During a key sequence in Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition (2013), we hear stifled noises, breaths and whispers as the lead protagonist – a performance artist known only as ‘D’ (Viv Albertine) – navigates the physical and psychical parameters of her beloved, modernist house in London. On the threshold of a new stage in her career and the sale of her marital home, D’s inner and outer worlds are unsettled. Hogg’s rejection of scoring such moments sculpts a much more intimate and subtle soundscape that is composed of silence, breath, kinetic movement and the low, distant rumblings of urban life. In addition, the visual cadences of Hogg’s imagery help highlight the processes of creation that are at work within her film. As D lives and breathes within her homely surroundings, invariably strange and familiar, Hogg’s film foregrounds rhythms of attention and absorption.
This article will call attention, precisely, to the role of the senses and to the sonic as well as audiovisual textures of Exhibition in order to examine Hogg’s evocation of imagination, desire, proximity and spatiality. [1] My analysis will lead me to the philosophical thought of Luce Irigaray and Gaston Bachelard, in particular, in order to shed light on the embodied significance of gender, the sensuous experience of air and the other elements and the modernist spaces that are at the heart of Hogg’s film. More broadly, I aim to rethink Hogg’s intertextual references, her visual language and her subject matter in the context of this Dossier’s theme of ‘materialising absence’. Absence opens up fresh questions relating to the cinematic representation of embodiment, sonic cinema and sensory experience.
Absence
Time and space are eternally locked into each other in the silent spaces between … matter space and time fuse into one singular elemental experience, the sense of being.
… the well rooted house likes to have a branch that is sensitive to the wind or an attic. — Juhani Pallasmaa [2]
The notion of absence in cinema is at the heart of my fascination with film. My first book The Place of Breath in Cinema (2012), was concerned with the limits of cinema’s materiality and its evocation of the unseen, of breath and air, dust and silence. I considered such issues both in terms of the cinematic apparatus and film form. Here, my work involved, but was not limited to, questions relating to narratives of loss and mortality and the embodied foregrounding of such loss through an aesthetics of absence. I asked my readers to reflect on the sound of breath in a horror film or the ways in which grainy, shaky images conjure a kind of life force or ontological state of being where lenses appear to breathe, contracting, as if the film itself were alive. Thus my interest in Hogg is a continuation of my investment in the subject of absence and its material connotations in cinema. While what follows will not dwell further on contemporary art practices, I owe a great debt to the installations of the German conceptual artist, Werner Rieterer, and Kimsooja, a South Korean multi-disciplinary artist. Both artists explore the relationship between breath and visuality in inspiring ways. In Reiterer’s work, Breath (2006/07), one breathes on panels in order to light up an installation space. Kimsooja’s audiovisual performances reconfigure her own voice and breath as an ‘invisible needle’, weaving colour and light through the grand space of a Venetian opera house (To Breathe/Respirar, 2006). [3] Here, the invisible becomes something, the immaterial is given flesh. Hogg’s Exhibition resonates with the origins of my project on breath in cinema and with the ‘airy’ spaces of contemporary installation art, raising questions about cinema’s foregrounding of the body and its connections with space and architecture. In interview, Hogg has spoken of her characteristic use of ambient sound and her strict refusal to employ any kind of film score. [4] Such aesthetic choices significantly contribute to Hogg’s cinema of subtle absences and airy spaces in which ‘nothing happens’, to quote the title of Ivone Margulies’ book on Chantal Akerman (a female filmmaker whom Hogg much admires). [5]
Hogg has been described as “one of the most important new voices to have emerged in British cinema in the last decade”. [6] A retrospective of her work was recently screened at Cambridge. [7] In Hogg’s debut feature Unrelated (2007), Anna (Kathryn Worth), a British woman in her 40s, visits friends in Tuscany, encountering a group of youths whose uncomplicated and liberated lives offer a seductive antidote to the personal crisis that she is experiencing. This film was followed by Archipelago (2010) in which a family moves into an island retreat off the coast of England. In a much loved holiday cottage, now rarely visited, tensions start to surface. The family are rooted in an uncanny, liminal space and a strange reality in which the mother, Patricia (Kate Fahy), finds renewed fulfilment and affirmation. Through painting, Patricia finds a form of escape from the domesticity of her new surroundings on the archipelago of the Isles of Scilly. Exhibition is the third instalment in Hogg’s loose trilogy, echoing the narrative structure of her previous films with a ‘specific set of people in a specific place’, to paraphrase Jonathan Romney. [8] This time, Hogg concentrates on a single couple in their home.
