Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Australia
Educated in London, where she studied fine arts at the
Chelsea School of Arts, and Sydney, Jane Campion was
accepted into the Australian Film and Television School in
1981, where she directed the controversial short Peel
(1982), which some years later won the 1986 Palme d’Or
for shorts at the Cannes Film Festival. After more shorts
and, following that, experience on a television series, her
first feature was Two Friends (1986) for television.
Although the basis of the story, the relationship between
two girls over a period of time, was familiar, Campion’s
interest in exploring independent women in films that
were presented in a nonliteral manner was already evident.
Two Friends won awards from the Australian Film
Institute for its innovative narrative, which told the story
of the two girls in reverse time.
Similarly, Campion’s first theatrical feature film,
Sweetie (1989), was unconventional. The film traces the
volatile relationship between two sisters, the introverted
Kay and the erratic Sweetie, and explores a recurring motif
in Campion’s cinema, the tenuous divide between anarchy
and ‘‘civilization.’’ Sweetie was followed by An Angel at My
Table (1990), a three-part miniseries for New Zealand
television. Based on the experiences of the New Zealand
writer Janet Frame it contains some of the stylistic and
thematic attributes of her earlier films. Frame suffered
from long periods of institutionalization following an
incorrect diagnosis of schizophrenia, but Campion did not
present her story as a simple melodrama of victimization,
producing instead an episodic blend of comedy, suffering,
and sensuality.
of the deduction (changed to two years in 1983). This
encouraged a boom in production although, unfortunately,
there were many substandard films as some producers,
motivated solely by the tax rebate, churned out
movies that went straight to video or even remained
unreleased. As a consequence, the tax benefits were constantly
reduced throughout the 1980s as the debate over
the nature, and level, of government support intensified
until a major review of film funding was conducted in
1997. The resultant Gonski Report, however, received
only a lukewarm reception by the federal government,
and a mixture of tax concessions and incentives for
JANE CAMPION
b. Wellington, New Zealand, 30 April 1954
In 1993 Campion won an Academy AwardÒ for best
screenplay for The Piano, as well as receiving a nomination
for best director and a host of other awards. Filmed in
New Zealand, the story concerns a deceptively ‘‘mute’’
Scottish widow who arrives in nineteenth-century New
Zealand with her young daughter. After an arranged
marriage to a lonely farmer, she enters into an affair with a
neighbor who gives her piano lessons. Although the story
contained elements of the romantic melodrama, Campion
refused to be constrained by its conventions and combined
a sense of ‘‘perverse’’ eroticism with stylistic modernism as
she explored the negative effects of patriarchy and
colonialism.
Campion’s subsequent films have not achieved the
critical or commercial success of The Piano. Her 1996
adaptation of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady was
another study of an independent woman battling the
social and sexual constraints of a repressive environment, a
theme she revisited in a contemporary setting in her 2003
adaptation of Susanna Moore’s novel, In the Cut.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Sweetie (1989), An Angel at My Table (1990), The Piano
(1993), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), In the Cut (2003)
FURTHER READING
Gillett, Sue. Views from Beyond the Mirror: The Films of Jane
Campion. St. Kilda, Victoria, Australia: Atom, 2004.
Polan, Dana. Jane Campion. London: British Film Institute,
2001.
Geoff Mayer
private investment emerged as a compromise between a
government reluctant to continue large-scale financial
support and an industry still reliant on external funding.
There was also a steady increase in offshore American
productions during the 1990s with large budget films
such as Mission Impossible (1996), its sequel (2000), The
Matrix (1999), and its sequels (2003, 2004), as well as
the continuation of the Star Wars series. Many Australian
actors, directors, cinematographers, and musicians found
work, and sometimes fame, in Hollywood and Britain,
including Russell Crowe (b. 1964) (who was born in New
Zealand), Mel Gibson (who was born in the United
138 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM