Jane Campion and Adaptation

Angels, Demons and Unsettling Voices

Estella Tincknell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230228993
• eBook ISBN: 9781350306387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Best known for The Piano, Jane Campion is an author/director whose films explore the relationship between literature and cinema. This book examines Campion's films as adaptations, mixing cultural and textual analysis, and exploring context, pastiche and genre. It is a must-read for anyone interested in Campion or adaptation studies.

Part One

Versions

In this part, I explore the problematic relationship between authorship, adaptation, fidelity and cultural value. Jane Campion is primarily treated in critical commentary and in the marketing of her work as one of cinema’s auteurs. Yet, the status of auteur is a problematic one, especially for women film-makers and certainly when the question of the adaptation’s cultural reputation is considered. As we will see, Campion’s career and films have been lightning conductors for controversy around these concerns, yet the ensuing debates have helped to demonstrate the limitations to their parameters and the creative ways in which ‘adaptation’ may be redefined and reimagined.

‘A Jane Campion film’: authorships and adaptations

Jane Campion has been widely written about as a cinematic auteur; her films are claimed as the product of a distinct and often quirky personal vision. However, this emphasis offers the frequently uncomfortable juxtapositioning of what are competing and contested discourses. Although Campion was rapidly embraced as an authentic auteur by the global cinema establishment with the success of The Piano, such a position can be uneasy for women directors. Auteurism – the idea of the director as author with an identifiable cinematic style, voice, thematic concerns and approach – is a highly ‘masculine’ discursive disposition, implying the desire and ability to impose a singular vision on a work, as well as assuming a pure form of expressivity and intentionality on the part of a single creative artist. In other words, it suggests a drive for mastery over the medium while marginalising the collaborative nature of film production. As Angela Martin has observed,

authorship is the main aspect of film theory that directly affects women filmmakers; however, for historical reasons, it actually contributes to the omission of women’s films from circulation and from film theory.... Unless we talk about women’s films in a different way, we will not be able to address that omission. (2008: 127)

While female directors are often most concerned to express a personal vision, then, this is not associated with the valorisation accorded to the male auteur, but is frequently ghettoised or culturally devalued. The privileging of auteurism’s implicitly masculinist model of film authorship thus continues to largely exclude women directors, who appear in tokenistic ways if they feature at all. But auteurism has powerfully shaped both academic and popular accounts of film-making since the late 1960s as the dominant paradigm for critical evaluation, not least because its model chimes with the contemporary ideological investment in heroic individualism. The figure of the cinema auteur dominates the serious popular cinema press and cineaste blogs and websites, where the establishment of a pantheon of ‘leading filmmakers’ has largely become hegemonic, and a critical and noisy audience of commentators and opinion-formers operates.¹

The role of this ‘authenticating audience’ of academics and critics, or what Deb Verhoeven (2009: 156–157), following Bourdieu, calls ‘authorised knowers’, is to invest specific texts and their creators with a privileged form of cultural significance that exceeds that of ‘ordinary’ mass art, while also authenticating the power of that specialised audience to create these distinctions. Such work involves the assertion of a claim to elevated levels of social and cultural capital in which the ability to identify and appreciate the auteur text is directly linked to education and class power – and to gendered forms of authority, since authorised knowers also tend to be male, white and middle-class. Furthermore, the ‘authorising’ of a film director as auteur involves substantial ideological labour on the part of the media, the film industry and academic scholarship, as well as the personal intervention and self-promotion of the film-maker him or herself, to be effective. Auteur-led criticism is a useful mechanism for branding and marketing films as commodities. The film industry ‘needs’ auteurs in order to market films as distinctive works of art, while film-makers ‘need’ to be identified as such in order to distinguish themselves and their product.

But Campion’s status as an auteur has been the site of considerable struggles, often ones in which the director herself has directly engaged, perhaps because of her awareness of the profoundly gendered nature of such ideological work. As Verhoeven explains, Campion’s problematic and precarious position as female auteur privileges her as a ‘unique voice’ within global cinema without acknowledging the gendered discourses involved, while simultaneously reiterating the tokenism such a qualification entails. She is certainly a film-maker whose storytelling competence and control over her material has been questioned by critics in ways that rehearse a familiar narrative whereby women’s creative legitimacy is undermined not by overt opposition but by a more tacit resistance which deploys common-sense definitions of creative mastery to re-naturalise masculine ownership of and access to ‘authentic’ cultural production.

Such responses help to reproduce the habitual over-valuing of male-centred narratives, genres and subject matter (war, adventure, homo-social bonding) while marginalising or devaluing female-centred texts. They clearly contributed to the heightened debates around the cultural value of Campion’s films, debates which too often fixated on Campion’s symbolic position as a woman film-maker rather than the films themselves. ² As Verhoeven argues, she has become ‘a figure to be celebrated and criticised for what she has come to represent as much as for what she does’ (2009: 2–3). The extent to which Campion is ‘entitled’ to auteur status or has been bestowed it because of her gender thus remains (paradoxically) one of the main reasons for her prominence within cinema culture.

