Visual Elements in 'The Piano'

In the scene beginning at 01:43:44, where Ada and George set sail for Nelson, shot sizes are used for various reasons. The scenes uses an establishing shot at 01:44:19 to communicate with the audience clearly the nature and set up of the scene. This particular shot is a tacking shot and it starts with a close up on a Maori woman’s face as she sings a farewell waiata. The shot then zooms out from the woman gradually to reveal the men pushing the waka into the sea. The shot reveals the establishment of the scene in an aesthetically pleasing way. The dramatic movement of the camera from the close-up to an establishing shot matches the movement of the waka through the sand in a flowing way. The use of a tracking shot here also focuses the viewer on the Maori woman as she sings her melancholy waiata, emphasising the fact that the characters are leaving the place they had called their home. The final part of the tracking shot really displays the big wide ocean that the characters are sailing into, this is to highlight the fact that they are going into an unknown, something big and mysterious. However, this is not presented in a frightening way because of the warm lighting from the sunset. 

The film also uses close up shots in the scene, particularly when they are rowing the waka across the sea. The use of close up shots in this scene does two things, it focuses the viewer on the emotions of the characters, and makes the boat feel cramped.  One example of these close up shots in the scene is the shot at 1:46:10. In this shot Ada looks at her piano falling into the water, and contemplates her suicide. The shot has a clear back ground, middle ground, and fore ground. In the background we see a Maori paddling the waka, the middle ground (where the focus is) is Ada, and the foreground is a man dealing with the ropes after pushing the piano overboard. The inclusion of so many thing in a close up shot, creates a cramped feeling for the audience. All of the moving, in one close up shot, really make the shot feel busy and tightly packed. This look is probably reflective of how the main character, Ada is feeling. I imagine she is feeling claustrophobic and suffocated. Maybe she is feeling claustrophobic and suffocated not just from the canoe but from her circumstances in general. From being forced to marry a man, to being shipped to a foreign country her circumstances are less than desirable. By making the canoe suffocatingly full, Campion may be symbolising the suffocating Ada does a few seconds later when she drowns. Her suffocated feeling is reiterated through the use of the close up to focus the viewer on Ada’s face. With the close up, we can see in detail the emotion on Ada’s face. This is important as Ada is having an internal existential crisis as she ponders her suicide. The audience is able to sense the drama on her face, and the use of a close up shot intensifies that effect because it is so large on screen.

The film is edited very slowly; it has a lingering and thoughtful pace. The pace slows the action down and gives the film a sense of realness, but in an awkward way. A critic once said of Campion’s work, that it conveys “the reality of experience”, and I think a huge component of that is the editing pace. The film has quite a considerable number of seconds on each shot, making the film seem very slow. The action seems slower because the dialogue takes longer. But this gives the film the “reality of experience. It makes the film seem more real because the editing pace allows the characters to take long pauses and ponder the actions that have been taken and wonder about the ones they’ll take next. This is much like how real life is, dialogue doesn’t flow and people don’t know how to react to things. The lingering pace gives the film genuineness and it brings the audience in to the world of the film.  Because it is more like real life, the actions taken by the characters seem more significant to members of the audience. Thusly they are more hurt or happier when things go one way or another. The lingering pace also makes the audience feel a little uncomfortable. Audiences are used to the standard fast paced and action heavy films, so the slow pace of the piano is a contrast for the Audience and it feels a little awkward. This stiff feeling, makes the Audience feel how Ada is feeling in the film, uncomfortable. She is thrust into a new, somewhat twisted society and she is a little bit of an outcast, subsequently she feels uncomfortable for most of the film. We are able to see how Ada is reacting to the scene through the editing pace. An example of the lingering pace is at 1:33:50 after Alisdair cuts of Ada’s finger and she is attempting to hold herself together. The camera lingers on Ada as she limps around in the mud holding her bloody wound. It spends several seconds looking straight onto her wound and her face. By having the camera spend so much unbroken time on her the audience is forced to look at her suffering face; creating an awkward feeling in the audience.