Speaking the "mind's voice": double discursivity in Jane Campion's The Piano.

In the fall of 1993, Jane Campion's film The Piano was released in American theaters and immediately took the cinematic critical community by storm. Film critics either loved or hated it. According to film scholar Tania Modleski, response to the film was divided along gender lines: "Before I

even saw The Piano, a mythology seemed to have developed around it: according to various acquaintances of mine both in the United States and abroad, this was a film that women loved and men hated" (34). (1) Kathi Maio, however, states that the opposite was the case: those who offered the most praise were mostly male critics, who were quick to label the film "feminist." However, as Maio writes, "feminists aren't so sure. We've been debating it for months with a passion that takes no prisoners." The passionate response (2) to the film on the part of both men and women focuses on the question of whether or not the film can be considered a "feminist" project, considering the relationship between the film's female protagonist, Ada, and Baines, the man who, after obtaining ownership of her piano, offers her the opportunity to earn it back through sexual favors. Despite the fact that film problematizes the nature of this sexual extortion by constructing Ada as an active and willing participant in this relationship (first, by having her agree to the barter (3) and second, by having her desire to continue the sexual relationship after Baines, recognizing the transaction as a form of prostitution, puts an end to it), several critics have classified the relationship between the two characters as tantamount to rape. (4)

Carolyn Gage, in one of the most polemical reviews of the film, writes,

   "The Piano" is a gorgeously shot, utterly
   repellent film about a woman
   trapped between two rapists: a
   sleazy, blackmailing rapist and a violent
   possessive rapist. The woman
   "chooses" the sleazy, blackmailing
   rapist, fails deeply in love with him
   apparently because her experience of
   coerced sex was so hot, and ends up
   blissfully married to him in a cozy
   English cottage. And in case the misogyny
   of this scenario isn't enough
   to turn you off, there is an extra fillip
   of ableism at the end: The woman,
   who is mute and communicates very
   effectively through sign language, is
   taught to speak by the sleazy rapist--thereby
   consolidating the film's claim
   to a happy ending. So why am I wasting
   paper reviewing this silly film?
   Because it is by a woman, because this
   woman is obviously a brilliant cinematographer,
   and because she
   started to say something important.

Although Gage is outraged by what she sees as "the romanticizing of rape," the major part of her attack is not leveled at the content of the film, for as she implies, the theme of rape is common in Hollywood films. As becomes gradually evident in the quotation above, what concerns her is the fact that the film was made by a woman, and that this woman chose to tell the story from what, in Gage's opinion, is without question a "misogynist," "anti-feminist" point of view. Campion's gender is of utmost priority for Gage, because it necessarily implies for her a definite, rigidly proscribed approach to sexual politics. (5) According to this perspective, the critical element of films made by women is the political message they convey, or rather, in Gage's words, what they are trying to "say." To direct as a woman, according to Gage, requires one to "speak" a specific discourse on gender and to "tell" a story from a specifically "feminist" point of view. Above all, this "feminist" approach should announce itself by means of the plot. Despite the fact that Gage finds Campion a "brilliant cinematographer," she considers the visual elements of the film mere window dressing ("gorgeously shot," "magnificently beautiful") and privileges the film's story over its visual language, claiming that Campion willingly sacrifices the "feminist" political message of the film to Hollywood conventions in order to make a high-budget, visually stunning movie. By opposing the "feminist" message she wants to hear with the "degrading" visuals of Campion's film, Gage effectively constructs a dichotomy in which the visual (aesthetic) and the narrative (political) are necessarily mutually exclusive qualities. By abandoning her political mission as a woman director and creating a visual masterpiece that seduces the viewer, Campion is thus classified as a "non-feminist" or "Hollywood" director (one who favors visuals over "feminist" plot) as opposed to a "'feminist" director (one whose films "tell" a political message through the means of plot). (6)

In designating Campion's film "antifeminist," Gage utilizes distinctions that have developed within film studies for films made by and about women. According to Judith Mayne in The Woman at the Keyhole (1990), feminist scholarship on gender and film, beginning with the work of Mary Ann Doane, has tended to divide films into one of two categories that are diametrically opposed to one another, woman's film and women's film. Woman's flint designates classical Hollywood films marketed toward women and centered on feminine themes (such as the "maternal melodrama" and the "medical discourse" film) that voyeuristically construct women as fetishized objects of desire while simultaneously structuring female desire as masochistic. In this type of film, any attempt to account for female subjectivity butts up against an established patriarchal cinematic practice based on male desire that is unable or unwilling to account for female difference. Women's film, on the other hand, the designation Mayne uses for Doane's vision of "another cinematic practice" (4), refers to films made by women directors who concern themselves with "female modes of expression" (2), female subjectivity and female desire. For Mayne, the absolute distinction between woman's film and women's film is problematic in its inflexibility:

