Harriet Margolis

Unheroic Mothers in Campion's Films

The Piano (1993) was a successful crossover from art-house to mainstream cinema. Yet even most art-house filmgoers wouldn't have recognized Jane Campion's mother, Edith, in the dedication at the film's end. However, sufficient information is publicly available about Jane Campion's life for us to make this and other identifications.

Edith Campion is known among those familiar with the history of New Zealand theatre as the money behind the New Zealand Players, a professional theatre company of the 1950s. Edith Campion also appears in used bookstores, where her short stories and novella are often to be found. Her performance as a teacher in An Angel at My Table (1990) is brief but memorable.

Yet A Girl's Own Story 's (1984) picture of a dysfunctional family made up of depressed mother, philandering father, and squabbling sisters suggests that to the teenaged Jane Campion, none of her mother's positive attributes mattered. Jane Campion said early on that she didn't expect to be a mother, but, after difficulties in bearing a healthy child, she now says that spending time with her daughter is more important than making movies.

So we might expect her films' representation of mother/daughter relations to change over time, perhaps even alongside changes in visual style. Freda Freiberg was prescient in identifying from the student work what have been recurrent aspects of Jane Campion's films. While the mother of A Girl's Own Story is full of hostile passivity and occasional passions, Peel 's (1982) mother/sister brings the family group to an angry standstill through her assertiveness. The first of many Campion women to piss on-camera, this is a figure of ambiguous transgressions.

Both of these student films present dysfunctional families, and they take as themes the imbalance of power—between males and females, children and adults. The transgressive sexual qualities of Campion's women have been universally acknowledged. Relatively few analyses consider the mother/daughter relation so unusually common in Campion's films; even fewer have looked at that relation as a source of female transgression.

Campion is too clever to suggest any simple cause/effect relation between a mother's and a daughter's behavior. There's certainly no “blame it on the mother” approach to understanding one character or the other. In fact, it is sometimes difficult to tell which character behaves more like mother, more like daughter, and one of the things that makes Jane Campion's films so intriguing is her characters' ability to change over time, as they learn something about themselves, usually through the experience of transgression.

This is the aspect of Campion's work that I'd like to explore, with an emphasis on the two student narratives and her next two films, After Hours (1984) and Two Friends (1986). The groundwork Campion laid in these films should shed light on the later films, particularly Sweetie (1989), The Piano, and Holy Smoke (1999), which feature mother/daughter relations. If my hunch is correct, though, what the mother/daughter relation reveals should shed light on Campion's other transgressive characters, whether or not they are primarily mothers or daughters.

Biography

Dr Harriet Margolis is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Victoria University, Wellington. She was the editor of Jane Campion's “The Piano” (2000) and the co-author (with Janet Hughes) of “An Antipodean Melodrama in a Jamesian World: Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady ” to be published in the forthcoming anthology, Nineteenth-Century American Fiction on Screen, edited by R. Barton Palmer (to be published by Cambridge University Press).