Jane Campion (Contemporary Film Directors) [Paperback]

Kathleen McHugh (Author)

Book Description

Series: Contemporary Film Directors | Publication Date: May 1, 2007

The subversive style of the woman who has become one of the world's greatest film directors

From 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-scène, and visual tropes typical of that genre, her films instead invite a distanced or even amused engagement.

A volume in the series Contemporary Film Directors, edited by James R. Naremore

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Best known for her third feature, The Piano, Campion had already won widespread praise for Sweetie and Angel at My Table, as well as for short films made in her native New Zealand that McHugh says provided "a crucial template for her later, more well-known work." McHugh supplies close, if sometimes cloudy, critical readings of Campion's films, including the seldom-viewed shorts, offering thorough analyses of Campion's visual approach and recurrent subject matter—female self-expression, familial and sexual relationships, and gender roles, all of which evince the filmmaker's "complicated relationship with feminism." Campion's post-Piano output has proved less successful, and her most recent feature, In the Cut, showed her attempting a mainstream thriller about a high-school teacher who has a risky affair with a homicide. Critics and audiences failed to respond, but McHugh sees In the Cut as a culmination of the visual and thematic concerns that have marked the director's career. Three brief interviews and a filmography round out this Contemporary Film Directors volume. Flagg, Gordon --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"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

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press (May 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252074475
• ISBN-13: 978-0252074479
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,153,629 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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