   While Doane's exploration of the
   woman's film is remarkably sophisticated
   and complex, her designation
   of the status of the classical Hollywood
   cinema suggests a rigid opposition
   between Hollywood films,
   made by men for female consumption,
   and films by women. Few contemporary
   critics would use the language
   of authenticity to describe this
   opposition (e.g., the inauthentic portrayals
   of the classical cinema versus
   the authentic portrayals by women
   directors), but there is something of
   that rigid opposition that lingers on
   in feminist accounts of the classical
   cinema. (4)

Mayne opposes the absolute division of the terms because it implies the possibility of a cinema that is somehow able to escape the influence of dominant film, an assumption she rightly questions. Women directors, however much they wish to separate themselves from Hollywood depictions of femininity, can not completely throw off the influence of Hollywood on their work, for according to Teresa de Laurentis (as quoted in Mayne), "the feminist critique is a critique of culture at once from within and from without, in the same way in which women are both in the cinema as representation and outside the cinema as subjects of practices" (6). It is precisely the woman filmmaker's position as both "within" and "with-out" cinematic culture that makes the construction of a rigid dichotomy between women's film (wholly independent of Hollywood modes of representation) and woman's film (wholly enclosed in dominant practice) impossible.

Furthermore, Mayne questions not only the possibility of a filmic practice that exists outside of dominant cinema, but its very desirability in the first place, for such a notion places unreasonable, indeed "utopian" (4) pressures on women filmmakers to somehow escape dominant discourse within their films, when such an escape is nigh impossible in the larger culture in which they live and work. Thus the critical relationship between the extremes of women's film and woman's film, which, in Mayne's reading of Doane, is "purely theoretical" is not only unavoidable, it expresses the reality in which women filmmakers must operate if they wish to continue practicing their craft. Rather than insisting on the theoretical purity of women's film and mourning its absence in cinematic practice (as if that very absence automatically relegates any film to the opposing category of woman's film), however, Mayne suggests that critics look to the ways in which films by women articulate the very disjunction between the theoretical extremes.

One can take Mayne's suggestion a bit further and argue that the interactions between women directors and dominant film, rather than signaling capitulation to Hollywood conceptions of femininity, result in some of the most interesting and productive engagements in women's cinema, for it is here that the tensions that surround both the impossibility of and desire for an untainted feminist film practice play out. As Mayne's book indicates, many women filmmakers possess a "love-hate" relationship with Hollywood film, and rather than wishing to ignore the dominant genre, few are able to resist wrestling with the giant and forcing it, however temporarily, to surrender its power. For these directors, a sense of play exists, a double discursivity that involves an open willingness to negotiate with dominant cinematic practice in order to manipulate it from both the outside and inside. Rather than trying to align their films to one pole of a rigid dichotomy, a utopian project Mayne claims is doomed to failure, these directors straddle the space that marks the tension and the possibilities between the oppositions in an effort to deny and defy their supposed mutual exclusivity.

Jane Campion, in The Piano, is one director who employs double discursivity in an attempt to grapple with dominant film practice and thematize the dilemma of totalizing categories. (7) Part of this particular discursive practice lies in the form in which Campion casts her film. From the beginning, she positions herself squarely within the problematic between women's film and woman's film with her choice of genre: rather than searching for a radically alternative filmic genre (which the women's film would require of her), she casts her film in a staple of the woman's film, the Gothic melodrama. Campion's critical discourse of dominant cinema thus begins within that most feminine of dominant filmic forms, rather than in opposition to it. In addition, Campion insists on not only telling us a story (in the form of a linear, developing plot), but also imbedding this narrative within a formal visual network of non-linear, symbolic relationships that can reinforce, supplement, contradict, or outright negate the plot. In short, Campion's double discursivity refuses to delimit the boundaries between the aesthetic force of the visual and the political message of narrative. Furthermore, Campion's film performs this refusal to conform to distinct classifications by preventing the viewer from consistently and confidently accessing them as well. By disorienting the viewer, particularly in the expository sequences, Campion's film forces her to abandon any rigid categories and to see how structures such as gender figure in a specific way in the film, rather than allowing her simply to assign the film a label. (8) In addition, Campion, by playing with the expectations the viewer has of film (expectations formed by experience with Hollywood cinema and by women's film), shows how one can (and indeed, is forced to) work within dominant representations of women, yet at the same time construct a notion of female subjectivity that refuses to be wholly determined by these modes of representation. (9) The Piano does not allow itself to be aligned into any closed category, but rather continually resists the viewer's attempt to put her finger on what the film is doing. In this way, the film, through its double discursivity, thwarts its audience's attempts to pidgeonhole it into either woman's film or women's film and instead forces it to rethink the problems inherent in these categories.

