Join us for a virtual edition of Book + Film Club! Deadline to register is May 6.

Book: The Piano and Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema

Film: The Piano (directed by Jane Campion, 1993)

Books will be shipped to participants. Participants will watch the film on their own and meet up for a discussion of the book and film via Zoom on Wednesday, May 27 at 7 PM.

An intro to the director and the film:

Jane Campion has always been one of the most vocal challengers of cinema’s white, straight male default, in front of the camera as well as behind it. Her work celebrates and studies multi-faceted, interesting and, often, deeply flawed women, challenging our notion of femininity in the process. Both as writer and director, Campion doesn’t shy away from the brutality of the female experience but, even though her protagonists are often under extreme duress, they are never victims, instead taking their fates firmly into their own hands.

In The Piano, Holly Hunter plays Ava, a mute woman sent to 1850s New Zealand for an arranged marriage, accompanied by her young daughter. Upon their arrival, forester Baines (Harvey Keitel) buys her piano and barters it back to her, key by key, for increasingly intimate favours.

In lesser hands this may have been the uncomfortable exploitation of a vulnerable woman, but Campion’s masterful screenplay and sensitive direction, matched by stunning performances – not least Hunter, who expresses Ava’s innate strength of character without saying a word – and Michael Nyman’s evocative piano score turns this into a haunting and tender love story. The film went on to achieve US box office of more than $40m and garnered multiple awards (out of eight Oscar nominations, it won three awards: best actress, best supporting actress and best screenplay). The Piano propelled Campion into the history books as the first (and, at the time of writing, only) woman to win the Cannes Palme d’Or.

Support for Sidewalk’s educational programs comes from Wind Creek Hospitality and the Book & Film Club is generously funded by the Alabama State Council on the Arts.