Return to Intro. to Film syllabus
Updated 8 November 2006
ENGLISH 114: INTRODUCTION TO FILM, Fall 2006
Section 3: Thursday, 6:00-9:30 p.m.,
Professor Larsson
Week 10, November 2
6:00-6:20
Test 2 (Mise-en-scene, Cinematography)
6:20-6:35
Break and Test Review
6:35-8:40
View The Piano
8:40-8:50
Break
8:50-9:30
Discuss The Piano
Quiz 5 next week (Chapter 5, Acting)
Bring a full-sized (8 ½” x 11”) Scantron sheet and a number 2 pencil
The Piano (Australia/New Zealand, 1993)
Director: Jame Campion; Script: Campion; Cinematography: Stuart Dryburgh; Editor: Veronka Jenet; Production Design: Andrew McAlpine; Music: Michael Nyman
Cast: Holly Hunter (Ada McGrath); Sam Neill (Alisdair Stewart); Harvey Keitel (George Baines); Anna Paquin (Flora McGrath)
Questions for Discussion:
1. Is there any special significance to Ada’s silence? Why can’t she speak? What other ways does she have of communicating?
2. Are there any other kinds of silence than Ada’s from the other characters?
3. Flora often functions as Ada’s “voice.” How does that make her seem older than she is? In what ways is she still a naïve child?
4. Why does Ada respond to George, despite his outrageous “bargain” with her? What keeps her and Alisdair apart?
5. How do the actors communicate their different roles? In what ways does an actor like Harvey Keitel play “against type”?
6. What is the effect of the setting in a New Zealand that is still on the edge of civilization? How does the presence of the Maori natives affect the narrative or the characters?
7. What is the significance of the piano itself?
Discussion Summary. (See the Case Study on The Piano at the textbook website: http://www.wwnorton.com/web/movies/chapters/ch5/case_study.asp)
As Barsam points out in his analysis of Holly Hunter’s performance as Ada, the role is demanding by requiring her tommunitcate most of her emotions and words through her looks and gestures, like a silent movie actress. In particular, her intense—almost violent—look of disapproval stops men’s actions in their tracks, both early in the film when Alisdair condescending shouts, “CAN YOU HEAR ME?” at her, and at the end when he attempts to have sex with her (actually his second attempt to rape her) after having chopped off her finger. Harvey Keitel on the other hand plays against his usual type (from gangster and tough guy roles in films by Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino). Baines is a rough and crude man on the surface, and his initial bargain with Ada, trading her right to play the piano for his own sexual approaches with her, is at first a repulsive act. But through his own performance, Keitel exposes the character as someone who is truly needy and vulnerable in a way that the more “respectable” Alisdair is not. (At the same time, Sam Neil makes Alisdair more an object to pity than to hate. He is someone who has no inner resources, no way to verbalize his own desires, and when he represses his own feelings too strongly, they finally emerge in his violent act at the end. Even then, his outburst is short-lived, and he realizes that he has lost Ada for good and must let her go.)
Anna Paquin as Flora has an equally demanding role. She is the “voice” of her mother, although at times the choice of specific words seems to be strictly her own, and she is capable of occasionally telling lies (especially about her real father) and of telling the truth when she should keep silent. Part of the reason for her truth-telling is that she bears too great a burden as a child, forced to cover for her mother’s visits with Baines while also being shut off from her mother at those times and almost literally pushed away when Ada realizes that she loves Baines. Flora’s jealousy is reinforced by her childlike need for order in her life. Although initially she insists that she won’t even speak to Alisdair, let alone call him “Papa,” she does call him that as her mother draws away from her. In the end, though, like Alisdair she comes to realize the depth of her mistake.
Ada’s silence, broken only by the voiceover narration of her thoughts at the beginning and end of the film, is the central metaphor in this movie. The piano is Ada’s true outlet for her emotions and her chief means of true communication. Flora may reinterpret and embellish and even change Ada’s words, and the little notepad that Ada carries can’t offer more than a few words at a time, but the piano and music cannot lie. They are the direct expression of her feelings (in keeping with music of the Romantic era of the 19th century, when all kinds of artists tried to make music, poetry, novels and painting into media that would portray the turmoil of inner lives). “Most of what people say is rubbish,” Flora says that her mother believes, and words—especially in the restricted social context of the British settlers in New Zealand—rarely serve the prupose of true communication. The closes that we see to actually honesty is in the conversations and actions of the Maori natives.
The final alternative to communication is silence—and at the end Ada is working to bring back her ability to speak. That, as much as her escape from drowing at the end, is an expression of her new desire to live, because the ultimate silence is death itself.