Romanticizing Colonialism: Power and Pleasure in Jane Campion's The Piano

Abstract

This article explores how Jane Campion's award-winning 1993 film, The Piano, succeeds in transposing nineteenth-century sex-and-race-bound colonial structures of meaning onto a colonialist narrative of twentieth-century romance, and examines the underlying political implications of that transposition. It argues that, through the use of filmic representations that produce both cultural and historical "knowledge," the film is inherently engaged in a politics of the relations of power. Through close textual analysis, the article demonstrates that through its "visible" narrative and dialogue and the "invisible" film vocabulary of miseen- scene, camera angle, shot, and editing technique, the film both emerges from and continues to engage in the nineteenth-century colonial system's ideological project of sustaining white, western, male-dominant global economic and political superiority. Campion's attempt to mask her film's underlying significating formalism in a narrative of romantic passion set in an ahistorical fantasy world inadequately disguises her authorization of a gendered, racialized, and distinctly contemporary colonialist politics. The article ends by calling for cultural critics to more vigorously analyze the interlocking structures of racism and sexism in other recent Euro-Arnerican films about the colonial era.