Peter Greenaway’s 1996 film, The Pillow Book is riddled with physical, metaphorical and emotional surfaces that challenge the idea of skin, and that skin existed before writing and is simply there as a blank, bodily canvas awaiting the penetration of culture and society. The Pillow Book also presents writing on human skin as a sensory experience, highlighting through a visual metaphor the sensitive, emotional and tactile aspect of text.
Greenaway’s use of artistic text projection, colour and emotive lighting combines the written word and the body together in an intense and literal embrace, and allows for a disturbing visual narrative that results in the protagonist’s lover fashioned into a book, a pillow book . Greenaway’s film, poetry and …show more content…
Questioning society’s ease to literally hide or shield themselves with words or text. Furthermore we conceal ourselves through layers of surface or in contrast become a beacon of identity through our surfaces. This point can be shown in the expansive scene where Nagiko and Jerome make love (fig 3). Their inked bodies bearing words tangled in clothing covered in calligraphy, show surface in play that makes the visual reading of certain scenes in The Pillow Book difficult. Decorated skins merge into decorated clothing and clothing fuses into skin. Also the superimposed layering of Japanese illustrations in the shot further adds to this judgement. The tactile nature and layering of this cinema is further added by the spectator’s eyes feeling over the flesh and fabric in the acknowledgement of haptic visuality once again. This editing analysis signifies an allegorical layering of surface concealing the truth and depth of a person, it could be assumed the safety and containment of our skin is not enough protection. Figure 3 shows these …show more content…
The penetration of ink against her body is an action so closely linked to her father, which can be said to symbolise an emotional wound that impresses onto her body which is later washed away, however the impressions still are engrained onto the skin in the action of a scar, as pictured in figure 12. The juxtaposition of different film slides in this still, emphasises this point. The background displays the protagonist, with her lover Jerome erotically scribing on her body, amidst the foreground, displaying her father’s ritualistic birthday writings upon her face as a young child, resulting in the unification of the past and present. A surfacing and scarring of emotion from the past, represented by the penetration of ink and words upon the
Greenaway’s use of artistic text projection, colour and emotive lighting combines the written word and the body together in an intense and literal embrace, and allows for a disturbing visual narrative that results in the protagonist’s lover fashioned into a book, a pillow book . Greenaway’s film, poetry and …show more content…
Questioning society’s ease to literally hide or shield themselves with words or text. Furthermore we conceal ourselves through layers of surface or in contrast become a beacon of identity through our surfaces. This point can be shown in the expansive scene where Nagiko and Jerome make love (fig 3). Their inked bodies bearing words tangled in clothing covered in calligraphy, show surface in play that makes the visual reading of certain scenes in The Pillow Book difficult. Decorated skins merge into decorated clothing and clothing fuses into skin. Also the superimposed layering of Japanese illustrations in the shot further adds to this judgement. The tactile nature and layering of this cinema is further added by the spectator’s eyes feeling over the flesh and fabric in the acknowledgement of haptic visuality once again. This editing analysis signifies an allegorical layering of surface concealing the truth and depth of a person, it could be assumed the safety and containment of our skin is not enough protection. Figure 3 shows these …show more content…
The penetration of ink against her body is an action so closely linked to her father, which can be said to symbolise an emotional wound that impresses onto her body which is later washed away, however the impressions still are engrained onto the skin in the action of a scar, as pictured in figure 12. The juxtaposition of different film slides in this still, emphasises this point. The background displays the protagonist, with her lover Jerome erotically scribing on her body, amidst the foreground, displaying her father’s ritualistic birthday writings upon her face as a young child, resulting in the unification of the past and present. A surfacing and scarring of emotion from the past, represented by the penetration of ink and words upon the