Dismembered Frames: Dialectic Intermedia in Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book

Abstract

Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996) demonstrates the director’s recurring interest in images of dismemberment. These images represent an uncanny and grotesque literalisation of key metaphors. The climactic image of a book made from the flayed skin of a central character is a literalisation of the film’s metaphorical presentation of text as a slicing up of the world, the page, and the body. The film’s form extends this concern, in line with Eisenstein’s theories of filmmaking as a cutting up (through filming) and reconstituting (through editing) of the world. Specifically, the film’s form plays with both structure and meaning through a sustained use of layered frames: multiple frames coincide and compete, some eclipsing others. These complex mosaics—which make use of digital technologies to create intermedial collisions between images, texts, and sounds—transform the familiar sequential and sutured structures of narrative film editing into collages that are defined, instead, by complex simultaneity. Aspects of film structure typically made invisible by continuity editing (including strained causal chains, temporal and spatial ellipses, and the privileging or excluding of points of view) are brought into sight within these multi-frame collages, creating an uncanny frame that performs a recognisable set of functions in an unfamiliar way and demands a new kind of reading. Stripped of the conventional supports offered by causation, linearity, spatial and temporal continuity, and three-dimensional characterisation, The Pillow Book calls into question techniques of interpretation.