Campion's particular employment of double discursivity is most evident in the first and third expository sequences that occur at the beginning of the film, in the domestic scene while Ada is still in Scotland and the bush scene in which Stewart is journeying to meet Ada for the first time. These two sequences lay out the story of the film; that is, they introduce the major themes and conflicts (Ada's muteness, the problem of her will, her connection to the piano, her relationship with Flora, and the rotating triangle of desire comprised of Ada, Stewart and Baines). In a sense, these sequences are emblematic of the film, for the composition of the mise en scene plays out for the viewer much of the action that will occur later. Like the Bluebeard performance scene, which functions as a "play-within-a-play" (or, in this case, a play-within-a-film), the opening sequences reveal and at the same time camouflage the narrative that follows. This is not to say, however, that the sequences are interchangeable with the entire film, for Campion disrupts totality by playing with the viewer's expectations. By simultaneously confirming and displacing the expectations the viewer brings to the film and by establishing new expectations that are at the same time overturned and undermined, The Piano misleads, disorients and confuses the audience and jests at all attempts to achieve closure. (10)

In the introductory sequence of the film, which occurs on a Scottish estate, the audience is introduced to the protagonist, Ada, as well as to her daughter, Flora. Nothing "happens" in the film on the level of plot; rather, we become familiar with the conditions that will propel the action of the film through Ada's voice-over, which proclaims,

   The voice you hear is not my speaking
   voice, but my mind's voice.

   I have not spoken since I was six years
   old. No one knows why, not even me.
   My father says it is a dark talent and
   the day I take it into my head to stop
   breathing will be my last.

   Today he married me to a man I've
   not yet met. Soon my daughter and I
   shall join him in his own country. My
   husband says my muteness does not
   bother him. He writes and hark this:
   God loves dumb creatures, so why
   not he!

   Were good he had God's patience for
   silence affects everyone in the end.
   The strange thing is I don't think
   myself silent, that is, because of my
   piano. I shall miss it on the journey.
   (9)

From the voice-over we learn of Ada's muteness, her strong will, her upcoming marriage and her relationship to her piano. By listening to this introductory text, one can extract some of the major themes and motives that operate in the film, yet it is only in the combination of the visual (the mise en scene) with the verbal (the voice-over) that the film displays its complexity and multifariousness.

In the opening shot of the film, the viewer is presented with an unidentifiable image that appears to be a strange and hazy darkness interrupted by small slits of light. From the beginning, Campion refuses to provide the viewer with any clear and established boundaries. Only as Ada acknowledges the viewer and begins to speak of her multiple voices ("The voice you hear is not my speaking voice, but my mind's voice"), does the camera cut to a shot of a woman covering her eyes with her fingers. The viewer is encouraged to connect the image of the woman to the voice, and when the camera again retreats to the hazy darkness, we understand that the original image adopted the woman's point of view from behind her hands. The first things we associate with Ada are thus her hands and her voice, as well as the agency of seeing/looking, tropes that will all play a major role in the film. In addition, the self-covering of Ada's eyes simultaneously with the paradoxical vocal expression of her muteness suggests Ada's agency in the loss of her voice and prefigures the problem of "will" that will be mentioned only seconds later. Because the first shot makes us privy to Ada's perspective, Ada is established from the very beginning as both the subject, or agent, of the film, and as its object as well. In addition, as the voice-over speaks of inner and outer voices, the visual as well makes a distinction between exteriority and interiority, subjectivity and objectivity. Ada's interior view is thus radically (self)-delimited from time empirical world. (11) This boundary between Ada's subjectivity and the outside world is evident in the composition of the frame: as Ada's fingers filter the outside light, the frame is out of focus, suggesting a subjective perspective that is not clear and rational, while the light that streams through in dark columns resembles prison bars, connoting time "prison" of interiority. (12) The camera pans slowly from left to right, conveying a sense of searching, perhaps soul-searching. The abrupt cut to the exterior view of Ada's hands gives the viewer a more objective picture of her, and this, combined with a close-up of her wedding band (hinting at the problematics of her marriage) serves to heighten the radical disruption Ada experiences between interiority and exteriority as well her roles as both subject and object of the film. However, although Ada's perspective seems to mark out the boundary between subjectivity and objectivity, the film forces time viewer constantly to transgress this border and shift between the perspectives, never for a moment able to stake a permanent claim in any one territory. For Carol Jacobs, this opening image is indicative in this respect of the film in general: "The Piano opens to view the mind's voice, but what opens to view is the point of articulation of the entire film as an unfixable movement between subjective and objective" (770).

