In Exihibition
Joanna Hogg’s account of a marriage between two middle-aged artists, a woman
named D and a man named H live in a house partitioned by walls that look like
Rothko paintings. In this austere, idiosyncratic place, the two of them make
art. H’s studio is a white room with a slit of a window that seems to be
upstairs; D’s is an airier, red room, closer to ground level, with a long
built-in desk sandwiched between a floor-to-ceiling window and a sliding door.
H works on the computer. D works with her body. Throughout the film, she
experiments with a pose that involves placing her hands on the seat of a stool,
arching her back, tying garments around herself, and pulling on them to press
her torso out of shape.
The
repeated appearance of this process, to which nobody ever refers, makes what
might otherwise seem like understandable deficiencies of a long relationship
(laconic exchanges, bored sex) feel bizarre. It is like an unrecognizable
animal occasionally peeking its head out of the deceptively static surface of
their shared life. In conversation, D or H will often sit silently in the face
of the other’s speech. They reject explicit invitations from one another — to
come to the other’s studio, to have sex — little denials that take on sharper
meanings once it emerges that they are in an extended conflict, because H wants
to sell their house, and D wants to stay.
Short,
barbed lines also betray D’s belief that H, who has the more established
career, doesn’t respect her work. D has dreams about being vulnerable with men
who do, and in bed, while H sleeps beside her, she relates these encounters
into her dictaphone. One night, he hears her mumbling, “He really listened, he
really got it. . . . I loved the sound of his voice. Could have listened to it
forever.” In another dream, where D is interviewed by H, H is lucid, engaged,
and seems to grasp D’s project. He praises her for offering “a critical and
analytical framework” without “being overly didactic.” “When I’m looking at
certain situations, I’m brought back to your work,” he says. “It works as a
road map to try and unpack a lot of these kinds of psychological aspects of the
domestic that are normally quite hard to reach.”
D says
nothing. Impatience crosses H’s face. He complains that he feels he’s “missing
something”: “I feel that there’s this barrier. I can be useful to you. I can be
useful. I’m not completely — ”
“But the
thing is,” D says, “I — I don’t want your input, I don’t want your judgment, I
want — I don’t want your ideas, I don’t want your cleverness, because it
derails me.”
Another
cause of this incompatibility might be the shadow that sexual objectification
can cast over heterosexual relationships. D’s poses, some of which are
performed nearly naked, seem to recognize the scripts of femininity that are
inevitably called up by any image of a disrobed female body and, upon that
recognition, refuse to yield. The one work of female iconography to which the
film overtly refers is Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, a photograph of which
is reflected in a hand mirror that D uses one night while applying makeup in
her studio. Bernini captured the saint in a moment of rapture, just before she
was liberated from her body by an angel. (“He appeared to me to be thrusting it
at times into my heart,” Teresa wrote of that angel and its scepter, “and to
pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also,
and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God.”) In one scene, standing
under cellophaned lights that flush the room a garish blue, D wears nothing but
horizontal neon bands wrapped around her body, a pair of underpants, and a
shroud on her head, as if exhibiting how far she is from the ecstatic
obliteration of the desexed nun.
D has
money, some success, no child, and lives in a time and a place with at least a
notional commitment to sexual equality — all conditions that should make it
easier to devise a plausible life as a woman, a wife, and an artist at once.
And yet she still experiences a conflict of such intensity that she becomes
compulsive, almost schizophrenic, like Munro’s two hands. Framed by this
problem, D’s silence around her husband begins to look strategic, not
desperate, more like a method she has found to maintain a boundary around the
part of herself that she cannot pour into the domestic arena — the one way she
can limit the sometimes difficult, sometimes necessary, and sometimes
pleasurable activity of ceding her being to a man.
Her first
three films are slow, subdued studies of upper-class malaise. (Martin Scorsese,
who has since become one of Hogg’s advocates, was so bored by her second
feature, 2010’s Archipelago, on his first attempt to watch it that he turned
off the DVD after a few minutes.) They are accomplished portraits of sad or
incompletely self-actualized people constricted by social norms — though this
might make them sound virtuous but stolid, like dutiful commentaries on a
certain kind of stereo-typically English reserve. In fact, despite their pace,
they are not stolid. She frequently casts amateurs, whose performances often
have an accidental quality. (The couple in Exhibition is played by Liam
Gillick, a conceptual artist, and Viv Albertine, the guitarist of the Slits,
who inhabits D with a slightly jerky, fitful inwardness.) Hogg’s cinematic
vocabulary — a painterly compositional sense; intensely considered, freighted
restraint — invites you to look for the secret in the plain face. Her takes can
be quiet and static, long and lacking in dramatic significance, but they are
never boring — you are never actually waiting — because she has trained you to
inspect the small change for the news of life.
Hogg
returns explicitly to the problem of male influence in The Souvenir (2019),
which, along with its sequel, The Souvenir: Part II (2021), dramatizes a period
of her late adolescence and early adulthood when she was a film student and had
a love affair with a man who was a heroin addict, an affair that ended when he
died. The diptych is usually referred to as a Künstlerroman, but the term
elides the films’ fixation on the entwinement of Hogg’s development as an
artist with the instruction, both formal and emotional, she received from a
turbulent relationship with an older man.
In the
films, Hogg’s avatar is a woman named Julie Harte, who lives in a replica of
Hogg’s former real-life apartment, a duplex in Knightsbridge owned by her
parents. Julie meets the man, whose name is Anthony, in the first film’s first
scene, at a party in her apartment where he has come as a guest of a guest. He
has dark hair, a cleft lip, a slightly slurred, deliberate voice, and wears a
tailored pinstripe jacket. Amid the flat’s silvery surfaces — white walls,
white sofa, white mirror — his fluid, louche way of holding himself gives him
the look of a spill of wine. In their first conversation, Julie tells him about
her thesis project, a tragedy about a young boy living in Sunderland, observing
its decline and loving his mother, who, by the end of the film, will be dead.
She fiddles with her hands and speaks in long sentences, with the halting clip
of a person who is eager to talk but not accustomed to being listened to. Anthony,
by comparison, sounds like he hasn’t needed to explain himself to anyone for a
very long time.
The
exchange prefigures the asymmetry that will come to define their relationship,
in which Anthony will become a kind of guide, a role conferred not just by his
age and his implied sexual experience but also by his covert assertion of
superior tastes — that ulterior motive of the inveterate recommender. At their
second meeting, he questions why she, a young woman from a family of means,
would want to make a film about a place whose conditions were so far from her
own. His voice has the accusatory caution of a professor trying to steer his
student away from something unwise. “You’re not trying to document,” he asks,
“some received idea of life up there, on the docks, the daily grind, huddled
listening to the wireless?”
These
humiliations appear in their raw form on the face of Honor Swinton Byrne, the
actress who plays Julie (and whose mother, Tilda Swinton, plays Julie’s
mother). Byrne is not professionally trained, and her performance has a
transparent, especially reactive quality; feeling spreads across her features almost
instantaneously. It is jarring to watch her face full of hurt in one scene and
then hear her try to describe what she imagines — what she wants so desperately
to make — in another. Watching her alternate between naked woundedness and
vehemence, I was reminded of Louise Glück’s description of the aspiring poet’s
debased yearning — her “adamant need which makes it possible to endure every
form of failure.” The harshness of that failure is as little veiled by Julie’s
face as a flush.
The
autobiographical element of Hogg’s project, which she has discussed freely in
the press, connects Julie’s torments and humiliations to a belated creative
fulfillment. The knowledge that Hogg is Julie gives Julie’s feelings of
smallness and doubt a special poignancy. You know she will succeed; you’re
invited to imagine a line between this moment and the one in which The Souvenir
is released, notched with twenty-odd years of lessons sought and involuntarily
received, of experiencing love and encountering dishonesty, of not making her
own films — and then, change.
When The
Souvenir came out, some critics bemoaned its apparent disinterest in the
mechanisms by which Hogg had unearthed and then transformed her memories. It is
a strange critique, given how much the film seems devoted to providing proof
that the painful processes of creative frustration, of confusing guidance and
dominance with love, cannot just be overcome but are also a worthwhile subject
for art. In an essay that appears in A24’s Souvenir DVD box set, Elif Batuman
notes that watching Julie reminded her of In Search of Lost Time, and of how
“Albertine took up the narrator’s time and money, and only her death has
finally freed him to write his book — and yet, she also furnished the material
of the book.” This might distill the nature of any work of art made out of a
ruin, but The Souvenir suggests that the transfiguration of experiences based
largely on degradation might possess higher stakes. In being attached to a
persistent truth — in Julie’s case, heterosexual womanhood — such
transfiguration carries the promise that circumstances that will persist
throughout one’s life might be converted from hindrances into tools.
How the
artist metabolizes experience is the central subject of Part II, which follows
Julie’s attempts to construct a story about what happened to her and to then
commit that story to film. Still a student, Julie has abandoned the Sunderland
idea and decided to make her thesis a portrait of her love affair instead. The
film is more expansive than The Souvenir, showing Julie with friends and
colleagues, and in many more kinds of spaces, like trailers and stages and pubs
and school buildings. She has much more time for all these things, of course,
now that she no longer has a boyfriend.
Though
Julie knows how she wants her film to look — watching her shoot it, we have a
sense that it will be a sort of Souvenir in miniature, an intimate and
basically realistic portrait composed of loose, close takes — Part II flirts
with genres Hogg hasn’t experimented with before. The film encompasses,
arguably, four separate films: one is a musical directed by Anthony’s friend
Patrick — the one who mocked Julie for her obliviousness to Anthony’s drug
habit. It’s shot in black-and-white and depicts young men roughing one another
up. The second is another student’s thesis, a sci-fi movie featuring aliens.
The third is Julie’s thesis, which she is shown making throughout the movie but
which never airs onscreen. The last is a dreamlike film-within-a-film that
elapses immediately after Julie introduces herself at her class’s graduation
screening, and to which Hogg cuts from a shot of the motes of dust caught in
the projector’s milky light. (None of the characters mentions this movie, which
might be taken as Hogg’s surrealist remake of her earlier Souvenir.)
There is a
teasing indictment of Hogg’s aesthetic early on, when Patrick tells an
interviewer, “Look at us. We’re in the pissing rain. Wouldn’t you want to be on
a soundstage, in widescreen, rather than here, like every other fucking English
film ever made, where it’s drizzling?” But rather than campaigning for any of
them, Part II runs through these new styles, as if it too wanted to embody the
art student’s imperative to experiment. Compared with Hogg’s other films, there
is more technical manipulation: faster cuts; a sweeping dolly shot; more
nondiegetic music. Its sensuousness can be less ambiguous, less restrained. The
film is studded with shots of flowers, in which the film grain is so dense and
legible that the frames look like blown-up slivers of Seurat paintings. When
Julie returns to London from a long convalescence at her parents’ house in the
country, she sleeps with an actor named Jim while she has her period. Their
encounter consists of long close-ups of their faces. Jim wears a slightly
villainous expression, a red smear on his lips. The scene ends with a cut from
a bloodstain on Julie’s white bed to the glossy metal surface of a car, so
smooth it looks like nail polish, which as the camera drifts is revealed to be
a prop on the alien movie. This might seem like a wink at the gulf between
certain conventional oppositions — flesh and steel; verité and melodrama — but
then, didn’t Jim look a bit like a vampire? Didn’t the bright mess on the
crumpled cotton and the menacing light falling through the doorway remind you a
little bit of Scream?
There is
something a touch unsatisfying about the way Hogg’s metafictional meditation is
tied together. The obvious parallel between Julie and Hogg casts Part II as a
study about making The Souvenir. But Part II’s account of the role that style
has played — in Hogg’s work, in Julie’s artistic maturation — is incomplete.
What does this embrace of different styles have to do with Julie’s
self-knowledge? How do they shape what she believes happened to her and
Anthony? Julie’s impediments are workaday: not knowing how to give her crew
consistent instructions about lighting, or how to talk to her actors so they understand
the emotional undertow of a scene. Exhibiting the process of becoming an artist
as incremental and unglamorous is valuable for its honesty, but there’s also
something slightly boring about it — though I suppose this sort of thing is
boring, when compared with dating a man who tussles with your father about the
IRA and also knows a lot about poetry. (The absence of Anthony, who seemed both
clearly doomed but was in his theater so magnetic, also leaves Part II somewhat
drained.) But perhaps counterintuitively, the film’s uneven texture is
intriguing and oddly cheering. More than anything else, the film is striking as
a document of an artist in the midst of change.
