Piano Lessons

Jan Campion's "The Piano" achieved critical acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993 and its world-wide box office success was followed up by winning three Academy Awards. As a result of these successes there was renewed global interest in the Australian and New Zealand film industries and their products. "Piano Lessons" is a provocative collection of essays examining the critically acclaimed film "The Piano" from a range of differing perspectives. An assembly of international academics, drawn from film and cultural studies disciplines, offers a unique study of a major Australian film. It encapsulates the vision of the film through diverse approaches - auteurist, feminist, psychoanalytic, post-colonial, melodrama and romance - as a major cinematic achievement and as a complex and intriguing cultural product. The film attracted wide discussion from its critics and its audience. Campion's quirky cinematic eye gave us a teacup and a wedding veil that became images representative of a transported imperial culture and a piano that shifted from monstrous beauty to an emblem of death.
Interesting and authoritative analyses of the film's textual narrative and representational strategies produce an informative rationale.