Tag: Amber Leab

From the Archive: Norma Rae

I’m feeling a little nostalgic (and I’m on vacation), so today I’m reposting the very first review I wrote for Bitch Flicks, way back in March 2008. It’s a movie I loved and still love, and is definitely worth your time if you haven’t seen it.
Norma Rae

Sally Field’s career, honestly, hasn’t meant much to me. Aside from recent Boniva commercials, Forrest Gump, and Steel Magnolias, I haven’t seen much of her work. She’s always struck me as a respectable actress, but not someone I seek out from a personal interest. Not being familiar with her early career, her so-called serious turn in Norma Rae was lost on me. What wasn’t lost, however, was an honest portrayal of a working woman, and a social issue that continues to dog women and men (though women, I suspect, suffer more from lack of unions) everywhere.

A primary question about social fiction is whether the story remains relevant, or if the sociopolitical situation remains mired in the past. Norma Rae does retain relevance, though she’d likely be working in Wal-Mart today instead of a textile mill (as I watched, I wondered how many textile mills still operate in the U.S.). While the movie seems to be a window on a past time in working America, it’s still relevant—and progressive—on many levels.
The plot of Norma Rae is inspired by the real life experience of Crystal Lee Jordan, a woman who worked in a North Carolina mill to unionize its employees, spurred on by an out-of-town organizer, until being fired on a bogus charge of “insubordination.” Norma Rae (played by Field, who won the Best Actress Oscar for the role) lives with her parents in the beginning of the movie, and reunites with an old friend who she marries after a brief courtship. As Norma Rae becomes more involved with union activities, the she experiences the usual relationship (romantic, familial, and work) strains, but doesn’t quit until the mill bosses force her out. It’s at this time she makes her famous stand; she refuses to leave, scrawls “UNION” on a piece of cardboard, stands on a table in the middle of a busy factory floor, and stoically remains–in an exhilarating climax to the film–until all her fellow employees shut down their machines and stand with her. She’s arrested and fired in the end, but finishes what she started and believed in.

It’s true that Field gives a standout performance, and the union-organizer Rueben (played by Ron Liebman) isn’t bad either. But what stands out for me in the film–and what makes this, in my opinion, a good piece of feminist muckraking–is the character’s relationship with men. We don’t learn too much about her relationship with other women, but what’s striking about her relationship with men is the lack of romanticism involved. Norma Rae has a couple of kids from a couple of different men–neither of whom are present in their lives–and when she marries Sonny, it’s for entirely pragmatic reasons. He proposes while on a date with both their children present, and makes his case to her that he’s a good man and that their lives might be easier if they lived them together. There’s no grand romance, and it’s refreshing to see marriage represented as the economic institution that it essentially is–particularly in the face of contemporary Hollywood, which just can’t seem to make a movie without a romantic sub-plot geared toward female viewers.

The other–and more prominent–relationship in the movie is between Norma Rae and Rueben. I admit that while watching the movie I waited for romance to blossom between these two characters, but felt great relief when it never happened. We see their relationship go from cautious skepticism to a fully fledged friendship, as Norma Rae becomes dedicated to the union cause. There are few representations of purely intellectual relationships (not to mention asexual friendships) between men and women that come to mind in movies, and though one could certainly argue that there is sexual antagonism underlying their interaction, it’s an emotion that stays below the surface, never consummated–all the way to their farewell handshake at the end of the movie.

Norma Rae isn’t a super mother, nor does she fit the description of a woman we’re typically supposed to look up to. She’s made mistakes in her life and she’ll probably make a few more. She’s not looking to move away from her roots and improve her life based on others’ terms; she doesn’t act out of selfish desire. In other words, she’s a rarity in film: a real woman. 

Quote of the Day: Janet McCabe

Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema by Janet McCabe (2004). Part of the Wallflower Short Cuts Series.

Leading comedic roles for women in film and television are often relegated to “romantic” comedy and these women still, in 2011, struggle to break into the classification of comedy–without modifiers–and remain relegated to the dreaded “chick flick” (a term that the title of this website plays off of).

From the section “Romantic comedy and gender” in the book Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema.

