To Pierre Rissient, pathfinder.

Other Works by Michel Ciment

Kubrick, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, USA, 1983; Collins, United Kingdom, 1983; Enlarged edition, Faber & Faber, 2003.

Conversations with Losey, Methuen, 1985.

Kazan on Kazan, Viking, 1974; Secker & Warburg, 1973.

Elia Kazan, An American Odyssey, Bloomsbury, 1988.

John Boorman, Faber & Faber, 1986.

Film World. Interviews with Cinema’s Leading Directors, Berg, Oxford and New York, 2009.

Cahiers du cinéma
241, boulevard Pereire
75017 Paris

Head office :
18–20, rue Claude-Tillier
75012 Paris

www.cahiersducinema.com

This English edition © 2022 Cahiers du cinéma Sarl

First published in French as Jane Campion par Jane Campion © 2014 Cahiers du cinéma Sarl
Revised and updated edition 2022

ISBN 978 2 37716 0709

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Cahiers du cinéma SARL.

Managing Director: Julie Lethiphu
Editorial coordination by Amélie Despérier-Bougdira
First edition designed by Melanie Mues, Amélie Bonhomme, Mues Design
Graphic adaptation of this edition by Nord Compo
Cover design of this edition by Élisabeth Welter
Translation by Anne McDowall
Copy-editing by Lise Connellan
Picture research by Carolina Lucibello
Photoengraving of the first edition by Point 4
Photoengraving of this edition by Nord Compo

‘The Dent’ © Jane Campion, May 1988
‘Big Shell’ © Jane Campion, May 1988, revised 1991
‘Blue Sky’ © Jane Campion, 2002
‘My John Keats’, introduction to The Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats, Vintage Books, London, 2009 © Vintage Books, London, 2009, from Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats by John Keats, published by Vintage, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
‘Scattered Memories’ © Holly Hunter, December 2013

Cover
Jane Campion and Phil Jones on the set of The Power of the Dog

This digital document has been developed by Nord Compo.

Anna Paquin, Jane Campion and Sam Neill on the set of The Piano (1993).

Introduction

The power of the image

The emergence in 1989 of Jane Campion with her first feature film Sweetie was roughly contemporaneous with that of a group of new American film directors: Joel and Ethan Coen (Blood Simple, 1984), Tim Burton (Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, 1985), Steven Soderbergh (Sex, Lies, and Videotape, 1989) and Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, 1992). Rather than associating her with other female directors or other filmmakers from the Antipodes, it seems to me more relevant to see in her films the same belief in the power of the image, the same confidence in the appeal of the story, and the same assertion of a personal approach that is indifferent to the diktats of French theorists (Barthes, Foucault) – very influential in the world of film studies – that in the 1970s were announcing the death of the auteur. Likewise, in opposition to the rejection of narrative that was then being proclaimed by some filmmakers (Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Tanner, Jean-Marie Straub), Campion, like these transatlantic ‘wonder boys’, was showing a new vitality and freedom of imagination.

There are many shots in Campion’s films whose unique brilliance have marked our cinematic memory: a young woman (Kay played by Karen Colston) pulling up a shrub in the middle of the night (Sweetie, 1989), the adolescent Janet Frame (Alexia Keogh) with her shock of red hair walking along a paved road in the middle of a deserted landscape (An Angel at My Table, 1990); Ada (Holly Hunter), her skirts over her head, tied to her piano under water (The Piano, 1993); the darkness of the catacomb where Gilbert Osmond (John Malkovich) declares his love for Isabel Archer (The Portrait of a Lady, 1996); Ruth (Kate Winslet) appearing to P. J. Waters (Harvey Keitel) like a goddess with multiple arms (Holy Smoke, 1999); Frannie (Meg Ryan) holding the severed head of her sister on her lap (In the Cut, 2003); Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) standing in a field of bluebells (Bright Star, 2009); Tui (Jacqueline Joe) plunging into a lake (Top of the Lake, 2013).

