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SPECTRAL a film journal

DESIRE

issue nº1

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”

Courage Against Mastery in Hedda Christie Johnson

Courage in Nia DaCosta’s Hedda (2025) appears most poignantly in displays of vulnerability. Accordingly, of the film’s three principal characters, it is Thea who attracts our attention as a model of courage and ethical action, and one, moreover, that reflects contemporary aesthetic preferences for the unfiltered and vulnerable. We might say that Thea relates to the structure of desire more flexibly than both Hedda and Eileen, her principal counterparts. Naming desire as structural places my argument in Lacanian theoretical territory. There, desire does not equate to what a person wants, but rather to an inescapable structure that positions human subjects within the social–symbolic world.[1] In the film, we see how the symbolic order—the network of social recognition, language and academic authority— constrains the three characters in unique ways. Hedda and Eileen use performances of strength and self-control to reject weakness, but to tragic effect; by contrast, Thea openly falters and struggles yet perseveres. In so doing, she evolves and embodies a form of courage that, by virtue of the medium of film fiction, arguably becomes more universally aspirational, while undeniably responding to a broader trend in contemporary modes of mediatised self-representation. Early in the film, Thea arrives unexpectedly at Hedda’s lavish party. With subtle contempt, the hostess asks, ‘Did you walk?’ while evaluating the appearance of her surprise guest.[2] This indication of Hedda’s will to dominate the social sphere rapidly intensifies after she has whisked Thea away to change. In a fast-paced scene, she first selects a gown in a rich peacock blue, which Thea begins to put on. ‘No. Not your colour,’ she declares, and brusquely removes it.[3] The camerawork is oppressively close. Hedda takes a less ostentatious alternative, and this time puts it on Thea herself. Meanwhile, Thea relates that she has left her husband and collaborated with Eileen on two books, the first a bestseller. The alternative gown similarly displeases Hedda, who ultimately fastens Thea into a comparatively plain, though still finely made, dress. Although Thea seems passive in the face of Hedda’s attempts to control her appearance, her persistent voice, which narrates an impressive stand against social constraints, tells a different story. By leaving her husband and co-authoring two books [1] This summary definition derives from a range of sources. There is a wealth of literature on this subject: see, for example, Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton University Press, 1995) and Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (MIT Press, 1994).

[2] Hedda. Directed by Nia DaCosta, Amazon MGM Studios, 2025; 00:11:23. [3] 00:13:03.

with Eileen—who, it transpires, is also her romantic partner—Thea has demonstrated remarkable agency. In fact, the second publication will carry her own name, ‘right underneath’ Eileen’s.[4] Imogen Poots conveys pride tinged with bashfulness in her interpretation of Thea’s statement of self-authorship here. Clearly, Thea is still learning how to embody her courage. Hedda is generally portrayed as self-possessed, but her confidence masks insecurities about her standing in society, which stem from her illegitimate birth, others’ chronic racialisation of her and the apparently semi-open secret of her queerness. Despite the privileges her father’s station as a general gave her—and which shine through in her wit and intelligence, and, when around others, her equanimity[5]—her illegitimate birth status troubles her social position. She has faced significant social limitations as a mixed-race woman.[6] To emphasise this predicament, the film repeatedly racialises her, like when Professor Greenwood’s wife expresses surprise about her skin tone. The professor’s wife does this just after exiting the frame in a moment that blends visual staging with the words of the script chillingly to expose the routine racial violence that Hedda has endured.[7] Her attempts to impress and manipulate others become suddenly legible as ways of negotiating systemic hostility. We also learn that she and Eileen previously had a relationship. Being marked as different throughout her life has led to a lack of acceptance that Hedda has attempted to address through marrying Tesman and purchasing a palatial estate. That was only possible thanks to Judge Brack’s loan, however, so now she must guarantee an academic promotion for her husband in order to repay the debt. Marriage and property may furnish a means of securing her social position, but only insofar as they are seen by others as symbolic tokens of her success, hence the expensive and probably unaffordable party. As part of this conceit, and owing to her precarious social fit, it is imperative her marriage be perceived on terms she can control and not, for instance, as a compromise for the possibility of queer love with Eileen she had to abandon. Eileen does not fear others’ judgments about her being queer. Rather, she hungers for recognition of her intelligence, a lack which Hedda uses to thwart Eileen’s ambitions for the

[4] 00:13:30. [5] DaCosta presents Hedda alone in several short scenes accompanied by tense sound effects where she allows her composure to falter (00:37:40; 01:02:58). [6] Wendy Ide, ‘Nia DaCosta on her gender-flipped adaptation of an Ibsen classic: “Making Hedda mixed-race added layers to her torture”’, in Screen Daily (Online, 30 December 2025), para. 6.