This arc
continues through The Eternal Daughter (2022), where Hogg expands the scope of
her examination of a dynamic to which she had already begun to shift her
attention. In Part II Julie is placed in contact with all the mundanities,
beautiful and tedious, that regain color once romantic obsession recedes. Many
people fill the space Anthony left behind: a friend and supporter; an artistic
foil; the boy with whom she has her tryst; a therapist. Most of all, there is
her mother. It is her mother who sits in bed with her, who agrees to lend her
money (at one point, £10,000), who stands outside the bathroom wearing a look
of fenced concern when Julie is so grieved she is sick. Who touches her hair
and says it looks like her own mother’s, and whose voice drops half an octave
as she says to her, when asked what it was like to learn of Anthony’s death, “I
felt through you.”
In The
Eternal Daughter, Hogg presents a midcareer artist and her mother on a short
holiday at an estate in the English countryside. Because she has to give her
name at the front desk, we know this filmmaker’s name is Julie Harte, and that
this new film is thus an extension of the Souvenir project, though one with a
different slant. The Eternal Daughter is unconcerned with the dynamics of
romantic love. Julie has a male partner — when she goes outside at night, it is
often because she is seeking a cell phone signal to call him. Brief mentions
establish that their relationship is imperfect; in a moment of frustration,
Julie tells her mother (whose name, as in the earlier films, is Rosalind), “I
have a husband I neglect completely and I don’t have that much time left, and I
don’t have a family beyond you. I don’t have any children, I’m not going to
have anybody to fuss over me when I’m your age.” All of Daughter takes place at
the manor, over a few days. Despite how spatially and temporally constrained
the film is, Hogg conjures the sense that, just offscreen, Julie and her
partner are attempting to eke out slips of freedom in heterosexuality’s
compromised country. Those slips might be partial, but — seeing as Julie no
longer feels that her romantic desires and her work are in such urgent
competition — perhaps they are enough.
The
grown-up Julie wears heavy-rimmed glasses and has an artful and
expensive-looking haircut. In fact, all of her clothes look expensive, curated
and appraised by a woman of discernment and specific desires: her dark coat,
her pajamas. Her mother has aged, though her wardrobe has not much changed
since we saw her in Part II, in pearls and smooth wool. In the manor, the two
of them share meals, chat, go through Christmas cards by the fire. Julie is
both capable — she’s the one who’s booked the room, who writes out her mother’s
cards — and visibly destabilized by witnessing Rosalind’s frailty and listening
to her accounts of bitter episodes from her youth. Throughout the trip, Julie
returns to a room at the top of the building, trying to write and not quite
being able to. Though she is by now more at ease with the banality and tedium
of creation, she confesses to feeling like she has no right to her mother’s stories — “trespassing,”
she calls it — as well as the sense that thinking about her mother’s life
requires confronting a sadness that she cannot bear. “I just want her to be
happy all the time,” she says.
Celia Paul
began to paint as a schoolgirl, but it was when she began to draw her mother
that, in her own words, she made her “first true works of art.” “They were
necessary because I loved her. Their necessity gave them their force.” And yet
that love can also be a kind of stricture. Hogg wrote Daughter in 2008, but, as
she explained in a recent interview, could not make it at the time: “I felt too
bad for my mother.” The film she eventually produced reveals this kind of pain
to be chaos. Chaos because its issue is unmanageable — Julie sometimes cries
when she’s with Rosalind, overflowing with need or petulance or frustration.
And chaos because its source is a conflict between the limitless — everything
she might want to know about her mother, might want to do to protect her;
everything that her mother once did for her; the entire world she once
was — and the inevitable but intolerable limit of her mother’s death.
But
boundless feeling has to be bound if it is to be encapsulated, and in Daughter
Hogg borrows motifs from ghost stories and gothic tales to scaffold the
mother-daughter encounter. On their way there, Julie and Rosalind’s cabdriver
tells them that the hotel is haunted, and when they arrive the lights in its
hallways are a violent, ectoplasmic green. When Julie tries to sleep, she hears
banging noises that cannot be accounted for. More than once, she sees a white
vapor drifting in the estate’s back garden, after which she scuttles inside.
In their
ambiguity, these conventions pose questions that lend the story shape. Perhaps
the ghostly presence is a symbol of what Julie and Rosalind are unearthing
during their time together? Or is it the specter of capital, a haunting by
class guilt? (Is this also the reason that the receptionist, a young woman who
has a Northern English accent and gets picked up at night by a hatchback
blaring loud dance music, seems to dislike Julie so much?) The film’s central
technical conceit is the fact that Julie and her mother are both played by
Tilda Swinton, reprising her role as Rosalind. The film’s supernatural elements
introduce a continuous instability into the viewer’s understanding of how Julie
and Rosalind relate to one another. Maybe they look the same in order to
emphasize how the mother-daughter relationship can be one in which two people
are so similar, and so emotionally enmeshed, that they sometimes feel
indistinguishable. Or maybe Rosalind isn’t even really there. If Rosalind is
haunting Julie — that is, if she is not just her doppelgänger but also,
literally, a phantom — then the simple reading also suffices. That the mother
is the daughter’s ghost.
Part of The
Eternal Daughter’s immense creative accomplishment derives from its balance
between these contrivances and, to a shocking degree, documentary qualities.
For it is possible to see in Swinton’s depiction of the older Julie her
observation of her own daughter, whose mannerisms she seems to know well.
Swinton improvised her lines. Her facial expressions and the clip of her voice,
the turns of phrase she uses when she speaks, all recall Byrne’s in the earlier
films, refined through age. I felt a bolt of recognition when Rosalind asks if
she’s going to try and do some work, and Julie says, the words rushing out of
her and then slowed by reservation, “Yeah, yeah, I think so. I’m going to give
it a stab, anyway.” In another scene, when her mother confesses to feeling “a
bit wobbly,” Julie’s “Aw, mum,” has the exact same sweet, pained, slightly
childlike tone of Byrne apologizing in Part II when she drops and breaks a clay
bowl that Rosalind has made.
One night,
when they sit across from each other at the dinner table, Julie takes a picture
of her mother, who complains, “Darling, will you stop doing that? You must,
must have enough photographs of me now.” Enough — as if anything could ever be
that. The memoiristic impulse that courses through Hogg’s body of work is
clearly tied to an urge to preserve who she has been marked by, who she has
loved. (And what is the film camera’s most basic function, except storing up
little swatches of time?) The fact that in Daughter Julie has such trouble organizing
her feelings — failing to write her script, failing to be sufficiently patient
with Rosalind — suggests that the mother-daughter dyad is, as far as the
material of autobiography goes, the representational limit case. When Julie
reacts with horror and sympathy to something her mother remembers about the
year, during the Second World War, that she spent in this manor, her mother
replies, “That’s what rooms do — they hold these stories. And we’re here now.
And that was then. And there’s just this muddle in me.”
In the
Julie Harte movies, the methods Hogg uses to make sense of her mother’s life
are first exercised in the film-within-a-film in Part II, where Julie
materializes in a hall of mirrors, by a misty river, and has to walk, like
Carroll’s Alice, through an undersized door. The film is dreamily disjointed
and obvious, filled with symbols of romantic intimidation, of the end of
adolescence, of ambition. It has a kinship with the terrible brightness and
emphatic, externalized rendering of the ballerina’s inner journey in The Red
Shoes. The allusion reaches back both to Anthony telling Julie, in the first
film, that he likes Powell and Pressburger (“I think they’re very truthful,” he
says, “without necessarily being real”), and to the urgent journey of that
film’s protagonist, an aspiring ballerina who is told by her impressive but
dour mentor, “You cannot have it both ways. The dancer who relies on the
doubtful comforts of human love will never be a great dancer.”
This
statement, directed by an older man at a younger woman, that love and work
cannot coexist (again, I think of Munro’s two hands, each one betraying her
heart), is winked at and troubled by the sum of the Souvenir films, which show
Julie to be overpowered but not exactly coerced, to be dragged down but also
creatively fed by her romance, to be loved but not exactly fairly treated.
Although Anthony is not domineering, and comes to depend on Julie’s financial
and emotional support, his will eclipses hers. There are imbalances that
precipitate this — his age; his undeniable, if qualified, self-possession; the
fact that Julie does not know how to address his addiction, which is
camouflaged by his rakishness. But there is also the fact that one forfeits
protection from certain cruelties when in love, and Anthony is careless with
Julie’s feelings.
And yet at
the same time that Anthony is stormy and unreliable and a liar, he is also
worldly and useful. Broke, he elides some of the world’s necessary mundanities
in favor of the beautiful. (Julie, having been given money by Rosalind, always
pays.) The couple do wondrous, fanciful things. They eat at Harrod’s, where
Hogg’s bluish color correction gives the room’s crown molding the look of
frosting. They take a trip to Venice. Anthony plays Béla Bartók in her
apartment and takes her to the Wallace Collection to look at a tiny
Fragonard — The Souvenir, from 1776–78 — depicting a young woman named Julie in
a chiffon dress carving her lover’s initials into a tree. In real life, Joanna
Hogg did get taken to this painting by her lover. In her film, their avatars
disagree about her expression. “She looks sad,” Julie says, to which Anthony
replies, “I think she looks determined.”
Hogg’s
gradual wandering-off from her old realism might be taken as a protracted reaction
to what Anthony claimed when critiquing Julie’s Sunderland idea — that viewers
of films “don’t want to see life just played out as it is. We want to see life
as it is experienced within this soft machine.” Perhaps Hogg was told this too,
by her own Anthony; some of the baroque images in Part II’s film-within-a-film,
like those of Julie walking through enormous pieces of torn paper, are swiped
straight from her real graduation movie, Caprice, about a young woman played by
Tilda Swinton who becomes stuck in a fashion magazine. After Anthony has died
and Julie has begun to make her film about their love affair, she goes to the
faculty to propose her new movie, which she describes as a film about “a
relationship in a fairy tale, in a fantasy.” The teachers — a board of
men — sneer at her and refuse to fund it, but we get the sense that she knows
exactly what she wants to do. She’s even laced together the pages of the
treatments with red ribbons.
Joanna Hogg’s Women. By Victoria Uren. N + 1 Magazine, Spring 2023.
Joanna Hogg
is probably the most understated filmmaker to currently have an entire
cinematic universe revolving around her. The British director emerged with her
2007 debut feature, Unrelated, which had an autobiographical tinge, and went on
to make two other brilliantly quiet interpersonal dramas, Archipelago and
Exhibition. But it was with 2019’s The Souvenir that Hogg began to build out an
interconnected series that blurs the line between fiction and memoir. She drew from
her own life in telling the story of Julie, a young film student in the 1980s
who embarks on a formative, if disastrous, relationship while trying to find
her artistic voice.
In that
movie, and its sequel (2021’s The Souvenir Part II), Julie was played by Honor
Swinton Byrne, and her mother, Rosalind, was played by Tilda Swinton, Honor’s
real-life mother. Hogg’s next project, The Eternal Daughter, now in theaters
and available on demand, is one she’s long considered filming. Set closer to
the present day at Christmastime, it follows a mother and daughter who visit an
old hotel and sift through sometimes-fraught memories together. Hogg knew she
wanted to tell a story about facing the mortality and vulnerability of one’s
parents. But only late in its development did she decide to name the characters
Julie and Rosalind, suggesting that they’re older versions of the Souvenir
characters.
“I toyed with that thought—is this a good
idea? It’s not the third part of a trilogy,” Hogg told me of The Eternal
Daughter. “But then they were embodying so much, those characters at a later
stage in life, it just seemed to be pointless to create other names. It didn’t
feel right. Names are really important in films.” She chuckled when I told her she
was creating a “Hogg-verse” of sorts. The idea of a film series existing inside
one giant story has become the norm for studio blockbusters, but it’s a notion
that more independent directors have indulged in, especially ones with
comic-booky inclinations: Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, M. Night Shyamalan.