After this brief introduction to Ada, the film cuts abruptly to an image of a child on a small horse, tugged by an old man. The voice-over line that coincides with this image announces, "I have not spoken since I was six years old. No one knows why, not even me." Later, we will learn that the child on the horse is in all likelihood Flora, but at this point in the film we are unaware of Flora's existence, and thus are led to believe that the child is the six-year-old Ada and that the film will tell us in a flashback how she lost her voice (an expectation that the film never satisfies). (13) Because we learn from Ada that even she is ignorant as to the cause of her muteness, we are led to believe it was occasioned by trauma, perhaps incestuous, since repressed. Time mise en scene supports such an expectation, for the image of the stark, desolate winter scene (as opposed to the lush jungle to come) in which a man tugs at a horse suggests a dramatic scene of father-daughter seduction and coercion, whether fantastic or real. The composition of the shot encourages this assumption on the part of the viewer, for the child, man, and horse on the left of the frame are dominated by an immense, dark, snarling tree branch ominously positioned in the center. Indeed, the tree seems to grab at the smaller figures, representing an all-encompassing, mutant family tree from which a young Ada can find no escape. This prefigures the sexually violent chase scene between Stewart and Ada among the snarling supplejack in the bush, which Andrew McAlpine describes as a "horrible tentacled nightmare" (141).

The idea that Ada's muteness was brought on by an incestuous relationship with the father is further supported by the next line of voice-over that is spoken just before the third image is established: "My father says it is a dark talent and the day I take it in to stop breathing will be my last." The "dark talent" hints at Ada's attraction for the father, and the rest of the line, though serving to introduce Ada's powerful will, can also be read as a threat issued by the father. However, the image that follows destroys the expectation regarding the cause of Ada's muteness that we have just been encouraged to develop, for the film cuts back to the Ada of the opening image (that is, the adult Ada sitting outside) and we are forced to realize that the preceding scene was not, in fact, a flashback. Indeed, we are more puzzled than ever as to the cause of Ada's muteness.

This is the first of several instances in which the film sets the viewer up and then mockingly lets her fall. In addition, the scene, unlike the introductory image, is composed in such a way that we are forced to view Ada as an object. It begins with a medium shot of Ada in her harsh Victorian dress with a notepad necklace hanging from her neck (which, like a noose, almost seems to strangle her, indicating the burden and restrictiveness of communication for Ada), and then the camera tilts and pans around and over Ada. From our vantage point directly above her, she becomes smaller and seems a mere object situated in a natural environment. Once again, however, the raise en scene conflicts with the voice-over, for at the very moment the visual establishes Ada as an object, her voiceover describes her strong will and asserts a moment of powerful agency in which a radical subjectivity ("the day I take it in my head to stop breathing") is achieved.

At this point in the film (less than a minute into the opening sequence), the viewer has already circled several loops on a wild and unpredictable roller coaster ride. The adventure doesn't stop here, for as the film cuts to the next scene, we find ourselves careening down a dark, narrow Victorian hall with Flora on a pair of roller skates. Despite the fact that this image is very brief (lasting only a few seconds), it seems to express the hectic, non-stop pace the film has already established. Like Flora, the viewer finds herself rushing headlong and without brakes into the cinematic experience.

An abrupt cut to the fifth scene finds Flora, worn-out and asleep in bed. The camera concentrates briefly on her face and then slowly and smoothly pans to Ada, establishing right away a strong and intimate connection between mother and daughter. However, once again, the voice-over jeopardizes the symbiotic moment that the visual has established, for Ada announces the entry of a third person who will threaten their intimacy: "Today he [her father] married me to a man I've not yet met. Soon my daughter and I shall join him in his own country." (14) After panning to Ada, the camera watches her cut a roller skate from Flora's foot, which, in addition to anticipating Stewart's dismembering of Ada's finger, further highlights the break in Ada and Flora's relationship his presence will occasion. Ada then puts the skate on the floor and, relinquishing control over its direction, shoves it, where, "disembodied" (10) like her finger, and in constant motion like the film, it rolls across the room. The next line of voice-over establishes Stewart's attitude toward Ada, one that characterizes her only as an object, rather than considering her an agent of desire as well, a position that, as we have seen, the film prevents the viewer from adopting: "He writes and hark this: God loves dumb creatures, so why not he!"

