Deb Verhoeven,
Jane Campion.
London: Routledge, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-415-26275-0
US$31.95
285pp
(Review copy supplied by Routledge
http://www.routledge.com/)

Over a decade ago, when I began working on Jane Campion’s The Piano, the amount of material a web search on the director’s name generated was overwhelming. So I appreciate Deb Verhoeven’s reference to “a time ‘BC’ (‘Before Campion’)” (xii); for female film scholars in the Antipodes Campion is something of an inevitability that is inescapable once one has begun. (Verhoeven is based in Melbourne, Australia, while I am based in Wellington, New Zealand.) And Verhoeven acknowledges that her book adds to the academic industry built on Campion’s success (p. 148). So it disturbed me that the blurb for her Jane Campion calls it “the first detailed account of Jane Campion’s career as a filmmaker.”

It’s the “career” that justifies a claim to uniqueness within the Campion canon, although during Verhoeven’s discussion of Campion’s “career” per se it’s uncertain whether the word refers to a more commercial sort of success involving longevity as a filmmaker and the ability to earn a living or the critical success associated with auteurism. For example, Verhoeven asserts that “by any standards [Campion] is the most successful woman working in the contemporary film industry” (p. 1). What, though, of Kathryn Bigelow or Nora Ephron, just for the sake of argument? Ultimately, Verhoeven’s Jane Campion is more a book about contemporary auteurism that happens to use Jane Campion as a case study than a study of Jane Campion’s films. Referring to a distinction made by Peter Wollen between the auteur as “constructed a posteriori, an outcome of the reading of their films”, and the auteur for whom we bring expectations to our understanding of her next film, Verhoeven asks us to “recognize how the contemporary film industry addresses the auteur as an integral part of its operations, as a crucial component of the ways in which films are financed … and … marketed to audiences” (p. 15).

Yet Jane Campion is third in a series of Routledge Film Guidebooks, which have a standard format: “an introduction, including a brief history, defining characteristics and major films; a chronology; key debates surrounding the filmmaker or movement; and pivotal scenes, focusing on narrative structure, camera work and production quality” (p. ii). Jane Campion delivers what’s promised and more, up to the last bit about aesthetic analysis, which is not Verhoeven’s focus. So there’s a bit of a misfit that might lead to false expectations if a reader bought the book on the basis of its publisher’s marketing. Were it not too, too self-reflexive, that ironic discrepancy could be part of Verhoeven’s analysis, given her emphasis on the construction of a public persona for Campion via the media and how important that has been for the marketing of her films, along with Verhoeven’s eventual discussion of how important Campion has been for many academic careers.

The Jane Campion in question here is “Jane Campion,” a brand on the supermarket shelves of film production, much like “Peter Jackson” or “Jane Austen.” (Surely a thorough web search would show that someone out there has published speculations on what would happen if Jane Campion adapted Jane Austen for the screen, or why it is that Campion has yet to do so. Probably not, though, since Verhoeven’s copious research would have turned it up – and it would have fitted well into her discussion.) This Jane Campion does not bring us the sort of “scene-by-scene analysis” (blurb again) that we might expect of a traditional auteurist analysis of a director’s oeuvre, but it does something more interesting in its way, if one is familiar with earlier books that have more than adequately covered that ground.[1]

As a quick overview of the book, here are the chapter titles, beginning with the introduction: “Being Jane Campion in a post-Campion world?”; “Becoming Jane Campion: modes of auteurism and the media”; “Realizing Jane Campion: the industry, politics and economics of contemporary auteurism”; “Disciplining Jane Campion: auteurism and the knowing audience”; and “Jane Campion on Jane Campion: one more interview.” Let’s start with the coyly disingenuous one: “Disciplining Jane Campion”.

After the intensity of passion in The Piano, Campion’s films have raised expectations about enticing if challenging representations of female sexual desire. So of course “Disciplining Jane Campion” suggests a connection with those expectations. But “disciplining” turns out to be a slightly kinky pun here. Verhoeven explains that “a multi-faceted approach to the auteur” enables us to see ways in which auteurs are authorized by providing different

frameworks for understanding the contributions of particular auteurs. This book is structured around four such lines of ‘authorisation’ in Campion’s career, firstly as they persist in the media (chapter one); in industry (chapter two); in academic scholarship (chapter three); and in the domain of personal reflection and self-promotion (chapter four) to the extent that these four industry practices can be distinctly delineated (for instance many members of the media are familiar with academic writing, many industry players are also academics, each informing and at times undermining the other and so on). (p. 27)

In other words, no sex; 1) academic disciplines (or, more specifically, academic intellectuals interested in film) are Verhoeven’s subject in chapter three, along with 2) Campion’s research in “academic” sources as part of her preparation for her films, and 3) the academy itself. Referring to “how Campion’s work, especially The Piano has been mobilized through a series of overtly tactical scholarly debates,” Verhoeven argues that “it is possible to see in these assorted disciplinary debates about Campion another way of thinking about the modalities of contemporary academic work” (pp. 154-55). This leads her to talk about Bourdieu, types of knowledge, and the status of universities.

