from NWSA Journal Volume 15, Number 1

The Representation of the Indigenous Other in Daughters of the Dust and The Piano

CAROLINE BROWN

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This article examines two films, Daughters of the Dust , by Julie Dash, and The Piano , by Jane Campion. While both are subversive tales that rely on unconventional narrative techniques to examine and challenge female subordination and ethnocentric ideological systems, they are simultaneously "foundational" epics that mythologize this subordination even as they attempt to resist it. Key to this process is each film's reliance on native Others to both create and sustain a space of individuality and revolt for the female protagonist. Despite significant differences in the structure and perspective of each production, in both, the indigenous characters are silenced in order to permit non-native women the right to speak and affirm themselves and their embattled identities. This article analyzes both the tensions and forms of novel representation arising from this process.

Keywords: aesthetics / African American / film / Maori / Native American / Polynesian / representation / women directors

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combines spectacle and narrative.

--Laura Mulvey (2000, 39–40)

(1)

In the language of traditional feminist film theory the cinematic gaze, conventionally gendered male, consumes the passive female image. As pointed out by Laura Mulvey, this process takes place on two levels: the woman as "erotic object" for both the other characters in the film and the audience itself. The hero pursues and takes possession of the eroticized female, the object of his desire, whether or not the plot is a conventional romance. She is not a presence in and of herself but both an extension and negation of the hero, an idealized figure who signifies his fate. Not only does the very act of looking thus cause the audience to identify with the hero, but the filmmaker is all too often himself a male.

This paradigm is necessarily made problematic when inserting issues related to race into ongoing questions revolving around gender and power. Most often, racial constructions, like those of the sexual, are translated in terms of those who are typically identified as the possessors of power: whites and men, usually white men, who invented and are the gatekeepers of what we have come to know as the film industry. Yet, there are presently a greater diversity of filmmakers than ever before, giving voice to new perspectives and tales. This has certainly been the case with the many women directors, who bring their own distinct and often radically unconventional visions and narrative techniques to the cinematic world. Nevertheless, creating spaces of greater inclusion and sites of resistance can be an extremely complicated and contradictory undertaking. Even as there is a struggle to render new realities on the silver screen, realities diverse, complex, and magical, to challenge the norm and subvert previous representations, there remains the nagging question of how to enact a truly inclusive and egalitarian diversity. Basically, who will speak for whom and how? Or, as posited by Gayatri Spivak: who truly speaks for the subaltern (1988)? What happens when those who have traditionally been marginalized seize the word, when they write the screenplays and direct the films, when they participate in the redistribution of power symbolized by film production? Can they do greater justice to the representation of themselves and their own Others? In fact, who now becomes the Other? Must there be one? When Spivak puts forth that question, she suggests the many levels of hegemony that intersect to silence the marginalized as well as the mutability of how power is distributed in order to maintain itself. Does that then signify that the process itself is an impossible undertaking and marginalization its inevitable byproduct?

Two films by women that were released within the last decade, Daughters of the Dust, directed by Julie Dash (1992), and The Piano, directed by Jane Campion (1993), manifest this particular dilemma. While both are subversive tales that rely on unorthodox narrative techniques to examine and challenge female subordination and ethnocentric ideological systems, they are simultaneously foundational epics that mythologize this subordination even as they attempt to resist it, engaging in acts of what I would call sentimental progressivism.1 Referring to a return to the past as a point of narrative reference in contemporary films, sentimental progressivism contains at its core the complementary tension of nostalgia and radical transformation. By presenting the past from the comfort allowed by a late twentieth-century perspective, each film simultaneously sentimentalizes that past while engaging in its critique and revision. What results is an idealized vision of how things could have been based on the peculiar mélange of historical fact, Victorian sentimental conventions, the active revisionism of a politically progressive agenda, and a highly individualized enactment of a feminist sensibility.

In many respects, Daughters of the Dust and The Piano could not be more disparate films: the former, community focused and womanist, revolves around an ensemble cast of characters who share the dual disenfranchisement of the racial and gender vulnerability experienced by African American women in the land of their birth. The latter is propelled by the image of the independent and rebellious femininity of a lone white woman in a hostile, misogynistic, and alienating foreign culture. Yet, structurally, both films rely on very specific cinematic conventions. Both could easily be labeled women's films. Period dramas, they are set in the past, relying on the twin props of an exotic locale and geographic isolation to establish a romanticized distance. This distance is further enabled by the lush cinematography of soft focus camera work and a filtered lens; beautifully intricate Victorian/Edwardian wardrobes and elaborate hairstyles; and a charged love story at the center of each. Yet, each is mobilized by a distinctly modern sensibility that destabilizes the carefully scripted codes of Hollywood gender and racial expectations. Both films rotate around a multi-ethnic cast of characters. Furthermore, women are the agents in each film. They are the protagonists who provide narrative focus, whose conflicts propel the action, and whose strong personalities compel audience attention. However, key to this process is each film's reliance on native Others to both create and sustain a space of individuality and revolt for the female protagonist. Despite significant differences in the structure and perspective of each production, in both, the indigenous characters are silenced in order to permit non-native women the right to speak and affirm themselves and their embattled identities. These native characters, American Indian and Polynesian, function in a manner typical of female--often nonwhite--characters in both mainstream Hollywood and independent films.2 In the process of serving to symbolically liberate the female character from the grip of a type of cultural silence, their own is reiterated. There is a correlation between these cinematic depictions and Aihwa Ong's observation regarding those of the scholarly sort: "For the privilege of making cultural judgements which see their way into print, feminists often speak without reducing the silence of the cultural Other" (1988, 82). What is provocative here is the reliance on specific forms of representation for these culturally liminal characters, representations that twist the balance of racial and gender expectations within the larger film while cleverly borrowing those same expectations in the construction of these cultural Others, regardless of the race of the director. Sites of tension are thus created that reproduce a dynamic similar to what occurs in standard movie fare in relation to the eroticized female. Yet, it is a process more complex than a simple binary opposition. There are truly novel depictions being offered in these films; in addition, many stock representations are being consciously dismantled. What is occurring on one level is the inevitable tension implicit in most transformative processes, as Shari Huhndorf suggests in her own mapping of these cultural struggles:

While culture never lies outside the realm of social domination and coercion, its function cannot be completely determined by these dynamics. Because culture operates as "a force field of relations shaped, precisely by these contradictory [political] pressures and tendencies," struggles over cultural meanings comprise part of broader struggles for power in society. Popular culture in particular is characterized by a "double movement of containment and resistance." This conception of culture dictates that critics look for multiple and contradictory meanings that articulate social struggles. It also compels us to recognize subordinated groups as cultural and political agents rather than simply as victims. (2001, 13)

I believe that the particular tension around the indigenous characters is tied to the struggles taking place in many Western societies as identity is contested and redefined by those who traditionally have not had access to a larger cultural forum, in this case women. An intriguing shift results: in both films the process of looking recorded within the Laura Mulvey excerpt is fundamentally destabilized, becoming a part of the push and pull of containment and resistance (2000). Furthermore, I would argue that while the female becomes the subject and the male the object, it is far from a neat reversal. Rather, the very experience of looking is charged with pressures related to overdetermined gender, sex, and racial expectations, expectations the directors are unable to simply elide and which are thus reincorporated within the cinematic narrative. In intervening in this discourse, I am working to examine the complexity of any process of representational resistance when the very vocabulary of representation often borrows from specific types of images, messages, and conventions that inform larger cultural systems. I will reveal how this process is both specific to race, culture, and gender, and how it transcends it. I will also question whether an artist can work within such conventions without reinscribing them and whether other forms of representation are possible.

(2)

Daughters of the Dust, set in 1902 and released in 1992, unwinds in the rural Gullah communities on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. It is narrated by the unborn daughter of two of the film's protagonists, Eli and Eula, a young married couple. Traumatized by the rape of the now pregnant wife by a man, presumably white, she refuses to identify, the newlyweds argue over whether to leave the islands with the exodus of a handful of fellow community members for the promise of the urban North. What results is an exploration of the tensions in an African American community experiencing the dramatic change of migration even as they deal with racism, class tensions, gender conflicts, and the legacy of slavery. Toni Cade Bambara calls Daughters of the Dust oppositional cinema that challenges the normative forms and values of contemporary filmmaking (Dash with Bambara and hooks 1992). Joel Brouwer writes that the film "has claimed a new center, historically, artistically, and economically" (1995, 15). He argues that

Historically, [Dash] has reconfigured the history of a marginalized people . . . by foregrounding the experiences of the Gullah, a group marginalized within the African American community. Artistically, she has employed an African narrative technique to break down the expectation that a story must be told with a single voice. . . . In the production and distribution of the film, she has confounded the normal expectations of the hegemonic Hollywood system and forced the system to recognize (albeit grudgingly and temporarily) the legitimacy of her subject and her artistic method, and the existence of her audience. (15)

This takes on new meaning in examining the strategies that Dash used to get the film made, including contracting with public television and working with a small distribution company that marketed Daughters of the Dust as a foreign film.3 In her essay "The Black South in Contemporary Film," Jacquie Jones explores some of the cinematic strategies that Dash relies on to mobilize her work:

Finally, on the screen, African American life is freed from the urban, from the cotton picking, from the tragic integrationist ladder-climbing. Here, in the unlikely arena of American film, the complexity and shaded histories of Black women's lives take center stage. There are no whores or maids in this film. No acquiescent slaves. No white people. Instead, Daughters of the Dust offers an historical moment in African American culture, plain and imperfect, blended with such subtle charm, such careful technique that the preparation of food and a stroll along the beach become overwhelming in their beauty. And Dash has conceded that the film does have a certain preoccupation with beauty. Cinematographer Arthur Jafa holds close-ups far longer than is customary, not only allowing the audience to contemplate the specific grace of his subjects but also forcing viewers into intimate proximity with each one. The entire film . . . allows very little space for those who are not Black and not women. (1993, 19)