Campion belongs to a line of artists – Luis Buñuel (whose work she discovered while still in her teens, with Belle de jour, 1967), Roman Polanski, David Lynch (one of her ‘modern heroes’) and Stanley Kubrick – for whom the strangeness of an image never detracts from the clarity of the story. Their mythopoetic works influenced by psychoanalysis are full of ambiguity and confusion and lend themselves to polysemic interpretations. Like them, Campion is attracted by surprising and moral stories that often have a humorous and playful dimension. The very diversity of the work of these filmmakers is part of their greatness. Like other major film directors, Campion has been criticized for the heterogeneity of her output. But although she has a desire to reinvent and challenge herself, her nine films reveal some recurring features, whether they are original screenplays (Sweetie, The Piano, Holy Smoke, Top of the Lake), adaptations (An Angel at My Table, The Portrait of a Lady, In the Cut, The Power of the Dog) or an unusual mixture (Bright Star, an original screenplay loosely based on a biography and the love letters between John Keats and Fanny Brawne). Like many modern filmmakers, she also likes playing with the notion of gender, subverting it or making it her own, whether in the biopic (An Angel at My Table), the costume drama (The Piano and The Portrait of a Lady), the television series (Top of the Lake) or the erotic thriller (In the Cut). When she gives free rein to her flirtation with what Edgar Allan Poe would have described as ‘the angel of the odd’ (Sweetie, Holy Smoke), her films are invariably disconcerting in a register that is highly idiosyncratic. Fierce independence is one of her dominant personality traits and sometimes explains the varied reception with which her films are greeted by critics. Sweetie, which was shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989, was received with equal measures of enthusiasm from some quarters and rejection from others. While Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, another debut film, won that year’s Palme d’Or, awarded by a jury presided over by Wim Wenders, Campion had managed to so disconcert the critics that she left empty-handed. Later, they were amazed, after the success of The Piano (which won the Palme d’Or in 1993), by her decision to create an adaptation of Henry James’s classic novel The Portrait of a Lady. Although Holy Smoke was just as surprising, this time because of the nature of its eccentric inspiration, her next, daringly erotic, project, In the Cut, once again created a stir. Clearly Campion does exactly as she pleases. Her father, Richard Campion, when he was on the set of Holy Smoke, related a conversation he had had with his daughter when she was five years old: ‘I was doing the parental thing about what she might want to do later on. She looked up at me with those big blue eyes and her golden hair and said, “Dad, I am my own self!” And that’s been the basic thing in her work. […] That’s what Holy Smoke is about: all in the family lean on this girl, but she finds her own way1.’ We find this same independence in her attitude to her career. While she dedicates herself to her films with passion and determination, she’s not worried about whether she should be shooting or not, ready to devote herself to other aspects of her life: for instance, she stopped for several years after making In the Cut to commit herself to the education of her daughter, Alice.

A woman’s take

Without ever claiming to be a standard-bearer for feminism and the like by rejecting ‘the woman’s film ghetto’, Campion has always asserted her femininity. The Palme d’Or that she won for The Piano gave her iconic status because no other female director before has ever obtained this prestigious award. Campion is aware of the difficulties a woman faces in this profession and even made it the subject of a three-minute-long satirical tale, The Lady Bug, for a film collective celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. A poster marking this celebration shows her jumping into the air alongside Pedro Almodóvar, Wong Kar-wai, Bruce Willis and Gérard Depardieu, as a tribute to the Festival and to the American photographer Philippe Halsman. Only two other women (one of whom was Juliette Binoche) were part of this celebrity gathering. In another group photograph taken at the same Festival she is the only woman among dozens of male winners of the award, including Manoel de Oliveira, Theo Angelopoulos, Chen Kaige, Ken Loach, Abbas Kiarostami, Wim Wenders, Bille August, Gus Van Sant and Claude Lelouch.

Femininity is at the centre of Campion’s life and work. Each of her first eight films focuses on a female protagonist who is struggling for psychological and sensual autonomy and who is in search of her own voice: Kelly in Two Friends (1986), Kay in Sweetie, Janet Frame in An Angel at My Table, Ada in The Piano, Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, Ruth in Holy Smoke, Frannie in In the Cut, Fanny Brawne in Bright Star, Robin in Top of the Lake. The heroine may also be contrasted with an alter ego, friend, sister or stepsister: Louise (Two Friends), Sweetie (Sweetie) and Pauline (In the Cut).

