Many cultural critics and film scholars observe that a recurrent
fascination with landscape and topography characterizes the national
cinemas of Australia and New Zealand. Filmmakers in both countries use
landscapes, including cityscapes and suburbia, as more than a mere
backdrop for human dramas, employing them instead as codes and metaphors
for social and psychological relationships, historical myths and
contemporary social issues (see Collier and Davis). In his book, South
of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of
Australia, Ross Gibson argues that the Australian landscape in film is
indeed,
Gibson here articulates the ways in which the cinematic
representation of mythologized landscapes, particularly of the rural
outback and desert interior, has indelibly shaped the Australian
cultural imaginary, a feature exemplified by such films as My Brilliant
Career (1979), Walkabout (1970), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Mad Max
(1979), The Man from Snowy River (1982), Crocodile Dundee (1986), The
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), and Japanese Story
(2003). Images of mythic landscapes have helped create a national
identity for a colonizing settler society that has both recoiled from
the alien and inhospitable land and sought its own national future and
identity in its distinguishing features. Struggling with a land so
different from Great Britain, Australian settlers and their descendents
created what Judith Wright has termed the "double aspect" of
Australian (literary) representations of nature, its dualistic portrayal
of the "reality of newness and freedom" and "the reality
of exile" (351-59).
While New Zealand offers a different topography than Australia,
combining beach, mountains, bush, high plains, and forest in close
proximity, it nevertheless shares with Australia its beginnings as a
British colony and features a similarly complex vision of a foreign
landscape that settlers sought to "civilize" and alter in the
image of Britain as part of the colonizing project. In films as diverse
as Strata (1983), The Lost Tribe (1983), Vigil (1984), The Piano (1993),
and Once Were Warriors (1994), the New Zealand landscape plays a
prominent role as both an awe-inspiring and threatening environment for
the central protagonists. As filmmaker Jane Campion has said in an
interview about The Piano, her film set in the New Zealand bush of the
1850s: "There is such an intensity in certain parts of the bush
that you have the impression of being underwater. It's a landscape
that is unsettling, claustrophobic and mythic all at the same time ...
It's scenery that has troubled a lot of Europeans when they
arrived, and since they didn't like it, they cleared a lot of it so
that it looked more like Europe" (Wexman 106).
Campion is a significant director for the study of landscape and
its cultural meanings in Australian and New Zealand cinema. Her films
present a particularly rich and layered vision of landscape and space
that reveals how the antipodean cinemas have both mythologized and
demythologized their national identities. Her films, which have received
wide acclaim and have been the subject of vigorous critical debates
between feminist and postcolonial critics, consistently include
landscape as both a ubiquitous character and metaphor, as actual setting
and psychic space. Campion's expressionist constructions of
landscape serve as a way to represent settler societies as fundamentally
problematic sites of national and gender identity, where power relations
between men and women, colonizer and colonized are at times ironically
critiqued and subverted.
Then there is the complex question of Campion's own national
location. Born in New Zealand, she left her home country in her early
twenties to attend the Sydney Art School and the Australian Film and
Television School, and is now professionally located in Sydney, calling
herself an "Aussie directress." Since her international
success at Cannes with The Piano, Australians are eager to claim her as
a representative of their film culture. Yet, Campion herself considers
The Piano an unmistakably New Zealand film. In two of her films, An
Angel at My Table (1990) and The Piano, Campion returned to her native
New Zealand, while her other works have Australian, European and
American settings. Treated as a director of international stature, who
receives funding from multiple foreign sources, Campion is now seen by
film critics as less a specifically Australian director than a
representative of global women's cinema.
Despite these tensions, or perhaps precisely because of them,
Campion is a compelling example of an antipodean director whose films
address what Australian cultural critic Graeme Turner has called the
"national fictions" of Australian cultural identities. As a
New Zealand expatriate, she explores the history of her home
country's colonization of the land through stories about women who
find themselves geographically and psychologically displaced. In
Campion's films, landscape functions not only as a cultural icon of
national identity but as a psychological frame for women's
entrapment in a colonial society whose daughters, wives and mothers were
expected to support the "civilizing" mission of settler
communities and their descendents. The neo-Gothic aesthetics so
characteristic of Campion's films emphasize the landscape as a
disorienting psychological space in which her female characters attempt
to redefine themselves outside those conventional social roles for
women. (1) From her early art-school shorts such as Peel (1982) and A
Girl's Own Story (1983/4) through her first feature Sweetie (1989)
to Holy Smoke (1999), Campion Gothesizes both interior and exterior
landscapes in order to articulate the essential "homelessness"
and sense of social entrapment of her white Australian and New Zealand
heroines. (2)
The predominance of a Gothic sensibility has been noted in the
films of postcolonial settler nations such as Australia and New Zealand,
where the abrupt encounter between Europeans and a harsh and strange
landscape created a sense of derangement and disorientation that lingers
in contemporary visions of the land and nature. For example, William
Schafer reads the images of landscape in New Zealand film as an example
of the "postmodern sublime":
Turner observes a similar mood of ambivalence in Australian
cultural texts: "Inverted in season, in mood and meaning, the
Australian landscape as mirror to the soul reflects the grotesque and
the desolate rather than the beautiful and the tranquil" (30-31).
