A Selected Annotated Bibliography of Jane Campion's Films
by Rochelle Simmons
I. Books
Coombs, Felicity, and Suzanne Gemmell, ed. Piano Lessons: Approaches to The Piano. Sydney: John Libbey, 1999. [Book]
This edited collection contains essays on gender, psychoanalysis, melodrama, the piano as a cultural object, postcolonialism, and depictions of nation in The Piano. In their Introduction, Coombs and Gemmell emphasize the debate aroused by Campion's film, which they attribute to its mixture of genres, to the “strained moral codes” of its subjects, in which persecutor and persecuted become interchangeable (viii), and to its combining of imperialist and postcolonialist discourses. The editors have included essays from Australian, New Zealand, and expatriate New Zealand critics.
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Gillett, Sue. Views From Beyond the Mirror: The Films of Jane Campion. The Moving Image 7. St Kilda: ATOM, 2004. [Book]
Gillett invokes feminist and psychoanalytic theories in her analysis of Campion's films. She states that Campion revises Laura Mulvey's notion of the male gaze, by subjecting male sexuality to female scrutiny and by attempting to invent the conditions of mutual seeing. For example, Gillett's discussion of In the Cut employs the myths of Medusa and Bluebeard and also Barbara Creed's conception of the monstrous feminine in its discussion of castration. She argues that whereas Malloy is unafraid of female desire, Rodriguez castrates (decapitates) women out of fear of being castrated himself. Although this film scrutinizes male sexuality, Gillett claims that it also provides a different story of female sexual desire.
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Margolis, Harriet, ed. Jane Campion's The Piano. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. [Book]
In her Introduction, Margolis provides an account of Campion's biography, she considers The Piano in relation to Campion's previous work and to New Zealand cinema, and she discusses the film in an international context. She also includes a glossary of relevant Maori terms. Margolis pays particular attention to Campion's preoccupation with sex, identity, and power, to the debates over whether Maori are integrated into or appropriated by The Piano, and to feminist responses to the film. The book includes essays by New Zealand and international critics on music, patriarchy, Jungian interpretation, constructions of Maori, and reception analysis.
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Polan, Dana. Jane Campion. London: BFI Publishing, 2001. [Book]
The dominance of The Piano within Campion's oeuvre is reflected in the organization of this book, since the film occupies a central position within Polan's analysis. He begins by citing popular cultural references to The Piano, in order to demonstrate how it has become identified with feminine feeling in the popular imagination and he then justifies the need for both author- and audience-based readings of the film. Polan adopts a self-reflexive attitude towards authorship, in which he argues that the name “Jane Campion” signifies both a female artist and shorthand for dispersive forces that work against unity. After discussing The Piano's representation of affect and sensibility in relation to the genres of the woman's film and the female gothic, he provides chronologically arranged close readings of all of Campion's films, thereby demonstrating divergences of subject and style.
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Wexman, Virginia Wright. Jane Campion: Interviews. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. [Book]
Interviews with Campion are arranged chronologically and they cover her work from her student films through to The Portrait of a Lady. There are some repetitions, but for the most part these interviews complement each other and they provide a useful collection of Campion's statements about her work. However, there are numerous Australian interviews, but no New Zealand ones, although on one occasion she is interviewed by a New Zealand writer for an Australian periodical (Miro Bilborough for Cinema Papers).
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II. General Discussions of Campion's Films
Gelder, Ken. “Jane Campion and the Limits of Literary Cinema.” Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text. Ed. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan. London: Routledge, 1999. 157-171. [Book chapter]
Gelder begins by discussing The Piano as a “literary” film, even though it was not an adaptation, and he argues that it demonstrates how a film can become something more than a novel. He suggests that if The Piano could be said to stand for “literary cinema” in its purest form, then the subsequent novel-of-the-film is seen as debased and inappropriate to the field of literature. Gelder also considers Campion's adaptation of Henry James's novel The Portrait of a Lady in terms of its autonomy from and dependence on the source novel, which has a thematic corollary in the way that its heroine's attempts at independence are increasingly thwarted. Thus, according to Gelder, the film addresses its own predicament as an adaptation.