The final image of the sequence shows Ada in a tight, inhibitive domestic sphere (unlike the outside expanse of the first three scenes), wandering around stacks of boxes until she reaches her piano, which, crated up, indicates the impeded communication Ada will experience in New Zealand. As the camera pans from Ada to the piano, connecting the two in the same manner as it previously linked Ada and Flora, her voice announces: "Were good he had God's patience in the end. The strange thing is I don't think myself silent, that is, because of my piano. I shall miss it on the journey." Ada acknowledges here the dichotomy between silence and speech that characterizes her problems with the outside world (and will become a problem in her relationship with Stewart, who, as it turns out, does not have "God's patience"). However, it is clear that she herself does not subscribe to this hegemonic division, but rather asserts her own particular radical relationship between silence, language and subjectivity: "I don't think myself silent, that is, because of my piano." At this point, Ada seats herself at the piano and begins to play, and her lyrical, expressive piano music (the diegetic music of her inner world) seamlessly joins the background music (the non-diegetic music of the outer world) that, until now, has been ominous and symphonic. (15) This collapse of the external and the internal, divided and distinct from one another in the first scene, does not provide the audience a view of a totalized, unified subject, but rather, in this moment of the evocation of language (Ada's language of music), the viewer is unable to distinguish decidedly between subject and object. This ephemeral moment, in which the screen between interiority and exteriority is momentarily lifted, seems almost utopian in its cinematic possibility, for it allows the viewer, however fleetingly, to break out of the hegemonic structure of subject-object that dominates filmic practice. This transitory collapse is not maintained, however, for Ada's playing is interrupted by the servant who appears from behind a screen (foreshadowing the screen that appears in the Bluebeard play). Like Ada's hands in the first image, this screen, that inescapable trope of cinema that necessarily structures power, reinstates the division between interiority and exteriority.

The first sequence of The Piano thus invites the viewer in, presents many of the conflicts that will dominate the film, and forces her to form expectations as to what the film is "saying." At the same time, however, a number of radical moves, shifts and ruptures occur that confuse the viewer, force her to abandon some of those very expectations and prevent her from confidently developing any totalized determination of what the film is or what it says. This practice of simultaneously orienting and disorienting the viewer is operative in the third sequence as well, in which Stewart prepares to meet Ada, and which, like the first, further indicates to the viewer the action that will ensue.

The sequence opens with a shot of the New Zealand bush that is lush, wild and cluttered, in contrast to the stark and ominous wintry scene in Scotland. "The wetness, closeness and darkness of the bush is such that the air seems green, as at the bottom of a deep sea" (17). According to Campion, this underwater quality evokes a "dark, inner world" (139), a counterpart to the interiority of Ada's "mind's voice" in the first sequence. In the midst of this dense labyrinth we see a group of Maori natives walking; though they twist and turn on a non-linear path, they seem to know how to negotiate this jumbled and confusing landscape. I do not suggest that the Maoris' are "at home" in this natural scene, or that they are somehow "one" with nature, as Cynthia Kaufman, in her article "Colonialism, Purity, and Resistance in The Piano," believes the film asserts: "The Maoris are staged as part of nature ... they provide an unexplored colonial backdrop. The line between nature and culture is drawn between the Europeans and the Maori" (253). The Maoris are not characterized as "nature," rather, with their twisting and turning, they represent a mode of existence that refuses to draw this line between nature and culture, subject and object, (16) unlike Stewart, who, with his constant fence-building and line-drawing ("I thought I might as well mark it out" [70]), endeavors to preserve the division. (17) In addition, as the scene progresses, the Maoris do not remain an "unexplored colonial backdrop," for the viewer becomes subtly aware of the colonial context in which they must operate from the "mixture of native and European costume" (17) in which they are clothed. Here, too the "lines" are blurred; in this case, the rigid distinctions between "colonizer" and "colonized." At this point, the audience is introduced to Baines, but because his clothes resemble that of the Maoris (practical dress for trekking through the bush), and because he has a "half-completed Maori tattoo across his cheeks" (17), we are not able to distinguish him from them. When the camera captures Stewart, however, we are immediately aware of his distinction from the Maoris, for in a European suit and top hat, he is not dressed for hiking and seems laughably "out of place here in the bush" (17). Only after we see Stewart, and he and Baines converse in English, do we realize that Baines is not a native Maori, another instance in which the viewer's expectations are simultaneously satisfied and dissatisfied. Yet, because of his tattoo, and because of his fluency in the Maori language, Baines negotiates between the two cultures and is able, as well, to defy the rigid line between "colonizer" and "colonized."

After introducing Stewart to the viewer, the camera takes her inside his pocket, where "inside the darkness ... he turns over a small, worn-edged photograph: a smudge of green light allows us to see Ada's tumbling face" (19). The inner/ outer distinctions associated with Ada are evoked here once again, and the viewer becomes aware as well of Stewart's economic control over and objectification of Ada, for she tumbles about in his pocket like a coin. As such, she is reduced to a much-desired commodity for Stewart, a possession that he effectively purchases from her father: "Today he married me to a man I've not yet met." This view of Ada as object of exchange will reappear in the transaction between Stewart and Baines over the piano, but as the viewer learns, it will undergo a significant transformation. (18)