Hogg,
though, has created an art-house version almost by accident, and the ongoing
experiment feels more literary in nature. Even though The Eternal Daughter can
be enjoyed on its own, it’s fascinating to consider the movie’s links to her
past work, and to her own life, especially given that Hogg has once again cast
her longtime friend Tilda Swinton. This time, Swinton plays a dual role: both
Julie and Rosalind. Julie is now a more established artist, doting on Rosalind
in her older age.
When Hogg
first wrote The Eternal Daughter in 2008, she felt too close to the material to
film it at the time. “I attempted to make it then, but I felt too bad for my
mother,” she said. “We often went on trips together to stay at hotels,
sometimes near relatives, and so it was very directly taken from that
experience with her.” Like Julie in the film, Hogg felt guilty about portraying
such a fresh moment in a real-life relationship. So the director explored her
family tensions in other ways through her art, putting some of her ideas into
Archipelago and then creating the Souvenir films, by which point the mother in
The Eternal Daughter was beginning to morph into Rosalind. “There was something
about Rosalind in the Souvenirs that was so interesting, both to myself and to
Tilda,” Hogg said. “We wanted to know more about that character. And, of
course, Rosalind is partly based on my mother, so my mother is still present
all along. But [the delay] made it possible to have a little bit more
distance.”
The other
major change she made from her 2008 conception of the project was to turn it
into a ghost story. The hotel Julie and Rosalind are staying in is devoid of
other guests, and the hallways are full of spooky noises and apparitions. “The
ghost-story [element] really came about partly from my mother aging, and me
thinking a lot more about mortality both for myself and for her,” Hogg said.
She “was still alive when I was making the film … so I still had to face this
thing of what will she think? Will I show it to her? But then, sadly, she died
while we were editing.”
That loss
is a melancholy coda to Hogg’s initial trepidation about making The Eternal
Daughter. But during our conversation, I got the sense that the director is
most inspired when she’s tapping into her past to tell stories. “In a strange
way, [it] replaces the real memories. Or becomes a confusion of memory and
reality,” she said of her storytelling style, where names might be changed but
specific scenes feel raw and distinctly honest, as though plucked from her mind
and beamed onto the screen. In The Souvenir, Hogg delved into an old
relationship, and in the sequel, she dramatized her youthful attempt to then
make a film about that relationship—a piece of self-reflection so complex, it
feels more like a hall of mirrors, warping the truth into something
cinematically compelling.
“I find it
very hard to get away from that transference, of my life or my experience and
the work. But I think there’s a need in me as a creator in having some basis of
truth in everything that I do,” Hogg admitted. “So if I make a thriller, it
will have to connect with feelings of mine, or some particular experience. It’s
like some kind of foundation that I need that I can’t really articulate fully.”
Still, she said, it was Swinton’s idea to play both roles, in part because the
actor felt similarly connected to the material. Over the years, the pair had
discussed their mothers and the experiences of feeling like outsiders in their
own families. Though The Eternal Daughter is largely gentle in tone, it’s
suffused with the kind of English tension Hogg specializes in—awkward pauses
and benign-sounding chitchat that tiptoes around deeper, darker feelings. In
The Eternal Daughter, Julie and Rosalind are clearly close, but Julie is also
anxious about her mother’s frailty, and worries that she’s failed her by
seeking an artistic life rather than a more traditional family-centric one.
Setting the
film at Christmas only heightens that anxiety. “The pressure to be all happy
and jolly is really excruciating,” Hogg told me. “The inability of both of them
to name what’s really going on—that’s the excruciating part for me, that
situation where you’re feeling something, or you know something inside, but you
can’t voice it.” Though Julie and Rosalind love each other, both are scared of
the end; Julie is afraid of losing her mother and Rosalind is afraid of dying.
“No one wants to talk about mortality, and I regret to this day that I was
never able to have that conversation with my mother,” Hogg continued. “I was
too fearful of it … I didn’t want to upset her by bringing it up. But it would
have been on her mind, and it would have maybe been a relief to have a
conversation about it. But it just didn’t happen.”
For all of
her films, Hogg has a specific process to make raw emotions more dramatically
nuanced and naturalistic. She doesn’t use a typical screenplay while she’s
filming. She instead writes a plot “document” that lays out the story
structure, visual ideas, and character backstories; most of the dialogue is
improvised on the day of shooting. For The Eternal Daughter, Hogg imagined that
her approach wouldn’t work, given that Swinton plays both major characters and
is onscreen almost the entire time. “But it worked, and Tilda was able to
improvise as one character and then the other, and keep the sense of the
scene,” she said. The movie doesn’t rely on the usual Parent Trap–style camera
trickery to have both characters onscreen; instead it largely isolates them
within the frame even when they’re in the room together.
Composing
scenes this way, Hogg said, helps audiences “see Julie and Rosalind as individuals,”
as does Swinton’s ability to embody them. “I still see them as different people
and don’t look and go, ‘That’s Tilda twice,’” Hogg said. The two have known
each other since Swinton was 10 years old and Hogg was 11 (they’re both now
62); in 1986 Swinton was the star of Hogg’s student-thesis film, Caprice, an
electrifying watch to this day. When I asked Hogg what Swinton was like as a
kid, she laughed. “I don’t know how much we’ve changed. It’s an incredible
thing to know someone for that long, even if you’re not working with them,” she
said. “It’s really nice that we’re both presenting something together that
we’ve made. And we’ve been through both our challenges and difficulties over
the years … but our friendship’s been very constant.”
Whether
Rosalind or Julie will return for Hogg’s next project is unknown, but whatever
the director pursues next will have at least some link to her other films. “I
won’t say any more, but it’s tempting to hang on to some names from the past,”
Hogg said. “I’m enjoying the connections. And I’m always doing diagrams when I
work out the structure. One can do a sort of diagram that connects all the
films together … It’s one piece of work, in a way, and will continue to be.”
The one-of-a-kind Hogg-verse endures and, with each film, solidifies its status
as one of the more important cinematic contributions of recent memory.
‘No One
Wants to Talk About Mortality’ By David Sims. The Atlantic, December 20, 2022.
Joanna Hogg
received critical acclaim for her last two movies, the deeply personal
"The Souvenir" and "The Souvenir Part II," which presented
a fictionalized version of her experience during film school in the '80s. In
those films, Honor Swinton Byrne played Julie, a fictionalized version of Hogg,
while Byrne's real-life mother, Tilda Swinton, played Julie's mother, Rosalind.
"The
Eternal Daughter" revisits Julie and Rosalind in our present day, with
Swinton now playing both an older Julie and a more elderly Rosalind. The tone
of "The Eternal Daughter," however, is markedly different than that
of the two "Souvenir" films. Hogg's latest work is a gothic ghost
story, set in an eerie old manor that has been converted into a hotel.
"All
my films have been about places and the ghosts within them and the memories
within them," Hogg told me in an interview about the making of her latest
film. "I'm absolutely fascinated in that. And so of course, when I'm
actually doing a ghost story, that was going to come to the fore."
During the
course of our conversation, Hogg shared how "The Eternal Daughter"
didn't start out as a ghost story, how Martin Scorsese gave her the inspiration
to make it one, how the place where she shoots greatly informs her work, and
more. Read on for the whole spoiler-free discussion.
Vanessa Armstrong
: I wanted to talk a little bit about
how you decided after "The Souvenir Part II" that this was the next
film that you wanted to tackle. Could you share your process for deciding what
to work on next?
Joanna Hogg
: I've actually been hanging around that
story for a while. I'd written it after I made "Unrelated," my first
feature film, and I was going to make it before "Archipelago" [which
came out in 2010] — it was a bit different, the story then. It was still about
a middle-aged daughter and an elderly mother going to stay in an empty hotel.
But I hadn't gone into the genre space at that point.
I ended up
not being able to make it then, because my mother was very much alive and well,
and I just felt in the end, too guilty to create this work because I thought,
"Well, I'll never be able to show it to her. She'll never be able to see
it, and I won't be able to tell her what I'm doing." And it was just too
fraught with too many anxieties around my mother. So I made
"Archipelago" instead.
With
"Archipelago," I ended up creating this family that wasn't directly
personal, but of course is in many ways. So I just decided to move away from
the personal for a little bit with that film. And before I made "The
Souvenirs" ["The Souvenir" and "The Souvenir Part
II"], I thought, "Well, am I going to do these two films that go
back to my film school days? Or am I going to make a ghost story?" Because
I'd become increasingly interested in ghost stories and been reading a lot and
watching quite a lot. And in the end, I decided to make "The
Souvenirs."
Then after
"The Souvenirs," with the creation of Rosalind, who was created by
Tilda [Swinton] so wonderfully, that character of the mother who grew up in the
Second World War was so interesting. So I brought out "The Eternal
Daughter" again — it was a 30-page document, more like a short story. I
showed it to Tilda and then started talking to her about this story. At that
point the characters weren't called Julie and Rosalind. I'm not even sure if I
had names. And then in talking to Tilda one day in a phone conversation — this
is during lockdown in 2020 — she said, "Oh, maybe I should play both
parts." Because I was thinking that she's going to be Julie and we'll find
an elderly actress to play Rosalind. And it went up that she would play both.
VA : You mentioned you had the script for "The Eternal Daughter" for a while, but that it didn't have that ghost story element. When exactly did you add that ghost story element into the story?
JH : After making "The Souvenirs." I
mean, actually, if I think about it, there was an overlap with all of those
films because I was promoting "The Souvenir Part II" while preparing
the shoot for "The Eternal Daughter." So somehow, in a way, thanks to
the first lockdown we had in this country, there was a bit of time and space.
We were all at home, weren't we? And actually not a lot of emails were coming
in and we weren't going out. No distractions, basically.
I was
thinking a lot about ghosts at that time, because of many people losing family
and friends, and a real theme of loss coming about it. And anxiety — I felt
anxiety, and I know a lot of people did. We didn't really know what we were
dealing with. And then I was worried for my mother, who was quite elderly at
that point. So ghosts came very naturally out of that.
But then I
was also talking to Martin Scorsese, who's been an incredible influence and
inspiration with my filmmaking and become a friend. He's very interested in
ghost stories and ghost films, and he recommended to me some short stories to
read. One was a book of short stories by Rudyard Kipling. And one of the
stories that actually became the most influential to the film was
"They," and it's a beautiful story that's very personal to Kipling,
apparently. It was the first time I'd read a ghost story that moved me to
tears. And that combination of ghosts and something very emotional and personal
really rang, and really changed something in my approach to "The Eternal
Daughter."
VA : "The
Eternal Daughter" is a ghost story, of course, but no ghost story is just
a ghost story. One of the things I was really struck by was the film's focus on
memories and how memories are real, and how places can hold memories when you
visit them. When you were crafting the script, especially when you were
incorporating these ghost story elements, was that a jumping off point for you?
Just using the physical space of that old manor as a place that holds memories?
JH : Yes. And like you've just described, I'm so
interested in places and the ghosts in places and what history that place has.
All my films have been about places and the ghosts within them and the memories
within them. I'm absolutely fascinated in that. And so of course, when I'm
actually doing a ghost story, that was going to come to the fore. Even talking
about it with you now, I realize it's not a conscious thing, but I just have a
fascination for places. I find even if I stay one night in a hotel room, I
become very attached to that space, very interested in it. I think, "Well,
who else has been in this room? What's happened in this room?" Sometimes
one picks up on something a bit dark and disturbing in a space.
So it was
really then about finding a house that could contain all that — that would get
my imagination going. Because wherever I film, I have to have a close
relationship with it. It's usually the absolute starting point for the stories,
the place. And I can never call the places where I film "locations,"
because that just feels too impersonal and distant.
The way of that we found Soughton Hall in Wales [the manor where "The Eternal Daughter" was filmed] was actually by Googling, because it was March/April 2020. I'm Googling, "Haunted houses around the U.K.," and looking at different architecture and looking at houses that hadn't been used in other films because I wanted to find something that really didn't have other associations with it at all.
Then I
found this wonderful house that has an incredible history. One of the
architects was Charles Berry, who was the architect of the Houses of Parliament
in London. And then the owner of the house had been traveling all over the
world, so there's Islamic influences, Italianate influences. It's a very rich
combination of different architecture. And so finally we were able to go and
visit there — I couldn't decide on it until actually going to see it — and it's
a wedding venue now. No weddings were obviously happening at that point in
time, so it was available for us. I visited with Stéphane Collonge, my
production designer who has designed all my films, and we both walked around
and fell in love with it. Bit spooked by it, but fell in love with it.
