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9. Lighting a Lamp: Loss, Art, and Transcendence in The Water Diary and Bright Star
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201 1By the time she finished In the Cut, released in 2003, Jane Campion had become aware that she was beginning to repeat herself. As she puts it, “I was starting to work with a bit of a full suitcase, and the same old suitcase, and that’s why I stopped working for a while, because I wanted to chuck the whole lot out and see what came up.”1 After a “sabbatical ” of several years, during which she found herself “doing things likeembroideringpillowslipsandverycraftysimplestuff,likehorsesand stuff for my daughter; doing like my mum and my sister and friends,”2 Campion’s attempt to rediscover herself bore fruit in three films that show her going in various new directions. The first was a short film, The Water Diary (2006), made as part of a United Nations Millennium Development Goals project about water and global warming. The second was The Lady Bug, a surrealistic three-minute segment in a compilation of thirty-three short films, Chacun son cinéma; ou, Ce petit coup au coeur quand la lumière s’éteint et que le film commence, shown at Cannes in May 2007, in which Campion satirized the attitude of men toward women in the world of filmmaking. The third was a new feature-length film, Bright Star (2009), dealing with the tragically truncated love relationship between the Romantic poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, the seventeenyear -old daughter of his neighbor at Hampstead Heath. The Lady Bug was a fanciful, one-off jeu d’esprit which protested the position of women directors in the cinema industry, but, given that the plansforBrightStarwereannouncedinmid-2006,soonafterthecompletionof The Water Diary, it is notsurprisingthat thelattertwo films beara close relationship to one another—not only stylistically, with Campion 9Lighting a Lamp: Loss, Art, and Transcendence in The Water Diary and Bright Star 202 Jane Campion using the same cinematographer (Greig Fraser) and composer (Mark Bradshaw), but also thematically. The second, longer film picks up from the point where the earlier one leaves off, that is, with characters who wait, metaphorically speaking, for “the rain” after the literal drought depicted in The Water Diary and the spiritual drought depicted earlier in Holy Smoke and In the Cut. Both of the newer films reveal a further development in Campion’s vision, in which “the rain” can only be found as the consequence of a cathartic response to a beauty that is fleeting and transient; being experienced under the sign of death, it is unable to survive for long the brutal realities of the actual world. Both films, moreover,arecloselyassociatedwithCampion’sdaughter,AliceEnglert, who in various ways is both the incentive for, and the instrument of, Campion’s exploration of her new understanding. Campion’s casting of Alice as the main character, Ziggy, in The Water Diary and her use of her daughter as the inspiration for her realization of the character of Fanny in Bright Star,3 makes for a complex set of imaginative projections and identifications. Indeed, in terms of autobiographically driven associations , these two films are as richly overdetermined with latent meaning as any of Campion’s earlier movies. That being the case, it is useful to examine them together. 2On the face of it, Campion’s The Water Diary, only eighteen minutes long, tells the simple story of the grief that a girl, Ziggy, and her friend Sam suffer at the deaths of two favorite horses, killed by Ziggy’s father to save them from starvation during a drought. Following this incident, the children of the area attempt to induce the rain to come back by having the most beautiful and talented girl among them play her viola on the top of a hill. The film, however, is laden with visual images derivingfromCampion’spersonalmythologythatinvestthissimplenarrative with an extraordinary depth of symbolic condensation. The deep attachment Ziggy and Sam display for their horses recalls not only Edith Campion’s lifelong passion for horses and horse riding, but Jane Campion ’s childhood enthusiasm for that sport. As Campion has revealed in an interview, she moved to the countryside when she was thirteen—the ageofZiggyinthemovie—andownedamare.4Indeed,aphotosurvives of the young Jane dressed in exactly the same kind of horse-riding outfit [54.196.27.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:04 GMT) Lighting a Lamp 203 in which Ziggy appears during the “gymkhana without horses” in The Water Diary. It is not fanciful, therefore, to see in Ziggy’s story a fictive projection of Jane’s experience, with the fact...