Jane Campion Frames Janet Frame: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young New Zealand Poet

Abstract

In An Angel At My Table (1989), her cinematic adaptation of Janet Frame's three-part Autobiography, Jane Campion faced many of the same problems encountered by Joseph Strick in his ambitious film version of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man} In each case, the narrative demanded by the bildungsroman genre competes with the more diffuse, episodic form dictated by autobiography. Just as Strick drew on Joyce's early, abandoned fictional fragment Stephen Hero to amplify his cinematic presentation, so Campion amalgamated a number of scenes from Janet Frame's autobio graphical novel, Faces in the Water, to dramatize her protagonist's eight year incarceration in mental hospitals after a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia. The result is an extraordinary cinematic portrait that challenges the tacit assumptions of more traditional Hollywood biopics. The screenplay was written by Australian author Laura Jones, and Campion chose three remarkable lookalikes to play Janet Frame at various stages of development: Alexia Keogh as the child Janet, Karen Fergusson as the adolescent protag onist, and Kerry Fox as the young adult. Iris Churn, as Lottie Frame, and K. J. Wilson, as the patriarch George, both turn in exceptional and con vincing performances. Biographical films, I would argue, owe much of their fascination to the referential frame of historical authenticity. And yet, while claiming the sanction of (auto)biographical verisimilitude, the biopic nonetheless repli cates, either consciously or inadvertently, the triangular structure of Aristo telian drama, conflating ostensible documentary reporting with an imposed narrative model dependent on rising and complicated action, a peripeteia