Yet, in auteur fashion, Campion’s films are always explicitly ‘signed’: the rubric, ‘a film by/written by Jane Campion’ appears in every one of the opening credit sequences to her work, thus overtly claiming authorship status. Campion herself has embraced the position of auteur in interviews, albeit with some ambivalence. This reluctance has largely focused around the question of the director’s identification or dis-identification with her central protagonists and the extent to which these figures constitute an extension of her own subjectivity. Indeed, both Verhoeven (2009: passim) and Kathleen McHugh (2009: 148–149) argue that it is the director’s three major film adaptations to date – An Angel at My Table, The Portrait of a Lady and In the Cut – which exemplify this through Campion’s declared identification with their central characters. While such ostensibly very different sources (a confessional autobiography, a classic literary novel and a contemporary thriller) might suggest an improbable – certainly a riven – form of subjective positioning on the part of the director, for both McHugh and Verhoeven it is Campion’s auteurist identification with the central protagonist which unites them.

While there is no overt and deducible singularity of genre, then, there are strong continuities of thematic and narrative engagement in these three texts. Campion herself identifies these particular films as autobiographically inflected, according to McHugh, who argues that it is their shared emphasis on interiority and a journey towards self-knowledge on the part of the main character that is the marker of the director’s authorial appropriation:

[A]ll three source texts feature a female protagonist struggling for some kind of self-expression or realization while subject to emotional, physical and/or institutional duress. This fundamental conflict between the heroine and her environment is mediated by each text’s crucial concern with narrating its heroine’s imagination and interiority. (2007: 140)

Indeed, this highly intimate identification with her source material informs the specific ways in which Campion’s authorship of her work seems to exceed the conventional discourses of auteurism. There is a sense in which a ‘Jane Campion film’ is the site of a unique and intense melding of director and text. As Verhoeven argues, ‘the idea of a “Jane Campion film” [is one] where the director and the movie seem to merge [and which] materialises with the credits for The Piano’. Here, the combination of levels of textual affectivity produced through image and sound seem to confirm that the film is speaking for, from and about Campion herself.

Such apparent closeness to the material has its dangers, however. While it is not unusual for directors to form an intense attachment to a particular text or its source – and such attachments are frequently presented as an a priori requirement for the auteur – gender complicates the issue in more than one way. As Verhoeven goes on to point out,

Other industry practices also allude to the literal ‘presence’ of the auteur in the film text, such as those occasions in which directors cast themselves in cameos..., including the work of luminaries such as Hitchcock, Scorsese and Tarantino. In this spirit, Jane Campion makes an uncredited appearance as a waitress in In the Cut, dancing with the man who will later be revealed as the mystery murderer. (2009: 54)

The literal placing of the body of the director within the body of the work inevitably personalises the story being told. However, for a woman director, the conflation of self and subject matter is more problematic because of the ways in which female creativity is already intensely pathologised, whether as an extension, perversion, sublimation or externalisation of an autobiographical self. The work of women writers, artists and directors is too frequently explained – or, rather ‘explained away’ – in terms of its simple reification of the inner self, as though the work merely ventriloquised real life experience, instead of transforming it into art. Male directors are credited with skill, imagination and talent rather than the ability to simply ‘channel’ their own life experience. Much more than for Hitchcock or Tarantino then, Campion’s playfulness with questions of authorship and identification has tended to tie her into her own fictions, as though the act of film-making for a woman involves little more than the revelation of different aspects of her psyche to the world.

Campion’s status as female auteur is then potentially more unstable than that of her male peers. More than this, however, by situating her work primarily in relation to adaptation the potential to undermine her cultural reputation within such a male dominated canon is intensified, since the focus of adaptive texts is on collaboration, the transformation and transmutation of existing material rather than the fantasy of originary creation.

Furthermore, narrowly academic debates about the auteurist status of specific directors are themselves limited and limiting, confined by a narrow model of reception and knowledge circulation that ignores the wider cultural context of cinematic exhibition and commentary which, in a globalised and increasingly fragmented media industry, goes well beyond academic or cineaste preoccupations. As Verhoeven points out, not only can we see Campion as a ‘post-auteur’ but ‘what is really required is a theory of the “post-auteurist” in which the questions that can be asked are not about intentions, origins or recognition, but about the trans-mediation of films as carriers of meaning’ (2009: 177). For Verhoeven, this recognises that film-making is a collaborative process and acknowledges the industrial context for production as well as the extent to which both the film and the director’s name are a commodity within an exchange system. Such an acknowledgment also enables the critic to identify the cultural investments involved in the construction of the figure of the ‘auteur’ in the first place.

Whose film is it, anyway?