As all three argue, Dash's approach is an unusual one. The political is cloaked within the lyricism of cinematography that celebrates the beauty of the land and its haunting relationship to the sea, the sustenance offered by prosaic rituals, and the elegance of the black body. The black body, and the black female body in particular, so commonly maligned in mainstream cinematic encounters, portrayed as ugly and undesirable, viewed as asexual or hypersexual, mutilated, satirized, sensationalized or simply ignored, becomes an object of an awed and adoring gaze. While the viewer is necessarily external to the unwinding narrative, there is an intimacy established, as Jones points out, and he or she is allowed to be privy to the secrets of the African Americans, male but particularly female, who interact within this familiar yet exotic community. In accomplishing this, Dash explains that

it's not just how the scenes are set up. We could get more specific and say it's the way the cameras are placed . . . , the closeness. Being inside the group rather than outside, as a spectator, outside looking in. We're inside; we're right in there. We're listening to intimate conversation between the women, while usually it's the men we hear talking and the women kind of walk by in the background. This time we overhear the women. So it's all from the point of view of a woman--about the women--and the men are kind of just on the periphery. (Dash with Bambara and hooks 1992, 33)

As mentioned by both Dash and Jones, there is truly little space reserved in the narrative for those who are not black and/or female. Dash herself has stated that she wanted to privilege "black women first, the black community second, and white women third. . . . And everyone else after that" (40). Subsequently, the gaze is a black female gaze. This is particularly resonant in light of the marginalization experienced by blacks on all levels in the American film industry. It is here, however, that I would like to examine the contradiction that is represented by positioning the indigenous Other within the film and this co-optation in ways that I perceive as both conventional and innovative.

Located on the periphery of the ensemble cast and community drama, Saint Julian Last Child, "Son of the Cherokee Nation," is objectified on several levels: as a male character by a female filmmaker; as a non-black by an African American; as an indigenous American by a culture asserting its own reconstituted yet distinctively foreign slave heritage. Within this process, what is perhaps most disarming and later disconcerting about Saint Julian is how profoundly yet conventionally seductive he is. Through the camera's lens, he becomes the feminized male, enacting a symbolic cross-dressing that relies on reified images similar to those of the traditional African American female lead: his hair is long and silken; his skin a caramel; his features are filtered to a blur of perfection; most suspiciously, like the ordinarily female object of desire, he himself never talks. Rather he is spoken for. On the one occasion when we have access to his thoughts, it is through Iona, the young Geechee woman he loves, who reads his letter aloud to her female relatives:

with the greatest respect for yourself and the Peazant family I beg that you stay by my side here on this island. Please do not leave me on this flood of migration. I feel that if I lose you I will lose myself. Consider the stories we share of growing up together. We are the young, the eager up from slavery. Eager to learn a trade, eager to live a better life for ourselves and our children who will follow. Our love is a very precious, very fragile flowering of our most innocent childhood association. . . . We must call out to higher forces that they may guide us. Iona, as I walk toward the future with your hand embracing mine everything seems new and . . . possible. (Dash 1992)

Captured from a distance, he becomes a romanticized ideal: Saint Julian sitting in a tree gazing at the sky; Saint Julian working with the other men in the fields; Saint Julian riding off into the distance with Iona on horseback as Iona's protesting mother and relatives sail toward the supposed progress of the North. It is impossible either to disregard Saint Julian's overwhelming silence in so oral a film, or his lack of place in this close-knit family drama. Saint Julian wordlessly floats. The details of his family and early life, his own ancestry and specific connection to Iona remain unknown. He comes to symbolize the rustic past, unchanging and bucolic, although ironically associated with African American slavery and Native American dispossession. What thus occurs is that he and Iona are able to flee the pressures of migration and urbanization. Yet the film, while powerful and moving, becomes trapped in an agrarian landscape, at once hopelessly beautiful and static, that signals this past but refuses to more deeply engage it.

Daughters of the Dust is an important intervention in this past in that it acknowledges the complexity of African American culture and identity in a medium which is often loathe to do so. A significant aspect of this history is the ongoing and complex interactions among the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Africans in their midst. A multiplicity of cultural exchanges has occurred, influencing food, music, and social organization and affiliation. In the continental United States, maroons--runaway slaves--were often assisted by various Native American communities, most notably the Seminoles of Florida. Many African Americans and Native Americans share bloodlines and intersecting histories of triumph and oppression, from the eastern seaboard to the founding of California itself.4 Yet, there is a more troubling side to this history. Blacks and American Indians have often been played off each other. Buffalo soldiers were used to suppress Indian political uprising and rebellion and Native Americans worked as slave trackers. In fact, members of the Cherokee nation, before their expulsion from the verdant lands of the Southeast, were often slave owners themselves; African Americans were excluded from participation in tribal politics; and there were violent divisions within the larger community related to power struggles and divided loyalties about the Civil War.5

Saint Julian's silence is indicative of the role played by Native American culture in the minds of many Americans--and it is a perspective that transcends race--as individuals not readily identified as Native American proudly proclaim: "My great-grandmother was a Cherokee" or, "We have some Indian blood." This often-unnamed ancestor becomes a site of cultural reclamation, the process through which American authenticity is appropriated and justified. As Shari Huhndorf writes in Going Native: "Indians, . . . safely 'vanishing,' began to provide the symbols and myths upon which white Americans created a sense of historical authenticity, a 'real' national identity which had been lacking in the adolescent colonial culture" (2001, 22). Thus, one is allowed access to the exotic while never having to experience the complexities of claiming and working through that identity. However, it is not a process limited to white Americans. Saint Julian becomes the ultimate manifestation of this co-optation.

