art
Adrian Martin
Harriet Margolis (ed)
Jane Campion's The Piano
CUP $34.95pb, 204pp
0 521 59721 8
In the prodigious discussion of a designated movie classic, scholars look into each aspect of the film, its sources, its mix of genres, the traditions and contexts into which it might usefully be fitted. Heated debate is restricted to questions of cultural politics: is the film sexist, racist, colonialist? But even the most violent polemics in this realm assume, tacitly, that the film must be, for all intents and purposes, 'great'.
Jane Campion's The Piano (1993) has marched into the hall of classics faster than any other film of recent times. Is this baptism of absolute quality perhaps a little premature? It is easy to see why The Piano made such a splash on its release. It was an international, 'crossover' success, drawing together the trappings of costume drama, the stylistic mannerisms of 'independent' or arthouse cinema, and a bold, very modern exploration of essentially female experience. And it was the perfect film to argue over, whether in the letters pages of newspapers or at dinner parties.
Until the graceless, downhill slide of her last two films (The Portrait of a Lady and Holy Smoke), Campion's career has benefited from extraordinary good fortune, canny timing and an unprecedented amount of critical support. When she came to make The Piano, she was already regarded, in many countries, as a major player with a full and impressive decade of work behind her behind her; in truth, it was only her second real feature, after Sweetie (1989). Somehow, Campion managed to meet these massive expectations with a film bold, attractive and contentious enough to capture the imagination of both audiences and critics. It is a trick that has eluded her ever since.
Nonetheless, Campion is currently enjoying a publications boom -- a book of collected interviews from University Press of Mississippi and two anthologies devoted to The Piano. Of the anthologies, Harriet Margolis' effort (part of the 'Cambridge Film Handbooks' series) is far superior to Piano Lessons: Approaches to The Piano (eds Felicity Coombs and Suzanne Gemmell, John Libbey) -- managing to elegantly and comprehensively cover in six essays what the other book fails to cover in twelve.
On the early '90s British TV series J'Accuse, Robert McKee cheekily summarised the critical literature on the daddy of all film classics, Citizen Kane, thus: there are old-fashioned 'humanist' readings that posit the film as profoundly meaningful, and modern 'semiotic' readings that declare it to be blissfully meaningless, merely a 'free play' of signifers -- and now we have 'deconstructive' readings which argue the film to be radically 'open' because it is impossible to decide once and for all whether it is meaningful or meaningless.
In the modern academy of cinema studies, the code word for 'great' is 'open' -- and The Piano, unsurprisingly, turns out to be, like Citizen Kane, an open sesame. It is fascinating to observe, across these deftly argued and well written essays, how such magical openness can be formulated. In 'The Last Patriarch', Ann Hardy suggests that Campion's film 'holds in tension patternings from different sources, two centuries, and several societies, producing an eerie sense of dislocation out of familiar materials and narrative structures'. In another variation on the theme of eerieness, Claudia Gorbman on 'Music in The Piano' stresses the ambiguity of Michael Nyman's score as it is placed over scenes by Campion or played by Holly Hunter: it is impossible for us to know, she argues, how apt, expressive or meaningful this music really is at any given point.
John Izod, in 'The Piano, the Animus, and Colonial Experience', takes an unfashion-ably Jungian approach to the film's content, and finds a dream-like overlapping of many, often contrary states, phases and archetypes of the psyche. Stephen Crofts's 'Foreign Tunes?' -- which productively links textual analysis with a 'reception study' -- argues that the film's 'originality, richness, and rare evocation of unconscious registers' arises from its 'unusual investment in the fluid ambiguities of the preoedipal'.
Political commentaries on The Piano are not so willing to celebrate openness, eerieness and ambiguity. In stark contrast to wishful-thinking Izod -- for whom the Anna Paquin character 'hints at the coming of a mind-set of which the colonial whites around her are not yet conscious' -- offended Leonie Pihama judges that the film 'neither criticises nor challenges the stereotypes that have been paraded continuously as "the way we were"', in her provocative contribution, 'Ebony and Ivory: Constructions of Maori in The Piano'.