Share
Clip description
Pam (Gabrielle Shornegg), Stella (Geraldine Haywood) and Gloria (Marina Knight) enact a Beatles performance for a crowd of screaming fans. Later Pam and Stella continue their play-acting at home.
Curator’s notes
In a 1986 interview with Michael Ciment, Campion describes her motivation for A Girl’s Own Story as wanting ‘to pay homage to that period of our lives where we feel lost and alone. It’s a very curious stage in our development where we feel adult emotions but we lack experience.’
Campion evokes this uneasy stage through a series of contrasts. In this scene, Pam and Stella’s masked kissing is an uncomfortable mix of childish game play and burgeoning adult desire. Framing the shot through a line of Barbie dolls adds emphasis, as does the music-box motif on the soundtrack. Campion also contrasts the impact of global pop culture and its 1960s promise of social change with the stifling environment of Pam, Stella and Gloria’s catholic school.
Campion, born in 1954, was herself a teenager in the 1960s. She spoke to Ciment about her desire to pay tribute to when she had ‘lived many experiences that I had never seen represented.’ She echoed this sentiment in a later interview with Mary Cantwell for The New York Times, talking about The Piano (1993) and growing up in New Zealand. Both films, she says, are ‘my territory – things I know about, that nobody else could easily get access to.’
The Piano (1993), like A Girl’s Own Story, places a female experience of sexual awakening within the context of a restrictive society.
