Joanna Hogg

The films of Joanna Hogg do not present themselves for the viewer’s full understanding. Like their female characters, they hold something back; though we may experience recognition and identification, in a crucial sense, they turn away from us. The first book devoted to a filmmaker regarded as one of the most original of this century, Joanna Hogg reads Hogg’s films through the concept of absorption. Art historian Michael Fried theorized absorption as the representational principle of important realist and modernist paintings, which assert their separateness and self-sufficiency as artworks by staging their resistance to the beholder’s gaze. Addressing both interdisciplinary scholars and a general readership, this book explores Hogg’s cinematic strategies of absorption, situating them within key paradigms of realism and modernism. In addition to her compositional aesthetic and filmmaking process, absorption describes her characters’ attachments, intimating psychoanalytic theorist Joan Copjec’s insight that absorption is an aesthetic demonstration of love, which depends on the apprehension of the love object’s ungraspability. But Hogg’s later films also reformulate modernist absorption in distinctive ways, as their non-realist and meta-representational elements stage encounters between the fiction and its author, the inside and outside of a scene. The book concludes with an interview with the filmmaker.