Story by Rochelle Siemienowicz, June 3 2009

Reading Jane Campion

An interview with Deb Verhoeven, author of Jane Campion, a new Routledge Film Guidebook.

When the Cannes Film Festival celebrated its sixtieth anniversary in 2007, thirty-five of the world’s leading art filmmakers were asked to contribute a short film expressing ‘their state of mind of the moment as inspired by the motion picture theatre’. Jane Campion was the only woman in the group. Her short film The Lady Bug, features a woman dressed as an insect, trying to extend her wings to dance on a stage. An annoyed cleaner continually swats at her, and eventually squashes her. This cheeky and whimsical film can be read not only as an outcry at the status of women in the film industry, but also as a frustrated joke about Campion’s own complicated relationship with her career, her critics and her always expectant public.

When Campion was awarded the prestigious Palme d’Or in 1993, for her lushly romantic arthouse blockbuster The Piano, she was the first woman to receive that honour. The film itself connected with audiences, critics and academics in a way that continues to astonish. Campion’s films are the subject of endless theses, books and papers. It was for this reason that Melbourne academic Deb Verhoeven was approached by publisher Routledge to compile a reader of other people’s writings about the Australasian filmmaker (born and raised in New Zealand, and trained in Australia, both countries want to claim Campion when it suits them).

The project changed, however, when the publisher decided that Verhoeven should instead write a monograph about Campion. Verhoeven thought long and hard about what she could contribute. After all, what was left unsaid? Campion was already discussed at length in disciplines as diverse as women’s studies, psychiatry and of course cinema studies. “I thought about what would be useful to my students,” says Verhoeven, who teaches in RMIT University’s School of Applied Communication. “And I thought that really, the book that I could write, would be like a guide to what it means to be a contemporary auteur. A lot of students are very well prepared technically. They know how to make films in a technological and pragmatic way, and we also teach them how to appreciate films [as viewers]. But I’m not sure we really teach them how to appreciate their future role in the industry.”

A contemporary auteur. What exactly does that mean? (Cast your mind back to uni, and try to remember the definition of ‘auteur’. It’s quite literally the French word for ‘author’, and is used to refer to filmmakers who exhibit a signature style; whose films seem to result from a single person’s artistic and creative vision, rather than from a collaborative effort or an industrial studio system.)

For Verhoeven, Campion is a fascinating example of how the modern auteur is constructed, marketed and debated. “I think we have this idea that the auteur is simply a figure of genius and their talent is innate, and comes from within,” says Verhoeven. “But we all know that’s an impractical way of thinking about the auteur, and that the pressures on the auteur are very different now than they were 50 years ago in France when people started to coin that sort of terminology. I guess that’s where some of the gutsier stuff in the book comes from, thinking about the ways the film industry needs the idea of the individual author, but at the same time is reliant on other kinds of practices. The individual author becomes like a front-of-house for a whole lot of other stuff that’s going on to make successful films. And that’s one of the things I wanted to talk about in this book, the very powerful set of forces or factors in Jane Campion’s career which were as nebulous as industry and critical expectation.”

“Jane Campion forged her career out of very specific circumstances, a fact which she acknowledges and talks about,” says Verhoeven. “For example, when she was beginning her career there was an enormous government effort in terms of equal opportunity in the film industry – government effort that doesn’t exist now. And then there were people, critics who helped her enormously, like David Stratton and Vincent Canby, who put her on the map. And then winning at Cannes so early in her career.”

So, is the auteur a myth, a creation of marketing departments which need a ‘brand’ to stamp on films in order to sell them to the public? It’s more complicated than that, says Verhoeven. “I don’t mean to suggest that Campion’s individual creative vision is irrelevant. Obviously it’s very important.” While external factors help to create the auteur, in Verhoeven’s view, the auteur herself has enormous agency in the whole process. “I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t see filmmakers activities as just being about making the film. They’re also very influential in terms of setting the scene prior to the film being made, not just in terms of attracting the right creatives to the project or getting the right finance, but in setting up expectations and anticipation around the film. Their job is to perform, particularly in this sector of the film industry, the art cinema industry. They have to perform at the festivals, they have to do interviews, and engage with the media. And of course the industry now expects auteurs to bring [monetary] value too you know. There’s no slack just because you’re making art films! That’s a market segment and you need to fulfil the expectations of financiers and distributors and exhibitors to actually draw an audience as well. So you can’t be too experimental if that’s going to alienate your audience. But at the same time you have to be a little bit experimental, because we expect auteurs to challenge us – but not too much!”

This tricky balancing act, of attracting audiences, pleasing critics and meeting high expectations is one that Campion has obviously struggled with. Her early short films, made in the 1990s (Sweetie, Peel and Passionless Moments among them) were singled out for great critical praise, with Campion anointed as an auteur even before she’d made a feature. Then came the acclaimed Janet Frame biopic Angel at My Table and of course The Piano, in 1993. Campion then outraged critics by taking on a big-budget Henry James literary adaptation, the 1996 Portrait of a Lady, starring Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich. Her next move was a swing back to low/medium-budget territory with the much-derided Holy Smoke, released in 1999. Then, an attempt at a subversive genre thriller, In the Cut in 2003, saw both Campion and her leading lady Meg Ryan come under attack, though many people loved the film and its interrogation of female desire. Then Campion announced that she was taking a break from filmmaking.  There was a long silence. After years underground, she emerged just last month to unveil Bright Star, which showed in competition at Cannes. It was one of only three films by female directors, and one that pleased the critics. Campion, it seems, has come full circle.

Verhoeven observes Campion’s continuing career with interest. “Bright Star is an interesting example because it’s Jane’s first feature film since taking that break, and of course expectations are running very high. But it does appear that those expectations have been met and consequently we’ve got a very happy situation with expectations and output being aligned. That hasn’t always been the case in Campion’s career – and it certainly hasn’t been the case in most filmmakers’ careers.”