I do not want to equate white co-optation, which suggests institutional power, with Dash's work of political and artistic resistance. But I do think it important to show how ideologies and approaches overlap without the necessary contextualization. Saint Julian's words are profoundly moving, particularly in that they suggest a more varied trajectory than was seemingly the case following Andrew Jackson's enforced Trail of Tears. They are the words of a thoughtful, sensitive, and perhaps educated, man. They also point to this alliance between the two communities that could otherwise be easily overlooked in which a respect for, and bond with, the land is shared. In fact, it is Nana Peazant, the grandmother and matriarch, who becomes its ultimate embodiment, who urges her lost kin to remain, poignantly waging an intergenerational battle to keep her family together. Saint Julian reiterates her strength and respect for culture and tradition, pointing to a past of shared oppression and hope for the future of their union and that of their possible progeny. Unlike Nana, however, he is not allowed to express himself--his hopes and dreams and deepest convictions--in his own words and voice. Rather than an agent, he is a passive recipient and helpmate who portends Iona's fate and helps to uncover her emotions, much as the eroticized white woman and Native American so often function in mainstream films. The gender roles and races are switched but the process itself remains the same. Here, Iona struggles with her domineering and shamelessly striving mother who arrogantly dismisses the worth of their collective heritage for the newfangled, the shiny, the modern. Saint Julian is both the knight on a white horse who literally carries her into the sunset and the feminized object of desire.

There is a fascinating story beneath the romantic conventions, including the effects of Christianity on these embattled cultures, as indicated by Saint Julian's name, the fact that both characters appear to have been educated, the nature of their personal and cultural connection, and the intersection of these communities. Does Saint Julian have a family, if so who and where are they? Is he of mixed heritage? Was he raised as a part of the Gullah community or did he migrate somewhat later? Even a short reference could have supplied more depth for the character.

Here I think it is necessary to examine Dash's own perspective on her project. In an interview with bell hooks, Dash explains her desire to subvert Hollywood stereotypes related to both Native Americans and African Americans. "The Cherokees," Dash states, "were some of the original inhabitants of the Sea Islands. So I thought it was important to have one remaining Native American there. . . . I see his family as having held back [after the Trail of Tears] and him the lone survivor. Because the whole film . . . is about retention, the saving of tradition, persistence of vision" (Dash with Bambara and hooks 1992, 46). Later, she emphasizes, "Where have you ever seen a Native American win in the end and ride off in glory? When have you ever seen an African American woman riding off into the sunset for love, only, and not escaping?" (49). Interestingly, however, Dash fails to interrogate her particular use of images related to Saint Julian, including his positioning within (the maternal crotch) of a tree and his speechlessness.6 (It is hooks who offers specific prompts, more thoroughly contextualizing the contradictions of some of these images, reiterating: "I think Daughters tries to show that something which, however flawed, we have no other cinematic example of" [hooks 1992, 49]). Hearing Saint Julian interact with the members of his community, whether Gullah, Cherokee, or another, or knowing he no longer belongs to a conventional community, could have established his presence as a dynamic character, allowing the viewer to appreciate his individuality and, for lack of a better word, authenticity. It also could have traced the intersections between Native American and African American communities in a more resonant manner. Saint Julian is not allowed the gift of unpredictability and an intimacy with the viewer that Dash generally grants the other characters. It can be argued that Dash is implicitly indicating her inability and/or unwillingness to speak for Saint Julian. Yet, both his very presence and his letter--his mediated words and formal tone that simultaneously establish a class-bound propriety and distance him as an individual--convey his imprint on the film.

(3)

Of Jane Campion's film, Carolyn Gage writes:

The Piano is a gorgeously shot, utterly repellent film about a woman trapped between two rapists: a sleazy, blackmailing rapist and a violent possessive rapist. The woman "chooses" the sleazy, blackmailing rapist, falling deeply in love with him apparently because her experience of coerced sex was so hot, and ends up blissfully married to him in a cozy English cottage. And in case the misogyny of this scenario isn't enough to turn you off there is an extra fillip of ableism at the end: the woman, who is mute and communicates very effectively through sign language, is taught to speak by the sleazy rapist--thereby consolidating the film's claim to a happy ending. (1994, 12)

While I share many of Gage's reservations on the gender politics of The Piano, which I believe fetishizes female powerlessness through the seduction allowed by a seemingly subversive masculine sexual economy, I would also stress that Campion's general cinematic sensibility, from Sweetie (1989) and An Angel at My Table (1990) to The Portrait of a Lady (1996), embraces the odd, the unconventional, the eccentric. She does so in a manner that causes discomfort, eroding the security permitted by a more convenient and tasteful distance. Campion, like Dash, is always visually engaging. Rather than the seeming intimacy of Dash's work that is based on the warmth of shared humanity, Campion offers the disconcerting intrusion of the bizarre, of becoming unwillingly yet fantastically consigned to the position of the voyeur. Still, what I find both disturbing and instructive in this scenario are the uses to which the native Other is put. As in Daughters of the Dust, the native presence becomes eroticized, gripping a cinematic gaze that simultaneously records and erases it. Once again, it reverses Mulvey's gendered paradigm through the substitution of a masculine body racialized as nonwhite. However, even as it performs this transference, The Piano manifests a tension particular to the manner in which it makes use of Ada, its female protagonist. In Ada's development, Campion falls into a form of viewing that both deconstructs and reinscribes Mulvey's example of the passive female. She teases the spectator by mixing narrative forms that veer from the assertively feminist to a Victorian pastoral with undertones of the true woman. In doing so, however, Campion reveals the fault lines around race, sex, the consumption of the female body, and the tensions around the creation of new discourses in film.

