AustLit

'This article examines the international critical reception of Australasian Director Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003). It suggests that the loaded language of reviews, and the pervasive reading of the film’s female characters as masochistic, deluded or sex-crazed, ironically amplify the themes that In the Cut self-consciously explores, namely the relation of romantic love to language, knowledge and narrative violence. Campion’s critique of the popular mythology of romantic love and her depiction of a complex adult female sexuality, a sexuality of private experience rather than display, is in productive tension with the serial-killer thriller format. An opaque female narrative perspective that refuses revelation and complicates (rather than inverts) the predator-prey dichotomy provokes deep unease within the genre. Ultimately, it is the stark vulnerability of the female characters as they risk their limits in real embodied connection that has been reviled by many reviewers, provoking a discourse of disgust and a characterization of the erotic content of the film as perverse or ‘kinky’ when there is little in the film to support this reading. The clichés of female sexuality mobilized in the mainstream critical debate surrounding In the Cut underline the importance of Campion’s demythologizing project and illustrate the continued relevance of feminist-oriented film scholarship, even as some reviews pre-emptively mock or reject such readings.' (Author's abstract)

'The uses and understandings of the category ‘Australasian’ seem to shift and vary within the multiple contexts of the term’s application. Each new

volume of Studies in Australasian Cinema, for example, not only negotiates the elasticity of screen culture, production, and scholarship as critical ‘objects’, but also speaks simultaneously (often in the broadest and even tangential senses) to regional experiences of, or responses to, all of these. ' (Author's introduction)

'This essay troubles the 'fidelity model' of adaptation criticism by mobilizing a slightly more dialogic analytical lens: one which re-conceives literary and cinematic works as textual engines generating and circulating affect, and the adaptive process as a productive drifting of those intensities from one medium to another. Specifically, I offer close readings of Susanna Moore's 1995 novel In the Cut and Jane Campion's 2003 filmic adaptation, not with an eye toward similarities and differences in story or character, but rather toward the palpable affective forces fostered by Moore's text -- the unease and anxiety, the discomfort and dread -- and the means by which Campion's film seeks to tap into those affective lines of flight, seeks to redirect those intensities from page to screen. In the process, I illustrate how both works, each in its own unique manner, come to function as critical meditations on the seemingly fragmented nature of postmodern identity.'

Source: Abstract.