While the previous section has analysed the mythological aura dominating Janet Frame’s reputation, this section explains how An Angel at My Table, the film, has influenced perception of her. I argue that a clearer distinction between ‘the real Janet Frame’ and ‘Janet Frame the character’ is necessary, and by analysing the main differences between the movie and the book, I contend that the film has contributed to reinforce ‘Janet Frame the myth’.
Many readers all over the world have come to Frame through the 1990 film An Angel at My Table directed by Jane Campion.59 An Angel at My Table came out first as a television film in April of that year. Frame watched it three times in rapid succession. The first time, she found herself too personally involved to be able to judge it objectively, but, by the third viewing, she was really pleased with it. She said: ‘[Within] its own limits it found its own freedom
56 Wrestling with the Angel, pp. 388–89. 57 Ibid., pp. 382–88.
58
Ibid., p. 388.
59
The screenplay of the film was written by Laura Jones, but Campion has made clear that she contributed significantly to it. Cf. Alistair Fox, Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal
and did [the job] splendidly’.60
Her only concern was that, it being a filmic adaptation, it substantially changed her story, and when facts are turned into a film, it is the re-created image that is fixed in people’s memory. As she predicted in a letter to Lindsay Shelton, the filmic revised version of her life would eventually become part of the ‘authorised version’ of her.61
The movie was an enormous success and took on a life of its own. The Sydney Film Festival screened it in June 1990 and it was soon voted the most popular film of the festival. Consequently, Jane Campion and Bridget Ikin, her producer, decided to convert the TV version into a theatrical release. An Angel
at My Table became the first New Zealand film selected for the Venice Film
Festival, where it won eight awards, including the Silver Lion and the Special Jury Prize. It was then screened all over the world and achieved feats that no other New Zealand film had ever managed. As King reported, An Angel the movie generated an unprecedented demand for Frame’s books, so that her agents in London and Sydney struggled to cope with the huge number of requests for foreign rights, for both the autobiography and the novel. This proves the importance of the film in boosting Frame’s popularity.62 Nevertheless, even if one should not talk of fidelity in film adaptations, Campion’s version of Frame gained such a popularity that it has brought many scholars and readers to forget that Frame the character was indeed a fictitious creation.
It is noteworthy that when actress Kerry Fox (who played the adult Janet in the film) was interviewed, she used to draw a neat distinction between ‘Janet Frame the person’ and ‘Janet Frame the character’.63
What journalists have failed to acknowledge is that the border she drew is blurred when in the film Janet is advised to write about her experience in mental hospitals, and is shown in the next scene writing Faces in the Water. This also happens every time the film includes scenes taken from that novel, removing the divide between real life and fiction. Campion’s intervention is visible in innumerable aspects and represents an interesting case of how a filmic recreation can strongly influence the reception of a real person.
60
Wrestling with the Angel, p. 495.
61
Janet Frame, private letter, quoted in Wrestling with the Angel, p. 495.
62
Ibid., p. 496.
63
In Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema, Alistair Fox addresses the creative process in Campion’s films and devotes a chapter to her adaptation of Janet Frame’s life.64
Fox explains how the film diverges from the text on which it is based, particularly because it tends to represent Campion’s preoccupations and personal views rather than Frame’s. In the commentary to the film, Campion herself admitted that her representation of the writer was deeply influenced by her mother’s struggle with depression.65
She acknowledged that her recreation was highly personal, and that she explored certain episodes of her own biography in the film, mingling them with Frame’s life.66
After reading Owls Do Cry when she was fourteen, Campion identified Frame with her mother, Edith, and with herself. She said that whenever she passed ‘the notorious loony bin’ at Porirua, she wondered whether Frame was there.67 Campion admitted that her mother’s depression was a traumatic experience in her life:
The issue of mental illness ... even now is still incredibly difficult in our society, and anybody who has a family member or anyone they’re close to who suffers any mental problems – depression, schizophrenia – knows how painful it is to have a family member with a problem like that or, in fact, to be the person with the problem, because it’s just so badly understood.68
According to Fox, it is not surprising that Campion decided to process this trauma through the literary figure of Frame, thus associating certain episodes and features of her own and her mother’s life with Frame: ‘she chose as her vehicle the story of a prominent figure who, in her mind, strikingly resembled Edith in certain respects’.69
It was actually Edith who introduced her daughter to Frame’s autobiography, when she sent her To the Is-Land from Ashburn Hall, a psychiatric clinic in Dunedin, Frame’s hometown. Campion remembers that
64 Fox, pp. 88–106. 65 Ibid., p. 14. 66 Ibid. 67
Campion was to become familiar with the Porirua Hospital because, fifteen years after she had read Frame’s book, her mother was admitted to ward K2 as she had ‘tried repeatedly to find relief from the overwhelming terror and bleakness of her late-life depression’. Fox, p. 91.
68
Jane Campion, quoted in Fox, p. 92.