VA : Was it all shot in that Hall? Did you do any
set builds?
JH : No.
Stéphane built some elements within the house, but it all took place there.
Some of us lived in the house during the shooting, including myself.
VA : I was
going to ask that, as it can certainly get you in the mood for the film by
staying there.
JH : Exactly.
VA : And
the Hall is a character almost in itself. It's a cliche to say that, but it's
true. One thing that really struck me was the shots of long hallways and at
night, the eerie green lighting. It almost seems like a labyrinth in some ways
that holds good memories and bad. How did you approach crafting those shots?
JH : Wherever I'm filming, I wait for the place to
tell me what to do. And that place begged views down corridors. I always like
to establish a geography that's very true to the place. So I don't make the
kitchen in a different place to where it really is. The carved door from the
entrance hall and sitting room into the reception area, that carved door was
there already and it's really quite frightening.
But then
Stéphane built the architecture that's behind the reception desk, where the
keys live. It is his architecture, but he based it on the exterior of the house
itself. And he built this incredible wooden house for the keys. But it fits so
well. And in fact, apparently the hotel has now become a hotel again and
they've kept that there because it just fit so well behind the desk.
There were
many other things that Stéphane did. And then there was that marquee outside,
well, we were both a bit horrified by the marquee, rather like the reaction
Julie has when she arrives. We didn't particularly want it to be there, but
then realized actually, of course it has to be there because they're coming to
stay in this hotel that's changed. It's no longer the home that Rosalind knew
as a child. And so it needed to have some elements that she would hate.
And then the green lights are exit lights at the hotel and are all over because it's used as a wedding venue and a hotel, so they've got to have all these security doors and lights. And that maybe struck us some, the ghostliness of those green lights. And of course, Ed Rutherford, our director of photography, exaggerates that green. We just pushed everything a bit further.
Even the
room names we didn't change. And there was a room called Rosebud, which looks
like I'm making a reference to "Citizen Kane," but it was already
there.
VA : That's really interesting how you take the
place like that and work it into the final film. Were there any major changes
you made to the story once you were there and saw the space and just saw what
you had?
JH : I mean, I'm sure there are, and the thing is
— I'm not writing. There's no script. So it's like a short story, what we are
working from. All the dialogue comes about while we're there. So Tilda in her
two guises is coming up with those words, as is Carly [Sophia-Davies], who
plays the receptionist, and then Joseph Mydell, who plays Bill — it's all
created at the time and it's all utilizing what's there in many ways.
And it
reminds me talking about it, that it's what Stéphane and I have done with all
the films — with "Unrelated," that was set in one house, and we used
what was there. I mean, that was partly a budgetary thing because we couldn't afford
to build sets or change too much. But it actually became the aesthetic and
became a key part of how we make films.
VA : Another
thing I noticed in the film is the use of mirrors, especially with Julie's
character, but also with Rosalind. I would love to hear how you decided to
incorporate that from a creative standpoint but also from a technical
standpoint. I imagine that must have been tricky to shoot.
JH : Yes. But also, because of the doubling, you
had to be careful what you saw. And sometimes we would create a shadow of, well
— more of Julie than Rosalind, but sometimes the other way around — and create
a shadow of something moving across to give a sense of the other person being
there.
But in
terms of the mirrors, that was always really interesting. I love mirrors, and
it's always exciting to see a different perspective. And there are some scenes
where it's not immediately obvious that we're shooting through a mirror, but
one can maybe look at it closely and see that the image is flipped. I'd say it
wasn't always that we wanted to see the mirror itself, but to get a feeling of
disorientation.
VA : Something that really captures the mood and
the tone of the film is the sound — the wind blowing, and the noises at night
that Julie hears. How did you go about deciding what noises you wanted where,
and how did you capture them?
JH : I'm so glad you've asked about the sound,
actually, because [sound designer] Jovan Ajder is another collaborator of mine
that I've worked with now for nearly 20 years. He's done the sound design for
all the films, and it's one of my favorite parts of the filmmaking, the sound.
He absolutely dove deeply into this story and became like a method sound
designer, if there's such a thing. I mean, he lived and breathed it, and the
wind sounds are so delicately orchestrated with the music. We took this one
piece of Bartók music for strings and percussion. Another movement of that
piece Kubrick used in "The Shining." And of course, we didn't want to
tread on that with all the associations it has, so it's another movement.
And Jovan
did miracles with it where it gets repeated, but it gets repeated with
different instrumentation. The flute is so connected with the wind, so the way
the wind sounds merge into the flute sounds and then the voices — he used the
voice of Carly Sophia-Davis, who plays the receptionist, as she's also a singer
as well as an actor. And she was singing the Bartók, which is incredibly
challenging to do in very subtle ways. You might not know it's a voice, but
sometimes there's a voice there where you think it's the wind. There were so
many other sounds — it took months and months to orchestrate all the sounds
together.
VA : The flute I thought was especially poignant.
I don't want to get too spoilery, but after Bill talks about a flute in a
certain way, it was certainly moving.
JH : Yeah, that was a wonderful thing that Joseph
himself brought to the character, because we'd already thought about the flute
and the close relation between the flute and the wind. It was an amazing thing
that it turns out that Joseph had been learning the flute. So then of course,
that gets incorporated, and it was a very moving — I feel he's very moving,
Joseph, in the way that he portrays Bill. He's putting a lot of himself in
there, but also this idea of the loss that he's dealing with in his own life.
VA : Absolutely. And "The Eternal
Daughter" is obviously different, in terms of tone, than "The
Souvenirs" and has more of a gothic feel. Do you think that's something
you want to explore again, perhaps with your next project?
JH : Yeah, I'm still figuring it out, to be
honest, but I'm still interested in ghosts. So I haven't finished with them. I
have the beginnings of some ideas of what to do, but I'm also really fascinated
by genre, so I might go deeper into that. But at the same time, I can't get
away from the personal, whatever I'm dealing with at particular points in time
when I'm creating a story; generally there's merging of me and the thing I'm
trying to create. I don't think I can escape that. I go rather deep. If I go to
genre, it'll have some connection with my life in some way.
VA : When you say genre, obviously there's science fiction, fantasy, surrealism. Is there any particular type of genre you're especially interested in?
JH : Maybe farther into ghosts and even horror. I
hesitate to say that because I'm really in such early days, and I don't even
know if that would be the next film that I do. But yeah, I like to be scared
and I'm also easily terrified.
You
mentioned science fiction as well, and I feel that there could be some
connection with science fiction, too. But again, it would be in my own way. So
I feel the problem with saying I'm doing a particular genre is then there's
immediately an expectation and then there are rules. There's a sort of game I
feel you have to play to an extent, but I guess I'm never interested in playing
the obvious game.
VA : That's interesting. And science fiction can be many things — it doesn't have to have space lasers to be science fiction.
JH : Exactly. And it's also about fear of the
future.
Joanna Hogg
On How Scorsese, Kipling, And Her Mother Influenced The Eternal Daughter. By Vanessa
Andrews. Slash Film, December 2, 2022.
British
writer-director Joanna Hogg’s newest film, The Eternal Daughter, is a
Gothic-inspired ghost story set in a fog-shrouded Welsh hotel. But its real
spooks are the spectral conversations between a pair of weekend travelers, a
convalescent mother and her fastidious middle-aged daughter, who are attempting
to mend some unspoken estrangement that has curdled into stifling politesse.
Written in the aftermath of Hogg’s successful 1980s bildungsroman The Souvenir
(2019) and sequel The Souvenir Part II (2021), The Eternal Daughter follows the
same mother and daughter protagonists, Julie and Rosalind Hart (originally
played by real-life relations Honor Swinton Byrne and Tilda Swinton), some 30
years later. More a coda to The Souvenir(s) than the third installment of a
trilogy, the new film dips briefly into the lives of the two women (now played
by Swinton in a dual role) and forms a sort of psychoanalytic miniature, not
unlike the Gothic short stories of Henry James, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Elizabeth
Gaskell.
Hogg and
Swinton first worked together 35 years ago, having shared their film debut on
the former’s graduation short Caprice (1986), a fanciful satire of fashion
magazines that lampoons the fantasies of youth and the absurdities of female
beauty standards. Around that time, both women also collaborated with queer
filmmaker Derek Jarman, who had become an exemplar of the post-punk artist in
the Thatcherite era. Swinton would go on to appear in Jarman classics
Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1988), and Edward II (1991) while Hogg
would direct various music videos (including for New York Dolls guitarist
Johnny Thunders) and British soap series before cementing her reputation with
early features Unrelated (2007) and Archipelago (2010), starring a young Tom Hiddleston.
Hogg’s work
has always dealt in themes of familial melodrama and the collisions between
fantasy and domesticity. But The Eternal Daughter’s domestic miniature has the
distinct subtext of quarantine about it: Most of the film was shot in a vast,
vacant interior with only the occasional appearance of supporting characters
alongside Swinton. The premise was conceived and shot during the height of
COVID when Hogg and Swinton’s ongoing conversations had turned to motherhood
and mortality, and the film is deeply absorbed in both. Swinton’s performance
as both Julie and Rosalind highlights the mystery of their relationship, with
echoes of James’s best ghost stories, The Turn of the Screw (and Jack Clayton’s
1961 film adaptation The Innocents), and The Jolly Corner. Despite its compact
form—a small cast and crew, a whisper of a narrative, and a single,
snow-globe-like setting—The Eternal Daughter’s formidable 100 minutes are
filled with acute silences, mundane rituals, and creaky atmospherics, recalling
the durational experiments of feminist writer-filmmakers Chantal Akerman and
Marguerite Duras, both of whom remain lodestars for Hogg.
These
disparate influences make The Eternal Daughter an intricate cross-stitch of
romantic Victoriana and contemporary slow cinema. Vogue recently spoke with
Hogg and Swinton in Los Angeles about the creative genesis of the film, their
personal hauntings, and the complexities of the mother-daughter bond.
Vogue: How did The Eternal Daughter come about creatively and practically after The Souvenir diptych? Was there some intention to create this film as the last installment of a trilogy or even a coda?
Joanna
Hogg: A coda, maybe. I’m not sure beyond that. I never saw it as the third part
of a trilogy. It’s often the case that I’ll make a film and there’s something
that I’m still interested in afterward that will lead to the next thing. I
wanted to go in a very different direction, towards something ghostly, but with
characters that were developed during the making of The Souvenir(s). Tilda and
I kept talking about Rosalind after we made these two films. Rosalind was very
much in the air. Then we were all stuck at home in 2020 and I was very
preoccupied with my mother and whether she was going to be okay. We were all
thinking a lot about mortality. I think the ghostliness of the film came out of
this mood that we found ourselves in. Tilda and I would talk a lot about our
mothers. In Tilda’s case, her mother wasn’t around anymore. Mine was, but she
was much more fragile. So, this fragility and fear of the future really grew as
we talked about developing this film.
Vogue : I
think what intrigues about The Eternal Daughter is that it could be seen as a
chamber piece or a film in miniature, a postscript, or even a minor work,
though not in a deprecating way. I was thinking about both of your careers’
relationships to the realm of the short film. Tilda, you’ve worked with
directors on short films throughout your career, from Cerith Wyn Evans to Doug
Aitken to Pedro Almodóvar. Were you also in some of Derek Jarman’s shorts?
Tilda
Swinton: Yes, I was. In Aria, for example. But the first short I was in was
Joanna’s graduation film [Caprice (1986)], which was also the first film I ever
made. But I love what you say about minor work, actually. Because what I love
about that is the idea of something quite complete. Someone said this beautiful
thing about [The Eternal Daughter], which…I’m going to say. It’s really about
Joanna. They said the film is like when you are peeling an egg and the membrane
comes off and the whole egg just comes out in one bloop. There is something so
perfectly formed about the film. We know from the very beginning—because it’s
declared in the first moments of dialogue—that the film takes place over only
three days. It’s a weekend. There’s a parameter around it. There’s even a
parameter around the weather: You can’t believe this weather can go on very
long. There’s a sense of a temporal boundary around it. It sets up a certain
expectation. It’s like a sonata—you know at the beginning it’s going to be
brought to a close.
