‘But do I care? No, I’m too old to care’: authority, unfuckability, and creative freedom in Jane Campion’s authorship after the age of sixty

ABSTRACT

The twenty-first century has seen an increase in scholarly interest in the discursive construction of women film practitioners, yet much of this literature focusses on women at the younger- or middle-aged ends of the spectrum, leaving the positioning of older women directors unexamined. Taking Jane Campion as an important case study, this paper explores how Campion is depicted in critical discourses including journalistic responses from Cannes, comments by female industry peers, her self-construction in interviews, and via the television show Top of the Lake, with its unique focus on themes of women and aging. While there is consistency within each discourse in which Campion is situated, each emphasises different facets of Campion’s career. This article explores counter-discourses around aging as uttered by Campion and as apparent in Top of the Lake and provides evidence of an intensified biographical focus in critical commentary from this stage of Campion’s career. While not definitively attributable to Campion’s biological age, the critical recourse to biography may be enabled by the sheer longevity of Campion’s career and many decades in the public eye. Taken together, these constructions of ‘Campion’ are contradictory, however many succeed in putting pressure on hegemonic notions of gender and aging.

KEYWORDS:

• Jane Campion
• women's film authorship
• older women film directors
• australasian cinema
• Top of the Lake

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Julia Erhart is Associate Professor in Screen Critical Studies at Flinders University, where she researches in women screen directors, LGBTIQ commercial media iterations, and Australian film and television. Her publications have appeared in numerous journals and edited anthologies including Continuum, Screen, Screening the Past, and Camera Obscura. Julia is the author of Gendering History on Screen: Women Filmmakers and Historical Films (IB Tauris 2018) and Gillian Armstrong: Popular, Sensual, Ethical Cinema (Edinburgh 2020).

ORCID

Julia Erhart http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4985-2023

Notes

1 IMDB lists Campion as the executive producer, director, and writer for all of season one except episode 3, which Garth Davis directed, and writer and executive producer for all of season two, when she shared directing with Ariel Kleinman. In season two, Kleinman has directing credit for episodes 2, 3, 4, and 6; Campion has credit for episodes 1 and 5.

2 Sources were selected for their ability to provide a cross-section of English-language entertainment reporting. Entertainment blogs and websites surveyed included Movie Web, Cinemablend, Much Ado About Cinema, The Wrap, Vox, Indiewire, and AV Club; entertainment print media included Variety, Entertainment Weekly, Speakeasy, and Hollywood Reporter; non-entertainment specific sources comprised The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Jezebel. The author wishes to thank Katharine Perrotta for her invaluable assistance at the beginning of this project selecting, prioritising, and surveying sources.

3 For example, in Australia the pension age has recently gone up a year to 66.

4 An important exception would be the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. See Smith et al. 2019.

5 For further quantitative information about the impact of gender and aging in the creative arts, see Bielby and Bielby 1996.