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SPECTRAL a film journal

DESIRE

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issue nº1

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SPECTRAL DESIRE

Cinema and Desire Introduction to our first issue

Jaclyn Bethany & Irene Gómez-Emilsson

Desire Now- Desire in Contemporary Cinema Courage Against Mastery in Hedda

Christie Johnson

La Chimera: Cinematography and Desire

Irene Gómez-Emilsson

Belén: A Call to Arms from Argentina

Jamie Garwood

Desire Revealed- Desire in Mid-century Cinema Goddess of Cinema, the Divine Gaze of Maya Deren

Sophie Dushko

The Fight for Desire: Sexuality, Censorship, and Female Performance in A Streetcar Named Desire

Jaclyn Bethany

Only What Heaven Allows: Desire in the Films of Douglas Sirk

Zain Hashmat

Real Ugly: The Enduring Legacy of the Great Susan Hayward

Ashlyn Frank

Know Your Place – Jennifer Jones, Ambiguity and Cross Class Mobility

Chris Cassingham

Passion, Wildness and Metamorphosis in Gone to Earth

Cathy Lomax

The Destruction of Desire: Girlhood, Performance, and Splendor in the Grass

Jaclyn Bethany

Considering Desire- Desire in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Cinema

Desire Interrupted: Death, Grief and Sublimation in Father of My Children

Irene Gómez-Emilsson

Cinematic Desire: Stillness, Femininity and Emotional Truth in Goodbye First Love and One Fine Morning

Anna Vlachou

I Have You Inside Me Like A Disease: Desire across space and time in Mia Hansen-Løve's Goodbye First Love

Yessica Klein

Notes From an Island: Desire for emancipation in Bergman Island

Diego Courchay

Behind Spectral x Desire

Co-Editors

Contributors

Our Sponsor

Editorial Notes: [1] Spectral Journal is committed to maintaining an intellectually diverse, inclusive, and independent platform for scholarly inquiry across disciplines, methodologies, perspectives, and cultural contexts in relation to cinema. Recognizing that scholarship is inherently situated within particular intellectual and historical frameworks, the Journal upholds principles of transparency, methodological rigor, critical engagement, and respect for divergent perspectives. The publication of any contribution or viewpoint does not constitute institutional endorsement, but reflects Spectral Journal’s commitment to fostering rigorous, pluralistic, and open scholarly discourse.

[2] The following critiques contain critical analysis of mature themes, sensitive topics and complex cinematic material that some individuals may find offensive. The analytical perspectives presented herein are intended strictly to serve the academic examination of the films and do not necessarily reflect the views of the writers or the editorial board. This publication is intended exclusively for academic and mature readers aged 17 and older. Reader discretion is advised. [3] A Note on Citation Style: In keeping with Spectral's dual academic and journalistic identity, this issue draws on both Chicago and MLA citation conventions. Citation style may therefore vary across contributions. © 2026 Film Journal. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without prior written permission from the publisher.

On this page: Lucy Cade, from 'White Girl' series 1,2 & 3, a study on Blanche DuBois, 2022 Oil & acrylic paint on canvas prints of original paintings, 50 X 50cm

Cinema and Desire- Introduction to our first issue

Desire permeates throughout cinema history. It is often underanalyzed, as desire has been often observed as an inherent female trait – the desired one – but as this journal proves, desire in cinema transcends gender and time and space. The way filmmakers have explored desire has changed significantly over time, and varies from director to director, actor to actor, or cinematographer to cinematographer - as no one’s vision of desire is singular, In this issue, our writers and artists eloquently explore how all facets of filmmaking contribute to our theme of desire. Our first issue interrogates, through and from cinema, what desire is and how it is expressed, conveyed, and threaded through the formal aspects of this endlessly malleable art form. From performance to the more granular themes and theories - Cinema and cinematic analysis is a vast, evolving art form. It constantly pushes boundaries while reflecting the world around us. The cinema is often where we go to escape, or think, to learn and to feel. The universal language of cinema brought our magnificent contributors for our debut issue of Spectral - together. Our debut issue of Spectral focuses on Desire - and is split into three distinct sections; desire in contemporary cinema, in mid-century cinema and a special section focused on the work of prolific French auteur Mia Hansen-Løve, a natural fit for our cinematic world. Hansen-Love’s filmmaking is filled with unspoken, subtle moments of desire, her camera positioned often against the palest blue skies. Last but not least, we would like to warmly thank Emily-Jane Robinson ‘Emmy’ and her team at Emmyland for their generous sponsorship on our very first issue.