Television comedy is another area of recent feminist inquiry, which investigates in particular star performance, joke-making techniques and the television audience. Alexander Doty (1990), investigating the interplay between the star image of Lucille Ball and the character she plays in I Love Lucy (Desilu Productions Inc/CBS, 1951-57) argues that Lucy Ricardo is constructed as the zany, loveable, ditzy and talentless housewife and mother based on the denial, repression and (re)construction of Ball’s star image. Patricia Mellencamp (1997) is another scholar fascinated by Lucille Ball’s slapstick routines. Recuperating Ball’s performance as an act of defiance from the confinement of the domestic space allows her to locate the radical underpinnings of the show for female viewers. Each week Lucy unsuccessfully attempting to escape domesticity and break into show business. They physical comic routines performed by Ball offered a means of challenging patriarchy as she upstages her husband/other men; and this is what audiences tuned in to see. Drawing on Freud’s theory of humorous pleasures (that is, humour used to avoid emotional pain) enables Mellencamp to argue that laughter directed at Lucy’s performance of being talentless – ‘her wretched, off-key singing, her mugging facial exaggerations and out-of-step dancing [is] paradoxically both the source of the audience’s pleasure and the narrative necessity for housewifery’ (1997: 73). She contends that Lucy’s situation made visible the real dilemmas faced by many women: ‘Given the repressive conditions of the 1950s, humour might have been women’s weapon and tactic of survival, ensuring sanity, the triumph of the ego, and pleasures’ (ibid).
One of the most sustained discussions on gender, representation and cross-cultural theories is Kathleen Rowe’s study of the unruly woman (1995). Using theoretical models from Mikhail Bakhtin concerned with the grotesque, Rowe identifies the grotesque body as ultimately the female body – often an outrageous, voluptuous, loud, joke-cracking dissenter or ‘woman on top’. The unruly female is not about gender confusion but inverting dominant social, cultural and political conventions; unruliness occurs when those who are socially or politically inferior (normally, women) use humour and excess to undermine patriarchal norms and authority. Focusing on Roseanne Arnold allows her to suggest how Roseanne’s star image and her television situation (Carsey-Werner Company/ABC, 1988-1997) disrupt and expose the gap between feminist liberation (informed by second-wave feminism) and the realities of working-class family life (those of whom feminist liberation left behind), between ideals of true womanhood and unruliness to challenge notions of a patriarchal construction of femininity. Making a spectacle of herself – her overweight body, her physical excesses, her performance as loud and brash – reveals ambivalence as the unruly woman speaks out. Difficulties faced by Roseanne in the press with the vitriol directed at her ‘make known the problems of representing what in our culture still remains largely unrepresentable: a fat woman who is also sexual; a sloppy housewife who’s a good mother; a “loose” woman who is also tidy, who hates matrimony but loves her husband, who hates the ideology of true womanhood, yet considers herself a domestic goddess’ (1995:91).
As I hope is clear, feminist critics disclose how television culture is informed by context and given meaning through the ways in which particular programmes are consumed, how narratives are experienced and what they mean to the female viewer – what television series says about women and how media texts function in their daily lives. Through interviews, Deborah Jermyn (2003) analyses how women talk about the series in an effort to understand what Sex and the City (HBO, 1998-2004) means to female fans. Pivotal here is the point at which Jermyn’s own fandom intersects with the experience of those she interviewed – it is a moment that allows her to reveal both the pleasures and difficulties involved in understanding how fan culture operates and how to speak about it.
I Love Lucy and Roseanne are two shows that were able to reach a large mainstream audience, while Sex and the City remained, most definitely, for female audiences (as has the atrocious film franchise). Yet Sex and the City is very different from these two other shows, in that it is (for the most part) about women who aren’t in these traditional domestic roles.

What leading women of comedy since the 90s reach across gender divides and avoid the ghettoization of the “chick flick?” Who are the new “unruly” women? Does Tyler Perry’s Madea count? (I’m only half joking here.) I’d love to hear readers’ thoughts on these matters.

