At home with strangeness:
the female main characters in Jane Campion's films
"Sweetie", "An Angel at My Table" and "The Piano"

i first came across jane campion during my stay in australia in 1991.
one day i happened to stroll into the nsw state library to escape the heat and to have a look around. they were just showing films by australasian directors - and one of these films was jane campion's "sweetie". the film instantly made a lasting impression on me, i never forgot it. i always wanted to see it again but never had the chance to do so until a long time after both "an angel at my table" and "the piano" had been released and triumphantly received by both critics and the audience. "the piano" had "caught" me the first time i saw it. i only saw "angel" after that and loved it too ... it seemed to me that something inside me responded to these movies, to these unusual characters, and i felt this woman had something to say by means of her female characters and her films.
in 1996 i wrote two papers on "the piano", one with two colleagues and one alone. one of those papers dealt with sociology of film and the other with cinematic language.
in mid-1996 i had to decide what i would like to write my master's thesis about. there were - as usual - many many subjects i was interested in, ranging from video clips to film and to internet / online communication. one possibility was to continue my work on jane campion's films, and when i came across a book called "marilyns starke schwestern" ("marilyn's tough sisters") by german author christiane peitz which partly deals with jane campion's movies, my mind was soon made up: jane campion's movies it would be. soon i decided to write about her female main characters, trying to find out what they have in common. and that, i soon discovered, is quite a lot.

i first had to write a theoretical part (of course). it's a very brief history of film and then deals with the basics of (film) semiotics as well as with different ways of film interpretation / analysis. There are a few remarks on the meanings of colours and on camera positions and such. if you want to know more about the contents, go to the table of contents.

of course the second part was more fun because i could actually use my brain and discover things myself.
don't ask me how many times i have seen the movies ... i didn't count them. some parts i have seen twenty times and more ... but campion's films win with each time you watch them.
i had to watch the films again and again to really get connected with the characters, to know them well, to understand them.

part two of the thesis begins with information on the life of jane campion and of course introduces my purpose in writing the paper and thus my hypotheses:

#1 jane campion's heroines are - even though very different at first glance - very much alike in some ways. they are all "different" from "common people", in some sense they are outsiders. what they have in common is not only their physical problems.

#2 by means of her films or her heroines jane campion gets across very similar messages, deals with very similar subjects: they have to do with growing up to be a woman and being a woman, deal with the pains a woman has to encounter and deal with on her journey through life, and her films are about strength as well as weaknesses.
in addition, her films are like pieces of one woman's biography.

#3 campion's way of filmic realization is very characteristic and can be traced down in all of her works. she tends to use certain filmic means for getting similar messages across, for illustrating particular situations.


after that introductory part i decided to first summarize each of the three films (her latest movies "the portrait of a lady", an adaptation of the famous henry james novel, is mentioned and summarized but only sporadically considered since it was not yet available on video when i first began to write the thesis, and i deem it necessary to have a copy of the film in question at my disposal for proper examination and analysis) and then describe every female main character - both kay and sweetie in "sweetie", janet in "an angel at my table" and ada in "the piano" - considering e.g. their looks, their ways of life, their habits, their social interactions, their peculiarities, their personalities, their histories, the people around them, as well as the filmic realization of the women.
i chose several minutes of each film for a protocol, writing down precisely what was filmed, how things were arranged in the picture and from what angle the people (also objects) were filmed. that was kind of tiresome work because i had to be very accurate and i had to watch those sequences many a time. still - it was important for my purpose, that is to prove that certain similar scenes were often filmed in a very similar or even the same way, that some people were often filmed using a special angle of the camera.
also, i looked out for symbolism in the films, symbolism related in a close way to the female main characters of course - a very interesting task which i loved.
after this part i had to compare - the question was: what do the films have in common now? i made a difference between similarities with regard to subjects / contents on the one hand and similarities with regard to the design / filmic realization on the other hand.
not surprisingly (to me) there were a lot of things to be found: subjects touched on in all the films (sometimes including "portrait") are

• hysteria (if in a somewhat different sense of the word than commonly used nowadays)
• craziness
• lost illusions (certainly including isabel in "portrait")
• loneliness
• liberation / survival
• sexuality
• voyeurism
• voluntary retreat
• being locked in
• talents / artists
• death or death and nature respectively
• fairy tales
• men
• geographical surroundings as mirrors of the women concerned
• and "sweetie" and "angel" share the subject childhood.

as far as the filmic realization is concerned, there are also some means of expressions to be found in each movie:

• the audience is alone with the woman in the beginning of the films (that does include "portrait")
• the frequent use of close-ups
• subjective camera (closely corresponding with -->)
• changes of perspective: the director won't allow us to lean back and relax, once we see through the eyes of the heroine, but the next minute we "are" someone else, only to virtually be back inside the heroine a couple of scenes later; thus we never get any rest, we are always involved in what is going on, and we get to know several characters "inside out" so to speak. we cannot merely sympathize with one of them, we don't see things from only one point of view, e.g. in "angel" we are not only little janet accused of theft by the teacher, we also see the girl through the pitiless eyes of the teacher. there are such situations in each of campion's films.
• voice-overs
• clothes.

one of my hypotheses was that the films could be seen as chapters of one woman's biography - that proved to be so: "sweetie" largely deals with childhood, "an angel at my table" with the pains and rare pleasures of growing up, while "the piano" tells about the discovery of sensuality and sexuality, about the woman finding love, and finally "the portrait of a lady" talks about the heroine settling down and her bitter disappointment after marriage.
so my hypotheses could all be verified to a large extent, and my work was done, a kind of work i had enjoyed to the last minute - notwithstanding the natural ups and downs that come with such a task and that occur now and then during this period. still, i loved what i was doing and therefore it turned out to be some proper and well done piece of work.

click here for the table of contents!


jane campion - related pages:

jane campion - largely on "the piano"
notes on her productions
in italian, mainly on "portrait of a lady
biography, filmography
biography, filmography
in dutch! on "the portrait of a lady"
comparing the females in the movies "crush" (a. maclean) and "sweetie", recommended!



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