So many great directors – from George Cukor to Elia Kazan, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni – have made a wonderful job of filming women and exploring their inner lives that it would be futile to contrast a female viewpoint with a masculine one and to give the former an advantage over the latter in this art of portraiture. But Campion’s approach to female sexuality and her heightened sensibility bring a special resonance to her treatment of women that perhaps only Agnès Varda had previously attempted – in films such as Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7, 1962) or L’Opéra-mouffe (Diary of a Pregnant Woman, 1958). Campion films her heroines without idealizing them, portraying them, indeed, with all their imperfections and vulnerability, and without passing over the most basic actions – urinating, defecating – which she captures in their most extreme materiality. She also knows how to portray, like no one else, the body of a woman desirous of the opposite sex. The central place of her heroines in no way reduces the importance of her male characters. Although confrontations in male–female relationships are exposed very directly, and often with much violence, her films do not portray a battle between the sexes from a woman’s point of view in the parallel way that misogyny is present in many films about couples. The force that enables Campion’s heroines to continue to live is expressed in heterosexual relationships. In Sweetie, Kay, after the death of her sister, rediscovers her identity with Louis; Ada experiences a semblance of peace with Baines in The Piano; in Holy Smoke, Ruth can live with P. J. once he has embraced his feminine side; Frannie, having defeated her attacker in In the Cut, finds her lover again; in Bright Star, Fanny Brawne will remain unswervingly attached to Keats after his death; and Robin renews her relationship with Johnno, her childhood sweetheart, in Top of the Lake. There are no happy endings, but over and above the suffering, trauma and violence experienced by her female characters, there’s the affirmation of a belief in life, albeit a fragile one. This vision of the world from a female perspective leads Campion to surround herself with women in her working life: Sally Bongers, cinematographer on her short films and Sweetie; Jan Chapman, producer of Two Friends, The Piano, Holy Smoke and Bright Star; Laura Jones, scriptwriter of An Angel at My Table and The Portrait of a Lady; her sister Anna (co-scriptwriter of Holy Smoke); Helen Garner, scriptwriter of Two Friends; and Veronika Jenet, who for a long time was her regular editor. Campion is not only a woman, but also an Australasian woman. The geography of her work is set around two polarities. Firstly there is the Antipodes, with on one side New Zealand, where she was born and raised, and on the other Australia, where she went to live and work. Within New Zealand another polarity is evident, that of the colonists who arrived from Europe – the ‘Pakehas’, a Maori word to describe the settlers from the Old Continent – and the Maoris themselves, two communities that are present in The Piano. Another polarity contrasts the New World with the Old: Janet Frame in An Angel at My Table leaves her native country to tour Europe before returning to New Zealand; Ada in The Piano leaves Scotland to travel to New Zealand where she will live following a shipwreck. In The Portrait of a Lady Isabel Archer leaves New England (another version of the New World) behind her to go to Great Britain, then Italy – a further witness of two value systems that will come into conflict. The choice to cast Australian actress Nicole Kidman in the role of an American heroine serves to underline the link between these two new worlds set against old Europe. Ruth in Holy Smoke goes to India to regenerate before returning, transformed, to Australia. In the back of a truck, she cradles the body, bloody but still alive, of the other that she tried to abandon in the desert but with whom she is reconciled, like two opposing forces finding each other beyond good and evil. To be an Australian woman is to have independence of mind and an ability to affect the world, as is evidenced not only by Ruth but also by Janet Frame and the ‘innocent’ American Isabel Archer.

At the heart of a work

Campion has often contrasted New Zealand (known as Aotearoa by the Maoris) with Australia, the former being governed by a Protestant work ethic and a refusal to accept that one might be better than other people, the cardinal sin. ‘New Zealanders believe in modesty at all times and we all thought Australians were vulgar and coarse. But I enjoy the way Australians are2.’ Although verbally Campion has often contrasted warm, relaxed, open Australians with serious, withdrawn and introverted New Zealanders, her films tell a different story. Those shot in Australia are dominated by insular suburbs, ugly interiors, diminished prospects and arid terrains parched by the sun, while the verdant landscapes that translate the nostalgia of a wild and invigorating nature are evident in the works made in New Zealand (An Angel at My Table, The Piano, Top of the Lake). The conflicting ties that characterize the filmmaker’s relationships with the two countries that have formed her are reflected in her vision of the family unit, at the heart of her work, an object of both detachment and attraction. Furthermore, the film credits reveal her attachment to her own family: Sweetie is dedicated to her sister Anna, The Piano to her mother Edith, The Portrait of a Lady to her son Jasper (who died eleven days after his birth), while her father is thanked repeatedly. Research carried out by Alistair Fox has shown that Campion’s work is intimately tied to her own life history, not in the form of autobiography but by a series of condensations, allusions and transferences, as well as frequent identifications with her heroines3. Her work thus echoes Valéry’s mauvaise pensée that ‘Everything you say speaks about yourself, especially when you are speaking about someone else4.’