My treatment of Hogg’s film spaces, especially my adoption of sensuous film theory and haptics, re-examines the role of landscape and architecture, female expression and imagination at the heart of her narratives. Current analyses of Hogg’s work focus far too little on the role of gender, overall, tending to elaborate on her socio-historic significance as a British social realist filmmaker and undermining her thematic exploration of space, colour, female embodiment and sexuality. While Hogg’s body of work currently consists of only three feature-length films (another is due for release in 2018), her exploration of female identity is distinct, compelling and complex, especially in terms of crisis, selfhood and personal expression. Strikingly, existing criticism offers up richly nuanced analyses of Hogg’s aesthetic such as with her use of the long take and stark tableaux but these rarely explore her cinema in relation to gender or the significantly female form of spectatorship which characterises her work. For instance, while critic Peter Bradshaw acknowledges the sensuous experience of Hogg’s latest film, remarking on its “challenging, sensual, brilliant film-making”, but does not refer to issues of gender. [9] Through her use of sound as well as her overall aesthetic approach, Hogg encourages viewers to intimately engage with her female subjects by entering into their psychic and physical world through specific processes of identification and visual pleasure. In my view, Hogg’s aesthetic techniques mark her out as a distinctive filmmaker who is deeply concerned with female sexuality, desire, imagination and alienation. Through her use of long takes and her close framing of the female artist D in Exhibition, Hogg invites viewers to become attentive to very small gestures, movements and sounds. Attentiveness shapes our embodied experience of D as she plays out and rediscovers rhythms of creation within the liminal spaces of her home, redefining her own sense of selfhood and subjectivity through the production of a new piece of performance art. Such gestures and rhythms, as they are evoked through the very spaces and soundtrack of Exhibition, are best understood as motifs of absence: the theme that is also at the centre of this Dossier. [10]
Absence, Imagination and the Elemental
There is key a moment in Exhibition in which D appears to walk through Trafalgar Square alone at night. She stops for a while to watch a street performer playing a tuba, each note billowing out a few flames into the darkness.
Standing on a wet pavement, just beneath the National Gallery, we see D dressed in heels and a raincoat, standing across from the performer while she listens. White and gold tinted flames rhythmically filter out of the tuba as we hear a cheerful, nostalgic piece of music from the 1920’s (the only music in the entire film). D sways in time with the jaunty music, her back to us as she listens. There is only a subtle trace of ambient sound as the fire flares from the large brass instrument and the breaths of the performer are exhaled. Individual flames emerge just above the edge of the tuba and float in the air, momentarily, like glowing clouds. This sequence is part of a longer, dream-like moment within the film in which D walks outside of her home for the first time and imagines herself at a Q&A with her husband, both discussing her work in a public arena. Absence, or rather the ‘materialising of absence’, is implicit to this sequence precisely because it foregrounds the tuba player’s breath as it is made visible through fire (fire-breathing). This on-screen motif is emblematic of D’s inner, psychic world and its expression through space and, indeed, architecture. (It is significant that D stops beneath the Pantheon-style columns of one of London’s best known pieces of architectural design). In a scene which conflates dream and reality, the imagination and the public/private world of D, the fire-breathing performer, is an inverted, mirror reflection of D, also a performer. D’s breath and her elemental, sensory engagement with the space around her, forms much of the narrative of the film itself.
In order to consider more closely the role of absence and its imbrication in the representation of female subjectivity in Exhibition, it is useful to explore Hogg’s wider references to the materiality of absence and her evocation of sound and space in the film.
Most notably, Hogg’s film opens with a fascinating entanglement of sound and image that occurs through the use of off-screen sound. Off-screen sound plays against a black screen during the film’s titles. The film then cuts to an image of D in a stripy green and black jumper, curled up on a window ledge overlooking an urban environment through a canopy of trees. The noise that we hear on-screen is acutely prescient of the film experience of Exhibition as a whole. That experience will repeatedly call attention to the invisible; its tangibility and its material evocation, on and off-screen. For Hogg, ‘absence’ is bound up with D’s inner life and her intimate connection to her beloved home.
