The Piano (1993 film, 121 mins, 1994 novel)

Plot

  1. Main plot: The triangular relationship among Ada, her husband Stewart, and her lover George
  2. Subplots:
  1. Mother and daughter relationship (Ada/Flora)
  2. Maoris and the Englishmen

George and Maoris

Stewart and Maoris

  1. Among English community

Stewart’s Uncle Campbell and Aunts Morag and Nessie

Others

Cast

  1. Ada: Holly Hunter
  2. George Baines: Havey Keitel
  3. Stewart: Sam Niel
  4. Flora: Anna Paquin

Credits

  1. Director and writer (based on 1994 novel co-written with Kate Pullinger) : Jane Campion
  2. Producers: Jane Campion et al.
  3. Music: Michael Nyman

Summary (by Joan Ellis)

In The Piano, Jane Campion transports the audience to another world and time immediately and with absolute precision. The gray of her New Zealand sea and sky is grayer, grander, more forbidding than our experience of it elsewhere. The stark image of the piano standing in the swirling surf will endure. Next to the piano, waiting, sit Ada and her 9 year old daughter, Flora, an arranged family for Stewart, a lonely Englishman working his land among the Maori in the New Zealand bush of the 19th century. Borne through the surf by canoes from their ship, they spend the night under the hoop of her skirt, half a world away from their native Scotland and without a notion of what may await them.

What awaits them is Stewart who arrives with a band of Maori bearers and his roughly silent neighbor, Baines. The piano is too heavy, Stewart says. It will stay on the beach. Ada, who hasn't spoken a word since she was six, still manages to let the intractable Stewart know her rage. Silence is no indicator of this woman's power. It is Baines who rescues the piano, Ada's voice for all she feels.

Ada can earn her piano back, Baines tells her, by coming to his house to give him lessons. One visit for every key, he says; only the black keys, she replies. And so this improbable pair explores the passion unleashed in both of them while Stewart stands by, submerged in emotion he has never felt before.

This is an extraordinary exploration of passion and betrayal as it explodes in the remote bush, removed from the eyes of conventional society, but judged with brutal intensity by the players themselves. The cast is beyond praise in conveying Campion's vision of a woman who speaks through her music to the two men who want her. Without words to distract us, we inhabit Ada's soul.

The Director: Jane Campion

  1. Life
  1. Jane Campion was born in Wellington, New Zealand.
  2. She graduated in Anthropology from Victoria University of her birthtown in 1975 and with a painting major at the Sydney College of the Arts in 1979.
  3. She started at the movies in the early eighties at the Australian School of Film and Television.
  1. Cinematic achievements
  1. Her first plays were short films, Sweetie (1989), which earned several international awards.
  2. In 1990 her second film, An Angel At My Table - a dramatization based on the biographies of Janet Frame - won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival
  3. The Piano (1993)

An anthropological excursion into the 19th century (the influence of Levi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked)

Influenced by Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Height

African Queeen

  1. The Portrait of a Lady (1996)
  2. Tango

Setting

  1. Ada’s native Scotland in the 19th Victorian tradition—an old world
  2. New Zealand (New England’s South Island in the novel)—“a Gothic exploration of the romantic impulses”—a new world
  1. Beach
  2. Sea

Between life and death

“To return to the sea” is “to return to the mother,” that is to die

  1. Forest

The symbolic meaning:

  1. The female principle of the Great Mother as opposed to the sun’s power and as symbol of the earth
  2. A symbol of the unconscious whose tendency is to devour of obscure the reason
  3. Harboring all kinds of dangers and demons, enemies and diseases

The forest scenes*

  1. Houses

Stewart’s hut

George’s cottage

Church

  1. Nelson (a town)

Character (Allegorical figures)

  1. Ada MaGrath (a mail-order bride and a middle class widow)
  2. A talented pianist who has a habit of sleepwalking (somnambulism)
  3. A mute woman who has a stubborn dark talent (a strong will)
  4. A repressed Victorian woman who eventually finds her true love
  5. Electra Complex and her resurrection
  6. Her rejection to be treated as a thing by bargaining with her own body with a maneuvering way to show her way of fighting the room of her own in the Victorian society

Bargaining for the black key with Baines

While exposing her body step by step, she protests in a way that Baines knows her mental unwillingness even she agrees to show her leg, arm, finally her whole body.