1. Howard Feinstein, ‘The Jane Mutiny’, Guardian Unlimited, 2 April 1999 (available online at http://www.theguardian.com/film/1999/apr/02/features).

2. Campion quoted in Katherine Tulich, The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 23 September 1990.

3. Alistair Fox, Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2011.

4. ‘Tout ce que tu dis parle de toi : singulièrement quand tu parles d’un autre.’ Paul Valéry, Mauvaises pensées et autres, Gallimard, Paris, 1942.

Jane Before Campion

Jane Campion by Patrick Swirc, 2009.

1920sA family of actors

Jane Campion was born in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, on 30 April 1954, the second daughter of producer and director Richard Campion and actress and writer Edith Campion. She is the younger sister of Anna, born a year and a half earlier, and the older sister of Michael, born in 1961 and who, as a businessman, is the only one of the family not connected to the world of entertainment and literature. Edith Hannah, Jane’s mother, born in 1923, was the only child of George and Jessie Hannah and the granddaughter of Robert Hannah, a shoe manufacturer and one of the country’s major industrialists1. Edith had a troubled childhood: both her parents drank and both died prematurely. Richard came from more humble origins. One of a family of eight children, he was brought up in a puritanical atmosphere: his parents were members of the Exclusive Brethren, an evangelical Christian denomination. He escaped the religious confinement of home by working for a newspaper, the Evening Post, and by taking refuge in the public library to read, his family home being devoid of books.

1940sThe couple met at drama classes that enabled them to form their own identities while reacting against the upbringings their backgrounds had imposed on them. They married in 1945 and joined the Unity Theatre, originally an agitprop theatre company created in 1942 and inspired by the radical ideas of the Group Theater, which had been founded ten years earlier in New York by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford. Among other roles, Richard played that of the knight in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and he also staged King Lear, while Edith performed many parts, including Mary Boyle in Juno and the Peacock by Sean O’Casey.

1950sLike lots of Australians – including later their daughter Jane – they took a trip to Europe, studying at the Old Vic in London before joining the touring company of the Young Vic. Their first child died prematurely a few days after his birth, like Jane’s son Jasper after her marriage to Colin Englert. On their return to New Zealand in 1951, thanks to a substantial inheritance Edith received from her grandfather (like Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady), the couple founded the country’s first professional theatre company, the New Zealand Players, with the help of Nola Miller, a local director. The new company was launched in 1953 and organized tours in the island with six plays a year. They staged a total of thirty plays, five of them by New Zealand playwrights. The company’s mission would have been approved by the future filmmaker: ‘To present the best plays of all kinds and, while not pandering to box-office appeal, not to present plays that cause loss of touch with the audience,’ and ‘To find a way of acting, fresh, bold and sincere, which sprang from and appealed to the people of New Zealand2.’ Included in their repertoire were Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw (with Edith in the title role), Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and The Solid Gold Cadillac by Howard Teichmann and George S. Kaufman.

1957Despite some major hits, the company gradually lost money and, in 1957, Richard resigned and joined Wellington College the following year. His relationship with his wife was becoming strained. Alistair Fox mentions numerous adulterous affairs he had with his actresses, including Margaret Turnbull, and sees an echo in Jane’s later work. Jane has a half-sister from one of his liaisons, which for a long time was a family secret. Ruth in Holy Smoke speaks to her father of a love child and, in her adaptation of In the Cut, the filmmaker introduces a half-sister who doesn’t exist in Susanna Moore’s original novel. In fact, both Anna and Jane suffered in childhood from their parents’ frequent absences, monopolized as they were by their work. Moreover, according to Jane, her parents in their earlier years of marriage were very much in love and their children took second place. Feeling neglected, the children sought their parents’ attention.

1961Family life

After the birth of their third child, Michael, Edith abandoned the theatre. Jane remembers: ‘After a while we kind of saw that that wasn’t a good decision. It didn’t help. My father only did what he wanted to do and of course he enjoyed it3.’ After retiring from the stage Edith devoted herself to writing and published poems, short stories and a novel. She communicated to her daughter her love of the great novels of the nineteenth century that would influence Jane’s writing of The Piano and would lead to her choice of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady for a film adaptation. However, the mental illness and depression that Edith suffered following her marital problems (she divorced her husband in 1984) had an effect on her daughter. In a television documentary by Lina Safro on the problem of depression, Campion admits that when she was a teenager her mother’s view of the world was so contagious that one day she said to her: ‘“Look Mum, if you really would like to die, if you think you would be happier, I’ll be with you. I’ll help you.” And she said to me “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die. I want to feel good about this.” And that was a real turning point for me4.’ Edith’s influence on Jane cannot be underestimated. The close relationship that Jane had with her mother is revealed in The Audition (1989), the documentary made by her sister Anna, where Jane has her mother audition for her role as the teacher in An Angel at My Table. Her mother speaks to her about the fear she feels every morning on waking, a fear born out of the absence of a father (who died when she was very young) and the failure of her marriage. The electric shock therapy that Edith underwent in psychiatric hospitals in the 1980s found an emotional echo in the treatments inflicted on Janet Frame in An Angel at My Table.

