Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema [Paperback]

Alistair Fox explores the dynamics of the creative process involved in cinematic representation in the films of Jane Campion, one of the most highly regarded of contemporary filmmakers. Utilizing a wealth of new materialincluding interviews with Campion and her sister and personal writings of her motherFox traces the connections between the filmmaker's complex background and the thematic preoccupations of her films, from her earliest short,Peel,to 2009'sBright Star.He establishes how Campion's deep investment in family relationships informs her aesthetic strategies, revealed in everything from the handling of shots and lighting, to the complex system of symbolic images repeated from one film to the next.

How personal experience is woven into a filmmaker's art

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2011

Alistair Fox is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Research on National Identity at the University of Otago.

In his book, Alistair Fox finds and illuminates the relations between diegetic worlds and the life of a New Zealand Australian , Jane Campion.

This is easily the best, most comprehensive book now available on Campion and her work. . . . Highly recommended.September 2011

Alistair Fox offers an impressively rich and thoroughly documented reading of Jane Campion's films. . . . [He] persuasively interprets them as working through the traumas of the artist's life. . . . Fox succeeds in resuscitating the biological author, giving us Jane Campion without the qualification of quotation marks around her name.

Contents
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Authorship, Creativity, and Personal Cinema
1. Origins of a Problematic: The Campion Family
2. The Tragic Underbelly of the Family: Fantasies of Transgression in the Early Films
3. Living in the Shadow of the Family Tree: Sweetie
4. How painful it is to have a family member with a problem like that : Authorship as Creatl“¿