These ambivalent responses of awe and fear to unknown landscapes and
nature--Schafer's "pleasing terror" of the Sublime--have
been a distinguishing feature of Australian and New Zealand film. (3)
Indeed, in one of the early studies of the Australian film
industry, The Screening of Australia: Anatomy of a National Cinema
(1988), Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka identified the sub-genre of
the "Australian Gothic," which they see as "a genuinely
local aesthetic tendency, and one that has had some vitalizing effects
on the industry" (239). Elements of the fantastic, grotesque and
supernatural that symbolically represent the Gothic fear of Otherness,
estrangement and the presence of the uncanny in the ostensibly known and
safe realm of the home are usually associated with the horror film. Yet,
they are a recurring hybridized feature, style or mood in other genres
in Australian and New Zealand film, whether melodrama, comedy, or action
film. The Gothic tradition originates in eighteenth-century European
literature with its characteristic scenes of terror and abuse, enclosure
and entrapment, madness, death and emotional or sexual excess set in a
variety of classically sinister locations, such as ruined castles or
abbeys, burial tombs, dark and gloomy moors and wild,
"uncivilized" territory. A precursor of European Romanticism
and a critical rejoinder to the rationalism, social order and scientific
approach to knowledge of the Enlightenment period, the Gothic emphasized
instead the irrational, uninhibited desires and passions, the dark
unconscious of the human psyche. (4) Threatening landscapes or haunted
interiors are a central topos in Gothic literature as a subjective image
of a divided self and society projecting its own fear of difference onto
Europe's Others and foreign places, and Gothic elements survive as
a stylistic and thematic legacy of Romanticism in European modernist
cinema, contemporary popular film, art, and postcolonial literature.
The persistence of the Gothic tradition in postcolonial texts is an
especially culturally significant and revealing phenomenon, and as I
will show, a key to appreciating Jane Campion's use of physical
space as a window to the psyches of Australians and New Zealanders.
Recent studies of the complex political and cultural relationship
between the Gothic and postcolonialism return to the novels of Empire
and their visions of the monstrous racialized and colonized Other, and
examine the ways in which postcolonial writers have in turn appropriated
Gothic conventions and elements to challenge the idealized coherence of
European colonizing power structures and to offer alternative histories
and cultures that had been repressed. (5) In a (post)colonial context,
Gothic themes of duality and ghostliness, which engender terror and
uncertainty in the reader or viewer, are fundamentally associated with
the threat of disorder, a loss of sell unstable power relationships,
bodily terrors, and the settler's or colonizer's feelings of
displacement and homelessness. With regard to the antipodes, Roslynn
Haynes writes succinctly about the importance of the Gothic in European
representations of the Australian desert, and about the significance of
the tradition as a specifically gendered mode of expression and critique
of Empire which is haunted by its suppressed Others:
In her seminal work, Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in
Literature, Art and Film, Haynes has done much to articulate the
peculiar landscape of Australia as a psycho-symbolic space that is
densely layered with feelings of dread, the uncanny, existential angst
in the European mind, and is also inflected with a gendered vision of
the land. In her analysis of male explorers' travel journals,
Haynes remarks, "a 'female' land was thus a ready
metaphor for male explorers to use, identifying an alien terrain with
the alien sex, and thus constituting it as doubly
'other'" (50-51). Her reading of space is particularly
relevant for a discussion of a contemporary filmmaker such as Jane
Campion, who is attuned to the conventions of Gothic landscape
representation and complex psychological dimensions of our perceptions
of environment.
Campion makes full use of the Gothic traditions of landscape
representation as a reflection of a state of mind, a mirror to the
psychic turmoil of her central heroines as well as the cultural tensions
in antipodean nations. Yet, the meaning of these landscapes and
interiors is not fixed or consistent as befits Campion's postmodern
perspective. She often consciously and ironically references the use of
landscape as a sign, as a mental construction, a symbol of the female
body or a cultural way of seeing. In Campion's films, landscape is
not merely a natural topography, but a cultural interpretation that has
always taken on particular resonance in colonial and postcolonial
contexts where the appropriation of land by the colonizer is often
reinforced by a visual possession of the territory. The representation
of landscape is never neutral but implies a particular point-of-view:
Campion's films seem to dramatize the postmodern and postcolonial
perspective of scholars such as George Seddon and Simon Ryan. Ladden
writes that "'Landscape' is a way of looking at a
terrain; it is a perceptual term, not an objective reality" (qtd.
in Haynes 249). In The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia,
Ryan suggests that sight and various forms of visual technologies such
as mapmaking and photography played a crucial role in advancing the
imperial enterprise and establishing particular images of the land. In
turn, film as a time-based visual medium may be particularly suited to a
critical re-visioning of landscape not as a static image but as a
protean construction, as a bearer of shifting and competing cultural
meanings. So argues Laurence Simmons, who sees landscape in cinema as a
"site for appropriation, a medium for exchange, a dynamic of
ecological, cultural and economic practices" (123).