Another
thing to say about its relationship to The Souvenir(s)—I don’t want this to set
up any expectations—but certainly in terms of our conversations, Joanna and I
have talked about our interest in developing a whole body of work—not
exclusively—but occasionally dipping into the lives of these particular people.
We said that we were very interested in looking at Rosalind in different stages
of her life. We were musing that we can’t think of filmmakers that have
necessarily done that. We were thinking of [John Updike’s] Rabbit novels. The
way that novelists feel license to do that, but filmmakers not necessarily. The
reason that I mention that is, obviously, because Julie and Rosalind Hart
appear in the preceding two films that we made, there is a temptation to see a
direct link. I think that’s a slight red herring. It’s not related. It’s more
to do with a sensibility. We like the feeling that there were little hares set
running in The Souvenir(s) that we were hunting down in this film. But we
haven’t hunted them all down by any means.
Hogg: It’s
like an arrow that comes from The Souvenir Part II to The Eternal Daughter. I
love diagrams. When I am writing, it’s not just words—there are a lot of
diagrams and maps. It’s just one of those arrows that leads into something new.
But I’m really interested in what you said about it being a miniature. Because I’ve
actually been struggling a bit with some people calling this film small. And
it’s hard not to feel a little prickly about that. I don’t think there’s
anything small about it. I know that’s not what you said. But it’s just a
negotiation I’m having with myself about what I think about a small work. And I
much prefer the word miniature. Because I realize that I love miniatures. If I
go to an exhibition, I like the sketch before the painting. And I like really
tiny things. So, it’s helping me see it in a different and more positive way.
Because why should that be a diminishment of the work? Maybe that’s a positive.
Vogue : Since
you mentioned literature, I was thinking of Victorian writers like Sheridan Le
Fanu. He was well known for creating these whole Gothic worlds within very
short stories. It got me thinking: What is it, precisely, that separates a
short film from a feature film? It’s duration, but it’s also the way in which a
director creates a world in a short film that is very different from a world in
a feature. Even though The Eternal Daughter is 100 minutes, it still has the
creative quality of a short, of a miniature.
Hogg:
Actually, the inspiration was from a number of short ghost stories. But
particularly one by Kipling called “They,” which we see Julia reading in the
film. So, actually its provenance was the short story—that’s true. And I read
many ghost stories in the lead-in to making the film.
Swinton:
Julie has a limited amount of time to make any strides in the relationship with
her mother. There is this urgency and sense of panic. And in that moment when
this honesty really spills out of her, she talks about her own mortality
pressing down on her. It’s this idea of limit: They only have three nights.
It’s feeling that it’s now or never. I think that the idea of the miniature is
beautiful.
Vogue
: I think another aspect of the film
that is really important is its setting in an inn, a hotel, rather than a home.
Hogg: Well,
it’s a neutral space, so it allows for a way of being that is free of the home.
So they can arrive as individuals, but then, of course, in navigating those
three days it turns out they’re not individuals in this place. They’re caught
up in family confusions. I generally like the setting of somewhere that is a
mutual space. But then there was also a very personal reason for the hotel.
Because my mother and I would go and stay in hotels together—and it would
usually be about three days, a long weekend. And it would always get more
challenging toward the end. It would start off with great hope and excitement
and enthusiasm. And then I would end up wanting to escape. It would become too
heavy. All the concerns that Julie has were very much mine in those situations.
Swinton:
There’s also something about the setup, the disruption of the relationship
between mother and daughter. The daughter is in control, and one assumes is
paying for the hotel, did all the booking, made all the arrangements. She is
the orchestrator of all of this. And there’s a tension for grown-up children
both taking that responsibility on and having an ambivalent relationship with
it, occasionally wanting to be a child again and being maybe frustrated or even
frightened when the parents become incapable and the child becomes the only
grown-up in the room. That whole disruption is possible in the hotel because
all the lines of authority are broken or not established in the way that they
would be if they were in Rosalind’s house.
Hogg: When
I went with my mother to these hotels, my mother would also insist on paying.
So, then, as a daughter I felt an obligation that everything be perfect and
wonderful for her. It’s that impetus that Julie has for her mother to always be
happy, intensified by the fact that I wasn’t paying. I was very much in the
position of child from the beginning. I’m so fascinated by these kinds of
dynamics.
Vogue
: I wanted to ask Tilda about the
process of playing dual characters within the same family in The Eternal
Daughter. How did this compare to the process or psychology of playing multiple
roles in Orlando (1992) and in Suspiria (2018)? Is there a different intensity
or extra dimensionality in taking on and dialoguing as multiple characters in a
film?
Swinton: I
find it completely, naturally fascinating. I’m doing a quick checklist in my
mind. In a way, [these different characters] always end up being one portrait.
For example, in Okja (2017), the identical twins were developed in relationship
to one another. One goes one way, and the other goes another. But they are
still an entity, if you like. In Hail Caesar! (2016), they are identical twins.
So, they are also one character. In Suspiria, it was something that Luca
[Guadagnino] and I were interested in—in fact, I play three characters in that
film. They are actually developed in relation to one another. So again, it’s
one portrait in a funny way. They are sort of like superego, ego, and id. [The
Eternal Daughter], of course, it’s the highest, highest value of that
because—no spoilers—we realize in the end why it’s important for the same
person to play both [characters]. In this case, it’s absolutely essential that
the mother and daughter are played by the same person. And the other major
difference between this particular [film] and the other [films] that I
mentioned before is that we wanted to work with minimal masks. We wanted both
portraits to be as natural…and authentic as they possibly could be, given that
I was still presenting as a very old woman who was born in a different era and
uses a [different] kind of language and moves in a particular way. So, in many
ways, I don’t see this as multiple roles. I see this as a portrait and a
projection. I know that sounds like a spoiler, but it kind of is. It could even
be a double projection, if you like.
It’s funny
you mention Orlando. It reminds me that when we made Orlando, Sally Potter and
I were quite naturally wondering how to work with the difference of Orlando as
a boy and Orlando as a woman. Very quickly, we worked out that it wasn’t going
to be about difference. It was going to be about consistency, about conjuring a
spirit that actually didn’t change. Outside of a hoop skirt here or a doublet
and hose and wig there, actually we are dealing with the same spirit. I’m not
saying that Rosalind and Julie are the same spirit. But they are entangled to
such a degree that they are played by the same person. There’s nothing flippant
about that. I hope that it’s not seen in any way as grandstanding or surface.
It’s actually about projection.
Vogue
: I was reminded of Charlotte
Gainsbourg’s recent film about her mother, Jane by Charlotte (2021), in which
she says at the film’s opening that making the film was an excuse to look at
her mother. So, I think the choice of having Tilda play both parts also
emphasizes or visually tricks the viewer into this universal experience of
looking between child and parent, mother and daughter, and seeing oneself in
them.
Hogg: It’s interesting you say that because it reminds me that I learned a lot about the mother-daughter bond through the making of this film. And now my mother is no longer here, though she was when we were filming. During the edit, she died. I’ve learned things from her point of view, how she might have seen me, or the difficulties of her talking about her life and telling me things. I’m not saying I’m filled with regret, but yes, I have learned about that bond and I wish I could communicate with her now. I feel I would be better at communicating with her now than I was before.
Swinton:
One of the things I remember sharing with Joanna—because my mother died 10
years ago—was that I had this experience—and I’ve heard other people have had
this too—where in the first few years, but particularly in the first few
months, after my mother died, I found myself absolutely unconsciously using
phrases that she would use, dressing like her, sometimes literally wearing the
same items of clothing—but more interestingly, wearing not the exact items of
clothing but things that she might have worn but that weren’t hers. It was
playing with a sort of incarnation. I even did it when my father died as well.
It was a form of solace. It was a way of keeping them with me. I’m sort of
psychoanalyzing myself for a second. But it was just, like, enjoying the enmeshment.
Holding on to this enmeshment and even bumping it up, making myself much more
enmeshed with them than I had ever been in life—because in life you are making
a beeline as far as you can away from your parents. [I was] adopting a
language, even trying to capture the timbre of their voices, enjoying using
words that only they would use, even if nobody else notices. Inhabiting them.
Incarnating them.
Hogg: What
I find now—and it’s this confusion of making a film so close to home—I find
myself using phrases that Rosalind uses in the film. Because you spend so many
months and years making a film—the edit itself took months—and listening
constantly to the words. So, I was on the airplane over here the other day, and
I found myself saying, “The beetroot and the salmon,” just like the way that
Rosalind would say it. It’s kind of crazy. And what Tilda [as Rosalind] says in
The Eternal Daughter is connected to something my real mother might have said,
so everything is enmeshed. Art and life.
Swinton:
Haunting upon haunting.
The
Hauntings of Tilda Swinton and Joanna Hogg. By Erik Morse. Vogue, December 1,
2022.
In the
final moments of Joanna Hogg’s transcendently meta reflection on art and loss,
The Souvenir Part II, film school graduate Julie (aluminous Honor
Swinton-Byrne) has fully blossomed as a director in command of her craft. After
being doubted, criticised and taken advantage of by her peers and ex-boyfriend,
she’s now confidently presiding over a music video shoot on a cavernous,
all-white soundstage. It’s a minimalist concept inspired by David Bowie’s Life
on Mars: a rotating display of statuesque models in pastel suits and baby pink
fur coats. At the centre is Mercury Prize-nominated musician Anna Calvi. “God,
I wanna go home, but I wanna stay out there,” she sings, echoing Julie’s
constant push-and-pull between risk and comfort.
Calvi
contributed more than just a small cameo to The Souvenir films. Part I ends with
her cathartic howls over a glissando sliding guitar – a song called Julie,
which is still unavailable officially, much to the dismay of fans. The second
song, Drive, is the one she performs in Part II. She and Hogg promise to drop
the music video this time.
Beyond
their collaborations, the two are connected by the themes of identity and
sexuality that are intrinsic to their work. Hogg’s autobiographical two-parter
about a young woman discovering freedom through filmmaking deeply resonated
with Calvi. “Both The Souvenir films are about Julie letting go of any
shackles, and that is something I was trying to get across in Hunter,” Calvi
explains. “This feeling of being the fullest version of yourself, including the
ugliness and the beauty.” Calling from their respective homes in London, the
pair fall into an easy rhythm as they catch up, coming to the realisation that,
surprisingly, their singular creative processes have quite a lot in common.
Crack: How
did you first discover each other’s work?
Anna Calvi:
I had seen Exhibition and I totally loved it. I was completely obsessed with
it. Interestingly, the sound design of that film was really like nothing I’d
heard before. It was the kind of film that I want to watch over and over again.
Joanna
Hogg: You watched Exhibition, and then I saw you perform Lady Grinning Soul.
Not live, unfortunately; I would’ve loved to have been there. But I saw the
recording from the Royal Albert Hall, and I was so struck by your presence and
the way you performed – just your whole energy. From there, I explored your
music and got really excited about a possible collaboration. This was before we
even met, or even knew it’d be possible to collaborate in any way. But I find
that sometimes with my best collaborations – I just get excited.
AC: I was
lucky enough to be in The Souvenir Part II, and I was really interested in
watching you allow people to improvise. You weren’t controlling in a way that
felt oppressive. It just felt that you had complete control to allow this
beautiful thing to happen. I wonder what it was like to find that balance when
you know exactly what you want, but also want it to bloom on its own.
JH: I think
because I’d written something quite dense and detailed, it allows my other
collaborators behind and in front of the camera to use their imagination. The
writing doesn’t constrain them. I’m not afraid of other people’s ideas. There’s
something about just creating the right energy that gives people – like
yourself, when we did the pop video [in The Souvenir Part II] – space to find
your own way in there. You have the richness of everyone’s journeys, but with a
map. You know where to go.
AC: What I
loved about that experience was this “Russian Doll” feeling of filming people
making a pop video, when we actually are making a music video. You had someone
who was a choreographer playing the choreographer, but I was asking him between
takes, “What do you think about how I’m moving?” I didn’t even know anymore
whether I was playing [a character], or whether I was saying it for myself. And
I don’t think he knew either. We were both a bit confused. It was a really
surreal experience.