The Piano, released in 1993, takes place in mid-nineteenth-century New Zealand. Newly colonized and experiencing the onslaught of Victorian ideals and technologies, the Maoris, the region's indigenous population of Polynesian origin, are being increasingly marginalized within their native land. Under assault to sell that land and assimilate to the dominant British cultural norms, their adversary is embodied in Alisdair Stewart, Ada's husband. An entrepreneurial bachelor who orders the mute Ada, the unmarried Scottish mother of a young child, as a mail order bride, he is afflicted with the many curses of the imperialist: pride, prudishness, distrust, greed, sanctimoniousness, and the capacity for an explosive and self-righteous violence. Standing in stark contrast is George Baines, the tribalized European who lives in harmony with the native population and who longs for Ada's love.

Unlike the lone survivor of the Cherokee in Daughters of the Dust, Campion's Maoris are allowed to speak. And speak they do. They willingly and not so willingly oblige the demands of the European settlers. Even as they do, they are practiced in the art of dissimulation, insulting the rude and grasping Stewart, calling him "dry balls" in their native language even as they labor for him. They also challenge him outright when their way of life and heritage are threatened. With Baines as translator, they refuse the former's offer of guns for land: "The rivers and burial caves of our ancestors lie within these lands. Are you saying we should sell the bones of our ancestors? Never! There is no price you can pay." With Baines himself, the Maoris are mischievous and jovial. As he broods over Ada, he is playfully informed: "You need a wife. It's no good having it sulk between your legs for the rest of your life."

There is a significant role reversal that takes place between the whites and the Maoris. It is Ada who is mute, though she narrates the film in voice-over. The white husband, shunned by her, is portrayed as emotionally rigid and emasculated, so repressed as to lack an appealing sexuality. Baines, acting as intermediary between the colonial whites and the Maori, with whom he lives but does not cohabit, is hypermasculine. His body, tattooed and darkened by exposure to the elements, is firm and muscled like those of his Maori counterparts, unlike the pale, soft, cosseted body of the rejected Stewart. He becomes the symbolic native whom Ada comes to desire. Yet the Maoris inhabit an interstitial sexuality, childlike and androgynous. Their sexuality is omnipresent but unthreatening. As mentioned previously, the women tease Baines with sly sexual innuendo. He is then propositioned by a young man, homosexual or transgendered, who offers: "I save you Baines." While Baines responds with silence, the young man, walking a thin line between male and female, is insulted by his fellow Maoris. Yet other Maoris, and Hira, the older woman who serves as Baines's maternal surrogate, are oddly androgynous; she sports tails and a top hat that mock European pretensions. It is with difficulty that the viewer identifies her as male or female, lover or friend. Later, as their mothers watch, indifferent, Maori children lead Ada's daughter in a sexualized game in which trees are embraced and humped. While the white child is punished by her stepfather, who forces her to wash the trees with soap and water, for the Maori, sexuality appears a natural occurrence about which no shame is felt. Though an empowering construction, the portrayal of Maori sexuality in the film is problematic. Leonie Pihama in "Are Films Dangerous? A Maori Woman's Perspective on The Piano" argues that "the imagery of Maori people is located firmly in colonial constructions" (1994, 241). Maori women, she adds

were the "sexual servants." It is the Maori women who cook for Baines in line with a colonial agenda that focused on Maori girls as house servants. Maori men are irrational, naÔve, simpleminded and warlike. It is Maori men with whom Baines attempts to do his suspect land deals, which again fits neatly in line with colonial expectations that men are the owners of property and therefore the decision makers in regard to its usage or sale. (241)

I would add that Maori sexuality enables Ada and Baines to manifest sexual agency in the unhealthy Victorian world of the parochial, racially stratified colonies. Ada and Baines play a taboo, dangerous, and addictive game of sexual barter. Ada provides favors, from a view of her corseted cleavage to a touch of her flesh through a torn undergarment, which will eventually permit her to buy her piano back from the sexually starved Baines, who cleverly bought the piano from the mercenary Stewart. Ada, the bartered object becomes an agent, lowering her defenses as she is increasingly attracted to Baines. As he touches the curves of her naked flesh, the viewer is transported to the land itself. Luxuriant with flora, dripping with moisture, opulent yet rough and largely uncharted, it is the paradise envisioned by Europeans in their imaginings of unclaimed foreign territories. Though initially presented to the viewer by the scornful Stewart as runtish and unattractive, Ada, with loosened hair and nude body, embodies that unclaimed territory. Baines becomes the working-class cultural mongrel who honestly earns access after refusing to participate in their risky exchange because it makes Ada a whore and he has had a crisis of conscience. Their relationship is consummated which eventually leads to their discovery by Stewart who severs Ada's finger, the phallic symbol through which she asserts her individuality. Ada and Baines then leave for a new life together with Ada's child. Baines, increasingly Europeanized himself, builds Ada a mechanical finger and teaches her vocalized speech. She gives piano lessons and the two become a part of their new European community though she is admittedly a freak. By this point, as the film nears its conclusion, no mention is made of the Maori and their plight.

