Ann Hardy

Jane Campion and the Moral Occult

While Jane Campion has led the production of a dozen short films and features in twenty-years of filmmaking, it is largely The Piano that has provided the conduit into her oeuvre for a majority of critics. In the thirteen years since its release the film has proved to be a cultural touchstone that has inspired, and been used by, many different groups of hermeneutic scholars.

The mainstreams of academic criticism have interrogated the text through post-feminist, postcolonial, and Lacanian frameworks, while others have employed it for instance, in rethinking the role of the auteur in cinema or in exploring the place of affective reactions in fan culture. Consideration of The Piano has also stimulated discussions of the boundaries and implications of genre classification in Campion's films, including the degree to which they deploy the characteristics of melodrama in an 'art-house' context; an approach that this presentation will take up in relation to two other objects of analysis - Holy Smoke and Sweetie .

Out of the mainstream however, in the somewhat shadowy realms of theological criticism, The Piano has also been taken captive, serving as the focus for interpretations that seek to demonstrate the continued relevance of a Christian worldview in a predominantly secularized modernity. Although these theological interpretations are, in the main, lamentably reductive they do highlight an aspect of Campion's work that has, so far, received insufficient attention: her explicit reference to spiritual topics and themes.

While information provided in interviews with Campion makes it clear that taking a spiritual approach to life is important to her both personally and professionally, mainstream comments on that aspect of her work have typically been brief, dealing with the representation of spirituality, as Polan (2001) does, in terms of 'quirkiness' and 'kitsch': both seen as a regressive turn to the self-conscious comedic tone of her early films.

This presentation suggests however that the relative invisibility of the spiritual content of Campion's films is a result of her consistent immersion in, and utilisation of, the melodramatic imagination as Peter Brooks (1976/1995) defines it. This imaginative mode, both the product and framework of a secularized world, entails an emphasis on the everyday but represents it with a degree of excess that strains to provide evidence of a 'moral occult' hidden behind patently godless quotidian manoeuvres. It is argued that Campion's work thus ultimately, does not provide significant sustenance for the Christian critics who seek to use it, but is representative instead of a widespread, but often unarticulated, conception of the 'spiritual' in contemporary life.

Biography

Ann Hardy is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Screen and Media Studies at Waikato University. Her research interests include Religion and Media and New Zealand Media. She is the author of two early essays on Jane Campion's work: 'A Song in the Desert' ( Illusions No 15, 1990) and 'The Last Patriarch', in Margolis (ed.) Jane Campion's ‘The Piano' (2000).