JH: That
pop video was loosely based on a pop video I shot in the late 80s for a band
called Living in a Box. And Michael, the choreographer who you were talking to,
was, in fact, the choreographer of that original pop video. I don’t know if I
ever told you that.
AC: No, you
didn’t! That’s so funny.
JH: I
recast him because I really loved what he did for that original pop video. It
never saw the light of day, unfortunately, because the record company didn’t
like what I did. They thought I was making fun of the band so it never
materialised. I approached him to work with you and he said, “I’m not really
doing that kind of work anymore.” But I managed to persuade him to come back.
So that may be part of his confusion with being thrust back into this world
that he’d left long ago.
When I
asked you to work on the music at the end of Part I, I thought the way it
happened was so exciting. I’d finished editing the film and then asked you to
look at it. And we decided together that you would create the music having
literally just watched it on your own, and you responded to it musically, which
is such a beautiful thing.
AC: I think it’s very much about instinct and that moment you feel something for the first time. You can never replay that moment. It was such an interesting thing for me, capturing how it made me feel at the end when these doors open and there’s this sense of wide space and possibility. I had my guitar on me and I just pressed record. What you hear is what I felt. You can’t always capture that first reaction to something, and I’m really glad that I did.
JH: Quite often, I have to do Q&As, so I always catch the end credits. I’ve listened to that piece many more times than I’ve watched the film. But I never tire of it, and it always gives me goosebumps. I can feel the emotion that you felt when you created that piece of music. That idea of not wasting that emotion after responding to something for the first time – I guess that’s my whole ethos when shooting a film. I don’t want the performers to try anything out unless I’ve got the camera running. I don’t want to miss that first go, even if that first take is chaotic and not exactly what I want. Sometimes you want that chaos. I don’t want to miss that opportunity to capture grappling our way through something.
AC: That’s
so similar to what happens when you record music. The first moments are when
you’re still figuring out what you’re doing, and there’s a lack of
self-consciousness – that’s where the magic is. You can get a more polished
performance that’s more correct, but it is often never as good as those first
moments. It’s interesting to me that that could be something present in both
film and music. I would love to have more opportunities with you to capture
moments like that, the moment of instinct.
JH: I would
really love that. And I really enjoyed all the conversations we had along the
journey, especially when we were doing Part II. My first films had hardly any
music – Exhibition had maybe one piece of music – so the works are getting more
musical. And yet, I’ve always seen the creation of the work as a musical
process. With Exhibition, I wanted the natural sounds to be like music. That’s
exciting to me, to create music in different ways.
AC: How
does it feel to see your films with music? Does it feel different from your
earlier films?
JH: I think
with my first films, I just didn’t want to use music in a way that influences how
you feel, because it’s so powerful. It can either completely drown an image or
support it. I suppose I’m interested in using music in unexpected places. I was
very aware of that manipulative power it has, and so I thought, “OK, I’ll keep
away from it.” Then gradually I enjoyed using it more and more.
AC: In a
funny way, it reminds me that I have this thing about the bass guitar. When I
was playing my first two albums live, I didn’t have a bass guitar. I was
fascinated with this instrument but I was also very suspicious of it. When you
don’t have a bass guitar, it feels like the music can go anywhere. It’s very
ethereal. You put a bass in there, and it grounds everything. I was always
like, “No, turn it down!” I like the idea of the music feeling as if it has
potential to go in all possible directions. I’ve had this love-hate
relationship with the bass guitar. I want you, but I don’t want you [laughs].
It slightly reminds me of what you’re saying about how music anchors the
emotion.
JH: But as
you’re describing your process with a bass guitar, I imagine that the piece of
music itself is reflecting that idea of “I want you” and “I don’t want you”.
AC: I’m
always about negative space – taking away gives you more. So when you bring
something in, I [have to] really want it in there. I always want the listener
to be desperately wanting it. It’s as if they’ve had loads of sweeties, and
they can’t taste anything anymore. I want it to be like, “Oh my god, there it
is!”
JH: Yes, I want that and it gets taken away again.
AC: There’s
something about this low-end that really does that for me. It reminds me of
when you see an orchestra play and hear the string section and it’s really
beautiful, and you almost don’t realise you’re missing something. And then the
brass comes in and suddenly there’s this power that you can feel in your body.
That’s similar to how it feels when you bring low-end into a pop song. You get
the same kind of thrill of the sound being filled out.
JH: I
really get what you mean. I’m sound mixing a ghost film at the moment, and
we’re creating a lot of wind sounds, sometimes using voice. My sound designer
Jovan [Adjer] and I have experienced the same thing of wanting it to be really
ethereal. If there’s any kind of bass note there, it pulls it down to earth, so
we’re trying to keep it in the air. I’m just reminded of what you did with the
music at the end of Part I, and how it goes into your track Drive. I really like
how the two ends of the films speak to each other.
AC: It’s a
song about wanting to be free. The line – “Is this all there is?” –made me
think about Julie, in the sense of how exciting it is to watch her fulfil all
that she’s capable of. I like the fact that it came together naturally. It
really seemed to fit without much effort.
JH: What’s interesting is that Drive is the only contemporary music in Part II, but I love the fact that it doesn’t feel like a musical leap from the other tracks. I know it wasn’t something we necessarily talked about but it just fits into the palette of those other tracks, which range from Nico to The Psychedelic Furs. I’m not saying it feels of that time exactly, but it just works in relation to the rest of the music.
AC: When I
was recording it, the inspiration was the classic David Bowie era. Actually,
the whole time I was writing that song, I was trying to imagine myself as a
female Iggy Pop. What would Iggy Pop do?
Joanna Hogg
in conversation with Anna Calvi. Words
by Iana Murray. Crack Magazine, April
27, 2022.
The Wallace
Collection, on Manchester Square, in central London, contains art works that
were gathered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by successive
Marquesses of Hertford. The museum, occupying a Georgian mansion, opened to the
public in 1900, and is particularly known for its fine eighteenth-century
French paintings—among them a small and delicate work by Jean-Honoré Fragonard,
which is known in English as “The Souvenir.” It shows a young woman carving an
initial into a tree trunk. She is wearing a gown of pink satin, its color
enhancing the blush of her cheek. At her feet lies a letter that, presumably,
was written by the lover whose initial she is inscribing. She looks dreamy yet
determined: the woman is caught in a reverie, but she is also making her mark.
Joanna Hogg
first saw “The Souvenir” in 1980, when she was twenty years old. She was taken
to see it by a man with whom she had a charged acquaintance, which soon
developed into a consuming love affair. At the time, she was living in
Knightsbridge and working in Soho, as a photographer’s assistant; she aspired
to become a filmmaker but didn’t quite know how to go about it. She wasn’t sure
what to make of the Fragonard, or why the man wanted to show it to her. Hogg
had spent her teen-age years at a boarding school deemed suitable for the less
academically inclined daughters of the affluent and titled, and she had not
gone to college. Her companion, who had studied art history at Cambridge
University and at the Courtauld Institute, in London, struck her as immensely
more knowledgeable. Nine years her senior, he was brimming with the confident,
ironical charm bestowed by élite English schools. He wore double-breasted
pin-striped suits and bow ties, and he had pronounced aesthetic preferences:
Symbolist opera, the movies of Powell and Pressburger, a brand of Turkish
cigarette with an elliptical shape.
During the
next several years, Hogg enrolled at film school while her lover continued
introducing her to his tastes and reshaping her sensibilities. He also exposed
her to a less elevating aspect of his personality: a ravaging addiction to
heroin, of which there was an epidemic in London in the early eighties. The
drug came to dominate their relationship, and the relationship came to dominate
Hogg’s life.
Hogg, who
is now fifty-nine, recently made a movie, “The Souvenir,” about those years; it
will be released on May 17th. The character who stands in for Hogg, named
Julie, is played by Honor Swinton Byrne, the daughter of Tilda Swinton (who
plays Julie’s mother). Hogg’s lover, named Anthony in the film, is played by
Tom Burke. “The Souvenir” is an unsparing depiction of what now would be called
codependency but was then simply understood as anguished first love.
The film is
obsessively autobiographical. It was shot on an inch-by-inch reconstruction of
Hogg’s elegant student digs—a pied-à-terre that her parents kept in
Knightsbridge. The set was furnished with objects from Hogg’s youth, including
an ornate antique French bed that she and her lover had bought, for a hundred
pounds, at auction in 1982. Hogg found old letters and incorporated them into
the film. “The vile beast knows itself and miserable he is with it,” Anthony
writes to Julie, as Hogg’s lover once wrote to her. “It is you who has power
over the beast; to cheer, to encourage, to reprimand, to forgive.” Stretches of
dialogue replicate conversations that have been inscribed in Hogg’s memory for
decades. Even some of the footage comes from the eighties, when she toted
around a Super 8 camera, filming friends and her environs. The production
designer of “The Souvenir,” Stéphane Collonge, painstakingly reconstructed the
views from the Knightsbridge apartment by digitally combining photographs taken
by Hogg. When Julie goes to the window after hearing a nearby explosion—the
bombing of Harrods by the I.R.A., in 1983—she looks out on the exact same
skyline that Hogg saw when her apartment was shaken by the blast.
The film
also offers a moving depiction of Hogg as a would-be artist, delineating the
kinds of inhibition that can hinder even a person born to privilege. She began
taking notes for “The Souvenir” not long after emerging from the relationship
with the man who took her to the Wallace Collection, the traumatic conclusion
of which is shown in the movie. (Hogg declines to name the man publicly.) In an
entry from 1988, Hogg wrote, “Everyone congratulates her on how well she is
coping with it. Ironic because she isn’t ‘coping’ with it at all—she won’t
allow herself to.” But Hogg didn’t tell that story, or any story, for years.
She didn’t release her first feature film until a decade ago, when she was
forty-seven, and “The Souvenir” is only her fourth movie. This summer, Hogg is
shooting “The Souvenir: Part II,” a continuation of the story of Julie’s early
adulthood. Together, the films will implicitly tell another story: that of a
female artist’s belated emergence in middle age, and her discovery that she
could create art out of experiences that had once seemed like lost time.
In the
short period that Hogg has been making movies, she has established strong
visual signatures: she prefers long, often distant takes with a fixed camera,
and tends to work with available light. She has become known as a precise and
compassionate observer of the British upper middle class, a segment of society
that is often either caricatured or glamorized onscreen. Her films have the
layered psychology and narrative depth of a nineteenth-century novel; while
working on “The Souvenir,” she reread Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady.”
Hogg’s films examine the world she comes from without embarrassment.
“Archipelago” depicts a young man who feels burdened by the expectations of his
well-to-do family. “Unrelated” focusses on a group of Britons who go on an
extended sojourn to Tuscany. They take in the Palio, shop in Siena’s boutiques,
drink Negronis as they lounge by a fifteenth-century villa’s
twenty-first-century pool, and play awkward party games that keep the dangerous
possibility of real intimacy at bay.
One morning
in April, I took the train to Norfolk, two hours northeast of London, and
continued on to a former Royal Air Force base near the village of West Raynham.
The base closed in the mid-nineties, but in recent years it has found a second
life as a business park and an occasional filming location. Part I of “The
Souvenir” was almost entirely shot there in the summer of 2017, much of it in
one of the base’s vast hangars. A corner of the hangar stood in for the studio
where Julie and her film-school classmates work on their projects; when I
visited, numbered pieces of “Flat L,” the apartment where Julie lives, leaned
against the hangar’s walls, ready to be reassembled for Part II.
Hogg finds
it effective to isolate the cast and crew at a single site for the entirety of
a shoot. “It’s about containing the energy,” she told me. “Unrelated” (2007),
Hogg’s first film, was shot in a villa outside Siena where Hogg had stayed a
few years earlier, while taking a painting course. The cast lived there during filming,
and the crew stayed in a property down the road. The same method was adopted
for “Archipelago” (2010), her second film, which is set in a vacation home in
the Scilly Isles, off the coast of Cornwall. In “Unrelated,” which cost only a
hundred and fifty thousand pounds to make, the bedrooms did double duty as
sets. Hogg discovered that the arrangement also served an artistic purpose,
fruitfully blurring the boundary between reality and fiction. Tom Hiddleston,
whose first major film role was as an arrogant, wounded Etonian in “Unrelated,”
and who has appeared in three of Hogg’s films, told me, “If you’re an actor and
your character decides to put the kettle on, if it’s the same kettle you’ve
been using every morning for the last six weeks, there’s something about the
way you’ll do it which will be very natural. It’s not a prop kettle—it’s the
kettle you used this morning to make a cup of coffee. The actors become part of
the fabric of the scene, because they’re living it all the time.”