Now is the time for my cynical side to reveal itself. For some years Antipodean universities have had to adapt to the British model of government funding based on research productivity. Again, this is something Verhoeven nearly touches on, although that would again lead her book into something like a mise en abîme of self-reflexivity. So I’m assuming that Verhoeven’s Jane Campion was written with Australia’s regular accounting of academics’ publications in mind. I’m not saying that she isn’t committed to what she has written, nor that there is any lack of integrity in her research or argument. But there is a deal of carelessness that goes with the urgency of publishing for the sake of publishing.

For example, Verhoeven consistently misspells the French sociologist’s name as Bordieu, but he’s in good company. Other people whose names are misspelled include Bridget Ikin, John O’Shea, Stanley Kauffmann, and Colin Englert. My favorite is probably (former New Zealand Prime Minister) Helen Clarke, a mistake presumably influenced by Kiwi satirist John Clarke’s success in Australia. Jokes aside, given Verhoeven’s stress on the relation between the public construction of “Jane Campion” and the private Jane Campion’s contribution to that construct, she should have explained the personal ties between these people and Campion: O’Shea, who died in 2001, and Ikin are Antipodean producers with strong ties to Campion’s personal and professional development, while Englert is Campion’s former husband. Meanwhile, Verhoeven attributes some of Campion’s specific revisions of Moore’s material for In the Cut to a sudden discovery on Campion’s part of a previously unknown half-sister. Why isn’t there more documentation about this discovery, something more than a casual reference, especially since the connection between personal and professional (specifically the conjunction of her son’s death with winning the Palme d’or) in Campion’s life is part of an earlier chapter’s discussion of the relation between professional control over one’s artistic projects and avoiding personal corruption, an “auteur’s authenticity”, and the ethics of auteurism (pp. 50-51)? Verhoeven’s attitude toward the relation between “Jane Campion” and Jane Campion seems elusive, or perhaps it is that I want to see more skepticism on her part about the extent to which we can know Jane Campion other than as “Jane Campion.”

In what seemed briefly like some sort of postcolonial joke, the Palme d’or usually appears in her text as the Palm d’or. Most of the proofreading errors are similarly negligible, but some get in the way of the author’s meaning. Captions get things wrong or omit information (e.g., 1.1, 2.3, 4.3, 4.5). I wouldn’t call After Hours(Australia 1984) a telefeature (27, n2), given its running time of 29 minutes and Verhoeven’s filmography includes it among Campion’s short films. I also can’t agree with calling Anna Campion’s short film The Audition(Australia 1989) a “documentary” (pp. 69 and 238). In these cases I think Verhoeven has ignored some factual information about the films, and I particularly think she has missed the humor and family subtleties associated with The Audition. But I probably have the advantage of her here, precisely because I am here, in Wellington, where I have been able to talk with people who grew up with Jane and Anna and with people who worked with them on The Audition.[2]

In fact, one of the delights of reading material about Campion produced by a fellow Antipodean is that information usually appears that could hardly have been sourced by outsiders. For example, Verhoeven bolsters her case that Campion has always been aware of auteurism and its importance for critics and academics by referring to Campion’s time at the Australian Film and Television School (now AFTRS), where the director “studied auteurism … [and] wrote essays on auteurs such as Fellini” (p. 112). This is a bit of unfootnoted information that I accept without question because I know that Verhoeven will have had access to this information from her own experience and through local contacts.

It disturbs me, however, to find a reference to the interesting phrase “‘smart’ cinema,” “in which the chief pleasure for the audience lies in their ability to recognize, to ‘know,’ a sequence of inter-textual references” (pp. 157-58), because you’d have to go to the glossary to find the source of this phrase, which apparently is Jeffrey Sconce. But where it is that Sconce discussed the concept does not appear, not in the glossary nor in a footnote, where information on Verhoeven’s citations primarily appears. Nor does Sconce’s name appear either in the index or the bibliography. This latter omission is understandable since the introduction to Verhoeven’s section of “Bibliographic Resources” describes it as “intended to provide students, scholars and fans with an overview of publications by and about Jane Campion, as well as identifying key books and articles that concern her movies” (pp. 240).

The glossary’s contents also suggest a student audience, with terms such as “major (studio)” and “vertical integration.” Its useful information about the economics of the film industry – for example, the distinction between “megaplex,” “miniplex,” and “multiplex – reflects the book’s emphasis on the economic aspects of auteurism as a marketing concept. Of course acronyms associated with film industry institutions in New Zealand and Australia, along with other culturally specific terms, such as “pakeha,” are useful, though the absence of the parallel term, “Maori,” leads to some interesting speculation (have Maori really become so internationally known that they no longer need to be identified?). Why, though is “flop” in there? What target audience would not understand that word? Or is it that Verhoeven’s target audience is Antipodean rather than international? I’m really not sure.

