Cirrus@Austlit

'Anna Neil argues that the film gives a voice to a national identity untroubled by Maori claims for sovereignty, as the Maori do not exist in the historical space of the colonising culture but rather are frozen in a sacred time prior to colonisation. She draws on other texts that attempt to write difference out of the modern myths of nation and to replace it with the notion of a shared relationship to the past, one that mourns the loss of an unrecoverable Maori history. In doing so, she exposes the selective version of post contact history that The Piano portrays.' (p.xii)