Hogg drove
me around the base at West Raynham and explained that it had become “another
kind of island.” The cast of “The Souvenir: Part II” was to be housed in nearby
accommodations. The actors’ costumes were being collected largely from local
thrift stores, although the costume designer had re-created some key pieces,
such as Anthony’s ankle-length navy-blue housecoat—instantly recognizable to
cognoscenti as part of the uniform of Christ’s Hospital School, a Sussex
boarding school founded in 1553.
The shoot
for the sequel was to begin in several weeks. That morning, Hogg was looking
for a stand-in for the office of a therapist she had visited in her
mid-twenties, toward the end of her relationship, when she was seeking help
with understanding her life and work. She went with Collonge and her director
of photography, David Raedeker, to survey a dilapidated block at the base where
newly arriving airmen had once been received. Hogg walked down a dim, dirty
corridor. “It’s nice, isn’t it?” she said to Raedeker, who was following her,
camera in hand. “I remember the place I went to as being quite run-down.”
Hogg, who
is birdlike in build, with a thin face and shoulder-length dark hair, entered a
room where light streamed through large, partly broken windows. If the room
were darkened with blinds, she decided, it could serve as the consulting room.
“I think that it’s O.K. that it’s an enclosed little world,” she said. She
recalled to Collonge that there had been nothing clinical in the room, and that
a couch and upholstered chairs had offered a sense of security to troubled
visitors like her. Later, Collonge told me that working with Hogg was unusually
intimate. “You still have to do breakdowns and drawings and plans, but it
becomes the fusion of my sensibility and hers,” he said. “It’s completely from
the inside out, rather than the outside in.”
The paint
on the walls was peeling like fish scales, and the floor, covered in
institutional carpet, was littered with dead leaves. The room looked
unpromising as a therapist’s office, given that the movie’s low budget would
not permit much renovation. But Hogg could vividly envisage the scene, in part
because she had amassed extraordinary documentary material that would inform
her direction of it: her sessions with the therapist had been recorded, and she
had kept a stash of some of these audiocassettes, which captured her younger
self discussing her relationship and the projects she aspired to do in film
school. As broken glass crunched underfoot, Hogg’s imagination was at work in
concert with her memory. “There’s nothing wrong with this carpet,” she said,
briskly. “It just needs a good clean.”
In the
mid-eighties, Hogg told me when we first met, she was “very confident, and very
unconfident.” We were talking, over tea, in the lobby of a hotel in Shoreditch,
a fashionable part of East London. She shares a house in the area with her
husband, Nick Turvey, a visual artist; they have lived together since 1990. She
went on, “I really had these two sides of me, where I thought I could make
groundbreaking cinema, and make a big noise in my filmmaking, but at the same
time also not be able to do any of that, and not be even sure who I was as a
human being.” Hogg’s manner is wry but reserved. Although she imbues her work
with her personal preoccupations, she is uncomfortable talking about herself.
“Creatively, I am at my most comfortable when I have got a project, a raison
d’être,” she said. “Take that away from me and put me at a dinner party or
something—that is really not where I want to be.” In a memorable scene in her
third film, “Exhibition” (2013), an exploration of the married life of
childless artists, the couple endures a suffocating supper with friends who
insist on discussing difficulties they are having with their adolescent
offspring. The artist wife pretends to faint, in order to engineer an exit. “I
always fantasized about doing that,” Hogg told me, adding, “It would be a bit
difficult to do it now.”
Hogg grew
up thirty miles southeast of London, in Kent, near the town of Tunbridge Wells.
The very name is a byword for provincial conservatism. (“Disgusted of Tunbridge
Wells” is the imagined signoff of someone who writes outraged letters to the
London papers.) Her father, John Hogg, commuted to work in London, where he was
the vice-chairman of a large insurance company. Her mother, the former Sarah
Noel-Buxton, was descended from a prominent family that included missionaries,
abolitionists, and Quakers. Crispin Buxton, who is Hogg’s cousin (and the
eighth Baronet of Belfield), was an associate producer on “The Souvenir.” He
told me, “There was an energy we all grew up with. It wasn’t always very seemly
to be seen to be having too much fun.”
At eleven,
Hogg was sent off to West Heath, a nearby boarding school of only a hundred and
thirty girls, some of them members of the grandest families in the country.
Lady Diana Spencer, the future Princess of Wales, was in the class below. Hogg,
who found the regime inimical, was shy but somewhat rebellious: she was once
caught smuggling a copy of Playgirl into her dormitory, and the headmistress
disciplined her by seating her in her office and asking her to turn every page
of the magazine and offer commentary. Tilda Swinton, a family friend whose
father had gone to boarding school with Hogg’s father, was a classmate at West
Heath. She told me, “We were supposed to be independent from the age of ten, in
a way that we clearly weren’t, but we had to fake it.” Buxton said that the
school was a milieu in which academic excellence was not even encouraged. “The
societal expectations would be: Queen’s Secretarial College, find a good
husband, be a dutiful wife,” he said. Swinton told me that when she attended her
brother’s graduation from Harrow, an élite boys’ school, the headmaster
declared that the boys were the leaders of tomorrow. She went on, “I distinctly
remember, the following week our headmistress gave a speech in which she said,
‘You girls are the wives of the leaders of tomorrow.’ ”
Hogg
steered clear of the finishing-school set, finding a small group of peers who,
like her, were interested in the visual arts. After graduating, she and a
friend moved to Florence, to study photography. “We were very clear, at age
seventeen, that we were going to Florence not in a traditional kind of
girl-going-to-language-school kind of way,” she said. They found an American
woman in her thirties to be their photography teacher. “It was a really amazing
thing to be taught how to look, how to observe,” Hogg said. She made a
photograph of a wall, near the Santa Croce basilica, on which someone had put
graffiti handprints. “It was a really beautiful sort of image—the hands, and
the textured ripple of the wall behind it,” she said. “That was the first serious
attempt I made to look at something—not photographing a person, just
photographing a wall.”
She stayed
in Italy for a year. On returning to England, Hogg moved into the Knightsbridge
flat, which she shared with a succession of roommates. She got a job with a
photographer on Greek Street, in Soho, and on off-hours she was allowed to use
his studio for her own photography, developing images from a series showing
visual artists and dancers at work. She also started carrying around her Super
8 camera; she hosted parties but hovered in the background, behind her lens.
Swinton, who delivers a nuanced performance in “The Souvenir”—with an Hermès
scarf tied under her chin, like the Queen, and a clucking helplessness—recalls
the young Hogg as a quiet, watchful presence in the bohemian swirl. “I really
believe that the reason Joanna has so many photographs is that deeply,
unconsciously, she was living through this time knowing that she would make a
piece of work out of it one day,” Swinton told me.
When Hogg
was nineteen, she switched her creative focus to film. “I had the slight
feeling that still photography wasn’t enough—that I wanted to tell a story,”
she said. She had some early encouragement from Derek Jarman, the avant-garde
filmmaker, whom she approached in a Soho café, asking to assist him on his next
movie, “Caravaggio.” Jarman invited her to visit him at his studio, and she
went, bringing along a portfolio of photographs and drawings. “He said, ‘You
should start making your own films, rather than come to work on mine,’ ” she
recalled. But Hogg wasn’t sure what she wanted to say. She spent months trying
to develop a feature film set in Sunderland, a working-class city in the North
of England. Hogg had visited Sunderland, a former shipbuilding hub that had fallen
into decline, while shooting a photographic series about the work of two visual
artists. She wanted to tell the story of the city’s devastation through the
figure of a small boy who fears his mother’s imminent death. “But when I sat
down to write it I realized I didn’t have the tools to do it,” Hogg said. “I
didn’t know, inside out, that place and those characters.”
Around this time, she met the man with the heroin addiction. He immediately called into question her choice of subject matter. “He sort of threw it back at me,” she recalled. “He was quite critical of the fact that I, from this background, would want to make a film so far from my experience.” These conversations are mercilessly re-created in “The Souvenir.” Hogg set the Sunderland project aside. Her lover’s critique was harsh, but it rang true. Hogg told me, “I wasn’t at that point in time able to look at my own life and turn it into something.”
An affair
that coincides with an artistic reversal: this is where “The Souvenir” begins.
The movie poignantly shows Julie channelling her creative energies into the
stumbling conduct of her life, rather than into the making of art. Today, when
the standard for a young female artist’s self-fashioning has been set by the
precocious accomplishments of the likes of Lena Dunham, Hogg’s slower, more
inhibited path to self-expression can be painful to watch. Yet this trajectory
will be eminently recognizable to any viewer who has felt, especially in early
adulthood, as if she were performing the role of herself, rather than simply
living it. “I have done big productions, but they were productions in my life,”
Hogg told me. “That phase was very much about me being a protagonist in a
production, in a way.”
Her lover’s
secretiveness and deceit—not just about his addiction but also about other
aspects of his life—contributed to this dynamic. “Rather than make my own films
when I was with him, I was in a film—a genre film, a Hitchcock film that had a
lot of mystery and intrigue,” Hogg recalled. “I did a lot of detective work, I
dressed very glamorously, I went to glamorous places.” “The Souvenir”
replicates a luxurious trip to Venice taken by Hogg and her lover; Hogg’s
elaborate preparations for the journey extended to commissioning a tailor to
make her the kind of travel suit that Janet Leigh would have worn. The night
before the couple’s departure, the trip was almost scuppered by an apparent
robbery in Hogg’s apartment, in which her jewelry, her cameras, and other
valuables were stolen. Hogg quickly realized that her lover had faked the
theft, and had sold the items for drugs; nevertheless, the trip went ahead. “I
had spent months planning, and didn’t want to give up on the plan,” Hogg said.
“The show had to go on, and there was so much in the show—so much dreaming, all
the ideas. It was creating a piece of work.”
In 1981,
Hogg enrolled at the National Film and Television School, in Beaconsfield,
outside London. Trix Worrell, a creator of British sitcoms, was a classmate,
and remembers that, although Hogg had strong opinions, she was discreet in
making them known. “The Souvenir” shows Julie’s professors, all male,
patronizing her; she absorbs their criticisms with mild good manners.
Underneath, Hogg told me, she resented how she was treated. The experience
still stings. “Those moments—they are hard to let go of,” she admitted. In “The
Souvenir,” Richard Ayoade plays a supremely confident young filmmaker whom
Julie encounters at a dinner party; he reappears in Part II, as the director of
one of several movies-within-the-movie. Some of the characters in the
“Souvenir” films correspond to real people, but Ayoade’s character, Hogg said,
is “a composite of all the arrogant film directors I’ve ever met.”
Hogg,
influenced more by her lover than by anyone at film school, developed an
appreciation of more stylized cinematic modes. She also had an intense interest
in fashion. Worrell said of Hogg, “She was very aware of the next new thing,
like the Issey Miyake pleated things—she didn’t flaunt it, but if you came up
close it would be ‘That’s a really good cut.’ ” Hogg’s graduation film, a short
titled “Caprice” (1986), starred Tilda Swinton in a dark fantasia about the
fashion-magazine industry, inspired by Technicolor Hollywood musicals. Hogg
planned to follow it up with big-budget projects, including a feature film
called “London Paris Rome,” which she and a friend, who worked in advertising,
pitched to studios as “James Bond meets the cosmetics industry.” The project
didn’t get far off the ground; nor did a project called “Gorgeous,” which Hogg
described to me as “like ‘Brazil,’ but in a department store.” She said, “As
with the Sunderland film, I tended to go with these very ambitious ideas that
were almost unrealizable.”