“A woman is not a woman in nature but by degrees”—The Hours

  1. Alisdair Stewart
  1. A convention English man who is the antithesis to the Maoris
  2. A man who knows how to measure things and persons by money
  3. A jealous husband who “dried up balls” (impotent man destined to be a cuckold)
  4. Avoyeur who can’t love
  1. George Baines (a man with Maori symbols etched on his face)—Stewart’s overseer and neighbor
  1. The antithesis of Ada: a man without education, without manners, and without restraints
  2. A Englishman who knows and respects the tradition of Maoris
  3. A man who has an ex-wife in Britain named Elizabeth
  4. A man who knows how to love
  5. A man prefers to stay a low position
  6. The imaginary father; the father-mother conglomerate)
  7. Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre
  1. Flora
  2. An illegitimate child whose father is a piano teacher who never appears in the film but in the novel as Delwar Haussler
  3. Angel-like and demon-like at the same time
  4. An interpreter between her mother, Ada, and outside world
  5. A child who has the gift of telling imaginary stories, especially about her parents
  6. A girl who once betrays her own mother for the sake of possession of her mother
  7. A baby Jesus in the Christmas play
  1. The trinity: Piano (mother of flesh: Piano; Flora: daughter, and Ada: the cultural mother)
  1. The conventional English Community: Campbell, Morag, Nessie
  1. The primitive Maoris: Chief Nihe, leader Hone, Tahu

Theme

  1. Capitalism
  1. commercialization and exploitation

The process of seduction (The deal between Ada and George)

  1. Bargaining the black keys
  2. Lifting the skirt
  3. Showing up the arm
  4. Lying down beside me
  5. Naked
  6. Returning the piano
  1. the primitive and the civilized
  1. Sexual politics
  1. marriage institution (arranged marriage) and love
  2. voice and silence (female will)—imprisonment and freedom
  3. Fetishism

Ada: the piano (black keys and ivory keys), the sea, wedding dress

George: Ada’s clothes (jacket外套, bodice緊身胸衣, corset緊身上衣, pantaloon窄褲, hoops鐵環, stocking, crinoline cage網狀的籠子); Ada’s body (neck, arm. . .)

Stewart: land, axe, Ada’s index finger, photo

Flora: wings, dog Flynn, ponny Gabriel (in the novel)

  1. Voyeurism

George

Stewart

Flora

  1. betrayal and love

mother and daughter (symbiosis)

a libidinal bond that shuts everyone else out

wife and husband: sado-masochistic domination with the unwilling female victim

friends and traders

Metaphor

  1. Piano with Ivory keys (symbol of love) and Black keys (symbol of trading)*:
  2. Beach
  3. a resort
  4. a place which can bring you at easiness
  5. a giant seahorse molded from the sand and seashells—clearly reminiscent of Maori designs
  1. Sea
  1. mysterious place inspired with the artistic sublimation
  2. death principle; something unknown
  1. Bush: entanglement; chaos, mother principle (a womb)
  2. Mud: downfall
  3. Hut: place of love and violence
  4. Axe: a tool of violence and castration
  5. Wings: angel or demon
  6. Land: place for the ancestor or place to bargain
  7. Finger—piano key—metal finger: a sacrifice of love and creation
  8. The mirror scenes
  9. Christmas play
  10. Bluebeard: a killer who murders a lot of wives
  11. Animals: dog, (pony and whale in the novel)—nature
  12. Houses: mission house; huts
  13. Storm: something bad
  14. Voice and silence
  15. Voyeurs: Stewart and Flora
  16. The missing buttons

Alan Stone’s Review

The Piano by Alan A. Stone

Campion as Mythmaker

The Piano is simultaneously connected to these earlier films and a total departure from them. Sweetie and Angel at My Table each featured an obviously disturbed woman; so does The Piano. But the women in those films were certifiably deranged, while the heroine of The Piano is mysteriously different. She is mute, but her silence is willed, rather than a symptom of conventional madness. Here, Campion creates a timeless aesthetic truth of her own, rather than capturing a new slice of social reality. The characters in The Piano are allegorical figures, not ethnographic case histories. Campion still has an anthropological signature, but this time it is the anthropologist as expounder of myths and fables. The result is an instant classic. Umberto Eco has written that cult movies must be divisible into pieces, each strong enough to stand alone, clearly linked to earlier texts, and a source of instant associations that make the pieces unforgettable. The Piano may not become a cult film but it meets Eco's criteria. Each scene is powerful enough in its images to impress itself on our mind's eye, and each resonates in our conscious memory and instantly connects with our unconscious archetypes. If it is not a cult film, it takes its place with other gothic tales that haunt our memory.

Wuthering Heights has been identified as the major literary inspiration for the story. But there are many other influences -- among them, African Queen. Where Wuthering Heights and African Queen left all the sex to the imagination, however, The Piano insists on the central role in the narrative of explicit, if not graphic, sexuality. We see in this insistent sexuality the anthropologist's reading of Freud. The Piano's mood is gothic, its temporal context is Victorian, the scene is New Zealand, but its sexual overtones are decidedly Freudian (including that brutal axe scene). As a whole generation of feminists has recognized, Freud misconstrued almost everything about female sexuality, but he did see more clearly than anyone else the intimate connections between physical/moral revulsion and sexual attraction. What is most disgusting is very close to what is most exciting in all its polymorphous variations: that is the secret of the bedroom that everyone knows and almost no one acknowledges. And it is the theme of The Piano, elaborately played out in High Gothic. Campion's movie brings her audience back to the romantic mystification of sexuality as the unpredictable and dangerous spark that sets the fire of love.