The next shot of the sequence is a close-up of Stewart, gazing at Ada's picture. The camera pans slightly and very slowly (almost in slow motion) across Stewart's face, and at the same time, we hear the eerie, echoing call of a bird. The bush surroundings and the Maoris recede from our view, and the film structures an intimate, almost surreal moment in which time seems to stand still as Stewart gazes at his bride. The viewer is forced by these heavy, unambiguous filmic devices (techniques common to Hollywood romance films) to believe the connection between Ada and Stewart a highly significant one and consequently to expect a romance to unfold between them. This moment is broken when the camera switches to Stewart's perspective and we see Baines enter the frame and ask Stewart if the party should stop. (19) When Stewart sees Baines, he ceases simply to gaze at the picture, but, in a narcissistic move, pulls out a comb and fashions it as mirror for combing his hair as well. Ada is thus constructed as a mirror whose function is to reflect Stewart's image. (20) She, like the bush around Stewart, which is also reflected in the picture, becomes an object that returns to him a sense of self, an illusion of identity and totality. According to Luce Irigaray, in her book, Speculum of the Other Woman, women's desire has remained unrepresentable in Western discourse, for it functions as

   a hole in men's signifying economy ...
   A nothing threatening the process of
   production, reproduction, mastery,
   and profitability, of meaning, dominated
   by time phallus--that master signifier
   whose law of functioning
   erases, rejects, denies the surging up,
   the resurgence, the recall of a heterogeneity
   capable of reworking the principle
   of its authority. (50)

Because "'Woman" (Irigaray's term), according to Western paradigms, can not exist as subject, she must function as an object that ensures the subjectivity of male desire. Irigaray writes, "Now, if this ego is to be valuable, some 'mirror' is needed to reassure it and re-insure it of its value. Woman will be time foundation for this specular duplication, giving man back 'his' image and repeating it as time 'same'" (54). Ada becomes this foundation for Stewart, for she reflects back to him an image of identity and mastery over self, object and nature. Stewart, who must constantly mark out the border between subject and object, requires this confirmation of his selfhood and ownership. According to Carol Jacobs, this moment of the specular is crucial for Stewart's "ownership" of Ada, as well as for the colonial project in New Zealand, for "in the photograph lies the will to possess, however melancholy and disappointed, to possess woman, nature and self" (768).

In this part of the sequence, the camera cuts back and forth from Stewart's face, staring "dazed and zombie-like" (19) at Ada's picture, to his perspective, from which we see Baines approach Stewart and speak to him. The film, through the cinematic techniques outlined above, encourages the viewer to link Ada and Stewart together and to view them as a romantic couple around which the film will revolve. However, at time same time, the film also constructs a mise en scene that subtly undermines its own attempt to shape the viewer's expectations of the romance to come. The viewer, positioned in Stewart's place, sees Ada's picture, held out by Stewart and illuminated by a beam of light, on the left of the frame. Baines, waiting for Stewart to reply to his question, has positioned himself in half-profile at the right of the frame. In a slow, subtle movement that is emphasized by a slightly low angle shot, Baines turns his head and poses next to the picture of Ada, in a sense becoming a picture for the viewer in the same manner as Ada's picture for Stewart. In this way, like Ada and Stewart, Ada and Baines are inextricably linked together, although unlike the narcissistic objectification that connects Stewart and Ada, here Ada and Baines are constructed in a relationship of objective equality, for both function as pictures, or objects, presented on level with one another.

However, rather than simply exchanging the set-up of the Stewart-Ada romance for the Ada-Baines couple, the film complicates the classic romantic plot by fashioning a triangle in which Stewart, by way of his perspective situated between the other two, is also included, it is noteworthy that Stewart participates in this trinity of desire as an outsider, that is, as a viewer, for it prefigures the moments of his voyeuristic pleasure that occur later in the film (looking through the camera, peeping into Baines' hut). Furthermore, we as viewers are also implicated in this paradigm, for we occupy Stewart's perspective in this shot and as such become a component of the continually shifting allegiances of desire as well as voyeurs forced constantly to peep in on the film.

What happens in this scene, then, is that the viewer, through manipulative cinematic techniques, is led to believe that the story constitutes a romance between Ada and Stewart; after all, what could be more romantic than a man gazing at a photograph of his bride? The viewer responds to this seduction because she is trained as a filmgoer to identify these romantic clues early on. The story that ensues, however, is nothing like what she is led to expect. The viewer becomes disoriented, for having misread the clues in the expository sequence, she doesn't know how to proceed and begins to distrust both the film and the expectations she brought to it. Nothing seems to work, least of all the categories she has for identifying the film. Dogmatic labels such as woman's film and women's film become problematic and impossible to employ, and the viewer is thus forced to reconsider the structures that have borne these categories. The Piano, through the very subtle visual images it creates, makes the viewer aware of the problems of rigid dichotomies, especially the problematics of subject-object polarization and rigid distinctions between visuality and plot. This practice of playing with and subverting seemingly reified categories, of prohibiting the viewer from hanging her hat onto any one political message or aesthetic meaning, becomes Campion's particular brand of double discursivity. Rather than aligning itself to the polarized conceptions of "feminist" and "anti-feminist," and aesthetics and politics, Campion's film discourses in both directions simultaneously, causing profound discomfort in the viewer (and, by extension, in the feminist critic) and exposing her reliance on the same dichotomies of power that structure misogyny and oppression of women. (21) According to Jacobs, the goal of The Piano is thus not to endorse a particular political or aesthetic message, but rather, through its efforts to engender discomfort in the viewer it suspends, however momentarily, the oppressive mechanics of power, a process she terms the "punctual a-morality" of the film (780). This political silence on the part of the film, its willful refusal to "say" something, is precisely the element of discomfort that so troubles Gage, who demands that the film announce a particular political (feminist) program. Like Ada, Campion's film remains mute about its own moral subjectivity. However, in much the same way that Ada insists upon her radical will through silence, it is through its conscious suspension of categories and determinations, in its deliberate refusal to "say" something, that The Piano paradoxically finds its voice.

