Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema

4. “How painful it is to have a family member with a problem like that”: Authorship as Creative Adaptation in An Angel at My Table

88 1EventhoughJaneCampion’sfilmsuptoandincludingSweetielaidout the dynamics of a family problematic in a fairly comprehensive manner ,therewasonemajorfactorthatshehadnotyetexploredindepth:the influence on her of her mother’s lifelong battle with depression. Indeed, there is a curious downplaying of the mother’s role, and even presence, in many of Campion’s films. The mother is absent altogether from the family group depicted in Peel; although there is a father and a son, the mother’s place is taken by an elder sister, which foreshadows Gordon’s substitution of Dawn for Flo as his femme in Sweetie.1 In A Girl’s Own Story, the mother is present but is virtually mute (foreshadowing Ada in The Piano), and she is presented as a passive victim who is easily dominated by her husband when the latter exploits sex as a weapon to play upon her needy hunger for personal affirmation. In both The Piano and The Portrait of a Lady, neither of the heroine’s parents is present: Ada’s mother is dead, and Isabel Archer is an orphan. In Holy Smoke, Ruth’s mother makes brief, intermittent appearances, much like Flo in Sweetie, and Ruth does end up with her at the end of the movie, but her role is far less significant than that of the father stand-in, PJ Waters, who assumes a more prominent place in the film than Ruth’s biological father. Finally, in In the Cut, the parents of Frannie and Pauline are presented only in fantasy, and while we learn that the father is still alive and intending to marry his fifth wife, we get the impression that the mother is dead. At any rate, in Frannie’s fantasy recollection, her mother has been killed off by Frannie’s father. 4“How painful it is to have a family member with a problem like that”: Authorship as Creative Adaptation in An Angel at My Table “How painful it is to have a family member with a problem like that”: Authorship as Creative Adaptation in An Angel at My Table “How painful it is to have a family member with a problem” 89 Despite these absences of significant maternal figures, Jane Campion ’s own mother had exerted a profound influence on her daughter’s formation. In particular, Jane had found the experience of her mother’s depression deeply traumatic. When Jane was a teenager, she recalls, Edith Campion had been affected so badly by depression that Jane had offered to help her mother die: “It really scared me to feel close to her complete lack of hope.” On that occasion, her mother turned her down, but the experience left “a deep and lasting impact” on Campion. As she puts it, “I had to get away, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see for myself my own optimism any more.” To Jane, Edith’s way of looking at the world “seemed almost contagious.”2 At the same time, Jane was deeply attached to her mother, and the empathic bond between them was exceedingly strong. Some sense of the paradoxical nature of the relationship between them, in which affection , compassion, and resentment on both sides played off against the other, can be glimpsed in Anna Campion’s short film, The Audition, made in 1989, the year before Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table was released. As Harriet Margolis has argued, The Audition could almost be viewed as an early exercise in reality TV, on account of the literal way it focuses on the manifestations of Edith’s state of mind and the reactions they provoke in her daughter.3 The opening sequences, which show Jane drivinghermother’scartoOtakiafterhermotherhaspickedherupfrom the Wellington airport, reveal an apparently peremptory bossiness in Edith as she orders her daughter to watch her speed, change gears, and not stray into the oncoming lane. This simple sequence allows one to infer an impulse to control springing from Edith’s need to master her anxiety. As the film proceeds, she links the fear she feels each morning to the breakdown of her marriage, which draws attention to the absence of the husband and father: “I suppose I cared about my marriage too much.” Jane, as she listens, is shown to take a breath from an inhaler— itself suggestive of a nervous psychosomatic reaction—which serves as preparation for the revelation that Edith also suffered from asthma as a child. This, as Margolis has proposed, implies a psychological connection between mother and daughter grounded in their vulnerability: “In a sense, The...