By Shonni Enelow.
Hogg’s films present rich and compelling psychological characters while eschewing that legibility of motive.”
Hogg’s films capture the tones and rhythms of contemporary relation quite differently from other historical realisms. The half-spoken, half-interrupted speech of her characters, the way they repeat themselves, revise their words, in conjunction with Hogg’s preference for the midshot, individuates them without emphasis. They are simply different people who appear in a kind of motley assortment, unstructured variety, not representations of anything, neither in the singular nor in the collective, neither archetypes nor figures for anything beyond themselves. (This is what I think Hogg means when she says that she is not interested in the discourse of class per se: her films do not think in terms of collective categories.) Although Swinton has commented that “Joanna’s a great respecter, as I would say I am, of inarticulacy, of silence, of the urge to speak but the inability to find the right words,” unlike the inarticulacy of some forms of American realist performance, in which the struggle is not to feel or to want something but to articulate it to a fundamentally hostile outside world, Hogg’s characters do not narrativize emotional expression (Hornaday). For Hogg’s characters, life, and therefore speech, doesn’t follow coherent emotional arcs or narratives. Their scenes have a seeming artlessness—you never feel that they are driving at anything, in particular, or have any clear motive or defined action, and they typically don’t “go” anywhere, narratively, with a few notable exceptions in climactic emotional duets.
In fact, Hogg refers to this characteristic with ironic self-reflexivity in The Souvenir Part II (see top image), in which we see Julie making a film about her relationship with Anthony, duplicating the set and scenes of The Souvenir. The actors she has cast as Anthony and herself, Pete (Harris Dickinson) and Garance (Ariane Labed), struggle to understand their characters’ feelings and motivations and why they do what they do:
GARANCE: Where should this scene go? Because if we start with that, like oh my god yeah he’s actually doing heroin. Then we have to maybe sit in the bathroom and start talking—
JULIE: No, you wouldn’t talk about it. Honestly, I don’t think you would talk about it straight away. . . . It’s not about that. . . . It’s just what it is.
G (incredulously): You cannot see that and just not talk about it. J (softly): Well, that’s how I did it. That’s how it happened.
Later, Julie hears the actors talking about her and the incoherence of the shoot (Garance says: “I don’t understand the origin of the relationship”). The increasingly hostile director of photography puts it more bluntly: “None of us have any idea what is going on.” This is not to say that Julie’s halting, uncertain process is anything like that of the mature filmmaker Joanna Hogg, but we might hear, in her cast and crew’s critiques, echoes of Brody’s complaint about Hogg’s own film. In these scenes, we get the sense of a nascent aesthetic that is not yet confident in its interruptions of convention. But pointing to the interruption, something important about Hogg’s vision snaps into focus: like Julie, she makes films in which people’s behavior does not conform to reasonable explanations or understandable motives; in fact, she isn’t interested in explaining behavior at all. Prikryl describes the scene in The Souvenir in which Julie fails to hold Anthony to account for his theft of her possessions in the following way:
This is one of the moments when the film’s rootedness in autobiography does something marvelous to its realism. . . . The outrageousness of what actually happened between the young Hogg and her lover is here preserved in all its blatancy; her submissiveness isn’t sanded down into some milder episode in which she might more plausibly allow herself to be deceived. Earlier Anthony had told Julie that he admired film characters who are “very truthful, without necessarily being real,” and you could say that the two of them are very truthful without necessarily being that approximated thing, realistic.
What I would add to this account is that the “realistic” mode as it is represented by the actors’ objections in The Souvenir Part II is entirely related to historical expectations about realist acting: the expectation, inherited from theories of Stanislavski but turned into firm directives by American director Elia Kazan in particular, that each character action be motivated by a legible want or desire.