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III. Short Films
Cook, Pam. “Passionless Moments.” Monthly Film Bulletin 57.678 (1990): 210. [Review]
Cook describes Campion's “off-kilter” perspective on suburban Australian life in terms of alienation and miscommunication. In a series of disconnected episodes, ten characters explore patterns of thought ranging from the poignant to the absurd. She sees these vignettes as containing many of the themes Campion explores in her longer works, such as, isolation, childhood experience, and the deceitfulness of language. For Cook, Campion uses banal and everyday incidents to suggest problems with the Australian psyche.
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Freiberg, Freda. “The Bizarre in the Banal: Notes on the Films of Jane Campion.” Don't Shoot Darling: Women's Independent Filmmaking in Australia. Ed. Annette Blonski, Barbara Creed, and Freda Freiberg. Richmond: Greenhouse Publications, 1987. 328-333.
In this discussion of Campion's short films, Freiberg focuses on those aspects that evade easy categorization. According to Freiberg, Campion's work “sits somewhere on the edges between experimental and art cinema, between the narrative fiction film and the social issue film, between anecdote and aphorism, and between an exploration of the banal and the profound” (328). She emphasizes how Campion's short films have non-sequential narrative structures, open endings, quirky and/or black humor, disquieting if not jarring images, bizarre or grotesque framing, jolting cuts, and a surreal mise-en-scène. In Freiberg's terms, Campion's films “invest everyday, domestic and trivial scenes and situations with an edge of menace” (328).
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Glaessner, Verina. “A Girl's Own Story.” Monthly Film Bulletin 57.678 (1990): 209. [Review]
Glaessner claims that Campion's avoidance of sentimental coming-of-age clichés allows her to include Australian references without resorting to self-consciousness and camp. She employs early '60s bric-à-brac, not simply to recreate the period, but in order to indicate a state of mind. For Glaessner, this state of mind is explored through cinematography. She writes: “Campion's figures inhabit the frame with the same sense of psychic awkwardness as [Diane] Arbus' subjects, their very ungainliness suggestive of extreme discomfort within the ‘feminine space' allotted to them, almost a protest against it” (209).
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Hausknecht, Gina. “Self-Possession, Dolls, Beatlemania, Loss: Telling the Girl's Own Story.” The Girl: Constructions of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women. Ed. Ruth O. Saxton. New York: St Martin's Press, 1998. 21-24. [Book chapter]
If girl's stories are traditionally about fitting in, Hausknecht argues that the girl's own story is about not fitting in and about failing to meet normative cultural expectations. She sees Campion's A Girl's Own Story as being paradigmatic of transgression in contemporary women's fiction. Hausknecht concludes: “Campion's short film presents a trajectory of girlhood in which active, busy play surrenders to threats, fears, and the suppression of desires rendered unworkable by conventional expectations” (31).
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Paskin, Sylvia. “Peel.” Monthly Film Bulletin 57.678 (1990): 210-11. [Review]
Paskin describes how Peel examines the hostility lurking within family relations, as a small incident—a boy dropping orange peel from a car window—elicits a power struggle over the boy's disobedience and his telling off. Frustrated by how the father and son's tussle interrupts their journey, the sister drops more peel, causing the others to join forces against her. To quote Paskin: “manipulation, obsession, perverse and casual cruelty” triumph at the end of this film, which contains a “bleak and profoundly disturbing” vision of family life (211).
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IV. Sweetie
Hardy, Ann. “Sweetie: A Song in the Desert.” Illusions 15 (1990): 7-13. [Article]
Hardy reads Sweetie in terms of male fear of female power and female transgression. She describes how Dawn and Kay represent opposed types of femininity according to, first, masculinist, and second, feminist, frames of reference. Hence, Dawn can be seen as inappropriately sexual and crazy and Kay as repressed and neurotic, or both sisters can be seen as enacting two different kinds of rebellion: a carnivalesque subversion of social mores and a radical withdrawal into negation and silence. Rather than proposing these as ideal forms of behavior, Hardy argues that they emerge out of the film's investigation of the effects of incest on a dysfunctional, nuclear family and its simultaneous exploration of female creativity.
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Smelik, Anneke. “Forces of Subversion: On the Excess of the Image.” And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. 123-151; 196-197. [Book chapter]
Smelik discusses the cinematic image and the representation of female subjectivity within the context of a visual pleasure that is not dependant upon narrative, but upon visual style. She identifies an excessive visual style in Sweetie, and in Percy Adlon's Bagdad Cafe, that subverts narrative structures and that privileges the image. In Smelik's view, Sweetie's visual elements create a subtle sense of Verfremdung in which a “bizarre style converges with the irrational behavior of the characters, creating a psychical reality that remains far removed from psychological realism” and that makes domestic surroundings appear unheimlich and hostile (140). Sweetie herself is seen as grotesquely excessive and abject.
