The art film, affect and the female viewer: The Piano revisited

Abstract

Every so often a film appears that has the ability to mesmerize its spectators, taking up sustained residence in their imaginations and emotions. A dozen years ago that film, at least for some female viewers, was Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993). In her 1995 essay in Screen, Sue Gillett testified to the film’s strange magic when she wrote that, ‘The Piano affected me very deeply. I was entranced, moved, dazed. I held my breath. I was reluctant to re-enter the everyday world after the film had finished. The Piano shook, disturbed, and inhabited me. I felt that my own dreams had taken form, been revealed. I dreamed of Ada the night after I saw the film. These were thick, heavy and exhilarating feelings’. In a more material instance of the film’s affective impact, Laleen Jayamanne reported that, to her astonishment, she acquired an inexplicable pain in a finger of her left hand in apparent sympathy with the suffering caused Ada, the film’s protagonist, when her index finger is severed by her axe-wielding husband in a fit of rage. Although there are undoubtedly viewers who were unmoved by The Piano, like Gillette and Jayamanne, others have found the film visually ravishing, provocatively perplexing and otherwise compelling. The film’s public heyday is over, but far from losing its purchase on viewers, The Piano lives on through video and DVD reissue. The passage of time and repeated viewing may dispel a film’s interest for fans, but multiple returns to a favourite text can also enhance its original effects, enabling spectators to meditate further on its allure, as well as their own responses. Indeed, such returns are often strongly motivated by a desire to recapture and to understand the emotions the film initially elicited. 1 Sue Gillett, ‘Lips and fingers: Jane Campion’s The Piano’, Screen, vol. 36, no. 3 (1995), p. 286. See also Gillett’s Views from Beyond the Mirror: The Films of Jane Campion (St Kilda, Australia: Australian Teachers of Media, 2004), where she continues to develop the importance of the personal to textual reading and response. 2 Laleen Jayamanne, Toward Cinema and its Double: CrossCultural Mimesis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 48. 3 For more commentary from female critics on The Piano when it first appeared, see: Stella Bruzzi, ‘Tempestuous petticoats: costume and desire in The Piano’, Screen, vol. 36, no. 3 (1995), pp. 257–66; and Lynda Dyson, ‘The return of the repressed? Whiteness, femininity, and colonialism in The Piano’, Screen, vol. 36, no. 3 (1995), pp. 267–76. See also Suzy Gordon, ‘ ‘I clipped your wing, that’s all’: auto-eroticism and the female spectator in The Piano debate’, Screen, vol. 37, no. 2 (1996), pp. 193–205. Such work as Gillett’s Views from Beyond the Mirror and Vivian Sobchack’s