The Grass is Not Always Greener: On Body Image and Illness

Originally published at I Will Not Diet and reprinted at The Opinioness of the World. An alternate version appears at Shakesville.
People have often told me—throughout a lifetime of being underweight—how great I look.
I confidently wear a bikini.
I’m one of those people you might love to hate: I can eat anything, and as much of it as I want, without gaining weight.
People, especially girls and women, praise my thinness, exclaiming “How do you stay so skinny?!” or “You’re so lucky.”
Other people envy me—a person whose thinness is due to cystic fibrosis, who has had regular, extended hospital stays since childhood, and whose daily medical regimen no one would ever envy. But I have this bizarre cultural privilege: I am skinny. It hasn’t generally mattered to people why; thinness is seen as an always-positive attribute in our society.
In the summer of 2004, I weighed 92 pounds. I was very sick and doing everything in my power to put on weight. My doctor went so far as to prescribe an appetite stimulant, derived from cannabis, which was supposed to give me the legal munchies.
It may have helped me put on a pound or two, but that wasn’t enough.
It wasn’t just that I was too thin; I needed a lung transplant and had to weigh a minimum of 100 pounds before I would even be considered for the surgery. I was left with one option: a feeding tube for high-calorie protein shakes every night while I slept, in addition to a high-calorie diet every day. This was scary for me, not just in the way that a feeding tube (and serious illness) would be frightening for anyone, but because, in spite of the serious illness, I liked being so thin and was afraid of gaining too much weight.
I know now that these feelings had much more to do with control (and, specifically, the lack of it in my life at that time) than the actual numbers, and that they weren’t rational or healthy attitudes to hold.
As much as I knew intellectually that I was too thin, I never felt too thin.
When I finally got beyond my fear of “fattening up” (which is how countless doctors and nurses, clearly not sensitive to issues involving body image, jokingly referred to my need to gain weight) and faced the reality of my situation, I scheduled the procedure to place the feeding tube.
I did so with reticence and anxiety.
There would be anesthesia, there would be an incision through the wall of my abdomen, there would be a tube permanently sticking out, there would be pain while my stomach healed from the surgery. I would be hooked up to a nutrition pump, much like an IV pole, every night.
On the operating table, I was prepped for the procedure by a female nurse and a male doctor. When the nurse lifted the hospital gown above my abdomen, she exclaimed, “Look at that pretty flat stomach!”
I processed this statement for a moment. A medical professional had complimented me on my thinness, which was so extreme as to prevent me from having life-saving surgery, while prepping me for a procedure intended to help me gain weight.
To his credit, the doctor quickly snapped, “That’s the problem!” but her message couldn’t have been clearer.
We live in a culture that so values thinness, that values such extreme thinness, that I received a compliment about my body when I was on an operating table, when I was so ill and weighed so little that doctors feared I might not survive major surgery.
While this might’ve been a single extreme incident, I can’t say the same about a lifetime of these compliments, the envy of women, and the gaze of men directed at my ultra-thin (so thin because it was diseased) body.
I can forgive myself for enjoying these moments; I had a difficult life that inspired little envy, and I took the compliments and positive feelings about myself where I could find them.
When I received that comment on the operating table, though, I felt a tangled mess of emotions: I was happy to hear something—anything—uplifting during such a trying time, I was scared to lose that unscarred, flat stomach, and I was angry at the nurse for her inability to read the situation.
Later that same year I had a double-lung transplant and have since gained 25 pounds. I’m still thin, but curvier than before. I threw out the old bikinis. The regular “You’re so skinny!” compliments are gone, but I’ve come to see those comments, even when they were meant in kindness, as all part of our toxic culture.
Depictions of unhealthily thin women in film, television, and advertising constantly bombard us, distorting the way we see one another and how we define a “healthy” body. Extremely thin bodies are often seen as the epitome of health and beauty, when the fact is that healthy, beautiful women come in all shapes and sizes.
If we all didn’t have such a distorted view of the female form, women might have better relationships with their bodies, instead of hating them, resorting to cosmetic surgery for self-esteem issues, and having unrealistic expectations about how they should look.

