Just as Merata Mita's Mauri (1988) is unique within the corpus of New Zealand coming-of-age films, Jane Campion's An Angel at My Table is similarly unique, but for very different reasons. Astonishingly, with the exception of Vincent Ward's Vigil (1984), it is the first feature film to focus on the maturational experience of a New Zealand Pākehā girl, and it is also the first coming- of-age film to be made by a woman. Additionally, it is the first film to blend the coming-of-age genre with that of the biopic, adapting its screenplay from the celebrated autobiography of the New Zealand writer Janet Frame. Finally, it is the only coming-of-age film to depict all three of the main maturational phases of the genre: childhood; adolescence; and post-adolescence. On top of that, An Angel at My Table was recognized as attaining a level of excellence that led to its being the first New Zealand film to be screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival.

The most striking aspect of An Angel at My Table is how, while outwardly maintaining an extreme fidelity in the representation of episodes described by Frame in her Autobiography, the film converts the subjective self-portrait of the original into a vehicle for a complex dual projection on the part of Campion herself. This conversion is made possible by the shift from Frame's first-person narration, which takes the reader deep into the reflections and insights of the author, to a plurimedial filmic narration that places the spectator at an observer's distance from the cinematic version of ‘Janet.’ Such a shift of perspective indicates a subtle change in the nature and function of the coming-of-age experience.

‘MY SAY’: JANET FRAME's AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

In a radio interview of 1983, Janet Frame made it clear that her purpose in writing the three volumes of her autobiography – To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1984), published together in 1989 – was to have ‘my say,’ that is, to give her account of her experience and correct the myth of herself as a ‘mad writer.’