Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/990701
22 CINEMONTAGE / Q2 2018 THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY 'The Piano' Ain't Got No Wrong Notes by Edward Landler F rom the age of six, Ada McGrath refuses to speak, yet film audiences first saw and heard how clearly she communicates on May 15, 1993, when Jane Campion's The Piano premiered at the 45th Cannes International Film Festival. At the festival's awards ceremony on May 24, its star, Holly Hunter, was named Best Actress for her portrayal of this mute woman who expresses herself through a combination of self-invented sign language, her eyes, and the exquisite music she creates on her piano. Also at the close of the festival 25 years ago, writer/ director Campion became the first — and still the only — woman director whose film received Cannes' highest honor, the Palme d'Or (shared with Farewell My Concubine by Chinese director Chen Kaige), for this Australian production shot entirely in New Zealand. Setting the film in her native land in the mid-19th century, yet speaking to the present, the filmmaker captured in Hunter's Ada a deeply elemental drive for female integrity in a male-dominated society.