Jane Campion is commonly thought of as an exceptional talent, winning numerous awards for her work, including some of the most prestigious both in Hollywood and in European film. Campion was only the second woman to be nominated for a best director Academy Award, eventually winning the Oscar for best original screenplay for The Piano (1993). In addition, until 2021 Campion was the only woman to win the Palme d’Or (twice), the first time for best short film for Peel –An Exercise in Discipline (1982) and latterly in the best film category for The Piano, with another nomination for the coveted Cannes prize for Bright Star (2009). Campion went on to be the first female director to preside over the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014, while more recently she was awarded the 2021 Prix Lumière as part of the Lumière Festival. Her latest feature, The Power of the Dog (2021), received twelve Oscar nominations in 2022, winning her the award for best director, only the third woman to have won in ninety-four years.

With over thirty years standing as a director, Campion is renowned for creating complex female characters and is fêted for exploring the power dynamics of sexual and familial relationships, homing in on the often-troubled dialectic between her female protagonists’ internal desires and the external environment in which they operate. It is true to say that Campion's representation of women often focuses on those at the edges of society, from the misunderstood writer Janet Frame (Kerry Fox) in the made-for-television biopic An Angel at my Table (1989) to the masochistic Frannie Avery (Meg Ryan) in the erotic thriller In the Cut (2003). More recently, in Campion's return to the television format with Top of the Lake (2013), Detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) undertakes an emotionally and psychologically traumatic return journey to her home to solve a case in which incest, sex-trafficking, and rape form the backdrop to the first season. In the second season, Top of the Lake: China Girl (2017), Griffin investigates another series of abuses against women and young girls in the Australian capital, Sydney.

Top of the Lake (2013), Jane Campion's first television offering since Angel at my Table (1990), is a study of what it means to be female in a patriarchal world structured around male sexual violence against women. The richness of Campion's vision lends itself to a multiplicity of readings but, this chapter will argue, the central concern of the series is an exploration of the meaning of feminism(s) for each of the female characters struggling to articulate her subjectivity within patriarchy. Campion's ambiguous, ambivalent, often thorny relationship to feminism and the question of whether her works engage with feminist politics is well-documented; indeed, it has become almost trite to state this. But although Campion has previously stated that her ‘orientation isn't political or doesn't come out of modern politics’ (Cantwell 1999, 158), I argue that Top of the Lake represents a marked shift from this assertion, as does Campion's own engagement in the discourse around the show. This chapter seeks, then, to read Top of the Lake as representative of a discursive shift in Campion's oeuvre. As in all her work, the female experience is central to the meanings generated by and reflected in the series but this time, feminism itself is the organising framework within which the narrative functions.

This may seem a bold claim to make about a director who has periodically problematised the idea that telling female stories is or should be a feminist endeavour. Of After Hours (1985), the short she developed with the Australian Women's Film Unit, Campion states, ‘[it] had to be openly feminist since it spoke about the sexual abuse of women at work. I wasn't comfortable because I don't like films that say how one should or shouldn't behave’ (Ciment 1999a, 35). Yet as Dana Polan notes, for all Campion's disavowal of After Hours, and her seeming antagonism towards (its) feminist politics, the film encompasses the stylistic and thematic concerns of her earlier student films as well as prefiguring the narrative structures and motifs of her work to date (2001, 76–84). Indeed, this early negation of openly feminist politics is itself an engagement with those politics, leading to a body of work underpinned by representations of the power dynamics between men and women explored in early films such as After Hours.