The Pillow Book

The Pillow Book is director Peter Greenaway's celebration of the literary and calligraphic potential of cinema, and the eroticism of inscription. The Pillow Book is set in Kyoto and Hong Kong at the very end of the 20th century, but pays homage to a 'pillow-book' written at the very end of the 10th century. Greenaway has borrowed much of the sensibility of his source to tell the story of a modern Sei Shonagon, obsessed with getting her many lovers to write texts on her body. The attention of the author is turned to an ironic demonstration that cinema, despite a hundred years of existence as a supposedly autonomous activity, is invariably text-driven, and almost wholly supported by literature.