The recurring presentation of family dysfunctions in Campion’s films raises questions about the relationships they have with her own life story. The filmmaker has denied any such inspiration: ‘If my family was really weird I think I’d have found it very hard to do stories that reveal what can go wrong with the family unit5.’ Certainly, the link is doubtless not a direct one, but the issue is revived, transformed, disguised and changed again in the conflictual father–daughter, mother–daughter and father–mother relationships. The same is true of sister–sister relationships too, given the rivalry between Anna and Jane that marked their childhood: ‘We hated each other growing up. I hated everything about her, her competitiveness. […] I was so sick of the fighting, the competition. I just wanted her to let me be6.’ Her relationship with her older sister later changed radically, to the point that they collaborated on Holy Smoke at a time when Anna herself had already begun directing films. To an extent, these buried traumas and emotional problems have continued to fuel Campion’s work – in the sense in which Baudelaire explained that ‘Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed7.’

1974Moving towards films

Campion’s rebellious sprit and fierce independence that has often been apparent in her life has its origins in her relationships with her family – with her sister but also with her parents. This was evident when, before she turned twenty, she decided to have no more to do with their theatrical world – the idea of doing the same as them was detestable to her – but instead to enrol for a degree in anthropology at Wellington’s Victoria University. She developed her interest in mythic thought and the non-rational while studying the work of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss. The rite-of-passage trip she took to Europe, like lots of young Australians, proved disappointing and once again she found herself at odds. Disappointed in particular by British reserve (‘I had to hide who I was, I was too much for them’), she learned at least one lesson from her trip, at the Chelsea School of Art in London, and on returning to Sydney enrolled at the Sydney College of the Arts in 1977. Like David Lynch and Tim Burton, she made her first creative experiments in painting and drawing and, by her own admission, it was at art college that she learned everything. She was influenced by Frida Kahlo (who provided the inspiration for the character of Ada in The Piano) and her exploration of female sexuality, and also by Joseph Beuys and his relationship with violence and ritual. She discovered Surrealism, with its ability to make the familiar strange, its often black humour and its exploration of dreams, which is also what attracts her to certain filmmakers who have influenced her (Buñuel, Polanski, Fellini, Lynch). She created some narrative paintings annotated with dialogue and text. Quite naturally, she turned to the cinema and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS), which enabled her to practise filmmaking from 1981 onwards.

1981The AFTRS had been created in 1973 along the lines of major film schools in the USA and Europe. Headed by the Polish critic and historian Jerzy Toeplitz, it had as its mission to promote ‘the intelligence and imagination of directors’, despite resistance from the Australian film industry, who would have preferred an exclusively technical school. The purpose of this school was to foster the development of a national film industry that could compete internationally. Its first intake comprised a dozen students, who included the future filmmakers Gillian Armstrong, Phillip Noyce and Chris Noonan. Coming from the fine art world, Campion was pursuing creative autonomy and a personal style that were destined to conflict with its more prescriptive style of teaching. Both Campion and fellow student Sally Bongers (later Campion’s cinematographer) have noted that their work, which was deemed too excessive, didn’t really meet with the approval of the teaching staff and that they, in turn, found the establishment too conservative. But the filmmaker nevertheless recognized that the AFTRS gave her the opportunity to take advantage of sophisticated equipment, to make contact with other students and, thanks to regular screenings, to acquaint herself with the work of major film directors.