We hope you enjoy our debut issue of Spectral. Jaclyn Bethany and Irene Gómez-Emilsson Co-Editors, Spectral

Desire Now- Desire in Contemporary Cinema

Claire Downes Whitehurst, For the Ginkgos, 2025, ink on paper, 8” x 7”

La Chimera: Cinematography and Desire Irene Gómez-Emilsson

La Chimera (2024), written and directed by Alice Rohrwacher is teeming with desire – in fact, desires – all kinds of them: desire as a possibility, as the liminal relationship between what is and what is to come or what has been; a burning desire to be in touch with the past, the present, the future, encapsulating through the visible what is invisible, the strata of time, the ancient, the departed, and what is to come and the inevitability of death. I am interested in how the cinematography, signed by French director of photography Hélène Louvart, is the vehicle to these different kinds of desire, and more largely how it achieves in conveying what French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty – the philosopher of the flesh – in later works calls the 'continuum of Being': the tension between the indivision and the chiasm between the seer and seen, the perceiver and the perceived, the one who desires and what is desired – a form of chiasmic relationship, a reversibility. In his later life, Merleau-Ponty transitioned from phenomenology to what Oliver Fahle calls an 'ontology founded upon visibility',[1] where through vision – the fleshy eye – the classical divide between subject and object is collapsed. These concepts are put forward in Eye and Mind (1960) and the unfinished and posthumous masterwork The Visible and the Invisible (1963). Marie Testu,[2] when considering MerleauPonty's ontology from the perspective of desire, explains: 'The object of desire is not separate from the subject. It is not an outside in relationship to the inside that is the subject, but the passage, the relationship between an outside within the inside, and the inside within the outside as projection and introjection show it, the symbolic mechanisms of desire.'[3] Furthermore, Testu introduces desire as a chiasmic concept: a hollow that is never fully replenished, always in process. This leads me to interrogate how the camera embodies desire – how it vehicles the reversibility between subject and object, between the one who desires and the object of desire – and how the oscillation between filling and emptying, this chiasmic relationship between camera and subject, is revealed in the film itself.

[1]. Dalmasso, Anna Caterina, Le Corps c'est l'écran: La Philosophie du visuel chez Merleau-Ponty, Éditions Mimésis, Paris, 2018, p. 32, quoting O. Fahle, 'La Visibilité du monde. Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty et le cinéma', in A. Beaulieu (dir.), Gilles Deleuze. Héritage philosophique, PUF, Paris, 2005, p. 135 (translation mine). This framework – reading Merleau-Ponty's late work as an ontology 'founded upon visibility' – is central to the argument I develop in my doctoral thesis: Gómez Emilsson, Irene, The Question of Landscape. Considering the Relationship between Cinematography and Landscape in Iceland through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Ontology, PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 2025 (unpublished) [2] Marie Testu's reading follows Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, who, in Être et chair I et II, undertakes a historiography of the concept of desire across MerleauPonty's body of work – a concept the philosopher himself rarely addressed directly. What Saint Aubert performs as this 'archaeological' work, Testu takes up as a direct reflection on desire, employing Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological and, later, ontological apparatus.

