Activity: Talk or presentation › Oral presentation
Description
The call for papers counterposes Bachelard’s experience of being in space with Joan Ockman’s Foucauldian reading of space as structuring power relations. This paper proposes a third exploration of space as a medium of deeply cinematic story-telling.
In Unrelated (2007), Joanna Hogg’s directorial debut, Anna (Kathryn Worth) joins the family of an old friend on holiday in Italy, but unexpectedly arrives without her husband. Hogg uses a realist style of film-making to explore this moment of change for Anna, not through the characters’ dialogue which is often entirely inconsequential, but through her deployment of space: the setting itself, and the placing of the characters in that space and amongst themselves. This narrative method and light touch direction allows deep pscyhological territory to quietly unfold for the viewer. As the Foreward to The Poetics of Space puts it “…our comprehension of space, however confined or expansive, still affords an opportunity to encounter the boundaries of the self just as they are about the give way” (Bachelard, 2014, p.vii).
Drawing on academic discussions of mise en scene and scenographic space, this paper will examine British director Joanna Hogg’s use of narrative space to allow her woman-centred story emerge.