Monday, May 2, 2011

True or False? #3

When Janet Frame was a young woman living in London she worked alone in a basement room painting the eyes onto the faces of dolls.

True or False?

2 comments:

Pamela Gordon said...

False. There is a scene in the Jane Campion movie that shows her doing this, but as with much else in the movie, this was fiction.

Pamela Gordon said...

Jane Campion did derive the idea to show Janet Frame working as a doll painter, from an observation Frame made of another tenant in her London building who earned her living that way.

Frame's actual job was as a cinema usher.

It's a mark of the poetry of the film that the doll painting works so well to strengthen the audience's impression about the "Janet" that Campion wants to convey.