I really like The Pillow Book, and although it feels a lot like the climax of Peter Greenaway's preoccupations (though 8½ Women followed) before he moved into a different 'installation' and more direct art criticism phase of work, it might not be too bad a point to start with. It still has that major Greenaway theme of the sort of timelessness of intellectualism carrying its own erotic power contrasted against the more direct, earthy and of the moment pleasures of the flesh which flare up but also quickly decay away (I usually think that he has come closest to making films that embody that Oscar Wilde "we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars" quote).
Its main character is another in the line of Greenaway protagonists who are both aiming to become 'something more' in intellectual (and slightly pretentious!) terms but also remain fascinated by their biological urges and the ephemerality of their existence, in this case in embodying (even becoming subservient to) language and poetry in the calligraphy being inked onto bodies but eventually washing away, leaving the body a fresh canvas again for future annotation. Its kind of a fetish in some ways, learnt in childhood and then turned into a personal quirk that then becomes an artistic statement that builds a career and reputation (which gets into the other big Greenaway theme of artists being exploited by, and in turn exploiting, their patrons in a kind of symbiotic relationship, as the creator starts to chafe against the rather crass artistic tastes of their employer or institution who are just looking to 'appropriate' and possess the results for having some prestige rub off on them by association), before eventually becoming a kind of mini-cult of personality passed on to the next generation in the relatively happy, though beautifully melancholy, ending.
I do really like the way that the main character sorts of drifts out of the film in the later sections as she becomes more experienced and assured as well as somewhat less naïve and in need of the camera to have to be there watching her all of the time, and we instead start to focus more on the schemes of the person desperately wanting to get their hands on the artworks (and being teased for their desires by the artist) and especially the 'final masterpiece' that has been created but made somewhat private and inaccessible through the artist's own wishes (it reminds me a little of how people might have been so desperate to have read that final Harry Potter book because they had become so invested in the narrative that had been weaved that they conceivably might even have stolen the manuscript if they had needed to!) And that in doing a kind of heist to get their hands that final work, and preserve it for the ages as their personal and private property, they kind of violate the entire purpose of the creation, and in some ways reveal their essential misunderstanding of the purpose for the creation of the piece by profaning it so thoroughly. (After all we know from the more thorough exploration of that particular idea in A Zed and Two Noughts that decay into nothingness is an essential part of the lifecycle, and why should it be any different for art itself? Because perhaps only the process of death and decay emphasises that something was truly alive in the first place)
It is a really similar kind of premise to the bookending stories that give Clive Barker's Books of Blood series its title!
Its a fascinating film with perhaps as much to say (and criticise) about the vagaries of publishing as it does about the artist as creator! With perhaps a cheeky little joke about that old phrase that we should not judge every book by its cover! And the usual slightly cynical Greenaway sense that the purity of a grand love affair is a kind of seductive but eventually insipid (and often deadly) delusion.