Set in the 1980s, La Chimera follows Arthur (Josh O'Connor), a bedraggled English archeologist who lives haphazardly in the outskirts of a Tuscan town and experiences 'the chimera', a strange form of trance and divination which allows him to find Etruscan treasures buried in the landscape, supported by a group of eccentric tombaroli, tomb raiders. Parallelly, Arthur forms a bond with lively Italia (Carol Duarte), a Brazilian immigrant who is part singing student, part maid to Signora Flora (Isabella Rossellini), a down-to-the-heel grande bourgeoise and the mother of Arthur's missing girlfriend, Beniamina. This set of offbeat characters leads us, often humorously, through a set of adventures involving ancient tomb looting, police chasing, tombaroli gang tensions, and the discovery of a priceless statue of the mother goddess Cybele. We also get to experience Arthur's inner world through visions and dreams, and we are allowed to get a glimpse of the missing and ethereal Beniamina, who, like Ariadne in the myth of the Minotaur, is pulling a red thread through Arthur's mazy idealities. The film was shot by Louvart – with whom Rohrwacher has continuously collaborated since 2011 – in celluloid film, choosing different formats for each 'realm' of the film. For everyday life, which expresses a desire of the now, of the present, and is associated with Italia's love of life, spontaneity, creativity, and enthusiasm – a desire that is present, visible, and alive – Louvart and Rohrwacher chose Super16mm, shot on the Arriflex 416 with a 1.66:1 aspect ratio. Interestingly, the same format was chosen to shoot some of the images of Beniamina, which belong to another realm yet sustain the same feeling of presence. For anything related to the Etruscan artifacts and the underground caves and tombs where the tombaroli find the treasures the team chose to shoot on 35mm on an Arricam LT with a 1.85:1 aspect ratio –pressing the desire for what the landscape hides within its strata, for the ancient, a connection to the past through its present remnants, invisible to the naked eye. And finally, Arthur's dreams and visions [4] and additional images of Beniamina were shot in 16mm with a 1.33:1 aspect ratio on a Bolex H16-Rex. These images reveal an embodied and internal desire for escapism and the beyond. The end of the film uses the three formats, eliciting a transition from desire to a transcendence through death and becoming invisible.[5]

[3] Testu, Marie, Merleau-Ponty. Une Ontologie du désir, MA dissertation, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, 2015, p. 86 (translation mine). [4] For Merleau-Ponty, '[V]ision doubles. There is the vision upon which I reflect; I cannot think about it except as thought, the mind's inspection, judgment, and reading as signs. And then there is the vision that actually occurs, an honorary or established thought collapsed

into a body.' Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Eye and Mind, p. 137.

Adriana Comi Pretelín, Chimera: Subtle Whispers, Digital Illustration, 2026

Desire Revealed- Desire in Mid-century Cinema

Lucy Cade, from White Girl' series 1, 2, and 3, a study on Blanche DuBois, 2022 Oil & acrylic paint on canvas prints of original paintings, each 50 X 50cm

The Fight for Desire: Sexuality, Censorship, and Female Performance in A Streetcar Named Desire Jaclyn Bethany Art Work Featured by Cathy Lomax

In 1950, filmmaking was experiencing a post-war boom; the industry was entering the Golden Age of Hollywood. In this pivotal year, the studio system produced genre pieces, and family friendly cinema such as Walt Disney’s Cinderella and Father of the Bride. In contrast, the studio's biggest hits included industry focused pictures such as All About Eve, and Sunset Boulevard - two films that critiqued fame in reference to the female psyche and desire. In New York City, a brilliant young playwright had emerged on Broadway, and with him, a thematic focus on the psychology, sexuality and desire of women. These prescient themes had never before been displayed so raw on the American stage. In Streetcar, Tennessee Williams wrote an urgent and real exploration of desire, introducing female characters that would become immortalized in cinema history. In September 1951 his masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Williams’s close collaborator Elia Kazan was released in cinemas nationwide (AFI Catalog - A Streetcar Named Desire, n.d.). The film version of Streetcar is forever synonymous with the iconic naturalistic performance given by Marlon Brando as the brutish Stanley Kowalski. However, it is the performances and characterizations of his wife Stella Kowalski, played by original Actor’s Studio co-founder Kim Hunter, and her older sister, the tragic Blanche DuBois, played by Vivien Leigh, that specifically, even in the era of the Hays Code, impacted how female desire and sexuality could be portrayed on screen. The women won Oscars for their revelatory performances, Brando, a transfer from the New York stage (along with Hunter, Kazan and Karl Malden) did not. Prior to 1950, sex on screen was heavily censored via the Hays Code (established 1934) and limited sex to implication, innuendos and timed kissing. In the post Mae West era, the new Hays Code standard was set by the classic, short fade to black kiss in Casablanca (1942). (Lewis) During the era of the Code which lasted until the 1960s, married couples in films had to be shown sleeping in twin beds. A Streetcar Named Desire was a film that fought

