The Piano (Campion, 1993) How can this sequence be described as an example of ecriture feminine (feminine writing)? http://136.148.76.72/asx/ricardo/250909/clip4.

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Wayne A. Brody who claims a view of Derridas Of Grammatology as that which sees feminine writing as interdeterminateness: Derrida links the logocentric privileging of apodictic determinateness over aporetic indeterminateness with the privileging of the masculine over the feminine. As the extract begins, we are immersed into the heart-warming and ever-comforting minds and lives of two of humans most beautiful female subjects; a woman named Ada McGrath, accompanied by a little girl called Flora McGrath, a mother and daughter. After the extract begins, the interpretation of the story from what is shown in the scene is very vivid. We are blessed with the setting of the films extract beginning in the woods; oftentimes in film, this particular forest-like setting is traditionally associated with the hidden, wild and dangerous. We can see from its foggy nature, that the air is dark and gloomy. The landscape itself is also symbolic. The wild, almost knotted forest is suggests restriction. It stands between Ada and Baines, like an obstacle. But once she is with him, it is like a blanket, concealing their secret. The forest also provokes traditional association, romance, secrets and danger. This also fits the style of the gothic era when this film is set. Jane Davies from http://moviemind.wikispaces.com/The+Piano Jane Davies mentions in her analysis how the forest is like a blanket that hides George Baines, the male protagonist, as if to pertain that Baines is removed from society by the obstacle of muddy trees, which is to be proven correct in the following scenes, but as Davies also suggests; Baines habitat provokes romantic danger. This can be described as an example of ecriture feminine with the perspective, per se, of the radical feminist, whose goal-interpretation of an equal society is of the acknowledgement of mans danger to woman, but of the liberal feminist, the interpretation is of social comfortability, thus deeming the womans right to romanticize their approach to the danger of man. However, as Davies also suggests, the films style sets a gothic tone with the beginning of the excerpt evoking gloom, nocturnal and ghost-like imagery, Ada, our feminine body, subjects the audience unto questions for reason of her feminine position. The viewer is presented with a lady and her young child who is helplessly assisting the woman across an unavoidable path of thick and deep mud. As the pair is allowed to walk across the mud with the use of a wood-plank laid flat above it; the camera pans alongside them, stopping in its tracks to view the pairs long-shot between the barks of two trees: as a sort of key-hole shot representing Baines cell-bars in his prison of trees and the McGraths innocently feminine attempts to cross a restricted path.

The metaphoric serpents moving freely from the medusas head correspond to Cixous theory of feminine writing as a discursive activity that rejects stabilized language and structuralism. She identifies that woman writing woman and writing the body can represent the feminine only when woman releases herself from the linguistic constraints of masculine oppression, from Lacans model of phallic centered language. When the pair walks to the end of the plank, arriving to their destination, you begin to see the feminine nature erupt unforebodingly, as if the presence of an angel had just appeared: Holly Hunter, who plays the angelic mute-protagonist, is wrapped in an Elizabethan, Victorian or medieval-type frock, attire that represents the beginning of the feminine era. chaka khan