Notes

(1) Modleski continues: "To be specific, women were said to have found the film's central situation (the building up of the relationship between Ada and Baines) erotic whereas men found it exploitative: after all, the heroine comes to love her sexual extortionist, the man who has prostituted her, by bargaining for her favors and allowing her to 'earn back' the piano that was hers to begin with but that her husband had given to Baines in return for land. How, assuming the truth of the mythology, do we begin to understand women's particular investment in such a fantasy?"

(2) "Dana Polan has identified in the reception of the film a powerful discourse of passion that is divided between passionate hatred and passionate love: "The film divides spectators, pushing both its lovers and its detractors to take up relations to it that are quite emotional, quite affective" (53).

(3) According to Sue Gillett, by concentrating on the bargaining relationship between Ada and Baines, many critics have ignored the even greater problem of economic powerlessness in the film: "It is interesting that most people I have spoken to have been more shocked by the bargain between Ada and Baines than by that which orders Ada into her marriage. Yet Ada plays no part in negotiating the terms of the marriage contract: they are set before Ada arrives in New Zealand and before Stewart has even seen his betrothed" (283).

(4) Carolyn Gage terms the sexual relationship between Baines and Ada "sexual torture." Gillett discusses similar critical designations of the film as misogynist and depicting rape (282).

(5) For further discussion of the relationship between Campion's gender and her filmmaking see hooks, Margolis and Polan.

(6) Gage's unease with the apparent visual betrayal of feminist politics is an example of a larger critical response to Campion's films identified by Dana Polan in his recent monograph on Campion: "This tension between an engagingly vivid style and a subject matter that is resonant because one can identity [sic] with it runs through the early film experiments of Campion. Indeed, if the fans of The Piano find in it a perfect match of style and story, we could even argue that the film's detractors frequently operate from a sense of a gap between story and style: Carol Clover's essay on the film argue, for instance, that the gorgeous style works to distract attention away form what for her is the masochistic sexual politics (Ada as suffering martyr) of the film's story" (64).

(7) "Carol Jacobs calls the The Piano "a protest against brutal and artificial hierarchies" (757-758).

(8) According to Sue Gillett, Campion's film questions most traditional categories of gender: "The Piano interrogates the conventional expectations of femininity, masculinity and heterosexuality ... [it] does not present masculinity and femininity as polar opposites but rather, in the Derridean sense, as categories achieved through the repudiation of each other" (282, 286).

(9) Dana Polan terms the film's interaction between the poles of dominant and alternative practice a "third approach": "We need then to note the range of possible positions on women's desire and woman's cinema and to suggest that for many spectators The Piano is an extreme incarnation--for better or worse--of one or another of these positions. On the one hand, the film has been applauded for offering women a place where sentiment can gain full expression. The film has also been condemned for remaining at the level of sentiment and romantic escapism and for using these to excuse male domination. And interestingly, a third affirming approach uses Mulvey's approach to argue that The Piano actually participates in the elaboration of a new woman's cinema that is not in fact in thrall to dominant cinematic pleasure" (45).

(10) Dana Polan terms identifies this as characteristic of Campion's entire oeuvre: "Campion's films have the capacity of seduce viewers, yet also to disrupt that seduction by refusing to present unambiguously positive representations of human relations, in particular those of women to the social world around them" (167).

(11) Jacobs asserts that Ada's hands "form the veil between the mind and the desiring gaze of the other" (770).

(12) Alan Stone identifies Ada's "prison" as one of the major conflicts in the film: "The Piano has a classic deep structure of binary opposition, but Campion's myth overflows with passion as it employs Freudian erotics and archetypal symbols to explore a woman's imprisonment and freedom. The movie begins in shadows with what seem to be heavy indistinct bars: perhaps an abstract expressionist painting. We gradually realize that in this first image we are seeing a woman signify her own state of imprisonment. The bars ar her fingers held up in front of her eyes."