The Piano, Campion's nineteenth-century melodrama, most
explicitly, and at times self-consciously, dramatizes the politics of
perception in its representation of a colonial landscape through a
Gothic lens. This film treats the British colonizing of New Zealand
through the unconventional eyes of Ada (Holly Hunter), a self-imposed
mute, who comes to New Zealand with her daughter and her only other
means of expression and communication, a piano, for an arranged marriage
to the settler Stewart (Sam Neill). The piano functions as both a
crucial plot element and a complex symbol for European culture, female
subjectivity and passion in the film. When Ada first arrives on the New
Zealand shore, and Stewart orders her to leave the piano behind,
panoramic shots of the abandoned instrument on the beach, surrounded by
ocean waves, bring into sharp focus the oppositions between nature and
culture at work in the colonial encounter. As Lydia Wevers writes:
"The piano is the point of focus through which the landscape
signifies wild, threatening, natural, not-civilized, not-cultured, and
what happens to the characters, and what they do is meaningfully
dependent on the film's construction of land as a terrain of
otherness" (par. 2).
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Later, Stewart sells the piano to his foreman Baines (Harvey
Keitel), a colonizer "gone native," for a piece of land, and
Baines in turn makes Ada a deal to win back her piano in exchange for
music lessons and his erotic enjoyment of her body. The arrangement
involves all three people in a highly charged love triangle that ends
with both Ada's erotic self-assertion and, for this social
transgression, violent punishment. The entire film is centrally
concerned with buying and trading--of land, objects and bodies--a
colonial ideology that sees both nature and women as possessions to be
dominated and controlled. Parallel images of Stewart burning the land
and chopping down trees--cultivating it for profit--and his constraint
and maiming of Ada's body, suggest a profoundly gendered vision of
landscape and indeed invites a psychoanalytic reading of the ways in
which male explorers have unconsciously symbolized the land as the
female body.
Two scenes from this symbolically rich film illustrate the
confluence of looking, power and the female body as landscape in a
particularly vivid way. Early in the film Stewart walks through the dark
and murky New Zealand bush to meet Ada, and stops to comb his hair,
using a daguerreotype of Ada as a mirror. The daguerreotype functions as
a narcissistic frame that simultaneously encloses his arranged
bride's picture, the bush landscape and the reflection of his own
face. In another scene, Ada and Stewart awkwardly pose during the
wedding ceremony in front of a static painting of a romantic European
landscape in the rain-sodden, muddy bush as a photographer takes their
picture. In this scene, Campion ironically presents Anglo-Celtic
settlers' inscription of their topographical associations and
expectations onto a foreign, decidedly non-pastoral landscape. Campion
again deliberately emphasizes the mechanically reproduced image--the
photograph--and the human eye framing the landscape. In her contemporary
rendition of the Victorian era, Campion may also be alluding to her own
position as a filmmaker reframing the colonial landscape with an ironic
perspective. In these Brechtian moments of distantiation the film
succeeds most effectively in its postcolonial critique, shifting our
attention from a transparent myth of landscape to the production of a
particular image and the reproduction of a colonialist ideology through
visual technology.
However, The Piano is also filled with vistas that suggest the
European sublime, majestically beautiful seascapes and overhead shots of
the New Zealand forest favored by the tourist industry, which in the
film match the grand elemental passions of the central protagonists, a
passion which the colonial settler Stewart seeks to confine and control.
One problematic aspect of the film is that it does not explore
Ada's own implication in the colonial enterprise as a white woman,
her resistance to her colonizer-husband and own erotic liberation
notwithstanding. (6) While the film implicitly connects the
dispossession of the Maori from their land and the patriarchal
domination of Ada's body, the Maori characters in the film are
reduced to secondary chorus players who merely serve to underline the
main conflict between Ada and the patriarchal settler society. There is
a hint of Ada's own psychological aversion to New Zealand being
conquered by white settlers. Shots of the New Zealand bush at times
exteriorize her own psychological alienation and sense of entrapment;
the entangling vegetation of the bush, its strangeness, mystery and
otherness visually repeated in the constraining hoops and corset Ada
wears, suggests the Gothic displacement of Ada's anxieties, fears
and homesickness as a "cultured" white woman wrenched away
from her European home. At the same time, this visual correlation
between a confining "wild" foreign landscape and socially
constrained female body breaches the classic opposition between nature
and culture, and exposes the violence and danger lurking in the
ostensibly known and civilized world of Victorian society.
Campion is particularly indebted to the tradition of the
"Female Gothic," a genre that typically dramatizes a female
protagonist's attempts to escape from a confining space. According
to David Punter and Glennis Byron,
The escape from male authority and entrapment in the literal and
metaphorical labyrinths of social conformity and conventional gender
roles play a vivid role in many of Campion's films, Sweetie, The
Piano, An Angel at My Table, The Portrait of a Lady (1996), and Holy
Smoke. However, in contrast to her predecessors working in the genre of
the Female Gothic, Campion does not portray her heroines as mere
persecuted victims of male power; they are concerned with questions of
identity and the transgressions of social and sexual taboos
traditionally reserved for male Gothic protagonists. It is in the
films' shifting and dynamic landscapes and the interplay between
symbolic interiors and exteriors that these struggles for
self-definition, agency and sexual identity are waged, where power
relations are at play, and where the ambivalent and haunted sense of
belonging (or non-belonging) of white Australians and New Zealanders is
articulated.