Cathy Lomax, Film Diary 58: 16/12/13 They were still playing cards, 2016, oil on paper

the Hays code through many elements - but specifically, through the sexual exploration of Blanche’s past, Stanley and Stella’s relationship and through the text’s initial frank depiction of homosexuality. The film version of Streetcar was forced to omit the information that Blanche’s deceased husband was homosexual. Stella DuBois Kowalski and the widowed Blanche DuBois are fiercely different sisters from genteel Mississippi. The sisters ultimate shared trait lies in their intelligence, and their desires. Stella and Blanche are two women forced to survive in a period of history when a woman’s identity was entirely controlled by marriage, and men. Stella has chosen the more “traditional” route - though first, she explored her independence. Stella left the family’s crumbling Mississippi plantation, Belle Reve, years before the film starts. She moved to the more diverse, bustling New Orleans consumed by World War II and fell in love with Master Sergeant Stanley Kowalski. When the film opens, Stanley, the child of Polish immigrants, is a war veteran who now works as a traveling salesman at a local plant. Stella’s feelings and sexual yearnings towards Stanley is apparent from the moment Hunter appears on screen. Kazan, Williams and his co-writer Oscar Saul have chosen to meet Stella at the bowling alley, a departure from the lay, where she meets Blanche at home.

By placing the character in the bowling alley, Kazan immediately engrosses the audience in Stella’s sexual hunger for Stanley, as she watches him bowl. Her sweaty demeanor oozes through the lens and is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Blanche. From the moment Stella is reunited with Blanche, she explains Stanley is like a different species, and Blanche’s first visual association with Stanley is from a distance, he is engaged in a brawl at the bowling alley. In her close-up, the expression on Hunter’s face, (as we see Blanche in the foreground, stunned) - is one of excitement, yearning and vulnerability. Dressed in an off the shoulder peasant blouse designed by Lucinda Ballard, she is more openly exhibiting her body than her tightly wound sister, who is dressed in long sleeves on a hot spring day. Stella is not a traditional housewife stereotype, but rather a modern woman who enjoys and desires sex with her husband. In 1951, the depiction of a woman embracing her sexuality was seldom seen on screen. Fighting against censorship, even in the final cut Stella’s needs and wants are a crucial part of the film’s storyline, and with subtle crafting of frames by Kazan and his cinematographer, Harry Stradling, the visual language of the film only amplifies Stella’s characterization as a woman exploring her sexual desires. Stella and Stanley’s intimacy is destructive, and defined by volatility. Stella becomes an enabler, nurturer and mother-like figure to her reeling, often abusive veteran husband. Her marriage is dependent on her sexual relationship with her husband and his wants and needs. The presence of sex in their relationship is even more overt, Stella is pregnant with the couple’s child.

Cathy Lomax, Film Diary 58: 16/12/13 They were still playing cards, 2016, oil on paper

Passion, Wildness and Metamorphosis in Gone to Earth Cathy Lomax

Cathy Lomax, Bad Blood, 2026, oil on paper

If the actress Jennifer Jones is remembered at all it tends to be for her leading role in the overwrought Duel in the Sun (1946), or Lust in the Dust as John Waters delightfully named it. In this western epic she plays Pearl Chavez, an orphan consumed by her passion for the psychopathic Lewt (Gregory Peck), with whom she enacts a melodramatic hillside shoot out before they crawl into each other’s arms to die. My first encounter with Jennifer Jones however was in the strangely haunting Gone to Earth (1950) which I came across while working on an exhibition called The English Museum. Made on location in Shropshire (on the borders of England and Wales) the story centres on Hazel Woodrus, a young passionate woman who loves animals and is unable to ignore the sexual feelings she has for a cruel country squire.