(13) Both Harvey Greenberg and Richard Alleva believe that the voice-over is the actual voice of Ada at the age of six years. I'm not sure I would characterize her voice as a "child's voice" (Alleva 27), but if this the viewer's impression, then it is further evidence of how Campion makes us believe we are experiencing a flashback to a six-year-old Ada. Ann Hardy, on the other hand, argues that the film intentionally misleads the viewer in this opening sequence with regard to the identities of Ada and Flora, adult and child (72).

(14) This line evokes Ada's economic powerlessness as she becomes an object of transaction between Stewart and her father (something that Gillett claims is ignored by many critics, who concentrate instead on the bargaining relationship between Ada and Baines; see note 3). In addition, the phrase "in his own country" foreshadows Stewart's obsession with boundaries, borders and ownership.

(15) Claudia Gorbman, in her analysis of film's music, identifies this opening sequence as "a series of complex chords around the key of A minor" played by a string orchestra (48).

(16) Gillett characterizes what I term a "mode of existence that refuses to draw this line" in spatial terms: "This space is not marked, in a racist fashion, as primitive. It is a space of difference, a between space, traversed by encounters between different cultures, different sexes, different languages, different desires. Within this space the piano is a charged symbol of these traversals, its music an expression of the passage to places which cannot be seized or owned" (285).

(17) According to Gillett, Stewart "rigidly erects boundaries between himself and others along the lines of race and sex. Unlike Baines he is unwilling or unable to leave his boundaries unprotected. The axe is his symbol. It cuts and divides. It helps him to mark out his territory, to build his fences, to deprive the Maori people of their land and Ada of her power. In other words, The Piano links sexual and racial structures of domination. Exploitation and dispossession (without collapsing them into each other), tracing each to the defensive and repressive work of phallic subjectivity" (284).

(18) For an excellent discussion of the movement of economic exchange in the film, see Gillett, 282-284.

(19) Baines is the first to speak in the scene (except for background conversation that we can't distinguish). Language, particularly oral communication, thus figures from the very beginning as crucial for Baines (he speaks two languages), but because he does not share a common form of mutual communication with Ada (he neither reads nor plays music), this would appear to problematize their relationship.

(20) Other good analyses of the function of Ada's photograph include those by Ann Hardy and Cyndy Hendershot.

(21) By problematizing the notion of distinct feminist and anti-feminist perspectives, The Piano not only questions the nature of these categories, but according to Dana Polan, also highlights the ways in which these designations are subtly negotiated in the contemporary cultural discourse in which the film is embedded: "Campion's film speaks to and from the political and socio-sexual splits of our historical moment, a complicated moment of feminism, of post-feminism, of re-masculinisation, of revision of masculinity in supposedly sensitive directions, and of the frequent blur of all of these together" (53). Here, as with Gage, Nolan has the film "speaking" as well; however in this case, the film speaks of its refusal to contain one particular ideological framework.

Works Cited

Alleva, Richard. "A Word of Dissent: This 'Piano' is Out of Tune." Commonweal 121.1 (1994): 27-28.

Campion, Jane. The Piano. New York: Hyperion, 1993.

Gage, Carolyn. "The Piano: Dangerous Music." Off Our Backs 24.2 (1994): 21.

Gillett, Sue. "Lips and fingers: Jane Campion's The Piano." Screen 36.3 (1995): 277-287.

Gorbman, Claudia. "Music in The Piano." Jane Campion's 'The Piano'. Ed. Harriet Margolis. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1999. 42-58.

Greenberg, Harvey. "'The Piano." Film Quarterly 47.3 (1994): 46-50.

Hardy, Ann. "The Last Patriarch." Jane Campion's "The Piano'. Ed. Harriet Margolis. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1999. 59-85.

Hendershot, Cyndy. "(Re)visioning the Gothic: Jane Campion's The Piano." Literature/Film Quarterly 26:2 (1998), 97-108.

hooks, bell. "Misogyny, gangsta rap, and The Piano." http://eserver.org/race/ misogyny.txt

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P, 1985.

Jacobs, Carol. "Playing Jane Campion's Piano, Politically." MLN 109 (1994): 754-785.

Kaufman, Cynthia. "Colonialism, Purity, and Resistance in The Piano." Socialist Review 24.1-2 (1994): 251-255.

Maio, Kathi. "The Key to The Piano." Ms 4.5 (1994): 84.

Margolis, Harriet. "'A Strange Heritage': From Colonization to Transformation?" Jane Campion's "The Piano'. Ed. Harriet Margolis. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1999.1-41.

Mayne, Judith. The Woman at the Keyhole. Feminism and Women's Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Modleski, Tania. "Axe the Piano Player." Old Wives and Other Women's Stories. New York: New York U P, 1998.

Polan, Dana. Jane Campion. London: British Film Institute, 2001.

Stone, Alan A. "The Piano." http://bostonrewview.mit.edu/ BR19.1/stone.html (1994).