Instead of
making feature films, Hogg found herself making pop-music videos, including
one, for the 1987 Johnny Hates Jazz hit “Shattered Dreams,” that reworked ideas
from “Caprice.” (It has nineteen million views on YouTube. “I’ve never had such
a big audience for my work,” she said, with heavy irony.) Television jobs
followed, and they became Hogg’s career for the next dozen years. She directed
episodes of soap operas, such as “London Bridge,” about a restaurant in
southeast London, and of “Casualty,” a long-running medical drama. “From one series
you get asked to do another, and it’s always very flattering to be asked, and
then you are working and earning money, and it’s very hard to dig yourself out
of that,” she said. “And then the confidence is wearing away a little bit.”
Hogg did
try to experiment, she said, “even if it was a really boring TV series that had
nothing of myself in it.” She made one episode of “Casualty” that consisted
almost entirely of a single shot, which had to be carefully choreographed in
advance. There were less artistically inclined ambitions, too. Hogg was the
first female director to work on a show called “London’s Burning,” about
firefighters, and she and the other directors competed to see who could shoot
the most minutes in one day. “I managed to do a ridiculous amount of
minutes—which is nothing to be proud of, because it’s nothing to do with
quality,” she said. “But there is quite a macho element—you want to prove
yourself.”
In the
early two-thousands, Hogg was hired to direct a spinoff of “EastEnders,” the
venerable soap opera about working-class Londoners. During filming, she said to
herself, “I would really like to be in a different situation, where it is my
story, and my ideas.” Her sense of restlessness was crystallized by a family
tragedy: in 2003, her father, a recreational pilot, died in a plane crash when
he was flying solo in the Chiltern Hills. He was seventy-eight. His death
opened up a sense of urgency for Hogg. “We had a memorial service a few months
later, and I wrote something about him—a kind of poem of my own memories of
him,” she told me. “In the process of writing that, I caught something that I
wanted to continue, in terms of expressing myself in words.”
Hogg, then
in her early forties, was also coming to terms with another loss: she and Turvey
had tried to start a family, but she had failed to become pregnant.
“Unrelated,” which she wrote after her father’s death, turns on the experience
of Anna, a childless woman in her forties. She shows up at the family vacation
of friends and finds herself drawn to the glowing, hedonistic society of their
teen-age offspring, rather than to the dull, bourgeois company of “the olds,”
as her friends are dismissively called by their children. Hogg told me, “I
wanted to show someone who has some fun—I wanted some kind of lightness, as
well as the trying for children and that not working out.”
Hogg had
long maintained that her first feature would be a 35-mm. film, but “Unrelated”
was shot with a nonprofessional Sony video camera. Unlike most movie
productions, in which scenes are shot in the order in which it is most
convenient to secure the necessary locations—meaning that an actor may have to
play a breakup fight with her romantic partner before enacting their first
kiss—“Unrelated” was filmed in narrative order. The actress who played Anna,
Kathryn Worth, arrived at the villa in Tuscany several days later than the rest
of the cast, in order to simulate the kind of outsider’s discomfort that her
character feels. Tom Hiddleston told me, “You’re actually living it as you go,
and that means Joanna could adjust the story as she goes. If something happens
in the chemistry between this actor and that actor, or someone makes a funny
joke, we can make a callback to it later. There was a very exciting sense of
creative collaboration in the momentum.”
While
shooting “Unrelated,” Hogg came to prefer very long takes; by the time she made
“Archipelago,” she was leaving the camera running for forty minutes for group
scenes that would last no more than two minutes in the final cut. Helle le
Fevre, who has been the editor on all of Hogg’s feature films, told me, “That
allows something to happen that you can’t predict—either the actors maneuver
themselves into a very uncomfortable space, or a humorous space, or the sun
goes down and it gives a certain intimacy.” Hogg’s predilection for wide,
static-camera shots—in which an ensemble can move freely, and the actors’ body
language is legibly captured within a photograph-like frame—was a repudiation
of the small screen’s demand for closeups and choreographed movement.
In
“Archipelago,” Hogg started to work with non-actors in supporting roles, and
the couple at the heart of her next film, “Exhibition,” was played by Viv
Albertine, the former guitarist of the post-punk band the Slits, and Liam
Gillick, a conceptual artist. In the film, the pair have decided to sell their
home, a modernist house in West London that serves as a kind of third party in
their relationship. Albertine and Gillick first met less than a week before
shooting began. “That distance of not knowing someone got translated into a
kind of distance that happens over many years in a relationship,” Hogg said.
The film, which is virtually plotless, offers an almost voyeuristic insight
into the day-to-day existence of two adults working and living in close proximity.
It quietly explores the unstated rivalries that arise between creative people
with differing degrees of recognition; the sometimes asynchronous nature of
sexual arousal; the solidarity of two people who have escaped the framework of
bourgeois family life. “Exhibition” has the quality of a documentary—as though
it were a film about Albertine and Gillick role-playing as a husband and a
wife. Not long before the film was made, Hogg and Turvey moved out of a house,
in Notting Hill, where they’d lived for seventeen years, and that willful
dismantling of an established life in favor of something new was one of Hogg’s
inspirations. “Some people see the film as being about the breakdown of a
marriage, but I think it’s the reverse,” she told me. “I think it’s actually
about a couple really trying to make a go of something.”
For
“Unrelated,” Hogg wrote a script, but in subsequent movies she discarded that
convention, and instead composed for each a narrative of about thirty pages,
which reads almost like a short story. A scene from “The Souvenir” is depicted
this way: “In the hushed Grand Hotel Piccadilly dining room the other guests,
mostly couples, are much older. Anthony likes to point them out; these couples
who sit quietly have nothing to say to each other. Whereas his conversation
with Julie never dries up. Julie enjoys being the youngest person in the room.
Underneath the dining table Julie kicks off her shoes. She places her bare feet
on top of Anthony’s monogrammed velvet slippers.” Not every actor sees the text
in advance. Tom Burke was given Hogg’s text for “The Souvenir” before filming
began, whereas Honor Swinton Byrne arrived every day on the set not knowing
what was coming—a strategic replication of Hogg’s original naïveté.
Hogg invited
the principals to comb through her diaries and letters, and to explore the
interests of their characters. Burke immersed himself in Béla Bartók’s 1918
opera, “Bluebeard’s Castle,” because Anthony listens to it compulsively in the
Knightsbridge apartment, his taste displacing Julie’s pop-music preferences.
(In a subtle shot, we see Anthony flinch with irritation when Julie dares to
put on a punk-rock cassette.) Burke told me, “The work of Joanna’s that I had
seen is very naturalistic, but with ‘The Souvenir’ I felt that was being prized
open a little. Anthony is very much bringing that other world to Julie, which
is intoxicating for her. And their relationship is hermetically sealed, similar
to the kind of world that you get in an opera. It doesn’t quite make sense to
anyone outside of it, but they have their own logic.” Entire scenes were built
around Hogg’s providing a key idea, or phrase, to Burke and Swinton Byrne, then
stepping back to let them improvise. Before filming, Hogg gave Burke a
recording of a session that her lover had undergone with her therapist. It
helped Burke appreciate the lover’s intelligence and magnetism: “He was able to
keep the balloon in the air, and talk and talk and talk and talk, and to think
very interesting things, and very insightful things—but not actually go to the
root of the addiction.”
Hogg cast
Burke, a fixture of British TV and the London stage, as Anthony because so much
of her lover’s self-presentation had been a performance; but she needed a
nonprofessional to play Julie. Tilda Swinton told me, “She wanted someone who
was not an actress and had never wanted to be an actress—someone who would be
uncomfortable in front of the camera. People of nineteen or twenty now are much
more used to looking at photos of themselves than anybody was in the eighties,
and she was looking for someone who didn’t have a selfie face.” Hogg did not
immediately think of Swinton Byrne, even though she knows her well—she is her
godmother. The role of Julie was cast only two weeks before shooting was to
begin. On the first day of filming, which involved a party scene, Swinton Byrne
felt very self-conscious about people looking at her. “That fear you see on my
face is real,” she said. “I was saying, ‘Joanna, I am so sorry, can you please
give me something about what I should be feeling, so that I can feel I am doing
Julie justice?’ She said, ‘Just feel uncomfortable.’ I said, ‘Right, O.K.
Done.’ ”
In 1988,
when Hogg first started sketching ideas for a film about her youth, she noted
that the story might be so expansive that it would have to be told in two
parts. At the time, this seemed like a grandiose notion. But the path has since
been cleared for a female artist to tell an epic story of her interior
development. Given the success of such novelists as Elena Ferrante and Rachel
Cusk, an extended telling of Hogg’s story no longer seems like an oversized
ambition. In one of our conversations, Hogg told me that she did not have time
to regret the decade and a half in which her creativity lay dormant. She
paused. “That’s not completely true,” she said. “There are times when I look
back and think it’s a shame, I could have made more films.” She then reasoned
that, if she had started making features right after film school, she might not
have been able to sustain her momentum. “And I am not sure that I would have
been making the films I am now,” she went on. “So I am happy.”
In
preparing to make Part II of “The Souvenir,” Hogg told me, she had come to feel
that Part I somewhat exaggerates Julie’s vulnerability. She had been rereading
old notebooks and diaries, which recorded other emotions: all the arguing with
her lover; her constant suspicion of his behavior. She was also reminded of her
complicity in allowing the relationship to take the course it did. “I am going
through a process of sort of facing up to who I was, and maybe who I am now,”
she said. “In my portrayal of Julie, I am not sure I have been entirely honest,
in a way. It’s not that I feel I have done something wrong, or made a mistake.
But something I need to do in Part II is have Julie assessing her
responsibility for who she is, and her part in the relationship. She was a
participant in what happened.”
Swinton
Byrne told me that she sometimes had to suppress an impulse to behave in ways that
were inconsistent with Hogg’s actions decades earlier. Swinton Byrne’s own
reactions to her fictional lover’s perfidies were more indignant, and less
compliant, than what we see onscreen as Julie’s. In one excruciating scene,
after the apartment robbery, Julie elicits an admission of guilt from Anthony,
only to end up apologizing to him. Swinton Byrne said, “It was so agonizing,
and frustrating, and heartbreaking—to allow yourself to be pushed around.”
These differences are both temperamental and generational. The film exquisitely
conjures a period in which it was common for a bright young woman to defer to a
man; an imbalance of experience and power was often taken as a natural state of
affairs. Swinton, recalling being a nineteen-year-old adrift alongside Hogg,
said, “We were lost, quite lost. We really didn’t know what being a grownup
was.”
Hogg’s film
lays bare the costs of that kind of love affair, but it is also honest about
what can be gained. “I sort of fought the dynamic of student and teacher, as
well as embraced it, because I didn’t like being condescended to,” Hogg told
me. “But at the same time I thought to myself, Take it all in. And there was a
lot to take in, and I did not have time to take everything in, and I wasn’t
always good at taking everything in. He had a lot to give.” Among the
privileges that “The Souvenir” delineates is the opportunity that may be found
in the role of protégée, at a phase of life when one is all receptivity. The
film underscores the value of being induced into an art of living, of having
one’s eyes opened.
One bright
afternoon, I joined Hogg at the Wallace Collection. She hadn’t been there for a
while; the scenes set in the museum had been filmed at Holkham Hall, a stately
home in Norfolk, with a replica of “The Souvenir” hanging on the wall. After
ascending a grand staircase to one of the galleries, we stood before
Fragonard’s original. Hogg tried to recall what she had thought and felt when
she first saw it, forty years earlier. “There was something about seeing myself
in the painting and wondering whether there was some message to me in showing
me this painting,” she said. “What did he mean? In a way, that’s partly to do
with wanting to make the film—it’s like a series of questions of trying to
understand who he was, and who he thought I was, and what was conscious and
what wasn’t.” Now, she said, the painting had a different meaning to her: “I
see the film that I have made—the film itself has become the souvenir to him.
It is almost like I am giving something back to him.”
Hogg had
told me earlier that in 1988 she had put the “Souvenir” project aside largely
because she had lacked confidence. As with the abortive film set in Sunderland,
she had been convinced that she didn’t have the material, and the skills, to
fashion a satisfying work from what was still raw experience. “I didn’t feel
like I knew enough to be able to tell a story about him,” she said, having
arrived, finally, at the simple modesty of self-assurance. “I didn’t realize at
the time that I could tell a story about me.”
Joanna
Hoggs’s Self-Portrait of a Lady. By
Rebecca Mead. The New Yorker, May 13, 2019.
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