Campion's earlier New Zealand-based feature, An Angel at My
Table, an originally made-for-television adaptation of acclaimed writer
Janet Frame's autobiography, focuses on a non-conformist female
protagonist whose ambivalent relationship to her home country, class
structure and traditional conceptions of femininity is cinematically
expressed through her uneasy position in domestic spaces and natural
landscapes, albeit in a more subtle, understated manner than The Piano.
The dramatic contrast between vast open spaces and claustrophobic bush
which dominates The Piano's Gothic mise-en-scene is here replaced
by a tighter focus on Janet Frame's (Kerry Fox; Alexia Keogh,
playing Frame as an adolescent; Karen Fergusson, playing Frame as a
child) immediate surroundings and interior world of the imagination in
order to tell the story of a woman's journey from a painfully shy,
shame-ridden working-class girl who was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic,
to an artist whose writings would be considered among the most important
of modern New Zealand literature. As an unconventional, modernist writer
Janet Frame's relationship to the land is conflicted, particularly
since land and nature in the works of male explorers, settlers and poets
are often feminized, idealized or designated as an unfamiliar, passive
territory to be entered and explored. For a woman artist, who tried to
define herself outside of traditionally gendered roles and who was
marginalized from middleclass society by her poverty and awkward
femininity, growing up in a conformist, rural New Zealand in the 1930s
and 1940s posed profound challenges for herself and her writing. Janet
Frame's sense of alienation was further compounded by family
tragedy, the drowning of two of her sisters during adolescence, and her
eight-yearlong incarceration in a mental hospital following her
increasing inability to find a place in society. For this story of a
female artist whose imagination is at odds with social convention
Campion avoids tourist images of New Zealand's picturesque,
breathtaking landscape, choosing instead to render the countryside
through Frame's ambivalent response to the pastoral landscape: the
close observation of natural phenomena becomes an inspiration for her
striking poetic imagery, but it is also the site of farm work drudgery
associated with her mother's self-sacrificing life, a nomadic
existence as a railway family, the death of two of her sisters, and her
own sense of being a social misfit.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
As an artist who grew up in New Zealand herself, left and returned
to make two feature films, Jane Campion is acutely attuned to
Frame's dual vision of the land as a site of life and death, of
mythic inspiration and confining, stifling conformity for female
artists. Several childhood vignettes subtly introduce the precariousness
of Janet Frame's later marginal position in New Zealand society and
her life story filled with psychic trauma: the film's opening shots
reveal an infant's point-of-view of her mother's dark, looming
shape against the sky; the maternal body as landscape is here both
nurturing and overpowering, imbued with a touch of menace. The following
scene shows a close-up of a toddler's legs moving through the sharp
blades of intensely green grass. Campion's expressive mise-en-scene
introduces the film's concern with Janet's subjective
experience of a precarious and potentially dangerous external world
rooted in childhood images, which would later find their way into her
writing. (7)
In another early childhood scene, Janet is walking along an empty
road toward the camera. Suddenly she is frightened by something unseen
or perhaps her own isolation and quickly runs away. In her book "To
the Is-land," Janet Frame writes that the lonely road and the wind
made her aware for the first time of the sadness of the world outside of
her. In the film's voice-over Janet announces that "this is
the story of my childhood," mentioning the death of her unnamed
twin which prefigures other tragedies to come. Her red, frizzy hair,
which in the course of the film becomes an emblem of her marginality,
repressed passion, and quiet refusal to fit into social norms, contrasts
visually with the lush green landscape that surrounds her. People are
forever teasing her about her hair or advising her on how to shape it
into a more conventionally pleasing appearance. In her autobiography,
Janet Frame draws explicit connections between her traumatic experience
of her own body, a female body that refuses to be
"disciplined," and the status of New Zealand as a colony. In
the film version, Campion explores Janet's sense of isolation,
"out-of-placeness" and discomfort with traditional femininity
through a series of cramped houses, rooms, railway tracks and
cemeteries, and confining institutional spaces such as the school and
mental asylum, which serves as the ultimate Gothic symbol for social
oppression and control of the female body. In one scene, espousing the
dogmatic views of her psychology professor who later sees her as a
"mad artist," Janet insists to her sisters that the clouds,
indeed everything they observe are phallic. However, she eventually
embraces her own more complex vision as an "envoy from mirror
city." Ultimately, it is from the marginal spaces that Janet
develops her most powerful writing, her acute awareness of the dangers
of women's compliance with patriarchal visions of femininity, and
her desire to liberate herself through her own imaginative recreation of
the world around her.
