes a medium. When Nagiko’s book is swiftly refused by a publisher with a note saying it is not worth the paper it is written on, Nagiko decides she needs a new paper. As a child, her father would every year write calligraphy on her face and back as a birthday ritual. In adulthood, this ritual evolves into something more like a fetish. Nagiko insists her lovers write on her, and can’t decide if a good lover but indifferent calligrapher is better than its reverse. In her love affair with Jerome, calligraphy is as much a part of foreplay as anything else. This linking of writing and lovemaking goes right through the movie. Earlier, black ink is equated with lacquered hair, and the writing quill with the instrument of pleasure.
It is no wonder something like a fetishization process seems to be implicit in all this. The sea shell’s insides are once linked to the navel. The scent of skin is compared with the scent of fresh paper, and later skin is converted to paper. Text appears on the screen detailing startling facts about the Southeast Asian publishing industry, like 250 trees get cut down a minute, seven million gallons of bleach dumped into the ocean, and extensive labour abuses -- all to support it. People bleed for our books, and who knows what else goes into our books. Questions like, “Where is the book before it is born?” and “Who are a book’s parents?” flash up on the screen at one point.
And there is this corporeality in both books and bodies that is acknowledged. Nagiko stands in the rain, and what was once text runs down her naked body in black streams. And twice she burns her books and diaries, and both times it is the necessary step to freedom.
In the end, I’m left with questions like what happens to the body and the text as we move deeper into the space age? At one point, Nagiko flustered with a typewriter dumps it in the toilet. If the quill is the instrument of pleasure, what pleasure do I get from this computer lab?
The Pillow Book is about a transcendence of spaces. Nothing can be confined.
Text must be everywhere, and is everywhere.
by Don Anderson
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