The Technology of Articulation

This chapter explores the use of collage structures in Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996), in which the use of intermedia, comprising different types of image and text, results in ever more complex configurations that gesture to new technological possibilities. The film places frames within frames, disturbing the linear cause-and-effect logic of sequence. Collage operates in the film as a complicated montage, disrupting linearity and replacing it with overwhelming simultaneity. This articulation results in a semiotic eccentricity in which frames compete for attention. Criticism has often dismissed the film’s central character Nagiko as too insubstantial to hold the pieces of this articulation together, but this is to mistake her function. She is a cipher, and her erotic writing on the skin of others is just one element in an unsutured and indeterminate collage that displaces narrative. Offering skin-deep characterization, the film plays with the proliferating complexities of intermedia.