One of the few panoramic shots of the New Zealand landscape Campion
employs is a scene that Janet remembers of herself and her three sisters
sitting on the wild coastline singing Robert Burns's "Duncan
Gray" with arms stretched out toward the sea. The song expresses
their desire to travel and escape to another part of the world, which
Janet eventually fulfills when she visits Europe on the advice of fellow
writer Frank Sargeson to "broaden her horizons." Upon her
return to New Zealand after her father's death, the adult Janet,
who has now become a recognized writer, stands on the same high bluffs
greeting her home country with outstretched arms. In a gently satiric
scene we see a news reporter and photographer scrambling up the hills to
reach Janet for an interview at her family's house at Willowglen, a
place that the community had earlier rejected as fit only for derelict
families. The irony that Janet Frame had to leave New Zealand in order
to be recognized as a New Zealand writer was certainly not lost on
Campion. It raises the question of where Janet Frame belongs and how, as
a colonial woman writer, she might envision a language and place for
herself outside of traditional boundaries.
The uneasy relationship between white European settlers and their
view of the "alien" landscape of Australia and New Zealand
visually and thematically permeates Campion's work as a whole,
beginning with her early film school short, Peel. In this film about the
power struggle between a father (Tim Pye), his son (Ben Martin), and a
female relative (Katie Pye) during a road trip exemplifies
Campion's early preoccupation with how characters relate to and
occupy space, her trademark eccentric compositions, her extreme visual
fragmentation of the human body in the landscape, and her ambiguous
narratives. However, her 1989 black comedy Sweetie most thoroughly
elaborates upon her contemporary characters' profound alienation
from their environment. The film is set in the modern suburbs of Sydney,
focusing on a dysfunctional family that is terrorized by the demands of
the titular character, Dawn, nicknamed "Sweetie" (Genevieve
Lemon), whose mental instability comes to embody the repressions of the
family itself. The central part of the film does not focus on the
recognizable Australian outback or the Sydney skyline, exploring instead
the uncanny, claustrophobic spaces of the suburban home, a Gothic site
of perverse oedipal and love relations that haunt the central
characters. Nevertheless, the film links an exploration of psychological
dysfunction in the Australian family with a commentary on
Australians' ambivalent perception of nature and the natural
landscape, its threatening, unruly aspects and its mythologized
potential for rejuvenation and "authentic" Australian
selfhood.
While Australian films from the 1970s largely drew on the
country's bush legend, cinema in the late 1980s and 1990s
increasingly explored suburban and urban settings, the coastal areas
inhabited by the majority of the population, and brought to the
foreground the conflict between nature and culture that structures so
many aspects of Australian life and attitudes (see Johnson). Robin Boyd,
a critic of suburban sprawl, coined the term "arboraphobia,"
or white Australia's fear of trees, that led to massive razing of
land to create a paved suburban landscape. In The Australian Ugliness,
Boyd writes:
Sweetie is filled with references to Australians' ambivalent
relationship to the native landscape; decentered shots portray the dry,
ugly cement landscape of the suburbs; mangy backyards with pathetic
garden plots and dark, claustrophobic interiors with cracked walls and
ceilings and, ironically, floral carpets. These images are linked to
moral aridity, sexual dysfunction, the sterile suffocation of suburban
living, and the dread of natural growth invading the house. The
governing narrative and visual metaphor is Kay's (Karen Colston)
fear of trees, which connotes her anxiety about sexuality and
reproduction, as well as her repressed rivalry with her grotesquely
sexual and out-of-control sister, Sweetie. The film opens with a shot of
Kay's figure positioned at an odd angle on a floral patterned
carpet, simultaneously a literal evocation and parody of woman's
body as landscape. In voiceover, Kay remembers a special tree and tree
house that her father (Jon Darling) built for her sister Sweetie in the
backyard, and she mentions her fear of trees and their "hidden
powers." Hence, from the very beginning of the film, Kay associates
Sweetie, the disturbed and uncontrollable sister, with an invasive
natural landscape run amok. Later we see Kay fearfully walking along a
concrete sidewalk, and close-ups of its surface ominously suggest that
something might lurk beneath. When her boyfriend Louis (Tom Lycos)
plants a little alder tree in their cement backyard to commemorate the
first-year anniversary of their relationship, he ironically triggers a
crisis in their sexual intimacy. Kay has nightmares about tree roots
spreading into the house and superstitiously associates the possible
death of the tree with the end of their relationship.
The nightmare sequence includes some time-lapse photographs of
distinctly phallic-looking roots shooting through the earth, as well as
a black-and-white image of two men shaking hands over a recently planted
tree. In her analysis of the Gothic imagery in Sweetie, Anneke Smelik
considers this dream scene in some detail, arguing that in the last shot
which decenters the men with their shovels to the right of the image,
they resemble gravediggers (142). In response to these frightening
images, Kay runs into the backyard and pulls out the little tree and
hides it under the bed. This revealing sequence condenses a number of
images and themes in the film as a whole: Kay's fear of her own
sexuality, rooted perhaps in some childhood trauma, and her
father's narcissistic, quasi-incestuous obsession with his favorite
daughter Sweetie, is visually linked to the cultivation of the land
which takes on sexual overtones. Interestingly, in both Australian and
New Zealand slang "to root" refers to having sex. The tree
planting ceremony perversely suggests a burial that ultimately
prefigures the end of the film. A naked, mud-splattered Sweetie, who had
been temporarily abandoned by the family, falls out of the treehouse in
her parents' yard and dies a grotesque death; her burial in the
cemetery is even interrupted because a root is obstructing the casket.
