An academic volume on Jane Campion presents the opportunity to reconcile two prevailing, competing approaches in authorship studies and film historiography, both of which revolve around ‘the auteur’. On the one hand, some feminist film scholars, beyond simply critiquing the male-dominated canon and its norms of representation, have long appropriated the framework of auteurism to advocate for female directors and to argue for their inclusion within the highest echelons of film art. In the late 1980s, after philosophical broadsides from Roland Barthes (2005) and Michel Foucault (1992), literary theorist Nancy K. Miller defended the ‘political potential’ of female authorship when she wrote the following:

One of the most honoured women in film history, Jane Campion has, as much as anyone, seized this ‘question of agency’ for female filmmakers, earning the esteem of even the most orthodox auteurist institutions.

On the other hand, Campion's vaunted, now-canonical status presents certain perils for the film historian tracking the collaborative and institutional realities of feature film production. While auteurist criticism excels at identifying the formal and ideational qualities of a filmmaker's work, an auteur-centred analysis tends to simplify the context of creation and circulation that ultimately impacts the meanings ascribed to a given work. In other words, one can both argue that Campion has an integral oeuvre, united by idiosyncratic formal strategies and themes of womanhood and transgression, and also challenge the assumption that Campion is the sole or primary creative agent behind all of ‘her’ films. To zoom out to a wider production context does not obscure the feminist project that is inextricable from Campion's auteurism, but rather sharpens it. Campion's overlooked first feature film Two Friends (1986) offers an ideal case study for an expanded, contextual analysis of her films, as the conditions of its production and distribution were directly shaped by feminist political action and female creative talent.