But none of these derivations really captures what is most striking in Campion's directorial signature. Cultural anthropologists influenced by Levi-Strauss have produced a fascinating literature interpreting myth, folklore, fables, sacred texts, and social structures. One of Levi-Strauss's own great essays reinterpreted the Oedipus myth as an attempt to understand the mystery of human conception. There, as in his account of The Raw and the Cooked, he found the deep structure in binary oppositions of concepts or terms. The myth works toward a mediation or solution in a quasi-logical dialectic. But the rules are elusive and decoding the deep structure of myths is usually a desiccating process. It is like the molecular biologist reducing the myriad works of nature to four bases in endless variation on a double helix. The discovery process inspires awe but the bases do not.

Campion has turned this process of interpretation on its head. Inspired by the skeleton, she has put flesh on the bones. 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 are her fingers held up in front of her eyes. Campion, the artist/anthropologist is literally showing us the world view of her heroine Ada (Holly Hunter) through her heroine's own eyes. The camera looks out through Ada's imprisoned gaze, and the audience sees a work of art. That consolidation -- individual perspective transformed into artistic vision -- is the hallmark of Jane Campion's achievement in The Piano. Ada spreads the fingers of her prison and the first distinguishable images emerge, still dark and obscure like a scene from a dimly remembered dream. Ada's voice-over establishes the basic premise of the plot: as a young girl she vowed never to speak and with a will of iron has persevered. What we are hearing, she tells us, is not her speaking voice but the self-imprisoned voice that sounds inside her mind.

Ada's iron will is at times as mysteriously other to her as it is to us. She is possessed by this other will, as if by an evil incubus that periodically descends on sleeping women and uses them. In this curious doubled quality of Ada's psyche -- free will and imprisoning will -- we have The Piano's guiding binary opposition. Ada has an illegitimate daughter, Flora, who understands her mother's sign language and speaks for her, mediating her mother's relationships to the men in her life. Through most of the film we have to wait out the doubled dialogue, sign language and then speech. Flora also doubles her mother's emotions, resonates to her mood and appearance. Campion makes the point pictorially by having this symbiotic mother and daughter tilt their heads in the same way at the same time. And Flora, like her mother, is no ordinary human being. She is a kind of spirit, disturbingly precocious and surprisingly capable of good and evil. She will determine her mother's fate.

We learn from the voice-over that Ada has been given in an arranged marriage to a man she has never met and is being sent out to him in New Zealand. Played against this portentous plot introduction, Flora comes crashing down the long hall of a Scottish country house on 19th-century roller skates. She will be a spirit of uncontrolled exuberance, a perfect complement to the silent fury of her mother who expresses her passions only through her beloved piano.

Campion quickly establishes all the premises for her storytelling. There is not an unnecessary moment in the film and even the most extraordinary visual scenes are not prolonged. And she has somehow inspired her actors to the same discipline. Holly Hunter and Harvey Keitel are remarkable as Ada and Baines, as is Sam Neil in the difficult part of the strange and insensitive husband, Stewart; and Anna Paquin gives a brilliant performance as the spirit/daughter. The first darkened images of the film are dream-like, and so in different ways are all the scenes that follow. Campion has put these dreams together like pearls on a string, except that each of her pearls is distinct and memorable. Nothing in her earlier work prepared us for the power and inventive beauty of The Piano's cinematography. Campion captures the trip from Scotland to New Zealand in one shimmering shot of a dory seen from beneath the water. Mother and daughter dressed in black are carried to the beach on the shoulders of sailors. They are small and fragile compared to the men and all the human figures are insignificant against the churning surf of New Zealand. Campion's surf is supernatural in its primeval power and her cinematography shows us another world which in its primitive magnificence reminds us of our own insignificance. When Ada and Flora are set down on the strand with all of their belongings, it is difficult to believe these delicate Victorian creatures will survive.

The camera pans the beach and we briefly see Flora bent over and vomiting: a parsimonious signifier of their wretched voyage and a typical Campion "ugly" touch. The camera pans to a large collection of packaged possessions spread out along the beach. And there in all its real and symbolic weight, against the background of the massive crashing waves, sits Ada's prized possession, her crated piano. The artifacts of Victorian civilization stranded on the antipodal beach and their owners dressed in elaborate layers of clothing seem ominously out of place. This is the meeting place of two worlds and mother and daughter are chattel sold from one to the other. Ada and Flora, out of Scotland and far from ordinary, are, with the other British émigrés, the anthropological specimens -- the alien others -- of Campion's film. The Maoris appear in this film not as exotic objects of study but as a Greek chorus and contrast; the clarity of their naive innocence is testimony to the civilized eccentricity of the white folks.