Ranking Jane Campion

by Cláudio Alves

The upcoming release of The Power of the Dog is a joyous moment for all cinephiles everywhere. Finally, after twelve long years, Jane Campion is back with a new feature that won her the Best Director prize at Venice earlier this year and might lead her to more Oscar nominations, maybe victories. Personally speaking, I'm on cloud nine right now, seeing as Campion is my favorite living filmmaker. Having watched every one of her features and most shorts, I've fallen in love with her cinema of extreme materiality and negative capability, her portraits painted with unsaid words and aborted gestures, silences, and voids.

 Such is my love that, to celebrate the incoming release of The Power of the Dog, I've decided to rank Jane Campion's nine features. It's a veritable cornucopia of cinematic excellence…

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Months of Meryl: A Cry in the Dark (1988)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

 #15 — Lindy Chamberlain, a New Zealand matriarch wrongfully convicted of her child’s murder.

MATTHEW: One evening in August 1980, Azaria Chamberlain, the two month-old daughter of New Zealander couple Michael and Lindy Chamberlain, was taken while the family was camping near Ayers Rock. She was never found again. Seconds before Azaria disappeared, Lindy claimed to have seen a dingo rummaging through the tent where her daughter lay sleeping, putting forth the soon-to-be-infamous story that a dingo had taken and perhaps eaten her baby. A seedy, sensationalist media frenzy ensued, with the Chamberlains’ faces splashed across the covers of obsessive tabloids and speculative segments of nightly news programs as many, including the Australian high court, viciously questioned the veracity of the family’s explanation.

None of Meryl Streep’s vehicles have entered the cultural lexicon with quite the same measure of gleefully ubiquitous parody that has surrounded and even overshadowed Fred Schepisi’s 1988 docudrama A Cry in the Dark, also titled — and released in Australia and New Zealand as — Evil Angels after the John Bryson true-crime bestseller that first chronicled the Chamberlain family’s legal ordeal. A Cry in the Dark’s devolution into little more than a widely-known (though often misquoted) punchline has proven to be both admittedly hilarious but also fairly odd, especially considering the gruesome events from which this gag originates...

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Pfeiffer in New Zealand. But why?

by Nathaniel R

Jane Campion and Michelle Pfeiffer embracing in New Zealand

Thanks to the twitter pfan account LaPfeiffer for alerting us to this but Michelle Pfeiffer was recently spotted in New Zealand hiking with her husband David E Kelley and... (gulp) Jane Campion, only one of the greatest living filmmakers. But why was she there...?

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Review: Alison Maclean Returns with 'The Rehearsal'

By Glenn Dunks

Alison Maclean is not a prolific filmmaker. While her resume is littered with TV (Sex and the City, The Tudors), music videos (Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn”) and short films (the superb domestic horror Kitchen Sink, and a segment in Subway Tales), films are few and far between. Her third feature is The Rehearsal and if its release feels awfully quiet then you can probably thank the near 20-year gap between feature projects and her return to her native New Zealand with a thorny film about tricky subject matter and written with a sense of ambiguous mystery.

My knowledge of New Zealand cinema is by far not as thorough as Australian film, but Maclean’s Crush is perhaps my favourite from there that isn’t Heavenly Creatures or The Piano. It is a film rife for rediscovery, not least of all for the delicious performance by Marcia Gay Harden at its centre (it also competed for the 1992 Palme d’Or). I was less enamoured by Jesus’ Son, a film that I assume stuck too closely to the often chaotic and episodic short story structure of its source novel to find its own groove, although Maclean’s experiences in the vast expanses of New Zealand and Canada gives her a unique advantage in framing the emptiness of the American mid-west and finding idiosyncrasies for her characters.

The Rehearsal is a much different style of film. It’s smaller in scope in terms of its core narrative, less tied to and reliant on its location and a sprawling need for its characters to escape whatever it is that nevertheless confines them to their place in life.

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Women's Pictures - Jane Campion's An Angel at my Table

With her 1990 film An Angel at my Table, Jane Campion solidified a pattern for herself. Her films would be about extraordinary women in stifling circumstances. Whether it is mental institutions, marital institutions, family, or society, Campion’s heroines have to overcome great difficulties in order to live truly as themselves. An Angel at my Table, based on the autobiographies of New Zealand author Janet Frame, stands out as the only film of Campion’s early body of work that could be comfortably called a biopic. But to dismiss An Angel at my Table as just another biopic would be to ignore the unusual film Campion has made about an unusual woman.

Janet Frame’s life was as strange as any of the twenty works she wrote. She spent her childhood poor but happy in rural New Zealand, grew into an awkward woman whose anxiety was mistaken for mental illness, spent eight years in a mental institution, was freed when her writing was published, and went on to become a New Zealand icon. Campion cast three actresses to play Frame as she matured: Karen Fergusson, Alexia Keogh, and finally the incredible Kerry Fox. The three actresses are unified by a shock of red, unruly hair, and an awkward physicality that show someone more comfortable in her imagination than in the world.

An Angel at my Table is shot in a straightforward style far removed from the canted camera angles and wide angle lenses of Sweetie. The practical reason for this was the film's humble beginnings as a TV miniseries. However, beyond practicality, this less showy camera blocking lends itself to grounding Janet Frame’s story in reality. Frame’s impoverished but happy upbringing, her nightmarish eight year detention in a mental institution, and her subsequent successful writing career are shown in mostly medium or long shots, with Janet at the visually at the center. Typically subjects are set off-center in a shot, because symmetrical framing looks odd to the audience’s eye. Placing Janet at the center of the frame visually sets Janet apart - reacting to, but separate from, the world around her.

Janet Frame's colorful inner life after the jump.

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