Preview: Prom

You all know that Disney’s latest atrocity teen flick, Prom, is in theatres now, right? For those of us without teenaged girls in our lives, sometimes it’s hard to keep up with the latest flicks–aside from Twilight (H/T to reader Emilie for cluing me in). 
Here’s the official trailer:

I especially enjoy the stereotypical male versus female behavior here, and the cherry on top is, of course, the two young men at the end who misogynistically bond over OMG Women! How do we deal with these creatures?!
I have some problems with the U.S. tradition of prom. Prom is this really odd cultural beast: it’s about gender roles, first and foremost, and it’s this weird space in which teenaged girls are highly sexualized and have their sexuality policed at the same time. Any deviation from heteronormativity is frowned upon–at best–and at worst…well, there are a lot things I could say here. Remember Constance, whose prom was cancelled when she wanted to wear a tux and attend with her girlfriend, and when she won a lawsuit against her Mississippi school, was then cruelly sent to a fake prom? Or look at the U.S. South, where de facto segregation continues to the point that schools just in the past decade have held their very first racially integrated proms? Prom is a divisive ritual in which girls are encouraged to spend outrageous amounts of money (yeah, it’s definitely about class performance, too) on a dress, shoes, hairstyle, nails, etc., and in which teenaged boys rent a tux and buy a corsage. And maybe pitch in on a ridiculous limo, too.
Believe it or not, I was a teenaged girl at one point and even went to prom–twice! And I know that it can be a fun celebration of a transitional time in a young person’s life. But the crass consumerism of it all and the gender norms…well, I’m sure Disney will actually critique those elements, right?

Director Spotlight: Tanya Hamilton

Filmmaker Tanya Hamilton

In past Director Spotlight features, we’ve highlighted women with extensive filmographies and those who have been nominated for or who have won an Academy Award for directing. Today’s Spotlight, however, looks at a woman who has made only one feature film: Tanya Hamilton.
Last December, Arielle Loren wrote about her experience watching Night Catches Us, in a piece titled Seeing My Reflection In Film: Night Catches Us Struck a Chord With Me. Loren discussed a number of ways in which the film resonated with her, from seeing a period in U.S. history thoughtfully explored to finding common values in the film, and especially seeing a strong, complex, black female character.
When I saw the film, it resonated with me as well. As a white woman, I wasn’t necessarily seeing a reflection of myself, but I was looking at a story that is–or at least should be–reflective of all of us. While the heart of the story is about relationships–between a mother and her daughter and between a woman and a man–and the roles we play in our communities, the context is a piece of U.S. history often glossed over, mischaracterized, or completely ignored. This is black history, and it’s also U.S. history–something Americans all share, something that is part of all of us. 

