The film theorist Vivian Sobchack’s writing on Campion’s film work insists on the corporeally-invested experience of film. And Campion harkens a gaze that is vigilant. The director’s attention matches hers, stitch by stitch, in its care and rigor. The fingers that now appear at the furthermost edges of the frame, Fanny’s, are sensitized to a high degree of nuance. The tiny peculiarities and hesitations register the work of a particular hand. The slight irregularities in the stitches cause little puckers. An exacting triple-stitched seam cuts a diagonal through the frame, leaving a flurry of tiny gathers behind. The dizzied gaze settles upon a piece of fine white muslin, smoothed flat against a firm surface. The camera withdraws a few inches more, revealing the extraordinary degree of magnification experienced in the first few seconds of the film. The camera angle gently cants as the loops are tugged snug, one after another, into a seam. The gaze plunges headlong with it into a material world existing at the fingertips. Its point pierces the textile again and again. The needle meets a bit of resistance and then draws the thread through. The focus is so sharp that the individual fibers of cotton thread are visible, as are the fabric’s woof and weft, and its infinitesimally fine flocking. The eye settles into the diminutive realm as the needle noses through a swathe of cloth. It suggests a miniature landscape of low, snow-blanketed hills. The next shot involves an adjustment of scale. The tip of a blurred finger appears, looming uncommonly close, as the stuff of the world rarely does. Light angles its way in through a pinprick, tripping on the head of a pin. Then, against the uniformly dense black page of the film screen, two words in white ink unreel in the cursive script of an unseen hand: “Bright Star.” From the onset, letter and stitch are juxtaposed. The subject emerges slowly into perception. ![]() A thrumming filament of thread is pulled taut behind it. Out of the velvety blur, it recognizes a needle in extreme close-up, set in a sliver-thin depth of field. The eye grasps after the glint, grapples to identify its source. Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009) opens with a black screen. “…a tailored concept, a piece of cloth, a strip of celluloid…” –Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (1)
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