Hogg’s films present rich and compelling psychological characters while eschewing that legibility of motive. They center highly subtle performances of character in which actors work through emotionally rich dynamics over time in complex ways, and they rely on actors’ ability to express, without cliché, ambiguity and internal conflict on their faces and bodies and to respond immediately to the affective input of their scene partners. Yet they consistently refute the injunction toward causal clarity and narrative closure that such psychological acting typically comes with. Prikryl notes that “the camera remains fixed and tends to avoid closeups, while the actors . . . largely improvise their roles. These techniques are familiar in the realm of art-house cinema, but it’s unusual to pair them—like grafting the still, endlessly patient camera of Yasujirō Ozu or Chantal Akerman to the loose, seemingly spontaneous acting in films by John Cassavetes or Mike Leigh.” What both the still camera and the loose acting have in common is that they allow in unimportant, “useless” details that other styles—if the filmmaker had chosen tighter edits or a more roving eye and directed the actors with fixed dialogue and prestructured scenes—would eliminate. These details I want to call the “reality effect.”
The aptness of Prikryl’s point about the spontaneity of the acting in Hogg’s films and its contrast to the expectations set by her camera work notwithstanding, it strikes me that Leigh’s and Cassavetes’s way of filming actors is very different from Hogg’s method, and they do so to different effects. With their mutual backgrounds in theater, both Leigh and Cassavetes were paradigmatically dramatic directors, in several senses of the term. Actors in their films, however “loose” and naturalistic their performances may feel and whatever their techniques of performance generation, tend to act scenes that follow fairly conventional structures in the Aristotelian dramatic tradition as it was inflected by realist playwrights from Henrik Ibsen to the present. The path from missing or incomplete knowledge to recognition (the tragic plot of Aristotle) tends to become, in these films, following the psychological adaptation of the realist playwrights, the journey from secrecy (as in, e.g., Leigh’s Secrets & Lies [1996]) or repression (as in, e.g., Cassavetes’s A Woman under the Influence [1974]) to revelation or explosion of truth or “reality.” Films by Leigh or Cassavetes tend to center conflicts, whether internal or external or both, and their mise-en-scène shows us, throughout, what we understand to be the whole of that conflict, disclosing its crucial elements for our view. There is an “all” to the worlds of those films, particularly Leigh’s: as in paradigmatic modern drama, as Peter Szondi has influentially theorized it, we find an “insistence on motivation and the exclusion of accident” (10). But Hogg’s films, as I have argued, insist that they are not showing us all, that what we are seeing, that what we can see, is a “not-all.” Borrowing Szondi’s theatrical references, Hogg’s films are more like the plays of Anton Chekhov, whom Szondi associates with the crisis of drama, in which the ingredients of drama, insofar as they appear, appear in a “deemphasized, incidental manner” (20). As Hogg has put it, “I fell out of love with any kind of imposed structure a long time ago, and I’m really just trying to follow my own instincts. Sometimes those instincts may seem to be anti-dramatic. Or I see drama in small things” (Rapold). The term “antidramatic” strikes me as appropriate; another possibility would be “postdramatic,” the term developed by Hans-Thies Lehmann to describe the critique of dramatic structure found in late twentieth-century theater and performance, which further extends the crisis that Szondi read into the late nineteenth century.
