An Existential Feminist Look At Campion’s Films

To the present day, women occupy significantly fewer key positions in global film industries and therefore, the dominant point-of-view from which representations are constructed is a male one. For a long time, female voices have been largely silent, or unrepresented within conventional cinema. However, as a female director, Campion produces women-centered films that express a female point of view. Her works are said to provide a deep insight into female experiences and female desires. Therefore, I choose two of her recent works, namely The Piano and Bright Star, as my focus. In these two films, she focuses on the lives of her central female protagonists and their battle against the world. Both Fanny and Ada are strong-willed and independent women. In spite of being constraint by the society, they insist in finding their subjectivity and self-expression.In this paper, moreover, I choose Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex(1984)as my theoretical framework. Her theory are said to be one of the few philosophies that questions human conditions seriously, especially female living conditions. Like Beauvoir, Jane Campion also shows great interests in sexual, social, and cultural conditions of women. Therefore, by landing ideas developed in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, this thesis tries to argue that one crucial step for women to achieve gender equality is to remove the internal obstacles within themselves. They internalize the negative messages they get from society. Therefore, it is necessary for women to arouse their sense of being and subjectivity. As Jane Campion once marks, “I’m here for one reason only, to find out who I am…it is not as easy as it sounds for a lady to find out who she is”. Also, Campion invites women to pursue economic independence.With material gains, women free themselves from the rank of “parasite”. She will enjoy the same dignity as a man. In short, Campion’s works foreground women’s lives and desires, offering a radically different view to that offered by the dominant patriarchal perspective.