Thank you for correcting me, and for clarifying. I'm not surprised I got it wrong -- the film is like a perceptual storm, so full and fine-grained at every moment that as much as I was getting I was also constantly aware that I was missing a lot. It's almost as if Greenaway is mimicking the very sensory profusion of lived experience itself, but because of the unavoidability of the film's outermost frame, and the way he constantly frames and unframes and reframes multiply and singularly everything within it, it's impossible to apply anything like the number and kind of filters and interpretive scrims that we automatically [automagically] apply every waking moment to the on-going sum of all living sensory input, scrims that have so thoroughly dissolved into our lived experience that we mostly forget they're there, and so confronted with Greenaway's unfamiliar yet highly coherent profusion, we feel perceptually unmoored, as if the film's very order and structure is such as to produce an experience of sensory chaos which very slowly, almost in the manner of a processional, a long slow reveal where what is being revealed is part and parcel of what has been before our senses from the very beginning, resolves itself into highly nuanced, elegant clarity: teaching us, perhaps, below thought or conscious choosing or even at first recognition, how to filter, how to adapt and adopt the film's palimpsestic scrims and interweave them with our own.

The preceding riff being an attempt to capture something of what watching the movie felt like to me; but I'm not at all sure it scans.

As for Caliban and Prospero in unison, I suppose I must have decided they hadn't been only after they had stopped speaking so, or could there have been earlier cases where they didn't?

I think I've only seen those two films by Greenaway; are any of his others similar in the use of frames within frames and screen splittings etc.? Twenty-four are Prospero's Books, and The Pillow is a twenty-fifth Book, and thus Greenaway's library grows. Until I test it with further viewings, my memories of the two films (seen a decade apart) suggest that The Pillow Book is the more spacious, embodies a greater equipoise, deploys its (re-/un-)framings with greater finesse and restraint, somehow manages to balance extraordinary sensory and intellectual profusion with the grace and brevity of haiku, opes doors of wonder in long draughts of silence. If not adjacent facets, then perhaps, pace Engine Summer, crystals of a single telling's stream.

There's one moment, even before the spells start breaking, where Prospero doesn't shadow Ariel's voice at all, and that's after Prospero has asked Ariel about the condition of his enemies: there are three main persons of Ariel, three dressed the same way but various ages, and you hear them mutter over and over the words "Your charm so strongly works 'em / That if you now beheld them, your affections / would become tender." All the while all three writing on a parchment, passing it around.

Then they hand it to Prospero and it has the line in three handwritings. And Prospero doesn't echo the line, just says "And mine shall." It comes across as the first time anyone else speaks, and certainly the first time Prospero listens to anybody.

Thank you for that! At first I didn't get the moment you were indicating, my beginner's grasp and memory of film and play being less than sure; but when I did it bowled me over. You show me that Greenaway deepens and broadens the pivotal lines of The Tempest to an extraordinary degree. It seems the threefold Ariel casts the spell on Prospero and not the other way around, a spell of dispelling, a kind of awakening. (But why Ariel as trinity?) I wonder if Ariel learned or gleaned some part of the dispelling from Prospero, turned it to new account, thereby giving Prospero the gift of his own humanity re-met, freeing him to free himself and others. So much to look for on subsequent viewings! A lovely chain you send me following; thank you.