There are similarities in Jones’ roles in the two films, notably the mixed-race heritage of her heroines – Pearl’s mother was Mexican, Hazel’s a Welsh Gypsy. I say ‘was’ because when we meet Pearl and Hazel their mothers are dead which means that the young women are without maternal love and guidance and their position as exotic outsiders in hostile environments leaves them vulnerable to predatory males. In both films the beautiful young heroine is haunted by her desire for a man she despises. Yet where Duel in the Sun is a Hollywood epic with the sexual appeal of the actress exploited for spectacle, Gone to Earth is earthy and British, with Hazel’s sexual allure and desires part of her attunement with the natural world. This beautiful, dark, fairytale is made all the stranger by its amplified colour, courtesy of Technicolor, which is used masterfully by the British directors Powell and Pressburger. The colour saturated shots of characterful non-actors, Hazel in vivid green, blue, red or yellow costumes, and most ominously the local fox hunters in their scarlet coats, are variously set against green landscapes, the vertical stripes of tall tree trunks, odd rocky outcrops and clear blue skies. This chemically enhanced palette, and reference to the ghostly Black Huntsman who rides the night wind with a pack of hounds, gives the film an elevated theatrical reality which makes it something of a forerunner to contemporary folk horror. The film opens (and ends) on the rolling Shropshire countryside which is bisected by Hazel running barefoot across the screen. The local hunt is out (led by her soon to be lover) and Hazel, dark hair flying wildly around her angelic apple cheeked face, scoops up her beloved fox before the hounds can catch its scent. Back home at the tiny cottage she shares with her father a violent tussle results in a tear to her only dress. The subsequent trip to buy a new dress sets in motion a series of events which lead to fear, sexual pleasure, humiliation, abstinence and ultimately death. The Commitment of Jennifer Jones Jennifer Jones’ Hazel is a fully rounded character, her confusion, panic, satisfaction and determination, are all articulated physically. As she travels between the chaste marital harmony offered by kindly pastor Edward Marston (Cyril Cusack) and the excitement of fulfilled sexual desire with the cruel foxhunting squire Jack Reddin (David Farrar)

Miriam Bale aptly describes Jones’ palpable sexual energy as ‘vibrational’ rather than simply physical [1]. Jones also adeptly embodies Hazel’s enjoyment of her physicality. Her new form fitting dress, is disapproved of by her aunt who acidly remarks, ‘A disgrace the way you look in that dress. You look like an actress […] You quite draw men’s eyes’. To which Hazel replies, ‘it’s nice to draw men’s eyes. Ain’t it?’ In his memoirs Michael Powell describes Jones’ conscientious attention to detail:

She […] had had corsets specially designed to pinch her in and to push her out. She knew where the camera was very well [and] insisted upon the wardrobe mistress pulling the corset tighter and tighter until her body moved within the dress like a panther in its skin.[2]

Alongside this physical commitment, Jones’ mobile and open face animates her performance. She is perfect for otherworldly outsider roles, with an ability to adopt a faraway look which immediately places her beyond the diegesis. For the ethereal Hazel she moves between naivety, intensity and determination. Hazel’s Gypsy heritage manifests in her superstitions and free-spirited association with the natural world. This is reflected by commentary on the film which often mentions Jones’ wildness. Michael Powell recounts that she: ‘threw her shoes away and went barefoot over the Welsh mountains […] the soles of her feet were like tanned buckskin’.[3]In this merging of the star and her role the suggestion is that Hazel, as a woman with Gypsy heritage, is driven by urges and desires, and as such is different from cultivated women. This plays into stereotypical ideas of the exotic other – non-white women who are closer to the natural world and the animals who inhabit it. These clichés/fantasies about wild natural women are however tempered by the complexity of Hazel’s character who indulges in her fiery sexual relationship with Reddin on her own terms, when he is cruel to her animal companion, the indomitable Foxy, she has no hesitation in leaving.