As the film opens, we hear a clatter of objects. Something is dropped, followed by the metallic, crinkling sound of shutters being rolled up or lifted, a chair or table being awkwardly dragged along the floor, tapping, and a brief flicking of switches. Then, the film cuts to an image of D with her face against a glass window pane. D is horizontal on the ledge, bisected by the window frame which looks out onto a forest of bushes and trees. We hear church bells and traffic and then wind against the double glazed glass. The foliage shakes outside, fanning outwards, recalling the recurrent imagery of damp blustering winds in Archipelago and the elegance of the swaying cypresses in Unrelated. Certainly, air, though invisible, is made acutely visible through the texturing of Hogg’s films. Movement within the diegesis contrasts with D’s perfect stillness, like a cocooned caterpillar in her encompassing jumper or the collection of cacti we see later in the film. We see her eyes wide open and very close to the glass, on the threshold of the inside and outside of her home. Given D’s position within the image itself and in terms of the film’s mise en scène, Hogg foregrounds the emptiness of D’s home through the sound of wind and the filming of the open spaces outside. Combined with what might be called the kinetic soundtrack of D’s movement, viewers are encouraged to become attentive to invisibility, to the everyday or, rather, the intimate spaces of the everyday in D’s world. Above all, this opening sequence is highly suggestive of the role that architecture and spatiality plays in Exhibition, especially in terms of liminal space and Hogg’s conjuring of absence as both elemental and embodied.
A few minutes into the film, Hogg begins to forge a closer connection between liminal space and silence through a sequence in which we view D in her office and around the various interiors of her home. The house itself is full of open spaces, modernist in style with large windows, multiple levels and a central circular staircase made of metal. We see D move up and down the staircase throughout the film. Yet, despite the vastness of D’s home, it also features a series of screens and doors which can close off rooms or partially seal them, creating liminal chambers for D to move within. We see D slide a red door across a hallway and enter her study, sitting in silence before she uses an intercom device to speak to her husband working upstairs. They speak, briefly, before she lingers at her desk, shuffling in her seat. Intriguingly, the physical absence of D’s partner is substituted through sound. While D’s partner also works in silence, her screening off of her own intimate workspace fosters a different kind of spatiality that is predicated on separation and retreat, a theme reflected throughout Exhibition.
Moments later, we view D moving up the staircase in silence and lying on the floor of a room with cushions and a sofa framed by a backdrop of tall palms and foliage glimpsed through white plastic roller blinds. In medium close-up and on her back, D stares out, facing the camera while the trees cast shadows over the room, filling it with a blue tinged light. This ‘blueness’ becomes part of the film’s palette and is synonymous with D and the texture of her home as well as her physicality. ‘Blueness’ is not the expression of melancholia or sorrow but of imagination and intimacy. The colour blue or rather its absence, is significant to Hogg, especially in Archipelago. As Romney observes of the engagement between the film’s matriarch and her art teacher and of Hogg’s materialism:
Like [Vilhelm] Hammershøi … Hogg adheres to the credo of understatement, withdrawing what other films might deem essential – such as any backstory to explain Cynthia’s bitterness. Christopher teaches the principle of subtraction as he explains the internal dynamics of his paintings: remove the colour blue, he says, and the role of blue is transferred to the other colours. You could call Archipelago a study in universally displaced blue. [11]
In Exhibition, Hogg evokes not Archipelago’s portrait of quiet desolation but a visual texture and symbolism associated with a subtle displacement of blue, to echo Romney. [12] This colour gives form and materiality to the spirit of D’s imaginative powers, her vulnerability and her thoughtfulness. ‘Blueness’ is subtly present in most of Hogg’s film: from the bright azure light projected over her white wedding veil which D wears as a prop when experimenting with gestures and poses for her performance art to the blue of her denim jeans and her powder blue kitchen units. However, blue is used only in an elemental way, as if making visible D’s psychic world. Thus, if silence and the airy, open spaces of Exhibition connote the invisible realm of the film, then blue is their material counterpart, registering as subtle shifts in the film’s formal composition and its colouration.
