BIOGRAPHY: Jane
Campion - Film Director - The Heroine Collective Miranda Bain, September 2, 2016
Jane Campion is at once trailblazing and defiant. She has
been the focus of much attention as one of the few leading women of her craft,
yet has always stressed that her role is first and foremost as a storyteller.
This acclaimed director professes not to belong to any clubs or political
agendas. Instead she simply states the obvious truth: that women are
drastically under-represented before and behind the lens.
Born to literary, artistic parents, Campion grew up immersed
in New Zealand’s theatre scene. Following an anthropology degree, she shifted
to art school and later, on discovering that the moving image best fulfilled
her artistic ambitions, she went to film school.
Her first feature film, Sweetie (1989), has been
labelled “a beautifully strange and compelling film debut” that is “bent out of
shape with an almost intangibly mystical precision.” It set the precedent for
her work and its otherworldly tone, rooted in a personal, small-scale
drama. It also featured credible female characters centrally – another common
feature of her films in an industry habitually lacking
three-dimensional representations of women.
Campion has spoken of the struggles she faces by trying to
depict real women. By “real” I mean women that make no attempt to appeal to the
viewer: they are unapologetically themselves. She challenged the male
critic class who complained that her female protagonist in An Angel at My
Table was despondent, and targets US macho culture in particular,
suggesting that “those men probably find women very threatening and difficult,
unless they’re packaged like sex objects.”
Her most famous film, The Piano (1993), is unlike any
film I’ve ever seen. It contains the common elements of a story –
essentially, a beginning, middle and end – and yet they are all put slightly
out of kilter, producing an ethereal, distorted reality. Perhaps this is what
Campion referred to when she claimed to want the film to seem as if shot
underwater. Roger Ebert hits the nail on the head, stating “It is one of those
rare movies that is not just about a story, or some characters, but about a
whole universe of feeling.”
The Piano follows the story of the silent Ada and her
marriage to a stranger in New Zealand, where she also captivates a neighbour –
Baines – through her piano playing. Each scene aches with emotion and
frustrated yearning, and Campion focuses more on this than the eventual
satisfaction of these desires. She dedicates a scene to Baines caressing Ada’s
piano naked with fetishistic gravitas (which makes me less embarrassed about a
simple Facebook browse of my latest romantic interest). An item of clothing is
removed with each visit Ada makes to Baines, building a seething sexual
atmosphere. When they do eventually have sex, you instead watch the scene play
out through her daughter, who peers through the cracks in the wall.
Campion’s art school training shines through her visual,
emotive method of working. Sue Gillett stresses the importance of the
“unsayable” and “unseeable” in Campion’s films; they are multi-sensory. The
protagonist of The Piano never speaks aloud, and during the filming of Bright
Star Campion developed a silent language based on hand signals: “we
didn’t talk, we kept the head out of it.”
Campion rejects emotional manipulation, aspiring to leave
the story open for the audience to emotionally experience in a way personal to
them. Bright Star (2009) is a masterpiece of such delicate directing.
She uses a still camera for most of the film. The result is that each shot
contains a tender lightness, whether in a room crowded with butterflies or in a
scene mourning the loss of love.
Bright Star is in many ways “classic Campion”.
Exploring the world of Keats, she focused not on the famous poet and man, but
instead the seamstress, lover and woman Fanny Brawne. Many biographers
derogated Brawne as meddlesome, but Campion gives her heroic status as a woman
who had only needlework to express herself in society.
Campion looks at the common narrative. She then looks at the
edges to discover and play with a wealth of untold stories, often of women and
often of how they were using what little means were bestowed upon them by
society to be heard. As the enclosed worlds of her characters are opened to
greater emotion and vision, so too is the experience of the audience, who are
taken into a place of heightened sensitivity, reverie and ultimately, being.
Jane
Campion: 'Life isn't a career' | Film | The Guardian Andrew Pulver, May 12, 2014
Jane Campion was the first woman to win a Palme d'Or and
only the second ever to be nominated for the best director Oscar. So it comes
as a surprise that her latest gig, as president of the Cannes film festival
jury, isn't another act of pioneering gender breakthrough. She's actually the
10th woman to lead the festival's prize-giving committee – even if men have done
it on 57 other occasions – and shares the honour with some heady company:
Jeanne Moreau, Françoise Sagan, Liv Ullmann, Sophia Loren. But as the only
female winner, to date, of that top prize, it's the kind of honour that is
her due.
As the festival gears up for its 67th edition, Campion
appears stoical about what she calls an "experiment in socialism",
the shepherding of an eight-strong group – including fellow directors Sofia
Coppola and Nicolas Winding Refn – around the Cannes competition films. "My
job is to make sure everyone's voice gets heard. They are all investing two
weeks of their time to come and watch the films and think about them. But I
will also be trying not to let things get personal, and keep a sense of
humour. It's a matter of looking after people – I think women do that
really well."
Perhaps inevitably, considering her figurehead status,
Campion's thoughts often turn to what women can and can't do in the film
industry. She won't knock the festival itself, despite its habit of routinely
granting high-profile berths to a coterie of veteran male directors; Cannes
has, as she says, "been really kind" to her, screening her early shorts (one, Peel,
won the short film Palme d'Or in 1986) and taking her first feature, Sweetie, three years later, before
giving her the ultimate accolade for The
Piano in 1993 (shared with Chen Kaige's Farewell
My Concubine).
