Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema

5. Traumas of Separation and the Encounter with the Phallic Other: The Piano

107 1Whereas the making of An Angel at My Table allowed Jane Campion to acknowledge through her art the existence of a profound empathic bond with her mother which, in her earlier films, had appeared to be disavowed, it also showed that there were other consequences of that relationship in her own life still waiting, and needing, to be explored. She had deepened her understanding of her mother’s depressive illness through her adaptation of the story of Janet Frame and could also see how, in the course of growing up, she had internalized certain of her mother’spredispositionsandtendencies;shehadnotonlybeguntogrow “similar to Mum,” but had also relived aspects of her mother’s experience . What Campion had not yet come to terms with, however, were the ways in which her mother’s psychic condition had influenced the formation of her own adult personality, particularly with respect to her ability toformsuccessfulrelationshipswithmen.Forthatlargerunderstanding to be achieved, she needed to integrate her new sense of how her mother had influenced her with the awareness revealed in her student films and Two Friends of how her relationship with her father had affected her. By doingthis,shewouldbeabletoseehowthesetwoinfluenceshadworked together to produce the feelings and personality predispositions that she recognized in herself. In short, she needed to attain a fuller, more rounded, more coherent understanding of the influence of her family background in its totality, rather than just parts of it, and it is this aim, I will argue, that prompted and informed the making of The Piano. The rest of this chapter will be devoted to a demonstration of how and why Campion drew upon her own experiences in creating this remarkable 5Traumas of Separation and the Encounter with the Phallic Other: The Piano 108 Jane Campion film, so as to turn it into a vehicle for advancing the understanding of her personal issues and how they might be resolved. 2The screenplay for The Piano took over six years to develop, and the processisilluminating.AccordingtoCampion,shewasonlyjustout of the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School (from which she graduated in 1984) when she first thought of the idea for the film. We can infer, although Campion has never directly said so, that this occurred when the producers John Maynard and Bridget Ikin—for whom Campion would soon make An Angel at My Table—approached her to direct a film adaptation of a novel by an earlier New Zealand woman novelist, Jane Mander, The Story of a New Zealand River. Maynard and Ikin, who had bought the film rights to this novel, wanted to cast Sam Neill in the film they planned to make with financial backing from the New Zealand Film Commission, which was to have been called The River.1 The plot of Mander’s novel strikingly foreshadows a number of the plot elements that resurface in The Piano. Its heroine, Alice, is a severely repressed unwed mother from Scotland, who arrives in colonial New Zealand, accompanied by her vivacious nine-year-old daughter, and marries a man she does not love for reasons of social propriety. Like Ada in the film, Alice brings with her a piano, to which she is deeply attached because it provides her with a means of emotional expression she does not otherwise have, and, like Ada, she is attracted to a bushman, David Bruce, who lives in a shanty near by and who is more sensitive to music than is her husband.2 Campion was interested in this project, and it is easy to see why. She has professed her love of novels in general: “As a whole, they satisfy me much more than most films, since they illuminate things much more patiently and deeply.”3 In particular, she admits to a special liking for romantic novels of the sort written by Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and Wuthering Heights is specifically mentioned as an influence: “She [Emily Brontë] . . . writes about the bareness of these marshy areas. I . . . [could] well imagine that feeling in the New Zealand landscapes.”4 Furthermore , her mother, Edith, had long been “a very strong advocate” for this type of story: “She always held up to my sister and myself the role of martyr. She believes in love and its redemptive power. She is extremely romantic, which is something that both of us recoiled against, but her Traumas of Separation 109 flame is still there.”5 In addition, Campion had become interested in her ancestors and...