Overview

In considering Jane Campion's early award-winning short films on through international sensation The Piano and beyond, Kathleen McHugh traces the director's distinctive visual style as well as her commitment to consistently renovating the conventions of ""women's films."" By refusing to position her female protagonists as victims, McHugh argues, Campion scrupulously avoids the moral structures of melodrama, and though she often works with the narratives, mise-en-scene, and visual tropes typical of that genre, her films instead invite a distanced or even amused engagement.  Jane Campion concludes with four brief, revelatory interviews and a filmography. Campion spoke twice with Michel Ciment—after the screening of her short and medium-length films at the Cannes Film Festival 1986, and three years later, after the Cannes screening of Sweetie. Judith Lewis narrates a Beverly Hills interview with Campion that followed the release of Holy Smoke, and Lizzie Francke's interview, reprinted from Sight and Sound,centers on Campion's film In the Cut, adapted from Susanna Moore's novel. A volume in the series Contemporary Film Directors, edited by James R. Naremore

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""This is an original, witty, and highly nuanced reading of Campion's films that takes into account a wide range of aesthetic and cultural influences on the filmmaker and her work. Wonderfully responsive to the films and informed by a non-dogmatic feminist sensibility, the book builds in power as it progresses. In sum: superb writing, superior scholarship, and stimulating - indeed, exciting - to read."" Vivian Sobchack, author of The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience "" ... the book offers three interviews with Campion in which her directness sets the most important elements of the record straight.""--TLS 2 Nov 2007 ""Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema by Alistair Fox prescribes to the concept of the individual genius, arguing for what Francis Vanoye calls - personal cinema. Fox examines the filmmaker's oeuvre from Tissues (1980), her first short film, which is not available for general viewing, to Brightstar (2009)...the debate on how significant the director or producer is is ongoing, and is not yet near resolution, which illustrates the need to continue discussing the origins and nature of creativity and collaboration within filmmaking, regardless of geographical location or budget."" - Deborah Mellamphy, Scope, June 2012

This is an original, witty, and highly nuanced reading of Campion's films that takes into account a wide range of aesthetic and cultural influences on the filmmaker and her work. Wonderfully responsive to the films and informed by a non-dogmatic feminist sensibility, the book builds in power as it progresses. In sum: superb writing, superior scholarship, and stimulating - indeed, exciting - to read. Vivian Sobchack, author of The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience ... the book offers three interviews with Campion in which her directness sets the most important elements of the record straight. --TLS 2 Nov 2007

Author Information

Kathleen McHugh is a professor of English and film, television, and digital media at UCLA. She is the author of American Domesticity: From How-To Manual to Hollywood Melodrama.

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