Breath, Air and Architecture
As we have seen, the interior spaces of Exhibition are central to the representation of D’s interiority and creativity. These spaces include her make-shift study, the kitchen and the meta-spaces between her desk and chairs, windows and walls, the floor and the glass. Hogg’s representation of architectural space and film space is especially gendered because it is characterised by D’s fostering of silence, breath and air. Most notably, the thought of Irigaray is helpful in demonstrating further the feminine architecture of Hogg’s film and its implications for the analysis of sexuality and inter-subjectivity between the sexes. Before I elaborate on my Irigarayan approach to femininity, it is important to foreground the ways in which the architecture of Exhibition is comparable with an elemental perception of space, light and air.
Exhibition thoroughly evokes an architecture of air and absence within a modernist context. The architecture of the film is replete with Japanese-style sliding doorways, interior voids (holes cut out of walls and floors), removable panels and a staircase that functions like a connective tube, passing through all levels of the house. Indeed, the building serves to emphasise blank spaces of retreat or emptiness which D invests with her own distinctive physicality (stillness as well as pacing, walking, lying down and crawling) and her contemplative silence. Furthermore, the wide sheets of glass which frame the house also replicate the film’s evocation of the immaterial. The upper levels of the building, especially, offer up views of the sky and abstract, horizontal lines of palms and conifers shivering like stiffened shadows in the wind. Hogg’s framing of space, both inside and out, recalls Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and his reflection on the metaphysics of air, wind and the psyche. For Bachelard, “elemental space is something we dwell in with body and soul; it is to be found shaped and formed in the material paradise of the protective dwelling as well as in the abysmal immensity that seems to breathe and blow through the house”. [13] Bachelard’s thought on the architecture of the house resonates particularly closely with Hogg’s poetics of domesticity, especially in terms of her specific use of the staircase motif in the film. D exits the frame of the image by climbing through the staircase. She is seen peering out from the staircase and, in one of the film’s key moments, she lingers with her bridal veil upon it.
As Richard Kearney writes of the staircase in his introduction to The Poetics of Space, it brings “together powers of memory, perception and fantasy that criss-cross in all kinds of surprising ways, sounding previously untapped reverberations”. [14] As D prepares for her artwork, physically navigating this liminal space, Hogg’s imagery of the steel staircase as an airy spiral is indeed a conduit of fantasy and memory.
Furthermore, as Kearney observes, Bachelard also writes of the “house blown by winds or the airy house of words”, recalling Hogg’s many shots of trees whipped by the wind or the humming of various draughts and breezes caught within the tiny gaps of the house, under doorways or through gaps in the window frames. [15] Throughout Exhibition, we also hear vents and shutters which call to mind the air which circulates throughout D’s home. This sensation of air is comparable with Bachelard’s ‘airy house of words’, as it mirrors D’s interiority and the thoughts which intermingle with silence as she moves around the house. Here, there is a reversibility between the house and the body which is articulated through D’s intimate relationship with her home, her movement and her voice. Indeed, as Bachelard writes, “there is a strange house contained in my voice”. [16] While Giuliana Bruno posits the idea of cinema as a kind of architecture or ‘site-seeing’, the viewing experience of Exhibition configures on-screen space as an architecture of the mind. [17]
Importantly, as the film’s opening moments suggest, Exhibition is also about the relationship between D and H. I want to reframe D and H’s relationship through this article’s concern with air and absence and the philosophy of Irigaray, whose thought not only raises pertinent questions about the nature of love in Hogg’s film but also gendered sexuality and female experience. Most importantly, Irigaray is well known for work on sexual difference. Unlike her French feminist counterpart Simone de Beauvoir, the thesis Irigaray puts forward privileges sexuate difference between men and women. Irigaray’s philosophy expands on the notion of sexed identity and female embodiment. Affirming bodily difference, Irigaray highlights the disavowal of female subjectivity in the history of Western culture, from Plato to Freud. Irigaray’s project features a range of work on breath which she incorporates into her philosophy of sexual difference, demonstrating how women breathe differently and share their breath with their child (via the intrauterine, pre-symbolic phase). She contends that the sharing of breath between men and women is more fundamental than the sharing of words. However, for Irigaray, women are more positively aligned with the element of air: “Women possess a more natural relationship with air while men use their energy in order to construct or fabricate objects, putting their breath into things they produce”. [18] These thoughts are reflected precisely through the narrative of Hogg’s film. H is presented as a designer, an architect who constructs buildings and spaces. He is seen static at his desk or on the phone. By contrast, D is often filmed against the backdrop of the elements. The sky, the rain or wind form part of the fabric of her existence. She is seen in silent contemplation, stretching and breathing as she plays, explores and revisits the intimate space of her home.