From suburbanite Kay's perspective the natural landscape is here
seen as perverse, sinister and cunning. Anneke Smelik and John Orr even
find a possible oblique reference to Australian Aboriginals, the
repressed cultural Other of white Australian suburbia, in Sweetie's
abject self (Smelik 147; Orr 92). Even beyond death, Sweetie haunts her
family's imagination as the final shot shows a young Sweetie
singing a mournful song in a Gothicly dark garden.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
One segment in the film temporarily takes the family away from the
suburban wasteland and the unmanageable Sweetie into the Australian
outback interior, en route to visit the mother, Flo (Dorothy Barry). Now
working in the Australian outback as a cook at a cattle ranch, Flo had
left the father in her despair over his stubborn refusal to acknowledge
how his attachment to their disturbed daughter was destroying their
lives. As Roslynn Haynes has noted, the Australian interior has
functioned in the national imaginary as either a hideous absence, a
meaningless, dangerous void, or as a source of spiritual rejuvenation,
the locus of the "true" Australian self for alienated
suburbanites. When the family reunites at the jackaroo camp, Kay, her
boyfriend Louis, and her father and mother briefly experience a sense of
peace, hope and emotional connection, believing that they can all begin
again. However, Sue Gillett observes that Campion's cinematic style
works against a mythologization of the outback as a place of
authenticity and renewal. "The outdoor shots refuse the obligatory
panorama, opting instead for the construction of tight framing which is
consistent with the style of photography used in the suburban
locations" (par. 9). The characters' illusion of returning to
some pre-lapsarian state of innocence, and by extension the illusion of
a pre-contact vision of the Australian landscape, is exposed. Shots of
the cowboys dancing with each other lend a humorous, surreal feel to
this traditionally male territory of elemental survival.
Jane Campion reprises her demythologized vision of the Australian
outback in her feature Holy Smoke, which can be interpreted as a
feminist, postmodern pastiche of the colonial exploration of the
interior. In this film, a young suburban woman, Ruth Barron (Kate
Winslet), who searches for Eastern spirituality in India as an antidote
to contemporary Australian materialism and conventionality, is taken
into the Australian desert by her family to be deprogrammed by an
American exit counselor. However, Ruth is neither a clueless victim of
Eastern cults nor a willing client for Harvey Keitel's macho,
ultra-rationalist deprogrammer PJ Waters. She survives the isolation of
the desert and the breakdown of her newly found beliefs, reverses the
power relationship with her captor, and ultimately returns to India to
live and work, humbled yet still searching for spiritual meaning.
Once again, Campion presents a desolate view of the Australian
suburbs in which Ruth grew up, in this case Sans Souci: overhead shots
emphasize the boring uniformity of suburban brick houses, their
interchangeable artificial front yards and drab interiors. The allusion
to Frederick the Great's pleasure palace ironically links
Australian middle-class suburbs to a carefully designed aristocratic
European landscape. Interestingly, during the family's discussions
of how to rescue Ruth from Eastern mysticism, her father and then an
Australian cult specialist are shown standing in front of a painting
depicting a romantic European landscape with rushing waterfalls and
forests, a landscape antithetical to Australia, as if to underscore the
ways in which white patriarchal Australian culture is still framed by
European conceptions of space and nature.
Ruth's family is convinced that isolating Ruth with
deprogrammer PJ Waters in the so-called "Halfway Hut" in the
outback will return her to her authentic Australian identity. (8) In
true Gothic fashion, the threat to Ruth's body and soul does not
come from the seductions of an Indian guru, but rather from the
dysfunctional family itself. The imaginary heart of Australia should, in
the Barrons' minds, reveal to Ruth her "true" self as a
member of their suburban family. While shots of the sun-drenched
landscape play on this notion, nothing could be further from the truth:
Ruth and PJ quickly become engaged in a battle of wills and spiritual
survival, and the American rationalist, who is hired to strip Ruth from
her religious illusions, finds that his own pretensions to objectivity
and clinical distance are exposed as a fraud. Like the ill-fated
nineteenth-century explorers of the Australian interior, Burke and
Wills, Ernest Giles, and Charles Sturt, PJ is full of male hubris and
expects to conquer Ruth, only to be confronted with a more intractable
and unpredictable terrain.
The final scenes evoke the historical explorations in parodic form:
after their final confrontation, during which Ruth tears down PJ's
macho facade but also learns the need for compassion, Ruth sets out for
the desert wearing make-shift shoes made out of books. Her impromptu,
practical appropriation of these icons of civilization to make her way
across the desert contrast with PJ's inability to survive the trek
on his own. PJ madly pursues Ruth and in a hallucination sees her in the
wilderness as the many-armed Indian creator-destroyer goddess Kali. Here
Campion is playfully referencing mythic Australian history, the mirages
seen by numerous explorers in the desert outback who were in search of a
fabled inland sea and experienced the land as a Gothic space of
imprisonment (see Haynes 58-84). Like those imperial adventurers, PJ
confronts a parody of his own desires and fears, imagining the cultural
otherness he was supposed to eradicate. Meanwhile, Ruth knows the desert
does not hold what she is looking for; her search and her destiny will
take her in quite a different direction.
