Kathleen McHugh

Adaptation and Auteurism: Jane Campion's Cinematic Signature

Attracted to and later formally schooled in art cinema, Jane Campion has consciously worked within this mode and shaped her cinematic vision as that of an art cinema auteur . Nowhere is this more evident than in her adaptations of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1996) and Susanna Moore's In the Cut (2003). In this paper, I will consider the ways Campion transforms these source texts to suit their cinematic realization while also sealing the transfer of ownership that implicitly subtends any film adaptation. She does so by beginning each of these texts with a sequence that signs its imaginative work as her own, specifically as her reading , her appropriation of the source text to address her own longstanding narrative, thematic and stylistic concerns. In The Portrait of a Lady , Campion's reading foregrounds the temporal, aesthetic and erotic disjunctions between the times of James's writing and the time of her filming. She does so by marking James's own revision of his text, originally published in 1881, and then, with newly added erotic inflections, in 1908. Campion aligns this revision with the history of her own medium, using multiple figures of visual anachronism to frame her adaptation.

By contrast, Campion's reading of In the Cut frames its narration within a visual archaeology of her own career and her sustained exploration of the conundrums of women's speech and desire. As she herself has said, In the Cut is a film about grief; it is also a summing up, a resolving, a culmination of the visual and thematic concerns that have animated her career. In this sense, Campion's decision to adapt a novel in which a woman narrates her own violent death through a declension from first person to third constitutes an endpoint in her sustained exploration of female narration under duress.

Biography

Kathleen McHugh ( mchughla@ucla.edu ) is a professor in the English Department and in the School of Film, Television and Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles. In American Domesticity: From How-To Manual to Hollywood Melodrama (Oxford, 1999) she reconsiders melodrama and the feminist commentary applied to it in relation to domestic labour and its representation in the United States. She has co-edited a collection of essays titled South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre and National Cinema (2005) and published articles on domesticity, feminism, melodrama, the avant-garde, and autobiography in such journals as Cultural Studies, Jump Cut, Screen, South Atlantic Quarterly , and Velvet Light Trap . Her book on Jane Campion will be published in March 2007 by University of Illinois Press and she is currently editing a book on collaborative autobiographies in the Americas.