AustLit

'In this article I argue that Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog (2021), can be read through Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1967); and that Campion’s films more generally can be viewed insightfully in a Nietzschean frame. Campion’s films are often concerned with ancient mythic themes and forces that continue to find expression in later times and places. I argue that Campion is also a feminist filmmaker who questions Hollywood narrative cinema from a subject position of difference, from within its genres but re-writing and re-valuing the values of its ‘plots’ (Gillett, Sue. 2004. Views From Beyond the Mirror: The Films of Jane Campion. The Moving Image 7. Australia: Australian Teachers of Media, Australian Film Institute and Deakin University). Campion explores abiding psycho-social phenomena and needs – here, masculinity, men’s relations with ‘mother’ – by drawing on mythological figures in service to the present in original ways and as a female director. I draw on Hélène Deutsch’s (1969. A Psychoanalytic Study of The Myth of Dionysus and Apollo: Two Variants of the Son-Mother Relationship. The Freud Anniversary Lecture Series, The New York Psychoanalytic Institute. New York: International Universities Press Inc.) analysis and discussion of Apollonian and Dionysian mythologies in support of this argument.' (Publication abstract)

'The Power of the Dog premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 2, 2021. In a short time, however, much has already been written about writer-director Jane Campion’s latest feature film, one of the most awarded releases of 2021 and the nexus of a range of heated, high-profile debates. These debates revolved around the place of the Western in contemporary cinema, with actor Sam Elliot infamously challenging Campion’s right to direct a film in the genre its representation of queerness, with, for example, The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber bemoaning its ‘queer problem and, coincident with the start of Oscar voting, Campion’s careless stumble into personifying white feminism’s glaring blind spot regarding race—when she framed the difficulty of her perennial competition with men for major directing awards against Serena and Venus Williams’ comparatively easy (in Campion’s view) challenges in professional tennis. While the intensity and diversity of these conversations no doubt speak to the strength of The Power of the Dog’s immediate impact, this article is motivated by the desire to comment on issues raised by the film that have yet to attract the wandering eye of mainstream film journalism to any sustained degree. And, in anticipation of longer-term discussions in the sphere of film scholarship, it approaches The Power of the Dog as an opportunity to revisit provocative questions about national cinema, genre and masculinity that Jane Campion’s cinema has evoked since the inception of her career.' (Introduction)

'On the set of The Power of the Dog, Benedict Cumberbatch gave himself nicotine poisoning. It turns out, unsurprisingly really, that relentlessly smoking filterless hand-rolled cigarettes during his portrayal of gristly cattle rancher Phil Burbank made him feel very, very sick.' (Introduction)