ABSTRACT
The opening image in The Piano (Campion, 1993) is a blur of moving vertical objects that we can distinguish only in the second shot. It is a woman looking out from between her fingers. The voice of a young girl speaks:
The voice you hear is not my speaking voice, but my mind’s voice.
I have not spoken since I was six years old.
No one knows why, not even me.
The woman, in a dark Victorian dress – presumably the speaker – walks from under a tree.My father says it is a dark talent and the day I take it into my head to stop breathing will be my last.
There is a smash cut to a girl roller skating down an interior corridor. Boisterous sound disrupts the internal mood of the first images, then shifts back to the internal mood again. The camera pans a bedroom, a girl is sleeping in bed and a woman is taking off her skates as the voiceover continues:Today he married me to a man I’ve not yet met.
Soon my daughter and I shall join him in his country.
The camera tracks the woman, bending to examine a piano in a shipping crate labelled New Zealand. Again the internal monologue continues:My husband said my muteness does not bother him.
He writes and hark this: God loves dumb creatures, so why not her!
’Twere good he had God’s patience for silence affects everyone in the end.
The strange thing is I don’t think myself silent – that is because of my piano.
I shall miss it on the journey.
The woman caresses the piano, sits down and begins to play.