Jane Campion's much-fêted return to film in 2021's The Power of the Dog marked a turn away from her career-long preference for female leads but left her firmly in the familiar territory of ambiguous sexual politics. As the contributors to this volume observe, Campion first asserted in 1989 that she did not want to be seen as a ‘feminist’ director, and she has reiterated an arms-length distance from feminism over the decades since (Ciment 1999a, 35). Nevertheless, her films and her way of working with other women have proven irresistibly attractive to feminist critics. The ‘feminist problem’ with Campion therefore naturally engages this collection.

In 1989, Campion appears to have held a quite prescriptive view of feminism, involving telling people ‘how they should behave’ (Ibid.). Since then, time and cultural politics have moved on and so has Campion's career. It is not irrelevant that for most of her career-building years, to submit to the classification of ‘feminist filmmaker’ would likely have delimited her reputation and restricted her access to funding. Moreover, her refusal to be pinned down may have left her freer to create complicated and unheroic female leads, and a character like The Piano's (1993) sympathetic but also somewhat creepy Baines (Harvey Keitel). So, even while much in her oeuvre proclaims her a close fellow traveller, Campion has managed to avoid being labelled, and therefore held to account, as a feminist.

Having emerged as a filmmaker through a brief window of unusual possibilities for women, as Zachary Zahos demonstrates (see Chapter 2), Campion has more than paid forward her own opportunities, maintaining close and supportive relationships with other women filmmakers throughout her career. She applauded the #MeToo campaign and the changes and new opportunities it has helped to effect. Her selection of Ari Wegner as cinematographer for The Power of the Dog – a major stepping-stone for Wegner's career resulting in an Oscar nomination – is only the latest in a series of productive female collaborations (Campion's first feature, Sweetie (1989), saw Sally Bongers become the first female director of photography in Australian feature filmmaking). Rona Murray's study of female conversation in paratexts demonstrates the integration of female working relationships in Campion's practices (see Chapter 6).