“If I helped anybody at all, that’s fantastic (…) in the same way other filmmakers opened doors for me (…) (But) I can’t take much credit for it because these women have got their own energy, they’re coming up, they want to do their things and share it”.
These words come from Jane Campion, considered a pioneer of female directing in contemporary cinema. She said them during the 77th Locarno Film Festival, which awarded her the Pardo d’onore Manor, when she was reminded that she was an example for women who nowadays prove the ability to direct films, are appreciated by audiences and win awards; there were very few female directors when she began a career that led her to be the first to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the only one to be nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Director (she won in 2022).
Jane Campion’s cinema, besides being an inspiration to other female directors, is also important for its content: not only because of the strength of her female characters, but also because these women, quite different from the female cinematic figures of previous decades, often have to overcome the ostracism society reserves for them, considering them wrong or inferior because of their alleged flaw.
Her two films shown to the Locarno audience to honor her explain this well. An Angel at My Table (1990) is based on the autobiographical books of writer Janet Frame, who was mistakenly diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was in her early twenties: she stayed in a psychiatric hospital for a long time, underwent hundreds of electroshocks, and was not lobotomized only because her books began to be published and awarded while she was still hospitalized.
“An Angel at My Table” (© Hibiscus Films. Image courtesy of Te Tumu Whakaata Taonga New Zealand Film Commission
In Campion’s vision, there is no romantic connection between madness (which, moreover, is nonexistent) and artistic genius; skill in writing is not a consequence of mental problems but rather a way of defending one’s right to exist. With her strong physical presence (because of the bush of red hair on her head) and her fragile soul, Frame is a contradiction to whom cinema is able to give a rightful place in the world.
Instead, the main character in The Piano (1993) is fictional but unforgettable: a nineteenth-century Scottish woman who travels all the way to New Zealand to marry a man she does not know, has not spoken since the age of six, and loves playing the piano more than anything else. Her silence makes her look weak and maneuverable, but she shows tremendous courage in bringing out her untamed personality.
Again, the female character is not defined by a lack (the voice) but rather by a presence, that of her passions (for playing music, but also loving the man who learns to respect her rather than the one who would have her submissive). She manages to overcome even her second, far more violent, exterior incompleteness because the richness of her interiority is never affected.
Still frame from “Akiplėša” by Saulė Bliuvaitė (photo ©Akis bado)
Speaking again about the example Campion set for female directors who came after her, the 2024 edition of the Locarno Film Festival can also be read as a passing of the baton. The Golden Leopard was won by a Lithuanian female director, Saulė Bliuvaitė, with Akiplėša (Toxic): the protagonists are two 13-year-old girls who maybe no one would have thought worthy of being the focus of a film in the past. They live in a dreary Lithuanian industrial town, become friends, and dream of modeling: Marija tries despite a slight limp for which she is often belittled and mocked by the other girls, but Kristina, too, is dissatisfied with her body so much that she is anorexic.
The absence of maternal figures leaves them alone in their relationship with their bodies, so that it is the ideas of others that shape the impossible ideal to aspire to: there is insistence in comparing, scene after scene, the joy of adolescent complicity between girls with the violence of wanting to change their exteriors. The director’s greatest merit is the realism in showing the difficult transition between childhood and adulthood: two teenagers who see themselves as imperfect teach us, however, to look at them also with the respect that is due to those who can still write their future entirely.
