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Hilary Radner

In Extremis --Genre, Heroine and the Woman's Film: the Cinema of Jane Campion

This essay argues that Jane Campion's films have much in common with the woman's film of Classical Hollywood as described by Jeannine Basinger. According to Basinger, the woman's film produces a heroine who understands her self as at the centre of her universe. The focus of Basinger's analysis shifts the definition of genre from one grounded in story structure to one grounded in point of view. In the first instance, then, in the woman's film, from Basinger's perspective, secondary characters, including the romantic interest of the heroine, serve largely to externalise the intra-psychic nature of the heroine's conflicts. In contradistinction, while Campion exploits the generic hybridity that Basinger also associates with the woman's film, Campion's heroines, such as Louise in Two Friends (1986), Kay in Sweetie (1989), Janet in An Angel at My Table (1990), Ada in The Piano (1993), Isabel in The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Ruth in Holy Smoke (1999) and, finally, Frannie in In the Cut (2003), must battle (more or less successfully) to maintain their predominance in the story world.

Campion's films construct a subjectivity that defines the heroine as the primary narrative vehicle for the film's story; however, this subjectivity is fragile, its integrity threatened by the intrusion of other points of view suggesting other (competing) subjectivities in the form of friends, sisters and lovers. These others may, on the one hand, be threatening as in the case of Dawn in Sweetie and Malloy in In the Cut— but they may, on the other, perform the function of a double, whose sacrifice preserves the subjectivity of the heroine, and her place in the story as more or less intact, as in the case of Pauline in In the Cut. Most importantly, these others can perform a redemptive function (for example, Baines in The Piano, P.J. Waters in Holy Smoke); however, this redemption is always costly and accompanied by a violation of that initial subjectivity. The extreme nature of the heroine's dilemma in her confrontation with the other and its consequence (often death) moves the woman's film out of the arena of domestic melodrama or romantic comedy into other genres––the gothic romance (The Piano) or the thriller (In the Cut) providing a mise-en-scène that echoes the potentially fragmented, and violated subjectivity of the heroine, whose universe is never completely whole.

Ultimately, however, it is not the point of view of the secondary characters that poses the most consistent threat to the story world of the film. Rather, it is the filmmaker herself who as an auteur asserts her dominance over the narrative within the film through the use of stylistic devices that disrupt the story, such as the surreal animated sequences in The Piano, in Holy Smoke, and in In the Cut, or the reverse chronology employed in Two Friends or the controversial contemporary vérité style sequence that introduces The Portrait of a Lady. Campion does not allow the viewer to forget that these are her stories or her story articulated as a palimpsest of visual and thematic strands maintained and developed from film to film beginning with her earliest works. These strands include an emphasis on the double as a visual motif, on the re-working of what Sigmund Freud calls the Family Romance, on female pairs, on artistic and erotic self-realisation (often inter-twined), on mise-en-scène as the externalisation of the heroine's state-of-mind, etc. Campion's own relationship with her image (the proliferation of photographs that alternate between girlishness and glamour) and her oeuvre (her films are often accompanied by novelisations, copious radio interviews, etc.) serve to posit her as the star of her own productions. Symptomatic of the position that she occupies is the controversy surrounding her national identity: is she a New Zealand director, an Australian director? Or more properly does her work fall into the category of art cinema produced for a nomadic and global intellectual class (into which she herself falls)? I argue that as the heroine of her own work, she occupies a position that she imagines as outside history, in which “the woman herself” forms the pivotal instance of identity, an identity defined like that of her heroines through self-fulfilment and self-realisation within the confines of a universe in which she is the centre.

This paper then proposes to investigate the play of point of view and its consequences with Campion's oeuvre with particular emphasis on how her films do and do not reproduce the narrative structures associated with the woman's film of Classical Hollywood.

Biography

Hilary Radner is Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Otago. She is the author of Shopping Around (1995), co-editor of Film Theory Goes to the Movies (1993), Constructing the New Consumer Society (1997), Swinging Single (1999), and the special issue, “Strange Localities: Utopias, Intellectuals, and National Identities in the 21st Century”. Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 2:2 (2005).