I had breakfast last week with the film director Jane Campion and a group of female bloggers to discuss her new film Bright Star, above the poet John Keats and the love of his life. I have been asked to postpone delivering my (crazily favorable) review but you can watch the trailer here:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810011941/trailer

Jane Campion is thoughtful, gracious, generous and soft-spoken, with the diffident posture often adopted by women of greater-than-average height. Which was why I was surprised at her answer to how she got into film, "Well, I was in art school, but I decided I wanted exposure."

Exposure? Could she elaborate? Exposure is not a word you often hear from women -- actresses, maybe, but not artists, and certainly not women artists in their twenties, who may hunger for validation, acknowledgement, connection, but rarely have the cojones to proclaim that they want their work out there. Exposed.

"Well," she shrugged into our dumbstruck faces, "women pay half the taxes, why shouldn't they get half the grants?"

Without pausing to explain that this is not Australia and artists here do not get grants to make films, the more social-minded blogger among us pursued her women-in-Hollywood take on things while I sat back and mused on my sudden understanding of Campion's characters.

"You create women with a vision, who are implacable," I stated.

"Implacable is a good word," Jane agreed.

The implacable insist that a piano can and must be hauled up a tropical mountainside, that she must and will love who she loves, that she will create what she must and not what she should. That she will blog, even though her blog is not "about" anything.

Labels: filmmakers, poetry

posted by Elizabeth at 10:53 AM