The “incomparable” director Jane Campion calls a “deep master of film”
The works of New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion have been widely acclaimed from a critical perspective. Her 1993 period drama The Piano won the ‘Best Original Screenplay’ at the Academy Awards, and nearly 30 years later, Campion won another Oscar for her revisionist western drama The Power of the Dog, scooping the ‘Best Director’ gong.
The recognition of those two films alone makes Campion the only woman to have been nominated for an Academy Award for ‘Best Director’ on more than one occasion. Campion’s other films include An Angel at the Table, The Portrait of a Lady and Bright Star, and she is a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
During a feature with Criterion, Campion once named her ten favourite films, and in her selection, she gave special reverence to the Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, whose work is often considered some of the greatest of all time. Fellini’s catalogue includes 8½, La Dolce Vita and Fellini Satyricon, amongst many other classics.
“Fellini is a deep, deep master of film,” Campion said. “As time goes by, I adore him more and more.” She went on to describe her love for Fellini’s 1954 drama film La Strada, likening it to a classic poem. “La Strada is quite perfect,” she noted. “It is like ‘The Ancient Mariner.’”
“A haunting film for all time; one cannot insult innocence without a lifetime of cost,” Campion continued. “I don’t know why it is, but it is so, a spiritual truth that both Coleridge and Fellini knew and tell in their respective stories”. The film tells of a young woman who is purchased from her mother by a strongman who takes her on the road with him.
There’s a fluency in Fellini that Campion can’t help but admire, and she called him “the most fluent filmmaker of them all”. High praise indeed. “His shots and storytelling are so at ease and elegant,” she said. “It’s as if he’s thinking his shots through a camera in his mind and straight onto a screen.”
Campion also has a fond memory of Fellini’s funeral, where several fans of his paid their respects. “I went to his funeral in Rome in 1993, where people in the crammed huge Piazza Republica gathered to salute farewell,” she said. “It was also a time when no one wanted to see a Fellini film. Every year since then, his legacy appears more remarkable and more incomparable.”