Though an intriguing narrative, The Piano is also perplexing on several levels. Yet I am as concerned with the unintentional racial dynamic as the more consciously wrought gender one, not because one is more insidious than the other, but because each so smoothly reinforces the other. Behind the radical chic of Campion's iconoclastic work lies the conservatism of an old-fashioned true romance. Or as Gage angrily declares:

What she started to say was something about a woman in patriarchy who decides to stop speaking and who channels all of her passion and all of her love into her piano and her daughter. Jane Campion, the filmmaker and screenwriter, started to say something about male trivialization and appropriation of women's art. She started to say something very important about men as enemies, men as colonizers. (1994, 12)

A strong argument in support of this can be found in the narrative and its perspective on the independence Ada claims through her artistry. Still, I do not think it is necessarily this simple. I am not so certain Campion views men as enemies or colonizers or that she particularly needs to in order to make her point. But, what I do find especially striking is the manner through which the film becomes the ultimate colonizing project, appropriating Maori culture as a site of radical and quirky difference. Despite the cleverness of their presence in the film--their humor, the fact that they speak their own language, their boldness--the Maori, though symbolically juxtaposed against the stodgy avariciousness of the European colonizers, do not in any way exist as individuals. Furthermore, their responses, while a space of radical opposition, are also perhaps too easily reincorporated into a host of earlier cultural stereotypes.

Here it is necessary to examine some other critical evaluations of Campion's cinematic text that refuse to acknowledge the use of cultural distortions and thus succeed in reinscribing them. For example, Peter Chumo, in examining the inability of cultures to more effectively communicate, writes:

The play within the film also shows the limitations of art bounded by social conventions. When Bluebeard is attacking his wife, the Maori natives, thinking a woman is really being attacked, storm the stage to save her. They have an honest, untutored reaction to the play--the art affects them on a gut level the way Ada's piano playing originally affected Baines. (1997, 175–6)

Jeanne Dapkus asserts:

Piano makes fun of Victorian restrictions and contrasts them with earthy, erotic images. Ada is an "alien" to the New Zealand coast. At the beginning of the film she is someone arriving from a far-away, civilized land. She and her piano are distinctly out of place on the savage shore. However, her character progressively changes to accommodate the natural surroundings along with her awakening sexual desires. The film makes fun of the prudish Victorian limitations on humanity, and it highlights the freeing aspects of the passionate, sexual sides of humanity. This is most apparent in the many scenes which involve native New Zealanders, the Maoris, as they contrast the Victorians and, often, mock them. . . . This taunting undercurrent by the Maoris continues throughout the film, and Ada's eventual migration to Baines's hut shows that she will eventually align herself with the more natural, sexually open natives. (1997, 180–1)

Both writers, in validating Maori culture as a legitimate site of cultural contestation, also flatten it through this process of naturalization. Despite novel representations, the mode of seeing reinforces a Eurocentric perspective. In the end, Baines compels viewers as the white native. Though the Maori talk, they are even less individualized than Saint Julian. It is harder to truly see them. They remain largely nameless and what happens to them, their land, their culture and traditions, is airbrushed in favor of Ada's tempestuous affair with and satisfaction in the now re-Europeanized Baines (which also averts the threat of miscegenation). Their difference, at once carnal and devoid of sexuality, enables Ada's ultimate sexual liberation. And it seems limited to that. As the androgynous native woman sleeps outside of Baines's cottage and the symbolic hermaphrodite flirts with him, he cannot respond to them. (Though I must admit that for me it was a relief to see the native Other portrayed as anything other than sexually available for the white hero.7) Rather, Baines, like Campion, is blinded and enraptured by Ada's whiteness, a rare commodity, in a land where whiteness comes to represent an object of startling uniqueness and value. Simultaneously, Baines, as exoticized white, becomes an object of erotic fascination, particularly in the tight focus of the camera on his naked and vulnerable body. His is the Other body the audience actually perceives. While we stare in erotic fascination, his sexuality, which nurtures Ada's into existence, intensifies the ascendance of European culture. Campion relies on the Maoris to provide the spaces of ambiguity that will propel her tale of the reconstitution of the white family according to a more liberated gender and sexual ideal. However, once the film has ended, there is little to be said about the Maori characters because the audience does not have to see or engage with them as individual subjects. This includes the fact that during the era that The Piano takes place there were escalating tensions between the Maoris and Europeans over land and political power. Campion's film hints at this. In fact, the original screenplay provides an indication of this, citing the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi that was not honored by European colonizers and subsequently led to a series of wars from 1860 to 1872.8 Instead, in the final adaptation they are members of the crowd, the idiosyncratic objects of Campion's anthropological gaze, her cryptic and charming artistic creation.

(4)

It is telling that in attempting to articulate her own cinematic sensibility in very different and difficult ways, both Dash and Campion return to the source of the nation state itself, revisiting, re-envisioning, and re-presenting the foundation of the nation. Each director performs a cultural archeology of sorts, acknowledging and incorporating the presence, perspective, and struggles of the region's original inhabitants. Dash appears to desire to depict an underrepresented minority with justice and thus, relies on the rejection of stereotypes of Native American savagery and primitivism, accentuating instead the dignity and polish of an industrious respectability tied to both Edwardian and modern American civic ideals. Conversely, Campion emphasizes Maori humanity by undermining the proper and expected; while risking offense, Campion's portrayal is steeped in the earthy humor of the ribald and idiosyncratic, destabilizing the contemporary middle-class preoccupation with conformity and achievement. Nonetheless, the process is replete with the dynamic of containment and resistance referred to by Huhndorf and which I am mapping in my own examination (2001). As indigenous culture is reclaimed in a dual show of cooperation and co-optation, the viewer is able to see not only how women from quite distinct subject positions operate against but within the traditions of which they are a part.

