Jane Campion: Cinema, Nation, Identity
Research Colloquium, University of Otago,
Dunedin, New Zealand, 6-9 December 2006

We are pleased to announce a forthcoming research colloquium to be held at the University of Otago between 6-9 December 2006 as part of an ongoing collaborative research programme in the area of Cinema Studies. The colloquium will be jointly sponsored by Fondation Maison des Sciences de L'Homme, Paris (MSH) and by the University of Otago's Research Network on Cultures, Histories and Identities in Film, Media and Literature. This event marks an important new stage in the development of academic links between New Zealand and French scholars. As well as scholars from France and New Zealand, the colloquium will be attended by experts from Australia, Belgium, and the United States.

One of the principle goals of this international collaboration is to stimulate and foster research in the area of Cinema Studies by providing a forum for the discussion and dissemination of knowledge in this area. This current research project follows on from an earlier research programme on intellectuals and identity in the context of globalisation that culminated in the publication of a special issue of the electronic journal Portal: A Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies .

Jane Campion is one of the most influential, controversial, and acclaimed filmmakers to have emerged from the antipodes. As a significant auteur, she has attracted the attention of both filmmakers and critics from beyond Australasia: she has won the Palme d'Or at Cannes for her short film Peel (in 1986) and also her feature-length film The Piano (in 1993), as well as numerous other awards. Significantly, the initial, and crucial, support that Campion received from French critics associated with both Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif contributed to her developing international prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s as a filmmaker. Campion's films, then, offer an especially rich terrain for research that would bring together an international cohort of scholars. As the first research colloquium sponsored by La Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and the University of Otago growing out of a Memorandum of Agreement between these two institutions signed in 2005, this cooperative effort signals the importance of international exchange to the Arts and Humanities in a global era.

Notably, Campion's work, which is often identified with feminism and women's issues (although this, too, has been subject to much debate), has raised significant questions about such issues as national cinemas, art cinema, gender and spectatorship, gender and the place of the auteur — among others. As one of the few women directors recognized as an auteur by international film scholars and critics, as well being a New Zealander by birth with strong ties to Australia (through training and funding), Campion, in terms both of her career and her work, provides a locus for discussion about important trends in Cinema Studies today. The research colloquium,   ‘Jane Campion: Cinema, Nation, and Identity', aims to bring together scholars to engage with those aspects of Campion's work that are likely to advance understanding of this important director and the concerns that her films represent within the wider arena of Cinema Studies from an international perspective

Campion's oeuvre serves to mobilise many of the themes investigated in our first research colloquium, ‘ Strange Localities: Utopias, Intellectuals and Identities in the 21st Century', while focusing these issues in terms of an important New Zealand figure of international prominence.   Topic areas to be addressed include:

  1. Mother/Daughter Rites
  2. Narrative and Nation
  3. Suburban Space and the Body
  4. Themes and Motifs
  5. Literary Adaptation and Cinema
  6. Psychoanalytic Perspectives
  7. Unusual Heroines
  8. Jane Campion's Women and . . . Men.

The event will also include a retrospective of the films of Jane Campion (to be screened in the University of Otago's St David Lecture Theatre), and a preliminary round-table (open to the public) on Wednesday 6 December. The aim of the research colloquium itself will be to generate discussion that will lead to new findings. To facilitate this, a number of expert respondents have also been invited to attend.

The final version of the papers presented, after revision to incorporate the findings that emerge from the colloquium, will be published as a co-edited volume in two versions –– one in French, and one in English. The research colloquium has as its goal to make an important contribution to the understanding of Jane Campion's work, but also to encourage research more widely in the area of cinema studies in New Zealand.

This research colloquium would not have been possible without the generous support of the Division of Humanities, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, l'Institut National d'historie de l'art, the School of Social Science, the Department of Communication Studies, and a University of Otago Research Grant.