*****
Hamilton was born in Jamaica and grew up in Maryland. Before Night Catches Us, she wrote and directed the short film The Killers. The Root asked Hamilton “What are your feelings about the challenges that black female directors face?” and she responded:
There aren’t a lot of black women making movies, which I find interesting in a way. I’ve blindly not really thought of it. I’m race obsessed, and that has been the lens through which I walk through the world. Making the film has made me think about my gender in a way I had previously not bothered [to]. Film is a very male-dominated world, and those positions are very protected. I think it’s interesting in terms of what gets defined as a woman’s film as opposed to a regular film. I haven’t figured it out yet. I don’t have a theory — at least not a smart one.
The Washington Post printed a great profile of Hamilton in December ’10, as Night was playing–in limited release–in theatres. When Night was playing at Sundance, she told indieWIRE about two upcoming projects she hopes to work on:
One is a thriller/love story set in Jamaica during a violent election. The other is a film about two brothers in fledgling Native American tribe building their first casino and confronting the unforgiving world of D.C. politics to achieve their goal.
If her writing and directing feature debut was this strong, I think (hope) we can expect some truly stellar work from Tanya Hamilton.
Night Catches Us (2010)
In addition to an intelligent and emotional look at race, politics, and history, Night is an amazing film–excellent story, acting (it stars Kerry Washington and Anthony Mackie), and directing. After watching it (twice) I strongly felt that Night is an Oscar-worthy film, and that it’s a shame it wasn’t even a contender. Here is the synopsis, from indieWIRE:
In the summer of ’76, as President Jimmy Carter pledges to give government back to the people, tensions run high in a working-class Philadelphia neighborhood where the Black Panthers once flourished. When Marcus returns—having bolted years earlier—his homecoming isn’t exactly met with fanfare. His former movement brothers blame him for an unspeakable betrayal. Only his best friend’s widow, Patricia, appreciates Marcus’s predicament, which both unites and paralyzes them. As Patricia’s daughter compels the two comrades to confront their past, history repeats itself in dangerous ways.
Although the film remained under the radar for a lot of people, it was critically acclaimed. Night Catches Us was nominated for a number of awards, winning five Black Reel Awards–for acting, score, screenplay, and best film.
Refusing to romanticize Black Power, Hamilton chooses the riskier path of examining its emotional and political fallout. The bullet holes and bloodstains that Iris uncovers after peeling away a strip of wallpaper at home suggest that her father died not as a martyr for the cause but as yet another senseless casualty in an endless conflict, with police harassment of African-Americans by the nearly all-white Philly force still continuing in ’76. Jimmy’s parroting of black macho, in turn, leads only to more spilled blood.
Hamilton doesn’t rush to supply answers. She lets her mesmerizing movie sneak up on you and seep in until you feel it in your bones. The fact that Hamilton studied painting at Cooper Union helps the images resonate, as does the haunting lighting supplied by cinematographer David Tumblety. Add a terrific score supplied by the Roots and the movie has you in its grip. Mackie and Washington could not be better; they had me at hello. Night Catches Us is essentially a ghost story, with the past persistently intruding on the present. Hamilton manifests her vision of what politics can do to individual thinking with subtlety and sophistication. Remember her name. She’s a genuine find. 
If you missed Loren’s earlier post, watch the preview here:

Have you seen Night Catches Us? What do you think? Anyone know further news on Hamilton’s next project(s)?

Short Film: Tech Support

Tech Support is a short film written and produced by Jenny Hagel. The film has won several awards–including Best Lesbian Short at the Hamburg International Queer Film Festival (Germany), the Audience Award at the Pittsburgh International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and Best Short Film at the Fresno Reel Pride LGBT Film Festival–and has been an official selection at 16 film festivals.

Watch Tech Support:

Be sure to also check out Hagel’s very funny Feminist Rapper series: A Lady Made That, Real Ladies Fight Back, and This Is What A Feminist Looks Like.

Preview: !Women Art Revolution

!Women Art Revolution

From the official movie website:

!Women Art Revolution elaborates the relationship of the Feminist Art Movement to the 1960s anti-war and civil rights movements and explains how historical events, such as the all-male protest exhibition against the invasion of Cambodia, sparked the first of many feminist actions against major cultural institutions. The film details major developments in women’s art of the 1970s, including the first feminist art education programs, political organizations and protests, alternative art spaces such as the A.I.R. Gallery and Franklin Furnace in New York and the Los Angeles Women’s Building, publications such as Chrysalis and Heresies, and landmark exhibitions, performances, and installations of public art that changed the entire direction of art.

Director Lynn Hershman Leeson claims to have worked on this project for 40 years, and the film has been picked up for distribution by Zeitgeist. It is currently playing at the San Francisco International Film Festival. I know very little about the Feminist Art Movement, aside from some of the Guerrilla Girls‘ work, and can’t wait to see this film.

Watch the trailer:

Just for fun, here’s the other poster:

Let us know if you have seen or plan to see this film!

Preview: Pariah

Pariah (2011)