The structure of these films underscores the fluidity of the colonizing process as well as the fact that the traditionally invisible and powerless are still capable of co-opting others, often with the best of intentions. Applying the format of progressive sentimentalism to validate a feminized gaze, each film lays claim to the quotidian events of the past that have all too often been effaced in favor of the masculinist metanarrative. Here, men's stories become secondary to women's stories, concerns, forms of labor, modes of conduct, and communication. Nonetheless, in each film, the indigenous Other, though distinctively drawn, serves a similar function. They are the repositories of truth and purity bound to the land, untouched by the contradictions and complexity of progress. Eroticized objects of a feminine gaze, they do not stand on their own as fully formed characters. Rather they present a backdrop to further dramatize the dilemma of its non-indigenous heroines.

As I asserted earlier, however, this is far from an orderly process. Even as stereotypical images are deployed in a move of cinematic Orientalism, it can be argued that subversive representations are built into these portraits. Despite reinscribing many conventions around the native, these stereotypes are also scrambled and diffuse. It is difficult to attach a single meaning to many of these images. By packaging this history in the trappings of nostalgia, both directors make their films more palatable and compelling to their audiences. Simultaneously, new forms of reading the text are also validated, forcing the viewer both to respect a female-oriented perspective and to revisit this past from a very different point of view. As Dash insists, how many sensitive, eloquent Native American characters ride off into the sunset with the women of their choice, particularly when she is African American and not fleeing slavery or a lynch mob? Furthermore, how many representations are there of African American and Native American coexistence in the American vernacular? Indeed, Saint Julian's humanity, though silenced and perceived from afar, is palpable. The reciprocity of the care and respect between Saint Julian and the larger community is poignant, particularly in that its representation does not rely on words, but rather images which demand a more visceral response. On the other hand, how many representations are there of natives signifying on the colonizers? How many images are there of an oppositional sexual identity of natives, an identity with which they--if not their communities--seem completely comfortable? How often do viewers see indigenous people who feel justified in actively resisting colonial incursions onto their land and into their cosmology? Far from a static process, the novelty and complexity of the images force the viewer to expand his or her definitions of both the native characters and the non-natives as well as how we determine meaning. The small, insignificant, and "quirky" become worthy of attention and exploration. Such images compel us to ponder the nature of history as we know it, based as it is on hierarchies of interest and action. Finally, however, these images press the issue of whether a character has to be central to the narrative, an individualized speaking subject, to effectively challenge established patterns of cinematic representation.

Reversing subject positions can create powerful representations that challenge the insidious silencing that nonwhite and women characters have all too often experienced. In pointing this out, I believe it especially important to acknowledge recent films made from the perspective of American Indians (Smoke Signals [Eyre 1999] and Naturally Native [Red-Horse and Farmer 1998]) and Maoris (Once Were Warriors [Tamahori 1994] and Broken English [Nicholas 1996]).9 While their reception has been mixed and examining them is outside the parameters of this paper, these films represent significant inroads into filming the experiences of indigenous peoples from the point of view of modern day urban dwellers who navigate a complex and contradictory sense of subjectivity. Even though these are very different projects and positing such radically disparate alternatives is not entirely fair, the image of an individualized speaking subject who even briefly returns the gaze of the filmmaker/spectator and speaks as an independent individual, can be empowering. It reverses Mulvey's paradigm and permits the spectator to perceive and/or identify with previously nonexistent images (2000). But simultaneously, dominant forms of representation are not necessarily transformed by doing so. Highly individualized, vocal Maoris and Native Americans would not necessarily change the texture of being a character of significance within each film or the reality of what it means to be an actual person living with this identity. In fact, doing so could easily extend this form of entitlement to remake the Other in the semblance of the dominant group, thus enabling a type of symbolic progress that becomes a form of artistic tokenism, obscuring the systemic inequalities that exist outside of the celluloid world. What it does, however, particularly in our media-obsessed culture, is make accessible a broader range of images and experiences.

In the end, these films are already made and distributed; they will not change. Nor should they have to. Yet, as viewers, it is important that we read them with critical and informed perspectives. An important aspect of that is acknowledging the complexity of any process of representation and the cultural forces at work in its enactment. Only then can we honestly take part in the production of radically new discourses of being and representation.

Caroline Brown is Assistant Professor of English at University of Massachusetts Boston. Her scholarship includes work in Women's Studies, twentieth-century American literature, and the literature of the African diaspora. She would like to thank Linda Dittmar and the readers of NWSA Journal for their invaluable feedback. Correspondence should be sent to Brown at W-6-058, English Dept., University of Massachusetts Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, MA 02125; caroline.brown@umb.edu.

Notes

1.Ý I would like to thank my colleague Linda Dittmar of the University of Massachusetts Boston for familiarizing me with this term.