These struggles over the nature of authorship and creative production have broadly informed the critical reception of Jane Campion’s major feature films, a process which has been unusually porous and open to discussion about these questions. For example, despite its phenomenal success and garnering of numerous critical plaudits and prizes, her first major film, The Piano, was not universally praised or received as a work of creative originality upon its release. ³ Stuart Klawans in The Nation described it as ‘contrived’ (1993: 704) and Alan A. Stone, in an otherwise rapturous assessment in The Boston Review, drew attention to what he saw as the spirit of Claude Levi-Strauss in the film’s overtly anthropological imagination (http://bostonreview.net/BR19.1/stone.html). Campion’s originality as its author was thus almost immediately heavily mediated (and therefore disputed) by such critics’ references to the sources she had drawn on in ways that problematised her authenticity as a creative artist and, indeed, an ‘auteur’. In addition, the score by Michael Nyman was widely perceived to be an essential contributory factor in the film’s success, winning Golden Globe and Ivor Novello awards as well as selling over three million copies of the soundtrack album. In this way, Campion’s right to claim authorship was challenged almost as soon as it was established.⁴

In the case of Campion’s next film, The Portrait of a Lady, and of the later In the Cut, the authorship of the original literary texts (Henry James and Susanna Moore respectively), was perhaps as important to the construction of meanings about the films and to the audiences they secured as Campion’s own name above the credits. The idea of a Henry James novel with its own distinctive – ‘Jamesian’ – authorial voice now refracted through the lens of Jane Campion produced an intense buzz, first of anticipation around what the film might do in the wake of The Piano’s immense success, and then of critical puzzlement (even bewilderment) on its release in 1996.⁵ The Portrait of a Lady, far from presenting an obvious reworking of The Piano’s distinctive tropes (and despite the shared nineteenth-century setting), offered a radical realignment of the conventions of heritage cinema, from its opening ‘documentary’ scenes to its refusal of the usual aesthetic stylisation of the female body in such films. Ten years later the film looks, if anything, even richer and more complex as an adaptive text, as I will discuss in later parts of the book. This was not the consensus of contemporary reviews, however. Holy Smoke was the subject of even more intense critical and discursive uncertainty as its blend of social comment and comedy, together with its implicit endorsement of a naïve western spiritual quest for Eastern enlightenment, generated much contention about the film’s originality and – significantly – Campion’s competence as its director.

This receptive tendency around Campion’s films, with its hysterical mix of anticipation and critical dispute, has perhaps become tiresomely conventionalised with subsequent film releases. It is useful for us here, however, because it illustrates the extent to which authorship of a film text (or indeed any text) is an unstable and contentious concept, and one which the twin debates around auteurism and adaptation have helped to problematise. In the case of Campion’s films, the fact that the director’s creative competence as well as her use of ‘original’ sources became a fulcrum around which what was known about her swirled, points to the complex and intertwined relationships directorial reputations, textual authority and cultural value have. Certainly, doubts about Campion’s powers as a storyteller, together with disputatious claims about her gender politics, have become paradigmatic of popular critical writing about her films. In the United Kingdom, for example, In the Cut was described both as ‘a minutely etched study in mood and female psychology’ by Leslie Felperin in Sight and Sound (December 2003) and as akin to ‘a particularly sordid episode of Sex And The City, made by the confused offspring of Andrea Dworkin and the Marquis de Sade’ in The Daily Mail (December 2003). In fact, the enormous differences between the ways in which this particular film was reviewed and the babble of competing critical voices it set in train made it difficult to construct a coherent narrative about its initial reception. What is clear is that In the Cut’ s blend of sex, violence, Freudianism and ellipticism produced strong and contradictory responses.

Bright Star, in contrast, was generally well-received critically as a ‘return to form’ for the director, meaning, perhaps, a return to the form of The Piano and of ‘feminine’ concerns in its painterly visual style and domestic mise en scene, although the absence of the volatile melodrama associated with the earlier film and with Campion’s now established signature as a director also led to disappointment and confusion. It was described as ‘a combination of unstuffy dialogue, wise casting, unselfconscious performances and sensuous but never pretty photography [which] makes Campion’s version of the nineteenth century feel current but not anachronistic’ in Time Out (6 November 2009), and less charitably as ‘a movie in the inimitable PBS Masterpiece Theater style’ by one critic (Louis Proyect rec.arts. movies.review). Crucially, too, the culturally valorised source material for the film, including the poetry of Keats, his letters to Fanny Brawne and Andrew Motion’s ‘serious’ literary biography, together with the film’s authenticating soundtrack of contemporary period music, were an important element in the discourses surrounding its reception.

Critical expectations thus clearly play a crucial role in establishing a film’s cultural value and the reputational status of a director. ⁶ In fact, the pervasiveness of contemporary publicity culture, with its extensive use of previews, pre-screenings, social media and viral whispers, now means that few major feature films can escape what Deb Verhoeven calls ‘pre-emptory critical evaluation’ in which the moment of a film’s release is no longer the point at which opinions about it have begun to circulate (2009: 178). In this respect, what exactly constitutes the ‘text’ of a film and where its boundaries lie becomes even more difficult to assess. Are such premediations and remediations part of the film text’s external facing characteristics alongside trailers, publicity s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Versions
• Part Two: Visions and Voices
• Part Three: Genres
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index