1982In the 1980s women became increasingly prominent in the Australian film world. Between 1974 and 1982 only one female director had been able to make a film – Gillian Armstrong with My Brilliant Career (1979) – as opposed to eighty-one men. There were 16 female scriptwriters to 132 male scriptwriters and 32 female producers to 87 male producers. To compensate for this discrepancy, the Women’s Film Fund (1976–88) created the Women’s Film Unit. It was in this favourable environment that Campion was able to flourish. Her short films were noticed by Pierre Rissient, an advisor to the Cannes Film Festival, while on a visit to Sydney. He selected Peel (1982), Passionless Moments (1983) and A Girl’s Own Story (1984), and also her feature-length film Two Friends (1986), made for the television channel ABC. In 1986 Peel was awarded the Short Film Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and her other three films confirmed her place among the most promising directors of her generation. The rest, as they say, is history.

1. I owe much of this biographical information to Alistair Fox’s Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2011) and to Jane Campion: Interviews, edited by Virginia Wright Wexman (University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1999).

2. Quoted in Kathleen McHugh, Jane Campion, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2007.

3. Campion quoted in Ellen Cheshire, Jane Campion, Pocket Essentials, Harpenden UK, 2000.

4. Lina Safro, Brainstorm, video, SBS Television, 1995. Quoted in Sue Williams, The Australian (Sydney), 2 May 1995.

5. Campion quoted in Sandra Hall, The Bulletin (Sydney), 26 October 1993.

6. Campion quoted in Suzie Mackenzie, ‘Beloved rivals’, Guardian Unlimited, 5 June 1999.

7. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter Of Modern Life And Other Essays, 1863.

Short and Medium-length Films
(1980–1986)

‘A Certain Irony About Life’

Rebecca Stewart in Passionless Moments (1983).

Mishaps of Seduction and Conquest
(1981)

Peel – An Exercise in Discipline
(1982)

Passionless Moments
(1983)

A Girl’s Own Story
(1984)

After Hours
(1985)

Dancing Daze
(1986)

Graeme (John Godden) and his sister Gloria (Marina Knight) in A Girl’s Own Story (1984).

The beginnings of a body of work

Very few directors – Roman Polanski and Alain Resnais are the first who spring to mind – have been able to create from the very start, as Campion has done, short films that so brilliantly presage their future work. In 1980, before entering the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS), she shot a film in Super 8 called Tissues, now lost, that analysed the sexual abuse of children and that was based on the story of a man arrested for this crime. This preoccupation of the filmmaker’s reappears in one form or another in certain of her later works. Shot over a period of four years while she was at AFTRS, Mishaps of Seduction and Conquest, Peel, Passionless Moments and A Girl’s Own Story, and later After Hours, established from the outset an original tone and a highly personal intention.

Mishaps of Seduction and Conquest (1981)

This experimental video has two brothers talking to each other in parallel montage via their correspondence: the first, George Mallory (Stuart Campbell), is unsuccessfully trying to climb Everest in 1924, while the second, Geoffrey (Richard Evans), a fictional character, fervently hopes to seduce Emma (Deborah Kennedy), a writer who shows little interest in him. The men on the expedition speak of the mountain as a temptress, and the closer they get to it the less they want it. The emotional conquest unfolds like an echo of this physical conquest. Even in her style of filming, Campion contrasts two worlds: that of Emma’s London interior, which is reminiscent of bourgeois apartments of 1920s cinema, particularly those featured in Kammerspiel films, and that of the Himalayan ascent, made up of archival documentaries of the time.

The film opens with a scene of voyeurism. At the end of a corridor a man bends down to look through a keyhole and to gaze at a woman sitting at her desk writing. In the third shot the man walks towards the camera and sits down, looking preoccupied, near a door. We learn from a voice-over that he is married (‘I trust only that my visits remain unnoticed and Elizabeth unsuspicious’). In this black and white film the filmmaker introduces touches of red that suggest desire and passion: the desire of the man, which decreases the more the conquest becomes possible; the passion of the woman, at first indifferent, who loses the power to write after she has been seduced and then abandoned by her lover. At the end of the film she plays with Geoffrey’s scarf, which she has wrapped around her neck, the only token left of this now-absent man.

At twenty-six years old, Campion laid the foundations of her world: an independent woman who makes a living by writing, a man who cheats on his wife, the vagaries of love, the exchange of letters (as would follow in Two Friends, Holy Smoke, Bright Star) and no doubt reminiscences – even unwitting – of family tragedies. ‘At the age of twenty-five’, she admitted much later, ‘I began to work in a rather idiosyncratic way and to develop a relationship with my subconscious. This was when I was writing my first film. After three pages it was finished, I couldn’t go any further. So I let my subconscious take over. But for this process to work, you have to believe that there are possible solutions1.’

Peel – An Exercise in Discipline (1982)

...