But if Hogg’s films are postdramatic in the sense that they contain the materials associated with European realist drama—family conflicts, psychological comings-of-age, sexual and emotional frustration with conventional environments and arrangements, the past impinging on the present—and abstract, undercut, and reconfigure them, showing them to no longer be sufficient or determining, they also substantially differ, particularly in their acting styles, from other contemporary or recent filmmakers who eschew the expressive centering of dramatic conflict. The cultural critic Lauren Berlant tracks a tone in the films of Gregg Araki that Berlant charts across a diverse range of contemporary filmmakers that the critic calls the “underperformative.” A mode of deadpan, flattened affect and apprehension, underperformativity “shows up to perform its recession from melodramatic norms, foregrounds the obstacles to immediate reading, without negating the affective encounter with immediacy,” which is different from what Deleuze referred to as the postwar time image, which marks its distance from melodrama: these films’ “stuckness or stillness denotes here not fundamentally a general crisis of experience” (Berlant, “Structures” 193). Hogg’s films share this retraction of melodrama and pervasive sense of stillness but do not share the aesthetic of the deadpan or affective flatness. Acting in her films is understated (at least in comparison to the tradition of melodrama and its variation in midcentury American realism) but affectively full. The “buzz” of uncertainty that pervades them is not inarticulateness; instead, it stems from a sense of relational instability: the brightly shifting allegiances and atmospheres of an invested-in social scene. The actors are almost never doing nothing, and the eschewal of close-ups means we often see at least two things that the actors are doing at once: drinking coffee and watching someone, for instance. In The Souvenir, whole scenes could be described as producing the reality effect: a number of scenes in the first quarter of the film simply show Julie and her roommate’s friends hanging out at her flat, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, listening to music, and chatting about nothing in particular while surrounded by empty wine and beer bottles. In The Souvenir Part II, the scenes at the film school where the students are filming their student films have this quality. The slight awkwardness and lack of decisiveness or polish in their bodily gestures are also markedly different from the style that Berlant references in Takashi Murakami (and that I would associate in performance with Miranda July) that “enmeshes and confuses the aggressive child and the adorable adult”: they are not self-conscious, particularly, just not on display (199).
The idiosyncratic and fundamentally irrational details of the reality effect charge the performances in Hogg’s films with surprising emotional rhythms. But also, in their very naturalness, their seeming spontaneity, they enable our apprehension of the principle of their representation: the presence of the actors who make its meaning. In this vein, one emotionally climactic scene in Hogg’s first film stands out. At the end of Unrelated, Anna flees the rejection of Oakley and the “youngs” and goes to a “grim” hotel. Prodded by her friend Verena, who begs her to tell her what is wrong, Anna confesses that she thought she was pregnant only to discover that she was menopausal instead. Although I have called the scene emotionally climactic, and it does involve the revelation of the main character’s secret, which in some way explains her behavior, the rhythm of the scene mitigates the feeling of dramatic closure. It moves in fits and starts; it neither builds nor resolves. At first they sit on opposite sides of a double bed. When Anna puts her head in her hand and starts to cry softly, Verena climbs over to her. Anna sobs suddenly as Verena awkwardly embraces her; Anna then puts both hands on her face and collapses into her friend’s lap. At first we can see nothing of Anna’s face as she sobs—we only get one glimpse of her from the side before she is enclosed by Verena, her face hidden behind Verena’s head. Verena pets Anna’s face and pulls her up, and Anna suddenly says, “I thought I was going to have a baby.” Just as suddenly as this outburst, her body yanks away from Verena in a violent sob and crumples over itself. Anna blurts out the story in a stream (“I still thought I was pregnant, I was convinced I was pregnant”), still rubbing her face with both her hands: “I had my opportunities and I didn’t take them. . . . You belong somewhere. I will just forever now be on the periphery of things.”
As Prikryl describes the scene, “Unrelated has until now been so rigorous in its refusal to psychologize that this burst of emotion carries more than ordinary weight; the confession explodes with formal audacity as well. It’s a cool, narratively loose film that suddenly shows itself concerned with a very particular kind of female experience, and willing to evoke an intense pain that, as recently as 2007, was much less mentionable than it is now.” I would locate both the “formal audacity” and the “intense pain” that she describes in one single gesture in Kathryn Worth’s performance: the sudden, violent jerk of Anna’s body away from her friend, midscene and mid–emotional stream. It is the kind of gesture that feels as though it could not be planned for, a seemingly unrehearsed break in the scene. But insofar as it is also a profoundly recognizable emotional response, it also telegraphs the performance’s virtuosic legibility as both lifelike and aesthetically fitting. What we apprehend, then, as the reality effect—which both “means” the scene and is not reducible to its taxonomy—is the actor herself, not the actor outside her role but fully absorbed in it.
The above was excerpted from Joanna Hogg by Shonni Enelow. Copyright 2024 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.
Shonni Enelow is a professor of English at Fordham University. She is the author of Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-drama and the coauthor of A Discourse on Method.