69
when she read the book she ‘sobbed and sobbed. She had struck a blow right to my heart. But it was not only about Janet’s life, I was also experiencing my own childhood’.70
As Fox notes, Campion associated herself and her mother with Frame’s story particularly in terms of a shared experience of isolation and suffering.71 Drawing on psychoanalytic literature on children’s behavioural development, Fox maintains that:
The weeping that was triggered in Jane as a response to
To the Is-Land shows Jane identifying with Janet as if she
(both Janet and Jane) were Jane’s mother Edith – which suggests a mirroring in Jane’s own life of her mother’s unhappiness, which she is moved to act out as a result of intense empathic identification.72
It may be that Campion was so fascinated by the book and by the myth of Janet Frame because she found in Frame’s life the answer to problems she could not solve in her own life, her mother’s depression, her struggle to cope with it, her anxiety.73 Campion has often noted that her cinema and her life reflect each other. ‘I live through my films’, she said, ‘and it is only later that I find out how much of myself I have invested in them’. The result is that, as Campion admits, ‘there is certainly more of me in the final result than I was conscious of when I started’.74
When she read Frame’s autobiography, Campion reports that she could ‘really see [her]self’ and felt ‘she would just kind of invest [her] own childhood memories along with it’.75 Fox thus identifies many passages where ‘Janet’ is
more Jane- or Edith-like, and where biographical truths are completely distorted or omitted. Even Frame’s relationship with her father is completely fictionalised in the film. Pamela Gordon reports that when Frame watched the film, she commented on one of the scenes featuring the father character, saying, ‘I would never have done something like that!’.76
Campion even inserted some of her
70 Jane Campion, quoted in Fox, pp. 92–93. 71 Fox, p. 93. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., p. 91. 74
Jane Campion, quoted in Fox, p. 93.
75
Fox, p. 93.
76
Here Frame was referring to the scene where 'Janet' returns to her family home after her father's death, and tries on his boots. Quoted in Pamela Gordon, An Angel @ My Blog
own father’s passions and hobbies, such as caravans, which did not belong to Frame’s father.77
As Fox explains, ‘Campion’s personal investment in her fictions extends even to small details in the costuming and props’.78
For example, in an interview with Marie Colman, Campion admitted that Frame ‘the character’ wore gumboots not much because everyone in rural New Zealand was wearing them, but rather because, when she was thirteen, she and her family moved to the country, thus when she puts on gumboots ‘it is like a physical memory, an extraordinary sensation’.79 She added: ‘I don’t know whether Janet actually had
them, but I wanted her to wear them’.80
Therefore, not only did Campion make Janet resemble Edith, her mother, but she also put parts of herself into Frame’s character.
Indeed, Frame’s story mirrored the shyness and anxiety Campion had experienced as a young woman. She described her years at university as deeply lonely and unhappy. She saw a striking parallel between Frame’s issues with social interactions and her own problems making friends and inserting herself into groups.81 As Fox points out, Campion projects her own childhood, traumas, and family-related problems onto the figure of Janet Frame in many ways, for instance in her depiction of the writer as a child who feels unwanted. In her commentary accompanying the film, Campion said: ‘We all feel vulnerable and unchosen, unlovable, uncared about in one way or another’, but, in fact, nothing in Frame's autobiography suggests that her parents neglected her or that she felt unloved.82
Fox holds that Campion expressed through the film her need to come to terms with her relationship with her mother, especially when, advancing through her thirties, she realised how much she was coming to resemble her. It is likely that dealing directly with this issue would have been too problematic; adaptation
<http://slightlyframous.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/how-much-jane-is-there-in-campions.html> [accessed 16 July 2014].
77
Fox, p. 15. The end scene of An Angel at My Table (film) features Janet Frame writing in a trailer.
78
Ibid., p. 14.
79
Jane Campion, quoted in Fox, p. 15.
80
Fox., p. 15.
81
Jane Campion, quoted in Fox, p. 43.
82
gave Campion a psychologically safe way to address it.83 Fox argues: ‘All fictive invention provides for precarious substitution, but an adaptation has the added advantage of allowing a particularly painful subject to be addressed at an even greater displaced remove, under the guise of another person’s invention’.84
Filmic adaptation was thus Campion’s way to deal with personal issues through the indirect lens of creativity. Filmic creativity claims a certain degree of authorship of the material that is adapted. As a consequence, Campion’s An
Angel at My Table is a work of fiction in itself and, by extension, Campion’s
Frame should not be viewed as the real Frame.
Some years after the film was released, Frame lamented: ‘Until Jane Campion's film I was known as the mad writer. Now I'm the mad fat writer’.85
In particular, she was disappointed that the film did not mention her poetic ambitions.
However, despite the discrepancies between the autobiography and its filmic recreation, Campion’s film has evident artistic merit, and has been praised worldwide, winning seventeen awards. Some critics have praised in particular its capacity not to reduce Frame to a victim of society. As Sue Gillett notes, the writer is never victimised, not even in the scenes of her breakdown, unlike the more pathologising portrait of Bertha in Jane Eyre (2003) or other cases of literary ‘mad women’.86
Conversely, Campion located her protagonist always at the centre of the picture, notably in certain scenes where she visually dominates the whole frame. For example, the ending scene where she is writing in the caravan, or the scene in which she moves towards the camera along a linear path in the middle of a field, are so intense that they echo Frame’s own style.87
Nevertheless, the power of the images should not be mistaken for the intensity of Frame’s own story. Scholars of Frame, the editors of her books, and the journalists who write about her should begin to recognise Campion’s work for what it is: an artistically (and commercially) successful adaptation.
83
Ibid., p. 90.
84
Ibid.
85 Janet Frame, in ‘Challenging the Myth’, Janet Frame Estate
<http://www.janetframe.org.nz/Biography.htm> [accessed 30 July 2014].
86 Sue Gillett, ‘Angel from the Mirror City: Jane Campion’s Janet Frame’, senses of cinema
(October 2000) <http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/103201/20090728- 0108/archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/10/angel.html> [accessed 1 August 2014].
87 Anna Ball, ‘Writing in the Margins: Exploring the Borderland in the Work of Janet Frame
and Jane Campion’, eSharp, 5 (2005) <http://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_41163_en.pdf> [accessed 24 August 2014] (para. 40 of 51).