Pariah, written and directed by Dee Rees, debuted this past January at Sundance, and Focus Features purchased distribution rights. The film is Rees’ feature debut, and centers around 17-year-old Alike, who is coming to terms with her sexuality and identity as a black lesbian. Gregory Ellwood describes Pariah:
Based on a short film Rees originally premiered at Sundance in 2007, “Pariah” centers on Alike (an excellent Adepero Oduye), a 17-year-old Brooklyn girl who is struggling to find herself as a lesbian and, just as importantly, a young woman.  She know’s she’s gay, but is she the more masculine, boyish dyke who hits the underage dance hip-hop dance clubs that her best friend Laura (Pernell Walker) wants her to be?  Or, is she the more socially conscious hipster poet her new friend Bina (Aasha Davis) sees in her?  These are the rarely depicted voices in America that Rees embraces as common place which is one of the reasons “Pariah” feels so special.
Allison Loring provides a detailed plot summary in her post-Sundance analysis of the film, and offers praise for the film’s quiet brand of storytelling:
As we delve into Alike’s world, which is meticulously painted by director Dee Rees, from the standout music selections to the infuriating control Audrey insists on lording over her daughter, we discover nuanced performances from each member of the talented cast. Nothing in Alike’s life is black or white and it is those precarious gray areas that Rees navigates so beautifully as we go on this journey. PARIAH is subtle in its effect and draws viewers in to the story rather than telling it to them.
I would love to see this film in the theatre, and hope Focus puts some muscle into promoting it (their last Sundance acquisition was Academy Award winner The Kids Are All Right). The film is slated for release this year, but the date–as far as I can tell–remains unknown. If you’d like to see Pariah, visit the film’s official website and click the “Demand Pariah” button. You can also visit the film’s Facebook page.
Watch the trailer:

Quote of the Day: Monica Nolan

bitchfest. Edited by Lisa Jervis & Andi Zeisler
Motherhood is a theme we’ve visited before (Black Swan comes immediately to mind, as does the mother character in Rachel Getting Married), and anxieties about it abound in film and television. Mothers can’t seem to escape the same virgin/whore dichotomy structure that plagues all depictions of women in sexist media: either the woman is domestic, passive, nurturing, and selfless, or she’s a monster whose desires ultimately destruct the familial unit. (I’m currently watching the first season of the AMC show The Walking Dead, and waiting to see if the mother character falls into the latter cliche. I suspect she will; stay tuned for a probable Flick Off.)
Thinking about mothers led me to page through bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine and revisit the essay “Mother Inferior: How Hollywood Keeps Single Moms in Their Place” by writer and filmmaker Monica Nolan, originally published in the Fall 2003 issue of Bitch. Here’s an excerpt that looks at single mothers in 1945’s Mildred Pierce and 1987’s Baby Boom.
In the 1940s and ’50s, when wartime taught women that they could be economically successful on their own, and as divorcees and widows became more common, Hollywood switched gears. Single moms, here transformed into the dreaded “career women,” were now messing up not their kids’ economic chances but their psyches. The most spectacular example was the 1945 classic Mildred Pierce, in which Mildred kicks out her deadbeat husband and builds a successful restaurant chain, only to have one daughter die and the other turn into an amoral murderess.
[…]
In Baby Boom, Diane Keaton’s J.C. is a high-powered Manhattan exec who suddenly inherits a baby. Initially, this looks like a radical twist on the Three Men and a Baby concept, as the film introduces the idea, in several comic sequences, that motherhood is no more instinctual for women than it is for men. But before the audience can grab another handful of popcorn, she’s quit her job and fled to a farmhouse in Vermont, a move that the plot reassures us is all for the best: J.C. has always dreamed of a house in the country. In this movie, children don’t entail real sacrifices, just changes that turn out to be redemptive. It’s the baby’s job to feminize Mom and, in the process, save her from the rat race.
[…]
A single mom and her kids are by definition a family without a father, and the female-headed household is destruction of the patriarchy at its most basic level. Needless to say, in Hollywood, showing its unproblematic success is still a huge taboo. Contemporary single-mom films are truly reflective of our culture: A massive amount of energy is expended in a desperate attempt to prove that single parenthood is not good enough, even as an ever-increasing number of women parent on their own. (It’s important to note that this anxiety manifests itself onscreen with an almost exclusive focus on white, middle-class single moms, despite the fact that more than one-third of American single moms are women of color. Though this is part and parcel of the overwhelming whiteness of Hollywood in general, it conveniently allows mainstream films to ignore the factors of class and race that are inextricably intertwined with single parenthood.
With the recent mini-series remake of Mildred Pierce in mind, I’d love to see an updated version of this article. (I also can’t help but think about The Kids Are All Right, which is not about a single mother but about lesbian mothers, and how it fits right into Nolan’s description of the “family without a father” in the final quoted paragraph above; here, lesbian “parenthood is not enough,” hence the disruption brought about by the sperm donor’s entrance into their lives, and the family is white and upper-middle class.) 
What movies, in the past decade, have depicted mothers in a positive way, moving forward from one-note stereotypes and bucking the trend of “keeping single moms in their place?” With all the focus on the negative, I’d like to see some positive examples.