[1] Miriam Bale, ‘Basic Instinct’, Film Comment (May-June 2008) https://www.filmcomment.com/article/basic-instinct-jennifer-jonesretrospective/ [2] Michael Powell, Million Dollar Movie (1995), 69-70

[3] Ibid, 70

In its original French title, the film is called Un amour de jeunesse, something closer to A Love of Youth. The phrasing already suggests that the love itself belongs to a time, to a particular phase of life that continues to move while somehow staying the same. Here, Hansen-Løve allows water to recur throughout the film, as if waiting for Camille to catch up with it, both visually and musically, through Johnny Flynn and Laura Marling’s song ‘The Water’, whose refrain quietly suggests that the lovers may finally be “done with their dying.” Years later, Camille returns not to the Seine but to another river, the Loire. By then, the coordinates of her life have changed: she works at an architecture firm, has a new relationship. It's a slow reconstruction of a self that once revolved entirely around Sullivan. As she leaves for the river, she follows Lorenz's advice to watch for the sun, and she chooses a hat that once belonged to her first love. The Loire moves quietly through the landscape as Johnny Flynn and Laura Marling’s song, ‘The Water’, begins to play. “All that I have is a river / the river is always my home / Lord, take me away / for I just cannot stay / or I'll sink in my skin and my bones.” Like first love itself, songs survive as emotional containers, and the song, played twice in the movie, is a temporal transport. Is Camille being reminded of the summers she spent in the Loire Valley with her past lover? Is the river bringing back her promise to jump into the Seine? Hearing ‘The Water’ today immediately returns the film to a specific emotional era, not only for Camille but also for viewers (like me) who first encountered it in their own indie-folk-tinted youth. Sullivan’s old hat floats downstream like an object released from the past, drifting through the current of Camille’s memory. Desire, which once seemed like a fixed point in time, is now revealed as something fluid, capable of stretching, receding, and returning in altered form. As for rivers, they are never static, even when they appear unchanged: as Heraclitus famously observed, no one steps into the same river twice. The Loire Camille revisits is not the same Loire of her adolescence, just as she is no longer the same woman. Yet both carry traces of earlier forms.

Considering Desire- Desire in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Cinema

Claire Downes Whitehurst, Blue, 2020, monotype on paper

Notes From an Island: Desire for emancipation in Bergman Island Diego Courchay

Small islands are curious spaces for imagination, bounded by clear limits, visibly finite. The world can seem to end at the shoreline. It’s once you’ve come to terms with the water’s encirclement that you can turn inward or inland, explore and find. In the movie Bergman Island (2021) by Mia Hansen-Løve, a filmmaking couple arrives on the Swedish island of Fårö for an artist’s retreat. Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) come ashore with all their affinities and differences, which will inform their relationship, their approach to their surroundings, and the new screenplays they have come to write. As the title tells us, the island they have chosen for work is already populated by another’s imagination, with whose constant myth they will have to contend. Director Ingmar Bergman lived on Fårö for 40 years, and made it the setting for some of his most notable films. After he died in 2007, an auction was held to sell off his estate and all the personal possessions from his insular life. Among the unlikely ripples of the Fårö sale was Hansen-Løve’s desire to film there. “It wasn’t when I saw films that were shot there, but it was the pictures of the island that were in the book that was made for the auction of the Bergman estate,”[1] she says in an interview. She was spurred to visit in 2014 and later returned for a month, writing it as the setting of her seventh film. Save for its first 90 seconds, it’s an island we never leave for the entire runtime, with the ferry carrying characters to and fro bookending our stay. It’s as Chris and Tony settle into one of Bergman’s former properties that their divergences first come to light. “Don’t you think it’s too nice, too beautiful, all this calm and perfection, I find it oppressive”, Chris says. The couple are knowing admirers of the director, though their relationship (with his movies) is at a crossroads. While Tony seamlessly takes up space, Chris struggles with the place, and perhaps with influence: their room is the same as in Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage, the film that “made millions of people divorce,” but only she finds this disquieting. Tony has no issue writing in

