The Piano (1993) is an Academy Award winning film by Jane Campion, revolving around a woman who refuses to speak and only communicate through playing her piano. The woman, Ada, is an unwed mother, and is married off to a New Zealand frontiersman Alistair Stewart. Alongside her daughter, Flora, she is forced to move to the rough countryside of New Zealand, amongst white settlers and New Zealand’s aboriginal people, the Maori. While she basically wants nothing to do with her new husband, Ada eventually winds up having an affair with another settler Baines, another white settler who has chosen to integrate himself into the Maori people for many years. The two men, Stewart and Baines, both seem to represent opposite spectrums of Ada’s life: Stewart representing the repressive patriarchy which continues to control her life and Baines representing jouissance or female pleasure, and her path to freedom and fully exploring her passion for life. The beautiful film portrays Ada’s torment, struggle and passion for life through her haunting piano playing, and ultimately explores the one of the central themes of feminism and Women’s Studies—the struggle of women under the confines of patriarchy.
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After taking a Feminism and Film course in the fall, I've gained a new appreciation for, not just simply movies from a feminist point of view, but even films with challenging female protagonists and female filmmakers. I felt this film was a really challenging film, especially with its focus of the life of Ada's character, who is essentially mute. She seems to represent the lack of voice women have within Western society with her voicelessness, yet presents herself as a very strong character. She doesn't let her husband control her life, and is even a fairly challenging figure sexually--she has had a child out of wedlock and has an affair with Baines despite her marital status. I really admired Ada's agency - despite the repressive conditions of her existence, she still manages to "have her voice heard," so to speak.
It was also fascinating to see the interconnection of music and film within The Piano. Music seems to play a very important role in feminist films. Orlando (1992) has become one of my favorite films since my first encounter with it during the Feminism and Film class. The film, based on a Virginia Woolf novel by the same name, follows a seemingly unaging and immortal character's transformation from being a man to becoming a woman, through the Victorian era to the present. Orlando was directed by Sally Potter, who also earns extra credit as a composer of many of the songs in the film. When thinking about music and gender, it must be important to these female filmmakers to have full control over the soundtrack of their films. Music obviously fills an important role within The Piano; it made me reflect back on my choice of music for my final project for Feminism and Film.
***
After taking a Feminism and Film course in the fall, I've gained a new appreciation for, not just simply movies from a feminist point of view, but even films with challenging female protagonists and female filmmakers. I felt this film was a really challenging film, especially with its focus of the life of Ada's character, who is essentially mute. She seems to represent the lack of voice women have within Western society with her voicelessness, yet presents herself as a very strong character. She doesn't let her husband control her life, and is even a fairly challenging figure sexually--she has had a child out of wedlock and has an affair with Baines despite her marital status. I really admired Ada's agency - despite the repressive conditions of her existence, she still manages to "have her voice heard," so to speak.
It was also fascinating to see the interconnection of music and film within The Piano. Music seems to play a very important role in feminist films. Orlando (1992) has become one of my favorite films since my first encounter with it during the Feminism and Film class. The film, based on a Virginia Woolf novel by the same name, follows a seemingly unaging and immortal character's transformation from being a man to becoming a woman, through the Victorian era to the present. Orlando was directed by Sally Potter, who also earns extra credit as a composer of many of the songs in the film. When thinking about music and gender, it must be important to these female filmmakers to have full control over the soundtrack of their films. Music obviously fills an important role within The Piano; it made me reflect back on my choice of music for my final project for Feminism and Film.
For a final project, we were required to experience filmmaking firsthand and create our own movie. Inspired by movies such as Metropolis (1927) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, I filmed a scene which depicts a female rebel-leader who has been revived to work for a repressive King, against her initial cause. I used music from Classical Soviet composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev for the soundtrack, to attempt to depict the repressive regime of a tyrant king. It is really interesting to think of music as 'gendered' and how we associate different genres of music and different kinds of music to men and women. Ultimately these connotations are socially constructed - it is completely arbitrary how tyrannical Classical music would represent a tyrannical male figure better than music deemed 'feminine.' Should we continue relying on seperate forms of music in identifying female and male characters within film? I hope filmmakers continue to explore different kinds of music within their films, rather than relying on traditional forms of "gendered" music.
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