2.Ý Two examples of this can be seen in vehicles starring Brad Pitt. In both, he is the troubled brother, the prodigal son. In A River Runs Through It, he is a gambler, a drunk, ne'er-do-well whose outlaw status is embodied in the brazen Indian woman with whom he consorts, clad in red, face painted not as the warrior but as the harlot, barred from respectable European-American society and thrown in jail (Redford 1992). Her ostracism signals Pitt's own, his own doomed fate. Once again in Legends of the Fall, Pitt's chosen mate is a Native American woman (Zwick 1994). Rather than the scarlet woman, it is the beautiful, chaste Karina Lombard who serves to redeem the previously corrupted Pitt. The daughter of a family servant, Lombard's regal yet simple presence ties her to the pristine land over which the white brothers feud. Her reward for sticking by the reformed Pitt and bearing his children is an accidental bullet and premature death. Though a forceful signifier, she is incidental. In both films, the native woman serves to point to the white man's status and fate. Although she serves to critique the corrupt, the wasteful, the discriminatory and hypocritical in white society, she herself is an oppositional force, idealized and abstracted, who never really crystallizes into an individual presence. Hers is the walk-on; Pitt's humanity is purchased at her expense.

3.Ý See Dash's Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman's Film for an in-depth description of her experiences in getting the film made (Dash with Bambara and hooks 1992).

4. Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples by Jack D. Forbes contextualizes this larger process throughout the Atlantic region (1993). His painstaking analysis of color perception and racial categories within ideological, linguistic, and legal systems reflect the evolution and intersections of these shifting communities of people.

5.Ý Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society 1540–1866 by Theda Perdue (1987).

6.Ý Dash reveals that the person in the tree could have been Nana but for the logistics of placing an elderly woman so high above the ground.

7.Ý Cyndy Hendershot offers an intriguing reading of this process in a footnote of her article, "(Re)Visioning the Gothic":

extensive scenes involving Baines and the Maoris have been cut from the final version of the film. The screenplay, however, makes it clear that Baines is not sexually involved with the Maoris. Possibly one explanation for this is that he does not want to replicate the European man's use of the "native" woman which was so common in colonial/imperial situations. More strongly, I would suggest, is the possibility that he wants to remain European but wants a different European subjectivity to be possible. (1998, 196, n. 8)

8.Ý See Hendershot (1998) and Thornley (2000).

9.Ý In addition, Naturally Native, the first crossover film starring, written, directed, and produced by (female) Native Americans, deals specifically with three sisters from a woman-oriented perspective (Red-Horse and Farmer 1998).

References

Brouwer, Joel. 1995. "Repositioning: Center and Margin in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust." African American Review 29(1):5–16.

Campion, Jane, dir. (1996). The Portrait of a Lady. Los Angeles, CA: Gramercy Pictures/Propaganda Films. Motion Picture.

------. 1993. The Piano. West Hollywood, CA: Miramax Films. Motion Picture.

------. (1990). An Angel at My Table. Australia: Hibiscus Films. Motion Picture.

------. (1989). Sweetie. Australia: Electric/Arena Film. Motion Picture.

Chumo, Peter N. 1997. "Keys to the Imagination: Jane Campion's The Piano." Literature/Film Quarterly 25(3):173–6.

Dapkus, Jeanne R. 1997. "Sloughing Off the Burdens: Parallel/Antithetical Quests for Self-Actualization in Jane Campion's The Piano and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady." Literature/Film Quarterly 25(3):177–87.

Dash, Julie, dir. 1992. Daughters of the Dust. New York: Kino International. Motion Picture.

Dash, Julie, with Toni Cade Bambara and bell hooks. 1992. Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman's Film. New York: The New Press.

Eyre, Chris, dir. 1999. Smoke Signals. West Hollywood, CA: Miramax. Motion Picture.

Forbes, Jack D. 1993. Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Gage, Carolyn. 1994. "The Piano: Dangerous Music." Feminist Voices (February):12–13.

hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press.

Hendershot, Cyndy. 1998. "(Re)Visioning the Gothic: Jane Campion's The Piano." Literature/Film Quarterly 26(2):97–108.

Huhndorf, Shari M. 2001. Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Jones, Jacquie. 1993. "The Black South in Contemporary Film." African American Review 27(1):19–24.

Mulvey, Laura. 2000. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 34–47. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nicholas, Gregor. 1996. Broken English. Culver City, CA: Sony. Motion Picture.

Ong, Aihwa. 1988. "Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-Presentations of Women in Non-Western Societies." Inscriptions 3-4:79–93.

Perdue, Theda. 1987. Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society 1540–1866. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Pihama, Leonie. 1994. "Are Films Dangerous: A Maori Woman's Perspective on The Piano." Hecate 20(2):239.

Redford, Robert, dir. 1992. A River Runs Through It. Culver City, CA: Columbia. Motion Picture.

Red-Horse, Valerie, and Jennifer Wynne Farmer, dirs. 1998. Naturally Native. Los Angeles, CA: Red-Horse Native Productions. Motion Picture.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 217–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Tamahori, Lee, dir. 1994. Once Were Warriors. Los Angeles, CA: Fine Line. Motion Picture.

Thornley, Davinia. 2000. "Duel or Duet? Gendered Nationalism in The Piano." Film Criticism 24(3):61–76.

Zwick, Edward. 1994. Legends of the Fall. Los Angeles, CA: Tristar Pictures. Motion Picture.

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