[1] Mia Hansen-Løve, ‘I Admire Bergman’s Aptitude for Being Alone’, interview by Little White Lies, 30 May 2022.

the house, and is as comfortable stepping into the immediate shadow of the famous director. As we later see, it is an ease that extends to his ongoing screenplay and his successful career in genre movies. Chris is younger than him, her career more art-house than established, her world and inspiration less self-involved, not as impermeable to her surroundings. She sidesteps the main house for the narrower space of a nearby mill, where she struggles to write. “An island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure and self-sufficient place,” wrote Tove Jansson,[2] another Nordic artist who chose life away from the mainland. It’s a dilemma shared by Hansen-Løve and her main character, as both seek to make the island their own. Part of the solution is hinted at in Hansen-Løve’s telling acquaintance with Fårö. “The auction book – it was so inspiring because these pictures were not in black and white, but in colour. And most of Bergman’s films shot on Fårö are in black and white. Most of them have to do with nightmares – they have to do with his demons as he was seeing them. But the island I saw when I went there was an island in colour. There was another way to experience the island,” she says. And though Bergman may be in the title, location, and pervades the dialogue, the knowing respect never leads to homage or mimicry. In a way, his overbearing presence is a catalyst for emancipation. “To me, it gave me a very strong feeling of the island as being a kind of haunted place,” Hansen Løve remarked. What “ghosts” of her own she finds will be far removed from Bergman’s, as seen through Chris’ search for personal expression. This process is played out in her experience of place and conversations about Bergman. As the couple discusses the great man with others, we hear of his belief in apparitions, and his distance from his family. When Chris –who has a daughter with Tony– asks if one can produce such a body of work and have children, she is told that “Bergman was as cruel in his art as in his life.” His wives raised his nine children while he focused on his oeuvre. Later, as they visit Bergman’s private screening room, one seat is to remain empty, reserved for him. They watch Cries and Whispers. Chris sees it as “a horror movie without catharsis…when you come out of a horror movie, you feel reassured because what you saw can’t happen to you”. But for her, this feels real. For Tony, the movie is merely a nightmare. And he admires that pursuit of darkness. “Why didn’t he once want to explore happiness?” she asks.

[2] Tove Jansson, The Summer Book, trans. by Thomas Teal (London: Sort of Books, 2022), p. 43.

Behind Spectral x Desire

Co-Editors

Jaclyn Bethany is a New Orleans based EMMY® winning filmmaker, theatremaker, writer, actor, and producer. She graduated from the American Film Institute with an M.F.A. in Directing and holds an M.A. in Screenwriting from the London Film School. Her film work has been screened in competition at the world’s most prestigious film festivals and distributed worldwide. Her most recent feature In Transit played in competition at Edinburgh, Deauville, New Fest (Audience Award), and numerous additional festivals. It will be released in 2026. As an actor, writer, producer and director she has numerous film, television, commercial, regional and Off-Broadway credits. In addition to her film work, Jaclyn is a rising Tennessee Williams scholar and runs Irene Collective Theater Company. Jaclyn's work and scholarship focuses on complex femininity and her Southern upbringing.

Irene Gómez-Emilsson is a Mexican-Icelandic cinematographer and film academic based in London, working internationally across practice and research. As a cinematographer, she has shot awardwinning independent features, shorts, and digital series, with work screened at festivals including Santa Barbara International Film Festival, HollyShorts, and Short Shorts Tokyo. As a researcher, she holds a PhD in Film by Practice (Exeter/LFS) for which she received a full scholarship. Her thesis, The Question of Landscape, considers the relationship between cinematography and landscape in Iceland through

Maurice

Merleau-Ponty's

ontology.

Her

scholarship

continues

extend

beyond

cinematography into broader areas of film theory. She approaches both filmmaking and research as ways of portraying thought and emotion, drawn to the medium's immense and fascinating malleability.

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Cover Art: Amanda Woolrich, Spectral x Desire, 2026, Linocut on paper and digital manipulation