Cirrus@Austlit

'By exploring the landscape of the film, Simmons traces the history of New Zealand landscape, weaving "a network of textual invocations" in colonial art and literature traditions of both the European and colonial environment. Analysis of these images provides a departure point for an examination of themes of cultural nationalism in the earlier stages of his argument. He interrogates colonialism's discursive practices through moments of irony, the fractions and occlusions of its formal syntax, and the psychoanalytic paradigms of its discourses of the body in opposition to a patriarchal order. He argues that ultimately The Piano re-narrativises the strategies of previous attitudes to the land where only the post-contact European possesses the ability to enunciate and represent the "other".' (p.xii)