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Strain, Ellen. “Reinstating the Cultural Framework: Kay Shaffer's Women and the Bush and Jane Campion's Sweetie.” Spectator 11.2 (1991): 32-43.
Taking Kay Shaffer's revisionist study of national cultural discourse as a starting point, Strain argues that Schaffer's supplanting of masculine myths of the bush with those that associate the land with the feminine and the other is relevant to Sweetie. Strain examines the symbolism that connects the tree with hidden powers and with Dawn's sister Sweetie, and describes how Sweetie not only represents women, but also the figure of the Aborigine in dominant Australian culture. Despite their apparently antithetical qualities, Strain claims that Kay is “only a slightly more socially-conditioned version of her sister” (40).
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V. The Piano
Bruzzi, Stella. “Tempestuous Petticoats: Costume and Desire in The Piano.” Screen 36.3 (1995): 257-66. [Article]
Bruzzi discusses the sensuality and sexuality of clothes in The Piano. She argues that the film's reworkings of gender stereotype are evident in the signification of costume. If Ada is restricted by her elaborate Victorian garments on some occasions, her attitude towards her clothing also demonstrates her agency on others, such as when she transforms her hooped petticoat into a tent. Campion reverses conventional scopophilic roles by making Ada the agent of the gaze and Baines' naked body its object. Moreover, Baines' caressing Ada's leg through a hole in her worsted stocking demonstrates how the distance that normally underlies the fetishization of the female form is supplanted by the sensual pleasure of touch.
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Clover, Carol. “Ecstatic Mutilation.” The Threepenny Review 57 (1994): 20-22. [Article]
Clover examines The Piano's “ledger-like accounting of pleasures (or freedoms) and prices” (20). She notes that the film seems to revel in its horrors, judging from its slow, beautiful finger chopping and drowning scenes, and she claims: “Wounding and annihilation are at the ecstatic heart of this film” (21). A medievalist by training, Clover reads The Piano in the tradition of the Christian martyr story, which she sees as having the same tone of ecstatic victimization as gothic romance. Not only is Campion's film marked by losses and mutilations, but Ada's power and desirability depend on them. Clover states: “Romance, in The Piano, is unimaginable outside the terrain of sadomasochism” (22).
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Dyson, Lynda. “The Return of the Repressed? Whiteness, Femininity and Colonialism in The Piano.” Screen 36.3 (1995): 267-76. [Article]
Dyson situates The Piano's representation of colonialism in relation to contemporary New Zealand debates about belonging and indigeneity. For Dyson, Campion's film presents the colonization of New Zealand as a narrative of reconciliation, in which Ada jettisons her piano (a symbol of middle-class European culture), and thus her link to Britain, and begins life in a New Jerusalem with Baines, a white man who has already “gone native” and who, along with Ada, assumes an indigenized Pakeha identity. Dyson also discusses how The Piano was marketed in Britain as an art film located within a European literary context and not as a representation of white settler colonialism, which had the effect of reinforcing the way that the film itself universalizes whiteness.
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hooks, bell. “Gangsta Culture–Sexism and Misogyny: Who Will Take the Rap?” Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York, Routledge: 1994. [Book chapter]
According to hooks, the white mainstream media are surprised to hear her describe gangsta rap, not as black deviance, but as part of the sexist continuum that exists within dominant white culture. Similarly, hooks asserts that no-one mentions “misogyny and sexism or white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” in relation to Campion's film The Piano (119). In contrast to gangsta rap, in this film violence against natives, land and women is depicted as natural.
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Jayamanne, Laleen. Toward Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001. 24-48. [Book chapter]
Jayamanne discusses The Piano as a Gothic melodrama, emphasizing Ada's terror in love and her narcissistic self-reconstitution. Some features, such as the doom laden mise-en–scène, are in keeping with traditional ideas of the Gothic, whereas Ada's “considered refusal of death” is part of the film's “generic modernity” (29). Employing Michael Taussig's conceptions of mimesis and alterity, Jayamanne argues that, by setting The Piano in the postcolonial moment of second contact, Campion is able to redefine the Gothic to include the ethnic other. If Maori have taken on a hybridized identity, then Baines becomes Maori mimetically, thereby performatively apprehending the other.
