A Commitment to Representing “the Unsayable and Unseeable”: Jane Campion, Cinematic Politics and Gendered Ageing

Abstract

Jane Campion remains one of the most distinctive and respected filmmakers to have emerged over the last 40 years. Her career began in New Zealand in the 1980s with a series of short films, and she then achieved wider recognition in the 1990s with Sweetie (1989), An Angel at My Table (1990) and the widely acclaimed The Piano (1993), with which Campion became the first woman director to win the Palme D’Or at Cannes. This was followed by Campion’s iconoclastic version of the heritage film, The Portrait of a Lady (1996), and her chilling noir, In the Cut (2003). Throughout her long career, Campion has refused to compromise either her artistic vision or her focus on women as the narrative centre of her films, while moving deftly between genres and mediums. Her recent work has seen a return to television drama (Top of the Lake, 2013, 2017), in a move that might be read as symptomatic of the way women directors often struggle to sustain a film career as they age. However, Campion made a triumphant return to cinema in 2021 with The Power of the Dog, a psychological western, which was also widely acclaimed.