Mary Wiles

Surveying Suburban and Panoramic Perspectives: Theatricality in the Early Films of Jane Campion

Born in New Zealand to parents who were considered luminaries of the national theatrical community, filmmaker Jane Campion remembers that as an adolescent girl she “was passionate about theater” (qtd. in Ciment 31). Varied modes of theatricality resurface later in Campion's films. In her short experimental film, A Girl's Own Story (1984), they inflect the trajectory of the coming-of-age girl through the domestic landscape that she seeks to relinquish yet retain. In this essay, I will focus on Campion's early works, A Girl's Own Story and Sweetie (1989), to show how--in a manner similar to her heroines--she reinvents theatrical and performance strategies, radically interfering with conventional storytelling technique in order to interrogate assumptions about being a girl.

In A Girl's Own Story, the domestic sphere is transfigured through the adolescent girl's capacity to dramatically re-envision it--and herself--through different forms of play, which include expressionistic fantasy and role-playing. The expressionist propensity towards strong shapes resurfaces in the film where it blends easily with the extremely structured, almost geometric aspect of an austere suburban landscape. Like the acts of an expressionist play, the film's scenes are loosed from one another, forming a chain of independent, illuminating impulses. Such scenes serve as correlates for the emotional states of its adolescent inhabitants, who rework in fantasy the traumatic bodily experiences that teenage girls may experience--molestation, incest, pregnancy, and the construction of sexual identity (Polan 71-76). Refusing the traditional dramaturgical elements of plot and characterization, Campion experiments with varied kinds of role-playing, storytelling, and musical fantasy in A Girl's Own Story to fabricate an idiosyncratic vision of the coming-of-age girl.

Whereas the suburban landscape serves as an expressionist reflection of bodily trauma in A Girl's Own Story, the body becomes the landscape in Sweetie. Bakhtinian theatricality serves Campion's construction of the grotesque fat body as a carnivalesque terrain. The monstrous female body displaces the suburban landscape in the film, where it emerges as a discordant, disunified universe that inexorably determines the lives of others. The film's final sequence in which Sweetie regresses to infantile scenarios in her tree house foregrounds the carnivalesque aspect of the body given over to "the shoots and branches, to all that prolongs the body and links it to other bodies or the world outside" (Bakhtin 92).   The grotesque body swallows the world in Sweetie and in the end, is swallowed by it.

In her early works A Girl's Own Story and Sweetie, Campion's family legacy becomes legible in the signs of theatricality that are inscribed within the shifting configurations of the suburban landscape and the body.   Viewed retrospectively as the culmination of this topographical movement, the panoramic vistas of The Piano (1993) serve as an illuminating inscription, demarcating the New Zealand director's coming-of-age.

 

Bibliography

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “The Grotesque Image of the Body and Its Sources.” The Body: Reader . Ed. Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco. New York: Routledge, 2005. 92-95.

Ciment, Michel. “Two Interviews with Jane Campion.” Jane Campion: Interviews . Ed. Virginia Wright Wexman. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999. 30-44.

Mazer, Sharon. Personal interview. 14 June 2006.

Mazer, Sharon. “‘She's So Fat. . .': Facing the Fat Lady at Coney Island's Sideshows by the Seashore.” Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression . Eds. J.E. Braziel and K. Le Besco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

McNaughton, Howard. Personal interview. 16 May 2006.

Polan, Dana. Jane Campion . London: BFI, 2001.

Biography

Mary Wiles is a Lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. She received a Ph.D. in film studies at the University of Florida, an M.A. in film studies and an M.A. in French at the University of Iowa, and also received a diplôme d'études approfondies at Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. She is currently working on her book Jacques Rivette, which will become part of the Contemporary Directors Series published by Illinois University Press. She has published numerous articles on avant-garde theatricality and adaptation in contemporary French and New German cinemas. She recently placed an essay on the coming-of-age girl in New Zealand cinema in the exciting new collection, Youth Culture in Global Cinema .