Director Spotlight: Jane Campion

Filmmaker Jane Campion
Jane Campion is one of only four women ever nominated for a Best Director Academy Award (other nominees have been Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, and Lina Wertmüller). In addition, Campion won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Piano–a film for which she also won two Australian Film Institute (AFI) Awards, the Golden Palm award at the Cannes Film Festival, an Independent Spirit Award, and a Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) Award, among others. Her latest film is 2009’s Bright Star. She has directed numerous films, shorts, and TV movies, and served as a writer and producer.
An exerpt from Campion’s bio, from IMDb:
Jane Campion was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and now lives in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Having graduated with a BA in Anthropology from Victoria University of Wellington in 1975, and a BA, with a painting major, at Sydney College of the Arts in 1979, she began filmmaking in the early 1980s, attending the Australian School of Film and Television. Her first short film, Peel (1982) won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986.

Here are a selection of her films and critical responses to each.

Sweetie(1989)
Campion’s first feature-length film, Sweetie, is often lauded as a feminist classic, though Campion herself denies a feminist perspective on the film. Here is a brief plot summary, also from IMDb:
Explores sisters, in their twenties, their parents, and family dysfunctions. Kay is gangly and slightly askew, consulting a fortune teller and then falling in love with a man because of a mole on his face and a lock of hair; then, falling out of love when he plants a tree in their yard. Sweetie is plump, imperious, self-centered, and seriously mentally ill. The parents see none of the illness, seeing only their cute child. Kay mainly feels exasperation at her sister’s impositions. Slowly, the film exposes how the roots of Sweetie’s illness have choked Kay’s own development. Can she be released?

Though the above summary alludes to “the roots of Sweetie’s illness,” this–and many reviews–ignore that the root of the her illness and Kay’s stunted sexuality is their father’s sexual abuse of the mentally-challenged Sweetie since her childhood (and continuing in adulthood). The theme is addressed subtly, and smartly, and the constant presence of a vague yet dark past imbues the film with a sense of tension and foreboding. (Also, the women’s body types aren’t nearly as important as the summary oddly makes it seem.)
From Roger Ebert:
The first time I saw it, at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, I didn’t know what to make of it. I doubted if I “liked” it and yet it was certainly a work of talent. There was something there. I didn’t feel much from it, though; the experience seemed primarily cerebral. Then six months later I saw “Sweetie” a second time, and suddenly there it all was, laid out in blood and passion on the screen, the emotional turmoil of a family’s life.

 Watch the trailer:

The Piano (1993)

The Piano is likely Campion’s most famous, and certainly most lauded film to date. Both female lead and supporting actors won Oscars (you can watch their speeches here, including one from the adorable 11-year-old Anna Paquin). The IMDb plot summary doesn’t really do the film justice, but here it is:
A mute woman along with her young daughter, and her prized piano, are sent to 1850s New Zealand for an arranged marriage to a wealthy landowner, and she’s soon lusted after by a local worker on the plantation.
Many reviewers, including Alan Stone, writing for the Boston Review, were quick to point out that The Piano is more than just “a feminist tract,” trying to gloss over the fact that it is, actually, a fantastic feminist fable–and that fact alone might make it worth your viewing time. Reviewer Vincent Canby was a little less interested in distancing the film–and himself–from feminism when he wrote:
Like “Sweetie,” Ms. Campion’s marvelous first feature, “The Piano” is never predictable, though it is seamless. It’s the work of a major writer and director. The film has the enchanted manner of a fairy tale. Even the setting suggests a fairy tale: the New Zealand bush, with its lush and rain-soaked vegetation, is as strange as the forest in which Flora says her mother was struck dumb.

