AustLit

'In an informed analysis of the film, Richard Allen provides a comprehensive rationale for the "elective mutism" of Ada McGrath. He introduces the relation of muteness to the Gothic melodrama and explains how Jane Campion subversts and transforms the conventions of melodrama in her subject positioning of Ada.' (p.xii)

'Kirsten Moana Thompson, based at New York University, focuses on the soundtrack and how the narrative movement between the three central melodies emblematises the conflicts and struggles between different parts of Ada's interiority. Thompson investigates how the thematic important of these melodies functions as aural emblems evoking the physical and psychological confinements in which Ada is placed. Ada, who had not voice, produced a strong representation of her self trhough her piano. The audience engages with both the sight of the musician and the sound of the music through the melodies used on the film soundtrack and plated by Ada. Thompson builds on the idea that the music, sound and silence are riddled with allegorical resonances.' (p.xii)

'Felicity Coombs' essay [...] reads the narrative framing of Ada through a relationship formed by feminine and colonial representations imbued in the physical body of her piano. Here, the distinct prominence of the piano uncoversthe social positioning not only of women in the nineteenth century, but also its social role: how the piano functions in the context of this film "as a vehicle for the symbolic representation of the close link between women and the Victorian domestic culture". The essay also points to the sonoric connection of their bodies teasing out an aural world of interaction between Ada, the piano, and Baines.' (p.xii)

'Stealla Bruzzi writes of the complex sensual and sexual relationship of both costume and body in The Piano. Under Campion's direction, the camera subverts the scopophilic gaze from the male subject creating instead an interrelationship between an active female subject and the feminine sense of touch. Bruzzi evaluates the unconventional portrayal of the female heroine, Ada, as instating a female subjectivity.' (p.xii)

'Lynda Dyson skilfully argues that the film is so preoccupied with upholding Ada's courgeois femininity and securing her fate in the colonial culture that it glosses over the history of Maori resistance. She locates her argument in the contemporary post-colonial anxieties over New Zealand's past, teasing out the primitivist discourse in the film that positions the Maori collectively outside of culture and history.' (p.xii)

'By exploring the landscape of the film, Simmons traces the history of New Zealand landscape, weaving "a network of textual invocations" in colonial art and literature traditions of both the European and colonial environment. Analysis of these images provides a departure point for an examination of themes of cultural nationalism in the earlier stages of his argument. He interrogates colonialism's discursive practices through moments of irony, the fractions and occlusions of its formal syntax, and the psychoanalytic paradigms of its discourses of the body in opposition to a patriarchal order. He argues that ultimately The Piano re-narrativises the strategies of previous attitudes to the land where only the post-contact European possesses the ability to enunciate and represent the "other".' (p.xii)

'Anna Neil argues that the film gives a voice to a national identity untroubled by Maori claims for sovereignty, as the Maori do not exist in the historical space of the colonising culture but rather are frozen in a sacred time prior to colonisation. She draws on other texts that attempt to write difference out of the modern myths of nation and to replace it with the notion of a shared relationship to the past, one that mourns the loss of an unrecoverable Maori history. In doing so, she exposes the selective version of post contact history that The Piano portrays.' (p.xii)

'A common inclusion of the colonialist genre, the Western is placed alongside the Romance to explore the production and reception of The Piano as a revisionist reworking of the two genres -- just as current Hollowood films often rework established generic codes. Bridget Orr recalls the implication of film in the construction of national identities. Taking the role of such cinematic origin myths as Griffith's Birth of a Nation as a starting point, she compares several films to explore the parody of these generic conventions in The Piano. Central to this investigation is the apparent decentring of the (Pakeha) male pioneering subject.' (p.xiii)

'Claire Corbett offers a richly personal account of working as second assistant editor on The Piano. Her story unfolds both as a look behind the scenes at the unfamiliar world of the feature film cutting room, the technical processes and work practices, and also the rigid structures at play in the hierarchy of a film crew. Her paper reveals much about the nature of lower echelons of film work, as well as film lore -- well unerstood by crew members but rarely made explicit.' (p.xiii)