Jane Campion
Dame Elizabeth Jane Campion DNZM (born 30 April 1954) is a New Zealand filmmaker.[1] She is best known for writing and directing the critically acclaimed films The Piano (1993) and The Power of the Dog (2021), for which she has received two Academy Awards (including Best Director for the latter), two BAFTA Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards. Campion was appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (DNZM) in the 2016 New Year Honours, for services to film.
Jane Campion
- Screenwriter
- producer
- director
2, including Alice Englert
- Richard Campion (father)
- Edith Campion (mother)
Campion is a groundbreaking female director, as of 2022 the only woman to be nominated twice for Academy Award for Best Director (winning once), and the first female filmmaker to receive the Palme d'Or (for The Piano, which also won her the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay).[2] She made history at the 94th Academy Awards when she won Best Director for The Power of the Dog (2021), as the oldest female director to win, the first woman to win Academy Awards for both directing and screenwriting in her different films, and the first woman not to win Best Picture after winning Best Director. She broke the same barrier at the 78th Venice International Film Festival when she won the Silver Lion award. She is the third woman to win the Directors Guild of America Award for Feature Film.
Campion is also known for directing the films An Angel at My Table (1990), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Holy Smoke! (1998), and Bright Star (2009). She also co-created the television series Top of the Lake (2013) and received three Primetime Emmy Award nominations.
Early life[edit]
Campion was born in Wellington, New Zealand, the second daughter of Edith Campion (born Beverley Georgette Hannah), an actress, writer, and heiress; and Richard M. Campion, a teacher, and theatre and opera director.[3][4][5] Her maternal great-grandfather was Robert Hannah, a well-known shoe manufacturer for whom Antrim House was built. Her father came from a family that belonged to the fundamentalist Christian Exclusive Brethren sect.[6] She attended Queen Margaret College and Wellington Girls' College.[7] Along with her sister, Anna, a year and a half her senior, and brother, Michael, seven years her junior, Campion grew up in the world of New Zealand theatre.[4] Their parents founded the New Zealand Players.[8] Campion initially rejected the idea of a career in the dramatic arts and graduated instead with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from Victoria University of Wellington in 1975.[4]
In 1976, she enrolled in the Chelsea Art School in London and travelled throughout Europe. She earned a graduate diploma in visual arts (painting) from the Sydney College of the Arts at the University of Sydney in 1981. Campion's later film work was shaped in part by her art school education; she has, even in her mature career, cited painter Frida Kahlo and sculptor Joseph Beuys as influences.[4]
Campion's dissatisfaction with the limitations of painting[4] led her to filmmaking and the creation of her first short, Tissues, in 1980. In 1981, she began studying at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, where she made several more short films and graduated in 1984.[9]
Personal life[edit]
In 1992, Campion married Colin David Englert, an Australian who worked as a second unit director on The Piano.[33] Their first child, Jasper, was born in 1993 but lived for only 12 days.[34] Their second child, Alice Englert, was born in 1994; she is an actress. The couple divorced in 2001.[35]
Reception[edit]
Her work, according to the critic bell hooks, "seduces and excites audiences with its uncritical portrayal of sexism and misogyny. Reviewers and audiences alike seem to assume that Campion's gender, as well as her breaking of traditional boundaries that inhibit the advancement of women in film, indicate that her work expresses a feminist standpoint."[36] Accordingly, Campion's work has received praise from other critics. In V.W. Wexman's Jane Campion: Interviews (1999), critic David Thomson describes Campion "as one of the best young directors in the world today."[37] In Sue Gillett's "More Than Meets The Eye: The Mediation of Affects in Jane Campion's Sweetie", Campion's work is described as "perhaps the fullest and truest way of being faithful to the reality of experience"; by utilising the "unsayable" and "unseeable", she manages to catalyze audience speculation.[38] Campion's films tend to gravitate around themes of gender politics, such as seduction and female sexual power. This has led some to label Campion's body of work as feminist; however, Rebecca Flint Marx argues that "while not inaccurate, [the feminist label] fails to fully capture the dilemmas of her characters and the depth of her work."[39]