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Jacobs, Carol. “Playing Jane Campion's Piano: Politically.” MLN 109 (1994): 757-785. [Article]
Jacobs provides nuanced readings of those aspects of the film that can be seen as belonging to Annette Michelson's idea of radical politics as dislocation, by engaging in “a political questioning in The Piano that plays both on the disruption of narrative in cinema as medium,” and on “conventionally constative statements” that accord with Susan Sontag's idea of the “political-moral position” of cinema being associated with realism (785). For example, she discusses the interpolated footage in Flora's story of how her father was struck by a bolt of lightening as well as the cumulative effects of the three endings. In Jacobs' view, Campion's film delivers “an astonishingly political performance” (780).
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Modleski, Tania. “Axe the Piano Player.” Old Wives' Tales and Other Women's Stories. New York: New York UP, 1998. 31-46. [Book chapter]
Modleski responds to Clover's article by affirming Campion's artistry and by examining her bold treatment of sadomascochism. For Modleski, Campion analyses how women “find space for their eroticism within the violent structures of patriarchy” and how mother-daughter relationships operate within these structures (32). She cites the daughter's violence against the mother, which underpins the daughter's separation from the mother and her development of a sexual identity. Modleski also credits Campion with distinguishing between male violence and its cinematic representation, since the staging of the Bluebeard play can be seen as a prelude to the Bluebeard plot in the film, in which art becomes a reality when Ada's finger is chopped off. The Piano implies that the “violence at the heart of the socio-symbolic order, which may indeed be symbolic for men . . . , is often literal for women” (34).
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Neill, Anna. “A Land Without a Past: Dreamtime and Nation in The Piano.” Piano Lessons: Approaches to The Piano. Ed. Felicity Coombs and Suzanne Gemmell. Sydney: John Libbey, 1999. 136-147. [Book chapter]
Neill responds to The Piano by drawing connections between sovereignty in the 1850s and depictions of cultural and national identity in the 1990s. She characterizes Campion's film as a modernist, postcolonial text that “flattens out” race history in New Zealand, by representing colonial and patriarchal violence within Maoriland, a pre-European dreamtime. This portrayal “takes history out of the landscape” (137) by eliminating any political reference to Maori land claims of the 1850s and by replacing them with a modernist fascination with the vanishing primitive. As an aestheticized, depoliticized, national narrative, the film offers up to the 1990s globalized tourist or foreign investor an exotic, untouched New Zealand landscape innocent of treaty claims.
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Pihama, Leonie. “Ebony and Ivory: Constructions of Maori in The Piano.” Jane Campion's The Piano. Ed. Harriet Margolis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 114-134. [Book chapter]
Pihama suggests that Maori are not involved in the debate over to which country The Piano belongs, because the definitions of ownership belong to the colonizers and not the colonized. She invokes Patricia Grace's essay, “Books are Dangerous” (1985), which outlines how invisibility and stereotyped representations of Maori reinforce negative images and belief systems. She also praises bell hooks' “Gangsta Culture” for situating The Piano's violence against Maori and women in relation to white hatred and misogyny. For Pihama, the film's constructions of Maori are “located firmly in a colonial gaze” (128).
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Wevers, Lydia. “A Story of Land: Narrating Landscape in Some Early New Zealand Writers or: Not The Story of a New Zealand River.” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 11 (1994): 1-11. [Article]
Rather than discussing the similarities between Jane Campion's film The Piano and Jane Mander's 1920s novel The Story of a New Zealand River, which led to Campion being accused of plagiarism, Wevers examines the differences between these works' treatment of landscape. She argues that in the novel the landscape is almost effaced by the emphasis on the central character's predicament and that it is viewed in a perfunctory, preconceived manner that reflects colonial attitudes. By contrast, in The Piano the scale and difficulty of the landscape is postcolonial, “dense with retrospective knowledges and multiple interpretations” (9).