Sue Gillett points out that Holy Smoke continually emphasizes the
self-conscious performance of a national Australian identity, citing
several examples of how this postmodern film resolutely undermines the
notion of an essential Australian identity that can be captured through
a mythic landscape: family members wear glitzy cowboy outfits to a party
and shoot each other with toy guns; a merino sheep serves as a coffee
table; Ruth spells out the word "HELP" with white rocks in the
desert to be rescued from captivity--all these exaggerated signs
ironically and even farcically reference historical and mythic images of
the Australian landscape, exploration and nationhood? Thus this satiric
look at Australia's relationship with India and the United States,
at new age spirituality and white middle class malaise reveals national
and gender identifies as masquerades, as powerful illusions that have
fundamentally shaped Australia's self-perception.
Despite the different tone, narrative focus and (at times)
cinematographic style in Campion's films, her work shows a
remarkably persistent interest in landscape as a defining and dynamic
symbol for her protagonists' tenuous and off-center relationship to
their environment and history. All of Campion's films set in the
antipodes suggest a cultural critique of the ways in which white
Australians and New Zealanders have created national fictions of
landscape and nation, fictions that her female protagonists experience
as particularly confining and alienating. Campion has commented on her
own "strange history" as a Pakeha New Zealander descended from
European settlers (Campion 135). The Gothicized landscape in her films
complicates and blurs the traditional boundaries between interior,
domestic realms and exterior terrains, turning the familiar and known
into the strange and uncanny. The Gothic is a most appropriate mode for
Campion's thematic concerns with psychic and physical displacement
and transgression as it "is a fiction of exile, of bodies separated
from minds, of minds without a physical place to inhabit" (Punter
17). Her films often end provisionally or ambiguously, leaving her
heroines suspended between different places and spaces. Landscape
therefore becomes a powerful signifier of displacement in Campion's
films about antipodean woman in search of themselves and a place of
their own.
Works Cited
Boyd, Robin, "The Australian Ugliness." The Macmillan
Anthology of Australian Literature. Ed. Ken Goodwin and Alan Lawson.
South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990. 44-46.
Campion, Jane. The Piano. New York: Hyperion, 1993.
Collier, Gordon, and Geoffrey Davis. "The Iconography of
Landscape in Australian Film." Australian and New Zealand Studies
in Canada 6 (1991): 27-41.
Conrich, Ian. "Kiwi Gothic: New Zealand's Cinema of a
Perilous Paradise." Horror International. Ed. Steven Jay Schneider
and Tony Williams. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2005. 114-127.
Dermody, Susan, and Elizabeth Jacka. The Screening of Australia:
Anatomy of a National Cinema. Vol. 2. Melbourne: Currency Press, 1988.
Gibson, Ross. South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative
Construction of Australia. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.
Gillett, Sue. "Never a Native: Deconstructing Home and Heart
in Holy Smoke." Senses of Cinema, March 2000. .
Haynes, Roslynn. Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in
Literature, Art and Film. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Hendershot, Cyndy. "(Re)Visioning the Gothic: Jane
Campion's The Piano." Literature/Film Quarterly 26.2 (1998):
97-108.
Jayamanne, Laleen. Toward Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural
Mimesis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001.
Johnson, Anna. "The Root of Evil: Suburban Imagery in Jane
Campion's Sweetie and Bill Herson's series Untitled 1985/
1986." Binocular: Focusing, Writing, Vision. Ed. Ewen McDonald and
Juliana Engberg. Sidney: Moet and Chandon, 1991.
Mishra, Vijay. The Gothic Sublime. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1994.
Morgan, Jack. The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002.
Orr, John. Contemporary Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998.
Punter, David. Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law.
London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin's Press, 1998.
Punter, David and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2004.
Ryan, Simon. The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.
Schafer, William J. Mapping the Godzone: A Primer on New Zealand
Literature and Culture. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1998.
Screen "reports and debates" on The Piano. Screen 36.3
(Autumn 1995): 257-287.
Seddon, George. Landprints: Reflections on Place and Landscape.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1997.
Simmons, Laurence. "From Land Escape to Bodyscape: Images of
the Land in The Piano." Piano Lessons: Approaches to The Piano. Ed.
Felicity Coombs and Suzanne Gemmell. Sydney: John Libbey, 1999. 122-135.
Smelik, Anneke. And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film
Theory. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.
Smith, Andrew and William Hughes, eds. Empire and the Gothic: The
Politics of Genre. Houndsmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Thompson, Kirsten Moana. "The Sickness Unto Death: Dislocated
Gothic in a Minor Key." Piano Lessons: Approaches to The Piano. Ed.
Felicity Coombs and Suzanne Gemmell. Sydney: John Libbey, 1999. 64-80.
