Introduction: Materialising Absence
Absence (noun) 1 The state of being away from a place or person. 1.1 An occasion or period of being away from a place or person. 1.2 The non-existence or…
Imaging Absence as Abjection: The Female Body in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides
Abjection preserves … the immemorial violence with which one body becomes separated from another body in order to be. — Julia Kristeva Imaging Absence The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999)…
Air, Atmosphere, Environment: Film Mood, Folk Horror and The VVitch
The poet of fire, of water, or of earth does not convey the same inspiration as the poet of air. — Gaston Bachelard Much has been written about the painful…
Lens-Sense: On Seeing a World as Sensed by a Camera
Can a camera sense what a human eye cannot? This question was of great concern to early film theorists. It has since been rejuvenated by recent trends in contemporary cinema…
Pornography, Ectoplasm and the Secret Dancer: A Twin Reading of Naomi Uman’s Removed
Seeing/Believing In pornography - a genre that Linda Williams has defined as “obsessed with visible proof” - bodies are spectacles, displayed and dissected by the camera in pursuit of pleasure’s…
‘My Flight is the Rebellion’: History, Ghosting and Represencing in Nalini Malani’s Video Installations
Award-winning Indian artist Nalini Malani has been making socially and politically engaged art for nearly five decades. Since the beginning of the twenty first century, she has produced videos and…
Beyond the Archive: The Work of Remembrance in John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses
We recognize that we are collective agents of history and that history cannot be deleted like web pages. — Angela Davis Among the most celebrated of essay films made by…
The Spectral Present: Landscapes of Absence in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and The Headless Woman
In Once Upon a Time in Anatolia/Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011), a deceptively simple plot – the search for a murder victim in the Anatolian steppes – serves…
In [No] Home Movie Style: Her Death and Rebirth
October 29, 1977 In the sentence “She’s no longer suffering,” to what, to whom does “she” refer? What does that present tense mean? —Roland Barthes The artist is the one…
An Architecture of Light and Air, A Rhythm of Stillness: Absence in Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition
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)…
Omission, Suggestion, Completion: Film and the Imagination of the Spectator
We are familiar with the illusions in which we believe that we see something which only our imagination supplies. - Hugo Münsterberg Accustom the public to divining the whole of…