On the Road With Jane Campion

It’s been six years since Jane Campion last directed a feature film, but her earthy, melancholy new Bright Star, about the romance between poet John Keats and his great love, Fanny Brawne, was well worth the wait. And now that Bright Star is receiving near-universal acclaim, our friends at New York magazine have put this trailblazing New Zealand director (whom we’ve always had a bit of a thing for) back in the spotlight, presenting her early Cannes-award-winning short An Exercise in Discipline: Peel (1982) on its Vulture blog. As blogger Bilge Ebiri notes, Peel is included as an extra on the Criterion special edition of Sweetie (“still one of the most gorgeous DVDs we’ve ever seen,” he nicely adds), along with her other early shorts, Passionless Moments and A Girl’s Own Story. As you’ll see below, Peel entertainingly displays many of what would become Campion’s touchstones: familial and gender power dynamics, eccentric visual compositions, and, uh, women peeing in public.