Elena del Rio has argued that the suspicious attitude of feminist film critics of the 1970s and 1980s towards the female body was limiting their understanding of its ‘possibilities of action and meaning in addition to, or in place of, those stipulated by culture’ (2003, 11). For del Rio, rather than repressing or omitting the fetishised female body, the solution to this problem lay in ‘the construction of a different body’ altogether (Ibid.). This chapter will argue that we find del Rio's ‘different body’ in many of Campion's films, as produced by her elastic audio-visual engagement with female bodies that stretches from understanding them as semiotic and discursive signs to experiencing them as lived, embodied presences. By recognising the multi-dimensional attachment to female bodies that Campion's practice allows, we can add to conceptions of what Kate Ince has called ‘agentic embodied action on the part of women’ (2017, 41). Conceiving of how Campion's female protagonists move and relate to space as ‘agentic’ is what helps us to understand the feminist import of their unsettling presences.

The stakes of this chapter are two-fold: first, the chapter shows how methodologies of feminist film criticism construct and – as del Rio's enquiry suggests – de-limit their object of study, in this case the female body; second, by focusing on the embodied nature of the framing of female bodies in Campion's films Sweetie (1989), Holy Smoke (1999), and In the Cut (2003), we find that she complicates our understanding of feminist agency. Ultimately, we are left with a sense of Campion's ambivalence towards feminism. Measured materially on visual and sensual levels and in terms of how they occupy space and move through it, Campion's protagonists present as riddled with complexities and contradictions. The paradox thus produced is insightfully summed up by Kathleen McHugh, who argues: ‘If they [Campion's women] are avatars of feminism, it is a feminism that Campion finds impossible to articulate’ (2007, 157).

Coming to filmmaking in the mid-1980s, Campion can be situated within what I would call a post-visual pleasure generation, a term which distinguishes women filmmakers who emerged in the 1970s and had their work measured against Laura Mulvey's foundational text (including Chantal Akerman, Sally Potter and Yvonne Rainer) from the generation who began their feature careers in the 1980s (including Catherine Breillat and Claire Denis).