Trips through this primeval forest are full of peril. When Ada goes off to her first assignation with Baines, she appears to be as innocent as Red Riding Hood. Yet this Red Riding Hood falls head over heels in love with the wolf, who turns out to be not a sheep in wolf’s clothing, but a recklessly romantic prince with dirty fingernails.

 Watch the trailer:

The Portrait of a Lady (1996)
With an official “rotten” rating from Rotten Tomatoes, this adaptation of Henry James’ novel of the same name (first published in 1881) may or may not have been the best follow up to a multi-Oscar winner. However, Campion’s acclaim allowed her a budget for this star-studded period literary adaptation. Frankly, I like this kind of movie–and even this version’s more experimental elements. It’s smart and has a feminist question at its heart. If you’re not familiar with the book, here’s a very brief plot synopsis:
Isabel Archer, an American heiress and free thinker, travels to Europe to find herself.
Instead of faithfully reiterating James’s novel, Ms. Campion chooses to reimagine it as a Freudian fever dream. Fantasies intrude; prison bars or doorways or mirrors offer tacit commentary; the story’s well-bred heroine abruptly sniffs her boot or tries to hide an undergarment hanging on a door. With startling intuitiveness, Ms. Campion traces the tension between polite, guarded characters and blunt visual symbols of their inner turmoil.
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In the Cut (2003)
Receiving worse reviews than Portrait, 2003’s In the Cut stars Meg Ryan playing against “America’s Sweetheart” type. Was this the reason for the harsh reviews–people unable to accept Ryan in a grittier role? I can’t say for sure, having not seen the movie, but it looks dark and creepy. The synopsis:
Following the gruesome murder of a young woman in her neighborhood, a self-determined woman living in New York City–as if to test the limits of her own safety–propels herself into an impossibly risky sexual liaison. Soon she grows increasingly wary about the motives of every man with whom she has contact–and about her own.

Ann Hornaday, writing for The Washington Post, says

These tricky sexual dynamics clearly interest Campion more than the thriller elements of “In the Cut,” in which Frannie has a tendency to walk into dark basements and get into strange men’s cars at a rate clearly disproportionate to her intelligence. The red herrings are trotted out almost by rote, with no finesse or subtlety, as are frequent outbursts of gratuitous gore. By the movie’s ludicrous conclusion, viewers will have abandoned all hope of getting the mature thriller they might have paid to see.

But if “In the Cut” fails as a thriller, it’s not such a write-off as a psychosexual portrait of a certain kind of single Manhattan woman at the turn of the new century. With its restless, jittery camera, the movie captures the jangly paranoia of a city that is often equally tantalizing and threatening; Frannie responds in kind, with her own contradictory sexual persona, which at certain times is defiantly autonomous and at others almost timidly girlish. A “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” for the post-9/11 age (the remnants of that tragedy form one of the movie’s many visual leitmotifs), “In the Cut” focuses on the darker face of the classic New York romance.

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Bright Star (2009)

Campion returned to critical acclaim with Bright Star, the story of poet John Keats’ first love and subject of his poem “Bright Star,” Fanny Brawne. The film is based on their 3-year romance.

Dana Stevens, writing for Slate, says of Bright Star

Keats proves as tough to demythologize as Marilyn Monroe: He died so young, his life was so tragic, and the small body of work he left behind is so incomparable, that any depiction of his short life is bound to be tinged with idealization. 

That’s why Campion was smart to make her film less about Keats than about Fanny Brawne, the fashionable, flirtatious young woman who captivated him in the spring of 1818 and lived next door to him in Hampstead for the last two years of his life. Fanny, as played by the up-and-coming Australian actress Abbie Cornish, is a curious heroine. 

Salon‘s Stephanie Zacharek says

Poetry gets a bad rap almost everywhere: In school, where many of us read it because we have to; in life, where most of us don’t read it at all; and in the movies, where it’s often quoted by the most pompous character or, worse yet, in a self-serious voice-over. Even people who like poetry well enough often fail to revisit poems they once connected with as young students.

If you’re in that last group, Jane Campion’s “Bright Star” just may be the film to reconnect you. And if you’re not, the film works on its own as an unfussy, passionate and gently erotic love story that never tips into sentimentality.

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