Tincknell, Estella. "New Zealand Gothic?: Jane Campion's
The Piano." New Zealand--A Pastoral Paradise? Ed. Ian Conrich and
David Woods. Nottingham: Kakapo Books, 2000. 107-119.
Turner, Graeme. National Fictions: Literature, film and the
construction of Australian narrative. St. Leonards, New South Wales:
Allen & Unwin, 1993.
Wevers, Lydia. "The Story of Land: Narrating Landscape in Some
Early New Zealand Writers or: Not the Story of a New Zealand
River." Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 11 (1994):
1-11. .
Wexman, Virginia Wright, ed. Jane Campion Interviews. Jackson: UP
of Mississippi, 1999.
Wright, Judith. "Australia's Double Aspect." The
Macmillan Anthology of Australian Literature. Ed. Ken Goodwin and Alan
Lawson. South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990. 351-359.
Notes
(1) For specific readings of Gothic elements in Campion's
films, see Hendershot, Jayamanne, Smelik, Thompson, and Tincknell.
(2) For the purposes of this essay, which focuses on the
representation of antipodean landscapes, I will not discuss
Campion's adaptation of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady,
a film set in England and Italy, or In the Cut (2003), which is located
in contemporary New York City. Despite the different locations, however,
these two films also feature Campion's interest in Gothicized
landscapes and interiors and are linked to her thematic preoccupation
with displaced women protagonists who seek to escape conventional social
roles.
(3) See the documentary Cinema of Unease: A Personal Journey by Sam
Neill (1995) for such a reading of a predominant Gothic mood and style
in New Zealand film. See also Conrich.
(4) Within the vast corpus of scholarly literature on the Gothic
and its various permutations in literature, film and art, some more
recent interesting examples include Mishra's The Gothic Sublime,
Smith and Hughes's Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre,
Morgan's The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film, and
Punter's Gothic Pathologies.
(5) See in particular Smith and Hughes.
(6) Aboriginal artist Tracey Moffatt provides a more direct and
provocative visual exploration of the historically fraught relationship
between European and indigenous women in her cinematically structured
photography series, "Laudanum," which uses classic Gothic
imagery to depict the power relationship between a bourgeois white woman
and her Aboriginal maid.
(7) In her famous short story, "The Reservoir," for
example, Frame uses Gothic imagery to describe the landscape of the
reservoir lake, which is an irresistible and fantastical destination for
a group of children despite their parents' repeated warnings not to
go there. The dreaded reservoir turns out to be both more harmless and
mundane than their parents' warnings suggest, and a strange
harbinger of adult knowledge of pain and death.
(8) Sue Gillett's "Never a Native" provides a
particularly incisive analysis of the film's critique of Australian
authenticity.
(9) Sue Gillett provides these examples from the film. "The
significations of place are, in Holy Smoke, rendered visible rather than
allowed the transparency which mythologizing relies upon. This is not
the Real Australia." Gillett, "Never a Native" (par. 9).a leitmotif and a ubiquitous character ...
By featuring the land so emphatically
in the stories, all these films
stake out something more significant
than decorative pictorialism. Knowingly
or unknowingly, they are all
engaging with the dominant mythology
of white Australia. They are all
partaking of the landscape tradition
which, for two hundred years, has
been used by white Australians to
promote a sense of the significance of
European society in the 'antipodes'.
(63-64)
The same interplay of foreground
(human) and background (nature)
works in New Zealand cinema, to
show a small land as a grand, sweeping
landscape, to magnify and uplift
the subjects of the movies. The cliched
feeling of Godzone [God's Own
Country] as a 'pretty picture,' the
merely picturesque sensation, is overcome
by making the landscape an
object of fear and apprehension--or
by blocking it out with cityscapes, the
closed spaces of urban modernity.
(183)
In symbolic terms it is now widely
recognized that the Gothic provided
a particularly appropriate mode of
speaking on behalf of women and of
the colonial condition, insofar as it
expressed otherwise suppressed
knowledge of alienation, disjunction,
oppression, terror and conflict.
Gothic fears were readily engendered
by the immensity of the Bush that
confronted the early settlers, and by
the perceived hostility of that landscape,
exacerbated by the presence of
Aborigines (the dark enemy) and escaped
convicts threatening the safe
structures of society. (77)
In the female Gothic plot, the transgressive
male becomes the primary
threat to the female protagonist. Initially,
she is usually depicted enjoying
an idyllic and secluded life; this
is followed by a period of imprisonment
when she is confined to a great
house or castle under the authority of
a powerful male figure or his female
surrogate. Within this labyrinthine
space she is trapped and pursued,
and the threat may variously be to her
virtue or to her life. (279)
Despite the natural tendency of the
country to overheat, despite the blistering
outback legend and the constant
search for relief even in the
milder areas during the hottest weeks
of summer, the object of the pioneering
cult is to banish all shade from
everyday life. Every lot is cleared for
yards in all directions before it is considered
safe for building ... It [the
landscape and climate] is almost unpleasant,
measured against the European
ideal. It is faintly frightening:
not that it menaces, but simply because
it is so unfamiliar, so strangely
primeval: as different again from the
European or North American landscape
as a tropical jungle. (45-46)