On the notion of love between the two sexes, Irigaray writes: “it is necessary that two subjects agree to the relationship and the possibility to consent exists, each must have the opportunity to be a concrete, corporeal and sexuate subject rather than an abstract one”. [19] One could extend an Irigarayan politics of the home to the ways in which D negotiates a space for herself within her shared home. The corporeal subjectivity she develops is also an essential part of her creativity as an artist and performer, as we shall see. Furthermore, H also respects D’s work and her personal space within their home, though some of the film hints at the ways D and H struggle to remain real to each other as authentic beings rather than projections of sexual fantasies. (One scene sees D and H failing to intimately connect with each other when D remains unresponsive to H’s sexual advances). It is most useful to consider Irigaray’s thought in relation to the liminal spaces of the film that I have discussed, especially the staircase. As I have previously mentioned, one of the film’s key sequences sees D standing on the stairs with her bridal veil and wedding dress, hesitant, neither ascending nor descending. I want to explore this scene and its Irigarayan potential further – as a moment of creation, imagination and female subjectivity.
At first, we glimpse D’s lower body standing on the circular steel staircase, looming, in a blue tinted twilight. D moves slowly downwards, draped with a white veil. Folds of white lace fabric fall loosely over the steps and we see D stoop further down the steps, slightly awkward and hesitant. There is no sound except for the ruffle of fabric over the metal steps and D’s breathing. Hogg cuts, then, to the moment in which three estate agents come to value D and H’s home. In an aerial shot, they circle the house like prey while their voices discuss the property (the sequence also includes an appearance from Hogg’s frequent collaborator Tom Hiddleston). Later in the film, we return to another image of D with her bridal veil, clutching it as she moves down the staircase. It is only at the end of the film that these sequences make sense to viewers as ‘rehearsals’ for D’s forthcoming performance art, revealing her experimentation with objects that are clearly beloved to her and the role that marriage has played in the formulation of her subjectivity. The thought of Irigaray and Bachelard help to illuminate such sequences, highlighting their significance as embodied evocations of female space and gendered subjectivity.
As Bachelard writes, the stairs are conduits for memory in the space of the home. It is fascinating that D chooses to linger in this particular liminal space in her house. Above all, her imagination and her creative processes are inspired by the staircase and its position in the heart of the home. The staircase occupies the innermost section of the modernist building, as the place in which all is brought together through light and movement. In dialogue with Irigaray, on the other hand, the stairs come to represent a passage of airy spatiality. This is precisely because the staircase is an open frame of steel and because it circulates both light and air. The filmic moments which capture D’s breath and her stillness emphasise D as an Irigarayan female subject. Her ‘masquerade’, as it were, of femininity as a bride can be seen to deconstruct patriarchal notions of marriage. [20]
D is both resurrecting herself as bride and using her transformative powers as a female artist to reckon with her feelings of sexuality, ageing and loss. She lays bare the construction of marriage as artifice and itself a kind of ‘performance’ which requires constant devotion. Indeed, while it is never discussed in the film, the closing image of Exhibition focuses on D looking out from a window at a woman with a buggy. Here, we are reminded of D’s childlessness. Though Hogg does not dwell on D’s lack of children, it becomes clear that she is still coming to terms with this and that it is certainly one of the many questions D seems to be exploring throughout the film (echoing Anna’s loss of a child in Unrelated).
In one of the last scenes of the film, we watch D standing in her study at night, perched on a chair. D is dressed in her bridal veil (wrapped around her head and shoulders rather like a medieval snood), black knickers and lengths of fluorescent white tape which gleam yellow and blue. In a long take, D is filmed in close-up as she stretches her arms up and places her hands on the ceiling, moving as if she were at the top of her staircase. Blue light falls across the room like a luminous aquarium and D gazes out onto the streets below, reminding viewers of the way in which the large windows of the house have always functioned as screens for D inside her performance space.
D’s strange, haunting performance seems to evoke Irigaray’s assertion of a “culture in the feminine” in which D reclaims her subjectivity as wife and artist. [21] Her sexuality is both visible and muted through her use of the tape across her body. The tape is not a motif of bondage or sadism but rather a foregrounding of absence. Invisible beneath the patriarchal construct par excellence, the wedding dress, each curve and contour of D’s body is enhanced by the widths of tape (also forming a measurement of her shape). Its vertical lines fashion her body into a beacon of light.
