The Impossible Encounter

This chapter reads the aesthetics of absorption in British filmmaker Joanna Hogg’s six feature films. Hogg’s aesthetic strategies, developed in her realist early films and refashioned in her self-reflexive later works, both formally stage and diegetically represent absorption as a dynamic of relation: the sustained attachment to an ungraspable other (the lover, the mother, or the film itself). Discussing Hogg’s films alongside realist and modernist painting, acting, and literature, the chapter argues that the relational dynamic of absorption comes to fruition in her later works, which create absorption in the spectator not only by withholding the whole of the scene but also by revealing that there is another, primary spectator to whom the films are truly addressed: the filmmaker.