‘I don’t think so, Jan, that’s just another fantasy’: Practice, Paratext and the Power of Women’s Talk in Jane Campion’s Filmmaking

Jane Campion is one of the few women occupying the public speaking position of the auteur in contemporary culture, evidenced by her ability to generate a volume of paratextual material (Genette, 1991, 1997) around her films, including interviews, DVD commentaries and on-set documentaries. Given that these are still largely contextual spaces occupied by male directors, Murray argues that Campion’s representation and her performance in the paratext (Corrigan, 1990; Verhoeven, 2009) constitutes a unique case study of the female director, as auteur, in practice. Campion’s paratextual talk arguably mobilises a specific persona, constituted of her personal biography and artistic labour, and her interactions with her female producers demonstrate her ability to speak in public of making films as a work of women’s fantasy and desire. Furthermore, Murray argues that Campion plays the subject and desiring hero of her own narrative. The feminist potential represented by this performance can be seen through the theoretical lens of Luce Irigaray’s concept of parler femme (1985, 1993), being the potential recovery of women’s relationships to each other and of their intergenerational genealogies. Therefore, the persona of the female auteur offers an alternative to the established and exclusionary discourses of film theory and popular film journalism.