Unsettling Presences: Agentic Embodiment in Jane Campion’s Films

Campion’s cinema can be located along a trajectory of women filmmakers coping with both the perils and the pleasures of a visual engagement with the female body on screen. Coming to filmmaking in the late 1980s, Campion is part of a post-visual pleasure generation, a term which distinguishes a first generation of women filmmakers in the 1970s who had to negotiate Laura Mulvey’s founding text, from a second generation who began their feature careers in the 1980s. In this chapter, Catherine Fowler considers the framing of the female body in Sweetie (1989), Holy Smoke (1999) and In the Cut (2003), through this post visual pleasure lens,examining the visible effects of forty years of feminist film theory and practice on its surface. The chapter argues that by considering Campion’s phenomenological framing of the female body, we find a way to reconcile what Kate Ince (2017) has called the ‘fundamental dissonance’ in feminist film theory with regard to embodiment’s place in our understanding of female subjectivity.