Jane Campion's film The Piano creates a series of oppositions and uses them to advance the narrative and to indicate certain thematic concerns on the part of the filmmaker. The story unfolds as a series of meetings and confrontations in which these oppositions are evoked. Opposing forces are shaped around individual characters who confront one another or interact in ways that conflict. The film sets up a series of contrasts, or oppositions, between other elements as well--interior versus exterior setting, interior versus exterior psychology, Scotland versus New Zealand, male versus female, self-absorption versus love, and so on.
The opening of the film sets up a contrast between the visual and the verbal that is carried throughout the film and which becomes a strong metaphor for the way the main character reacts to the world around her. The visual element is given added importance by being muted in the opening first by the fact that we are looking through Ada's eyes as she covers them with her fingers and second by the way the camera keeps in close in the scenes in Scotland, giving this world a sense of enclosure that will contrast with the lushness of New Zealand. The fingers held before the eyes mimic bars and show that Ada is a woman trapped in this world. She will travel from Scotland to New Zealand and be just as trapped in an arranged marriage. She is at the same time her own jailer, for her refusal to speak imprisons her and sets her apart from the rest of the world. In this opening, Ada also creates an opposition between her physical voice and her mind's voice as she tells us that she has not spoken since she was 6 and that the voice we hear is her mind's voice and not her physical voice. In another sense, this creates an ongoing opposition between the mental and the physical and so between physical actions like sex and mental actions like love. The story carries these contrasts through and shows the conflicts the...