Even so, she recalls with some horror an event she attended
for Cannes' 50th anniversary, when she found herself on a stage with all the
other Palme d'Or winners – the only woman there. "It was a shocking
moment. It was embarrassing for everyone. I think everyone felt that it was
really not right." She still would be the only woman, but the festival is
emphatically not the problem. "My sense is that Cannes is very interested
in new voices in cinema, never mind where it comes from or the sex of it. It's
to do with who funds films in the first place."
"At film schools," she says, "the gender
balance is about 50/50. Women do really well in short-film competitions.
It's when business and commerce and art come together; somehow men trust men
more."
What's to be done? "My feeling is we need an Abraham
Lincoln figure to get in there, and say – especially when it comes to public
money – it has to be equal." Citing the state-funding system in Australia
and New Zealand in the 70s, she says: "We are 50% of the population.
That's a good point and [state funding] is where you can push really hard and
say something's wrong here, we want change." Conversely, though, Campion
is wary of the danger of concentrating too hard on ideology. "When I talk
to young women film-makers, I say: don't think about this too much. Being a
director is very tough, and you need everything you've got just to do your best
job. You doing a brilliant job is your best support. Just get on with it.
"Film-making is not about whether you're a man or a
woman; it's about sensitivity and hard work and really loving what you do. But
women are going to tell different stories – there would be many more stories in
the world if women were making more films."
It was Campion's feature The Piano – her second, if you discount the originally-made-for-TV An Angel at My Table – that
appeared to galvanise the sense that a new kind of feminist cinema was
possible, a properly entertaining one with widespread appeal, liberated from
the dreary politicised ghetto of agit-prop film society or angry tub-thumping
festival screening. If the Ridley Scott-directed Thelma and Louise blazed a mainstream trail in 1991 for a
femme-buddy movie, The Piano went one
further: its all-female creative leadership (Campion, plus longtime
collaborator Jan Chapman) and defiantly feminised, literary-inflected themes
won both critical acclaim (including three Oscars, best actress for Holly
Hunter, best supporting for 11-year-old Anna Paquin, and best script for
Campion) and serious box office. The story of repressed Victorian settlers
in New Zealand, among them a mute woman who trades sexual favours with a
European man half-submerged in Maori culture in order to get her beloved piano
back, The Piano
appeared to be a harbinger of change.
As history tells us, it didn't work out like that. The 1990s
were dominated not by sophisticated studies of female sexuality, but by ironic
heist films and pop culture-referencing slasher movies. Facile
self-consciousness rather than heartfelt sensitivity won the day: Quentin
Tarantino took over the shop, rather than Campion. Her follow-up to The Piano, an adaptation of Henry
James's The Portrait of a Lady with
Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich, was respected rather than liked, and with
each subsequent release – Holy Smoke, In
the Cut – Campion looked to be floundering in a cinematic universe
that failed to live up to her expectations.
Looking back from her 2014 vantage point, Campion is
phlegmatic about her post-Piano
difficulties. "I really loved Portrait,
even if it didn't satisfy people's expectations about what I should be doing.
It's complex, because life isn't a career. At exactly the same time that I won
the Palme d'Or I had a baby that died, so the full impact of my success never
hit me. I was grieving, really, throughout that whole year. It was a very
difficult period, but at the same time it also protected me from any overblown
thoughts. I was just struggling to exist."
Campion is referring to her son, Jasper, who died when he was
only 12 days old, shortly after The Piano
won at Cannes. (She later gave birth to a daughter, Alice – now the actor Alice
Englert, who was so impressive in the Sally Potter-directed Ginger & Rosa.) One can intuit the
pain lingered for many years; in the early 2000s, she says, she "took a
few years off to rethink how I wanted to do things and to bring up my
daughter". Her return to film-making was auspicious with the Keats
biopic Bright Star – a
"rebirth", as she herself says. Her new approach was influenced, a
little improbably, by French minimalist Robert Bresson of A Man Escaped and Diary of a
Country Priest, and first showcased in a short film she made with her
daughter in 2006 called The Water Diary, a segment of a campaigning feature film called 8.
"It may not be obvious, but it was all about going back to simplicity. Bright Star hardly has a moving camera
in it."
Buoyed even further by the success of her TV series Top of the Lake, featuring Hunter
with a very Campionesque wall of long, iron-grey hair, this much-missed
director is now firmly back in the game. (She admits to being on the verge
of closing a deal to shoot an adaptation of Rachel Kushner's underground art scene novel The Flamethrowers for
indie super-producer Scott Rudin.) Now over two decades old, The Piano is also enjoying a brief
flurry of attention and critical care, with a restored print and Blu-ray
release on the way. And it's possible to sense that, with feminism in the
cultural ether once again, the film might find its proper place in the
pantheon.
"I didn't plan it," says Campion, "but I see
it even more in those terms now than at the time. Back then, it was a cipher
for some of my own frustrations about having a voice, and not being seen or
heard. But the way women love women is different to the way men love women:
women love women who feel real, who are complicated, and not just sex objects.
The woman characters in The Piano are
created by a woman; Ada was my heroine. That's the reason it had the impact it
did."
Campion films reviewed:
3
Campion Shorts (1982 – 84)
Two
Friends (1986)
Sweetie (1989)
An
Angel at My Table (1990)
The Piano (1993)
In the Cut (2003)
Bright
Star (2009)
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