Riddles of the Feminine in The Piano

Abstract

Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) has garnered a great deal of both criticism and acclaim from commentators. The film is complex, dealing with issues of female desire, the maternal relation, post-colonialism and notions of language. The extensive critical engagement with this film suggests it is a key point of reference for anyone interested in women and cinema. Campion’s film is not a straightforward text — the duality of its ending alone makes for a complicated relationship between the spectator and the on-screen narrative, as I will discuss below. As this chapter will suggest, however, it is precisely this complexity that enables us to read the film as an exemplar of a feminine cinematics. In many ways, the film neatly encapsulates all that is most slippery around this concept, with many of the key ideas struggling to be articulated. This chapter will show how a feminine cinematics can be aligned with the feminist approach to ‘reading against the grain’. In order to do so, it will consider the structuring of the gaze within the film as well as key aspects of the narrative that relate to female genealogy and questions of parler femme.