PROGRAM

Before she was enthralling audiences with features such as SWEETIE, THE PIANO, and, most recently, THE POWER OF THE DOG (which has garnered Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Director, among others), the New Zealand-born, Australia-based Jane Campion fostered themes and motifs that would punctuate her oeuvre in the short films she made during and immediately after her time at the Australian Film Television and Radio School. From the tension evoked by a fruit rind to the not-so-clear-cut dilemma of workplace harassment, these films provide the foundation for a prodigious body of work. Presented in partnership with Cine-File Chicago and programmed by Cine-File managing editor Kathleen Sachs. Special thanks to Women Make Movies.

AN EXERCISE IN DISCIPLINE: PEEL | Jane Campion

Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or for Best Short Film in 1986, this tense sketch—which also marks Campion’s first collaboration with cinematographer Sally Bongers, with whom she worked on her later shorts and SWEETIE—centers on a particularly strained car ride, during which a brother and sister and the former’s son become increasingly agitated after the boy throws his orange peel out the window. (1982, 9 min, Digital Projection)

“Uses a virtuosity of technique to deconstruct several types of discipline.” - Kathleen McHugh, Contemporary Film Directors: Jane Campion

PASSIONLESS MOMENTS | Jane Campion

Co-written and directed by Campion and Gerard Lee (with whom she would go on to co-write SWEETIE and the TV series Top of the Lake), this series of pithy vignettes illuminate the banal thoughts and happenings of everyday people in suburban Australia. (1983, 13 min, Digital Projection)

“The film takes to an extreme a fascination, visible in other films signed by Campion, with the fragment, the seemingly pregnant instant, everyday life as a series of discrete events which flit around at the edge of meaning.” - Dana Polan, World Directors Series: Jane Campion

A GIRL’S OWN STORY | Jane Campion

Set in the 1960s, Campion’s final student film centers on three young girls as they struggle with the usual growing pains inherent to adolescence as well as altogether more unsettling traumas. (1984, 27 mins, Digital Projection)

“[It] stands out for the concrete stylistic choices elaborated in each scene, but also owes much to an overall tone: passionless, desolate. This atmosphere is soaked in the experience of a world that is too small and gives too little, a world filled with boring rituals and sickening family dynamics.” - Cristina Álvarez López, MUBI Notebook

AFTER HOURS | Jane Campion

Campion has more or less disowned this film, made at the behest of a Sydney-based feminist action group, but it’s nevertheless an interesting artifact from her career and a charactertistically ambiguous examination of sexual harassment in the workplace. (1984, 26 min, Digital Projection)

“There is more nuance and less didacticism in AFTER HOURS than Campion’s… dismissal of the short would suggest.” - Ben Kooyman, Senses of Cinema

THE AUDITION | Anna Campion

Jane and her sister, Anna, co-wrote the former’s 1999 film HOLY SMOKE; a filmmaker in her own right, Anna’s short film THE AUDITION centers on their mother’s audition for Jane’s second film, AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE, an adaptation of New Zealand author Janet Frame’s triptych of autobiographies. (1990, 24 min, Digital Projection)

“This intimate family piece seems partly scripted and partly improvised, and the complicity of the participants makes it wholly convincing and riveting.” - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Chicago Filmmakers Firehouse Cinema

In-person screenings are held at Chicago Filmmakers firehouse cinema located at 1326 W Hollywood Ave in the Edgewater neighborhood. Please be sure to arrive 15 minutes prior to showtime and be ready to present your order confirmation number for admission. Proof of full vaccination or a negative Covid-19 PCR test result is required to attend all screenings and events.