I feel certain I’ve seen An Angel at My Table, but if I have, I haven’t reviewed it. And honestly, I feel like Jane Campion is one of those directors where I should really go out of my way to see all their films, as she hasn’t made that many total. Honestly, she’s one of those people where I kind of wonder what they’re doing with their time, as she’s directed a total of nine movies in the last thirty years, two of which aren’t even full movies but segments of others, and I don’t see a lot of “and then she was directing theatre” or “she contributes a lot of her time to philanthropy” or whatever, but of course I’m not doing a terribly in-depth look, here.

Still, all it takes is one, and she has one movie that will be remembered no matter what. She was the second woman nominated for Best Director at the Oscars, winning for Best Original Screenplay, and remains the only woman to win the Palme d’Or, both for The Piano. Two of the actresses from it won Oscars themselves, and the film in fact won a total of sixty-three awards all told. It won and was nominated for awards I’ve never even heard of, and it won more than half the awards it was nominated for, which itself is quite impressive. If she never did anything else in her life, she did The Piano.

But she has done other things, if not all that many. She’s even got another Oscar-nominated performance under her direction—Barbara Hershey in The Portrait of a Lady. She’s done some shorts, and she did TV. (I’ve started to watch Top of the Lake, but it didn’t really do anything for me.) And she is, let us be real, one of the most acclaimed female directors in modern cinema.

Which is in and of itself depressing, if for no other reason than that there should be talented female directors who by their sheer body of work would have acquired notice over the course of twenty or thirty films and collected a bunch of awards two or three at a time. The idea that only one woman has ever won Best Director, that only one woman has ever won the Palme d’Or, is pretty awful, and it’s not because there are no other good female directors. Far too often, even films that get a lot of attention from the public do not bring attention to female directors.

It is not unlikely, and perhaps someone who knows more about Campion than I can tell me, that she hasn’t done much because she doesn’t feel like dealing with the men of film. The studios are run by men; the decisions are made by men. I wouldn’t blame Campion for not wanting to deal with that. Still, she doesn’t even do many shorts, which you’d figure would require less dealing with the system. And she seems to quite like making shorts, based on what I’ve read, and doesn’t consider them Lesser Film at all. Which, you know, good for her!

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