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VI. An Angel at My Table
Henke, Suzette A. “Jane Campion Frames Janet Frame: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young New Zealand Poet.” Biography 23.4 (2000): 651-669. [Article]
Henke examines An Angel at my Table's narrative, illustrating how it draws upon Frame's three-part Autobiography and upon her autobiographical fiction. Although this article is more preoccupied with literary sources than with cinematic analysis, Henke nevertheless proposes that Campion's film challenges traditional Hollywood “biopics,” by including more of the diffuse, episodic material found in autobiographies than is usually accommodated within the three-part Aristotelian structure upon which most conventional cinematic biographies depend. According to Henke, Campion provides a more “open-ended and intellectually challenging” portrayal of Frame as a committed writer, as a result, that is in sympathy with Frame's self-representation (666).
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VII. The Portrait of a Lady
Shaw, Daniel. “Isabel Archer: Tragic Protagonist or Pitiable Victim.” Literature/Film Quarterly 30.4 (2002): 249-255. [Article]
This article considers whether Campion's film of The Portrait of a Lady is more or less tragic than James's book. Shaw believes that the film is less tragic, on account of what he sees as Isabel's lack of authenticity. (Although she sets out to pursue freedom and independence, she ends up bowing to convention.) Since Campion's film ends with Isabel's indecision over whether she should stay with her suitor Goodwood or return to her loveless marriage to Osmond, Shaw believes that Campion was “trying to save Isabel for feminism” (249).
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Walton, Priscilla L. “Jane and James Go to the Movies: Post Colonial Portraits of a Lady.” The Henry James Review 18.2 (1997): 187-190. [Article]
According to Walton, Campion's adaptation of The Portrait of a Lady makes Henry James's writing accessible to contemporary audiences. Walton asserts that the international argument over the identity of this multinational production highlights the predicament of James's American girl. She argues that this period film connects the female body with colonization, beginning with the opening sequence, in which late twentieth-century Australian women discuss the erotic significance of kissing. Thus, Isabel's awakened sexuality is fundamental to the film's early cinema style imperial travelogue.
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VIII. Holy Smoke
Neroni, Hilary. “Jane Campion's Jouissance: Holy Smoke and Feminist Film Theory.” Lacan and Contemporary Film. New York: Other Press, 2004. [Book chapter]
Despite Campion's reluctance to identify herself as a feminist, Neroni claims that Campion's films embody a feminist politics for our post-feminist era. She discusses how conceptions of the gaze have moved away from the viewer's mastery of the filmic image and towards the viewer's interaction with the filmic form. Her approach is based upon the idea that “[t]he Lacanian gaze is that concealed space that provokes the subject; it is the objet petit a (the locus of our desire)” (212). For Campion, this objet petit a is often depicted as feminine jouissance, which is associated not with pleasure, but with the rupture of those symbolic fictions that make up identity. Neroni analyses Holy Smoke in terms of the destabilization of the bourgeois family, which she identifies as political dimension of female jouissance.
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IX. In the Cut
Fuller, Graham, and Lizzie Francke. “Sex and Self-Danger.” Sight and Sound 11 (2003): 16-19. [Review article]
Fuller and Francke interpret Jane Campion's In the Cut as an inquiry into female masochism. They describe Frannie as a heroine who yearns for death, as much as she yearns for love and empowerment, and they situate this film within Campion's career-long examination of female masochism. Citing Campion's statement that the film is a “meditation on the romantic myth in western society,” they argue that In the Cut contradicts the unexamined misogyny of most slasher films (16). Fuller and Francke also show how Campion refuses to pander to expectations by using dissonance to undercut familiar notions of femininity and by deglamorising her female protagonists. They argue that the fairytale elements implied in Frannie's sadistic matricidal dream are literalized in the scene where murder-suspect Malloy takes Frannie into a wood, yet, instead of slaying her, he trains her to use a gun.
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Konow, David. “Rough Cut: Jane Campion and Susanna Moore on In the Cut.” Creative Screenwriting 10.5 (2003): 69-73. [Article]
In the Cut marks a departure for author Susanna Moore, who was hitherto known as an autobiographical woman's writer, in that the book caused a controversy when it was published. Moore and Campion became friends, and, because she was familiar with the Hollywood adaptation process, Moore gave Campion free reign with her script. Campion introduced perspectives other than Frannie's, provided Frannie with a half sister in order to explain her reticence towards romance, and changed the ending, so that instead of being murdered, Frannie escapes. Konow also discusses how Campion pays tribute to the New Zealand government for facilitating the careers of woman filmmakers.
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