This first entry into the British Film Institute's impressive and suitably disparate looking World Directors series is a timely, scholarly critique of the work of one of the most interesting, esoteric female directors to emerge in the 1990's, New Zealand born Jane Campion.
The Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California and the author of BFI Classics on Pulp Fiction and In A Lonely Place, Polan's book adopts an interesting and mostly invigorating structure, eschewing a linear, chronological analyses of Campion's oeuvre in favour of a closer examination of the cultural phenomenon triggered by Campion's critical and commercial watershed picture, 1993's The Piano. Following a literate, highly digestible and inter-textual (founding theorists such as Foucault and Barthes crop up) chapter on problems of authorship in cinema and the dangers of reducing the on-screen text to the toils and sensibilities of one single figurehead figure - Polan is quick to highlight the part played by Campion's regular D.P Sally Bongers in establishing the director's idiosyncratic sense of composition (Bongers was herself influenced by Godard and Tarkovsky) which has remained a key factor in her work. The author exhaustively examines how post-The Piano Campion became seem as 'a film-maker able to suggest new possibilities for a cinema of fervent emotionalism and the representation of feminine fantasy and desire on screen'.
With great humour and a degree of cultural channel-hopping, Polan looks at the ways in which The Piano not only divided opinion amongst both critics and male and female spectators (taking in questions of feminist cinema and female depictions of sexuality of objectification as raised by the film) but how it became a comedy byword for arthouse cinema, appearing as a series of skits in both film (Dogma), television (Dharma and Greg) and even newspaper cartoons, one of which is faithfully reproduced. The preceding chapter on the film is a delight, further exploring avenues of gender, authorship, cultural and national identity (Campion is New Zealand born but has adopted an Australian identity) and the very origins of art cinema in terms of various National cinemas struggling for self-definition. The chapters on Campion's successive feature works (The Portrait Of A Lady, 1996, and Holy Smoke, 1999) also look at how 'art' cinema and Campion the director of 'art pictures' becomes an identifiable commodity to be exploited in both domestic and international marketplaces. Again, Polan's use of supporting evidence (both photographic and in terms of referencing other theorists and the observations of contributors to the film) is hard to fault and the arguments and observations are cogent and persuasive.
The book then posits all Campion's other work in light of her success (The Piano grossed well internationally and also figured prominently at both Cannes and the Academy Awards), with Polan providing some much needed biographical background on Campion and her filmmaking origins before chartering the book through the director's directorial beginnings with off-beat, curious and visually striking and quirkily composed shorts such as her first effort following a second degree in painting at the Sydney College of Arts, the Super-8 composition Tissues. Lengthy discussion is then dedicated to all Campion's widely admired shorts: Peel (1982); Passionless Moments (1983); A Girl's Own Story (1984) and After Hours (1984), a longer piece from which the director has often sought to distance herself, made during Campion's largely uneventful time with the Women's Unit Of Film Australia.
The early features: Two Friends (1986), the cult-hit Sweetie (1989) and the island hopping Janet Frame adaptation (part financed by Channel Four and originally intended as a three part television series but later cut down slightly for a cinematic release when word of its originality and moving portrait of mental illness spread), An Angel At My Table (1990) are then intelligently, perceptively and objectively covered. Similarly, in a chapter titled After-Shocks Campion's most recent, hugely ambitious and disparate features: the somewhat rushed (a Merchant-Ivory production was also planned) Henry James adaptation The Portrait Of A Lady and the cross-cultural, religious cult-busting Holy Smoke are also detailed by the author with subtlety and insight.
The post-Piano work Campion has produced has been largely viewed as a disappointment and, sadly, as something of an adjunct to her career. Polan highlights how these subsequent works have sought to free Campion from the relative critical straitjacket that The Piano has become and shown the director to be steadfast in her refusal to simply follow preconceptions or trot-out re-treads of romantic, period pictures with (delete as appropriate) independent/sexually exploited heroines. Both works are revealed as extremely complex, imaginative creations (the Búnuelian talking bean sequence from The Portrait Of A Lady is a case in point) that reveal the director's enthusiasm for the syntax of cinematic language and the confidence to grapple with pertinent issues of identity, gender, convention and sexuality.
The book concludes with an attempt to elucidate on Campion's next move (a long in gestation adaptation of Susanna Moore's sex and slasher novel In The Cut) and a return to the questions of authorship raised by Polan in the opening chapter.
If there is a slight criticism to be made of the book - and this may be reflected in this review, though to be fair the author's agenda is clearly stated - is that the prominence given to The Piano is sometimes at the expense of other works and the weight the film carries and the stature the author accords it in connection with Campion's other work sometimes feels, as it perhaps does for the director herself, slightly oppressive and all-pervading. Those in search of a more evenly weighted work are directed to Ellen Cheshire's equally accomplished book on the director in the Pocket Essentials series. This minor criticism aside, the liberally illustrated Jane Campion is thought provoking, well-written, studious and thoroughly illuminating fare ideally suited not only to followers of Campion's work but those interested in far wider issues of representation, gender, authorship and the part the works of independent figures can play in forging recognisable National cinematic identities.
Reviewed by Jason Wood