Like the golden flares of air and fire which emerge from the tuba as D watches the street performer below the steps of the National Gallery, elemental sounds and textures haunt the spaces of Exhibition. All are intimately connected to D as manifestations of her psychic and physical world, materialising as colouration, silence, stillness and movement. The marital home in Hogg’s film is the apparatus through which D’s creative process is played out, tested, performed and, ultimately, reborn. Absence is vital here. Above all, absence is a kind of meaningfulness which is predicated on nothing, on the invisible, filmed over and over. Absence is exaggerated and enlarged through Hogg’s characteristic long takes and static shots which privilege D as a female artist, a lover and a wife but, most of all, as an authentic subject who is living in the present. D is also negotiating absence throughout her final weeks in the house, mourning its physical and psychic loss as the couple prepare to leave it. While the absence of her house is an event yet to come, it is nevertheless locked into the texture of D’s current experiences and the sensations that are felt within the walls of her home. The sound of the wind outside and its visual register is an uncanny marker of loss: another materialising of something unseen, a ghosting of the future.
NOTES
[1] While the role of imagination plays a specific part in the writings of Bachelard and Irigaray, I am first and foremost concerned with the evocation of imagination in Hogg’s work.
[2] See Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, Architecture and the Senses (London: John Wiley and Sons, 2012), p, 46.
[3] See Kimsooja, http://www.kimsooja.com/projects_Korean_Pavilion_Venice_2013.html and Werner Rieterer, http://www.galerie-krinzinger.at/artist/werner_reiterer/work/selected/breath_oberes_belvedere_1 (last accessed: 7 January 2018).
[4] I refer here to an interview that I conducted with Hogg in 2016 that is forthcoming in my next book.
[5] See Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 1.
[6] See David Forrest, “The Films of Joanna Hogg: New British Realism and Class”, Studies in European Cinema, Vol.11 No.1 (2014), p. 64.
[7] For more information, see the University of Cambridge site: https://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/news/filmmaker-residence-joanna-hogg (last accessed: 1 Nov 2017).
[8] Jonathan Romney, “Film of the month: Archipelago (2010)”, Sight and Sound online, http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/5961 (last accessed: 1 Nov 2017).
[9] Peter Bradshaw, “Exhibition review”, The Guardian, 25 April 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/apr/24/exhibition-review-joanna-hogg (last accessed: 1 Nov 2017).
[10] I warmly thank the co-editors of this Dossier for their invitation to contribute.
[11] See Romney, “Film”.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Bachelard quoted in Richard Kearney, “Introduction”, The Poetics of Space (London: Penguin, 2014). Here, I am also most inspired by Amelie Hastie’s recent work on Bachelard and the cinema in her beautiful piece “Teaching Tomboy”, The Cine-Files, Vol. 9 (2015), http://www.thecine-files.com/teaching-tomboy/ (last accessed: 2 Nov 2017).
[14] Kearney, “Introduction”.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Gaston Bachelard (trans. Maria Jolas), The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 60. See also Hastie, “Teaching”.
[17] Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), pp. 15-16.
[18] See Luce Irigaray (trans. Stephen Pluhácek), “The Way of Breath” in Between East and West: From Singularity to Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 84. For an excellent alternative reflection on sexual difference, breath and cinema, it is useful to consider Lucy Bolton’s brilliant Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). My thoughts on Irigaray and architecture are also very inspired by Andrea Wheeler’s critical engagement with Irigaray. See Andrea Wheeler, “Love in Architecture”, Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Thinking, Vol. 25 No.3 (2002), pp. 105-116. I read Wheeler’s essay many years ago and while my own work at the time had not permitted a fuller exploration of cinematic space and Irigaray, Hogg’s work offers up a tantalising opportunity to revisit this subject.
[19] See Irigaray (trans. Monique Rhodes and M. Cocito-Monoc), To Be Two (London: Athlone, 2000), p. 26.
[20] I refer here to Joan Riviere’s “Womanliness as a Masquerade” which examines an area of sexual development in which the femininity of certain women can be found to be a mask that is used to hide rivalry with and hatred of men. Riviere’s article was originally published in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 10 (1929): 303-13.
[21] I refer here to the term used by Irigaray in her book Conversations (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 160.