ABSTRACT
At the beginning of Jane Campion's film The Piano, Ada McGrath, its central character, is brought from Scotland to New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth century in order to marry a white colonial landowner, Stewart, a man she has not previously met. She brings with her ten-year-old daughter Flora, her trunks and baggage, and her baby-grand piano. The Piano employs a range of different systems of representation some of which are familiar to the spectator and some of which are not. Deaf Sign Language, the language in which Ada communicates with Flora, is a visual and physical form of language which is interwoven into the linguistic text throughout the film. Her own expressive communication systems are a complex blend of types of inscription or 'writings'. In recent years Deaf Sign Language has been recognised as a precise and fully developed syntactical language, but it is a language in which the majority of the film's spectators would not be fluent.
