The power of the paratext, the extra textual space surrounding film, has been extensively explored by film academics as an addition to film text analysis, evaluating how the persona of the filmmaker can enhance scholarly interpretations of their films via DVD commentaries. This chapter shifts the focus, concerned less with the paratext as a hermeneutic tool and more as another form of public space, one in which a woman filmmaker can mobilise the power of ‘women's talk’. This chapter argues that a woman filmmaker can further utilise the paratextual space to reimagine and fantasise: for example, about women's relationships to men, to each other, and most innovatively, about the labour of filmmaking. Campion's talk in paratext is key since it mimics and reinforces themes from her films and, equally as importantly, provides a space to develop an exchange between Campion and her collaborators who join her for these discussions. Previous scholarship regarding the paratext provides a useful starting point to consider this kind of ‘women's talk’ in a social context. Applying Luce Irigaray's idea of parler femme further extends this feminist investigation, uncovering the political potential of Campion's talk and her expressed notions of fantasy for women (1985, 222). Therefore, my analysis will focus on Campion's digital paratexts, produced for The Piano (1993) and In the Cut (2003), using an Irigarayan framework centred around the exchanges taking place in the paratext, because these reveal new possibilities both in their content and form. These commentaries demonstrate a particular quality of dynamic exchange between Campion and her female collaborators. As such, Irigaray's concept of parler femme is crucial since it provides an interpretative framework for the verbal exchanges in the paratext; in particular, how Campion and her collaborators disturb the established patriarchal economy of discourse that exists within conventional film criticism and journalism.

The Filmmaker – Auteur – in Paratext

By focusing on the paratext, this analysis builds on familiar scholarship relating to authorial agency, originating from the French New Wave critics’ invention of the auteur, a persona which gave each considered film a guiding consciousness and an explanation for consistencies within the text itself. Emphasising authorial agency supports the work of both film scholarship and journalism, but it arguably functions differently for women filmmakers than for men.