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Simon Sigley

Knowing New Zealand by Knowing Jane: How French Critics Imagined the one Through the Other, and Vice Versa

This presentation will introduce the initial results of a new and wider research project that analyses how French film critics have imagined and written about New Zealand via its cinema. For the purposes of this colloquium, I will concentrate on Jane Campion's An Angel at My Table (1990) and The Piano (1993).

The writings of critics from Cahiers du Cinema, Positif, Les Inrockubtibles, Télérama, Le Monde, and Libération will be collated and analysed in order to locate the discourses and concerns at work in French film critics' account of Campion's cinematic representations of New Zealand.

The primary intention is to identify and analyse interpretations of Campion's New Zealand films and to determine critical commonalities and differences; a secondary goal is to see whether, and to what ‘degenerate' degree, the accounts of Oceania by French scientists and explorers of the 17th-19th centuries - as earthly paradise replete with' dusky maidens' and ‘noble savages' - resonate in French critics' accounts of New Zealand.

If such echoes still exist, what symbolic role might New Zealand play in the French ‘imaginary' of today? Such a large and open question will not bring forth any definitive response at this early phase of research, but I hope to tentatively probe my way forward in speculating with others at the colloquium.

Biography

Simon Sigley is a graduate of the University of Auckland with a doctoral thesis entitled Film Culture: its Development in New Zealand, 1920s-1970s (2004). He studied the cinema in France (where he lived for several years) and has the French equivalent of an MA in film studies. He has produced, directed, and edited video in both New Zealand and France, and is currently a Media Studies lecturer at Massey University's Albany Campus (Auckland).