How personal experience is woven into a fi lmmaker's art

"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." Barry Keith Grant, Brock University

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

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 Creative Adaptation in An Angel at My Table; 5. Traumas of Separation and the Encounter with the Phallic Other: The Piano; 6. The Misfortunes of an Heiress: The Portrait of a Lady; 7. Exacting Revenge on "Cunt Men": Holy Smoke as Sexual Fantasy; 8. "That which terrifies and attracts simultaneously": Killing Daddy in In the Cut; 9. Lighting a Lamp: Loss, Art, and Transcendence in The Water Diary and Bright Star Conclusion: Theorizing the Personal Component of Authorship Notes; Works Cited; Filmography; Index