I find some of the language bothersome. “Adapteur,” “artbuster,” and “auteurprint” are kind of cute. “Endemic,” on the other hand, is a more serious issue, one central to the chapter entitled “Realizing Jane Campion.” “I want to make the case,” Verhoeven says:

that the various geopolitical dimensions attributed to Jane Campion’s auteurism would seem to occupy two broad spaces that frame the auteur’s agency and which at various times overlap and operate with changeable degrees of intensity and complexity at different points in her career …. Instead of understanding the auteur as an isolate figure, related to broader cultural categories simply by virtue of aspects of their personal biography, such as birthplace in the case of the auteur’s noted role in national cinema, it is possible to identify at least two other spaces in Campion’s auteurism: 1. The “endemic auteur” in which Campion’s value is measured by her ability to realize cultural policy objectives but which also recognizes that her political or national “originality,” her ability to be claimed as “home-grown” is subject to ambivalence since Campion is a New Zealander resident in Australia …. 2. The “dispersible auteur” in which Campion’s “globality” and “nomadism” is emphasized. This is especially evident in the presentation of Campion’s success in the European and US industries as a “bankable outsider.” (pp. 88-89)

Much later in the same chapter Verhoeven writes of Campion’s impact on Australian filmmakers, “fundamentally changing expectations for the national cinema, shifting them from beyond the focused cultural values of the originating auteur, beyond the regional resonances of the Antipodean endemic to the postnational promise of the dispersible” (pp. 112-13).

What bothers me about the use of “endemic” is its strong medical connotations, as though there were something sick about Campion and her devotees that is infecting the world. These connotations seem inappropriate to a discussion of auteurism in general and to Jane Campion in particular, especially given Verhoeven’s discussion of Campion’s insistence on self-realization as well as the author’s discussion of “the ethical dimensions of contemporary auteurism” (p. 100). The other meaning, of course, has to do with geographical restrictions, and here the problem is that Verhoeven hasn’t distinguished such restrictions clearly among responses to Campion in terms of their origins.[3]  She has not retained clear distinctions between the global and the local throughout Jane Campion, the sort of ultimate lack of focus that seems to take the book down from its promising beginnings.

From the book’s beginning I wondered about its target audience, and I’m not sure I ever found a true statement of purpose for the book as a whole. Verhoeven’s description of an intended audience for the bibliography fits with Routledge’s description of the sort of book a buyer might expect. Yet Verhoeven’s text is not such a book. The discussion in chapter three of a crisis of identity for universities as an institution hardly seems of interest to “students, scholars and fans” of Jane Campion, who herself is unlikely to care particularly about that debate. Early on, Verhoeven refers to her teaching experience and Table 1.1 (“Some features of post-auteurism”) looks like part of a PowerPoint lecture, but the upside of that is that over the years Verhoeven has gathered a large and wide-ranging collection of material on auteurism that she brings to bear on the subject to good effect.

Also on the positive side is her discussion of economic aspects of the production and success of Campion’s films, for example, the impact on The Piano of the then current status of relations between Miramax and Disney (e.g., p. 119). Similarly, her discussion of external factors affecting the development of Susanna Moore’s novel into Jane Campion’s film is enlightening.

Campion’s interviews have been many, substantial, and contradictory in equal measure; Verhoeven has done a good job of wading through this territory, noting Campion’s volte-faces on her positions vis-à-vis feminism, the relative value of television and film, and “her professional aspirations and personal attributes” (throughout chapter one). The interview with Campion with which Verhoeven concludes her text was conducted in 2005, “early in the research for this book and, as a result, it does not address some of the issues subsequently explored in this analysis” (p. 183).

Verhoeven has therefore selected from that interview Campion’s responses that deal with “the development of [her] career and her own approach to the creative process of filmmaking” – and indeed these are of “enormous interest” (p. 183).

Overall, Verhoeven’s study of Jane Campion as auteur resembles the curate’s egg: good in parts. The parts that are good, though, are very, very good.

Harriet Margolis
Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

Endnotes

[1] Especially Dana Polan’s Jane Campion [BFI, 2001] and Kathleen McHugh’s Jane Campion [U of Illinois P, 2007], with more sure to come in future years now that Bright Star is out and Campion seems interested again in directing feature films.
[2]  See my “The Campions Indulge in The Audition,” in Jane Campion: Cinema, Nation, Identity, eds. Hilary Radner, Alistair Fox, and Irène Bessière (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009: 39-52), a book that unfortunately seems to have appeared too late to be included in Verhoeven’s useful bibliography.
[3] One essay that she should have mentioned is Stephen Crofts’ study of critical responses from different countries that appears in my own anthology, given that it considers auteurism as a factor in the critics’ approach along with nationalism.

Created on: Thursday, 10 December 2009