In 2017, the Film Society of Lincoln Center held a Jane Campion retrospective to celebrate the release of Top of the Lake: China Girl (2017). To inaugurate the series, they hosted ‘An Evening with Jane Campion’, at which Campion narrated her life and work. Naturally, the same themes and ideas that have followed Campion throughout her career were discussed. Among the issues explored was the ever-thorny subject of feminism. Programming director Dennis Lim asked Campion, ‘As somebody who went to art school in the 70s and 80s, was feminist film theory something that was formative to you?’ (Film at Lincoln Center 2017, 1:19:38). Ever the humourist, Campion sidestepped the question by joking about her film school's ‘conservative’ nature (Campion attended the Australian Film, Television and Radio School [AFTRS]). While Campion followed up the comment with statements on gender parity, this discomforted-turned-facetious response is not out of the ordinary for her when asked about her relationship to feminism. She has long expressed unease around the term's application to her work, and after she directed After Hours (1984) she went as far as to claim that she regretted the feminist project, citing feelings of artistic constraint (Ciment 1999a, 35). Yet despite her protests, trade publications, curators and academics have continued to attach the feminist label to Campion and her films.

It's not hard to see why such writers and publications do so. Not only was she the only woman to win the Palme d’Or for almost seventy-five years, an individual win sometimes extrapolated for the collective, but also unlike some other visible women directors, Campion roots her films in the female experience, tracing the lives and histories of women. Patricia White summarises the impulse to claim Campion as feminist: ‘If I were to pick one woman filmmaker to stand for the lot, I would much rather it be Jane Campion, whose work speaks to feminist concerns and incites my passion, than, say, Leni Riefenstahl’ (2015, 34). With the mention of Riefenstahl, White recognises the particular history and problem of the German director, who attempted a rehabilitation of her image by separating her talent and gender from her Nazi context. This rehabilitation was accepted, in part, in some feminist circles.