same professorship that she and her husband crave. In a squirm-inducing display of manipulation, she pits Eileen (now teetotal after a recent scandal) against Thea to force her to drink. Using insecurities and prejudices about gender, Hedda sets up the lie that Thea had ‘asked that Tesman look after [Eileen] at the university [to] stay out of trouble’.[8] At the apex of Eileen’s indignant reaction to this insult, the camera brings Judge Brack and Tesman into the frame. Barely discernible through a background blur, they nonetheless press upon our attention, just as they evidently do on Eileen’s: ‘From the academics to the gossiping ladies in the corner,’ chides Hedda.[9] Immediately, Eileen reaches for a glass and toasts the two men, notably to the same sound effect that had accompanied a moment in which Hedda’s composure had slipped.[10] Demanding Thea call her ‘Dr Lovborg’, she departs to speak to Tesman, addressing Hedda as ‘Mrs Tesman’. These script choices align the two women’s comparable attempts to master their social positions: Hedda the consummate hostess and Eileen the brilliant academic who drinks ‘like the boys do’.[11] They aim to project unassailable images of commanding self-presentation which in fact reveal deep insecurities. Unlike Hedda and Eileen, Thea does not seek to project masterful performances of strength. In fact, her anxiety, awkwardness and uncertainty encourage an appreciation for imperfection. After Eileen withdraws, Thea confronts Hedda, snarling ‘Why are you like this?’[12] In the ensuing exchange, she is nervous, yet manages to stand her ground. Hedda ultimately retains the advantage, reflected physically in her gripping Thea’s arms, who shakes free and walks away. As in their first encounter, Hedda seems unperturbed and even amused. Despite the fact that Thea may still be learning how to express her confidence, however, she does so quickly. Not long afterwards, Hedda ambushes Thea as she listens anxiously through the door while Eileen talks to the male academics.[13] Despite being startled and having to face Hedda’s fresh insults, she declares that she will not leave without Eileen. The camera concentrates on her reactions and breathing while Hedda continues to talk, whom we hear out of shot. When a short while later both women return to the frame, Thea pauses before decisively

[7] 00:09:32. [8] 00:48:24. [9] 00:48:43.

[10] 00:37:38 [11] Hedda says this to her at 00:47:46.

Adriana Comi Pretelín, Hedda: Intertwining Dolences, 2026, Digital Illustration

approaching Hedda. Stopping midway, she intones ‘I hope you choke,’ and pushes past Hedda, whose face fleetingly registers concern. Thea’s direct challenge exposes the fragility of Hedda’s symbolic hierarchy. Despite the differences between herself—the queer woman who has quit her husband and coauthored two books—and Hedda—a general’s daughter, married woman and lady of the house—Thea stands up for herself. Echoing Lacan’s formulation that ethical action consists in not betraying the desire that structures the subject, we might say that she does not cede her desire.[14] Thea defies the norms of party etiquette to protect her and Eileen’s love and their joint intellectual venture. Through claiming her name as an author, Thea situates her desire within the symbolic order. Closer to Lacanian ethics than Hedda and Eileen, she acknowledges imperfection, chiming with a contemporary media aesthetics of vulnerability in which persons emerge as subjects in process. Such anxious but irrepressible courage, accessed through vulnerability, is not available to Hedda and Eileen, who respond to the structure of desire through fantasies of mastery and denying their lack. The film suggests that navigating desire’s structure through faltering courage beats displays of superior competence. Moreover, the potential of fictional representation that film affords means that the self-forming possibilities for spectators arguably become more salient, to complement similar instances of self-authorship through fallibility they encounter in the broader media landscape.

[12] 00:49:24. [13] 01:07:52. [14] J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960), vol. vii, ed. by J.-A. Miller, trans. by D. Porter (Routledge,

1992).

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.

Before I proceed to the analysis of each of these 'realms' and how the cinematography and its specific means achieve in expressing desire, I'd like to identify how generally – beyond the specificities of each format – the use of celluloid film contributes to achieving this, and how it is a fitting medium to express an embodied, chiasmic relationship to the world and to others. Although in the last couple of years there has been a tendency for productions across genres and budgets to return to analogue acquisition, for about a decade, between the mid2010s and recent years, cinematography was dominated by high-end digital acquisition. Despite this dominance, cinematographers often sought, through different means, to 'break down' the digital qualities of the format. For instance, the use of vintage optics – and their apparent mediatic qualities, such as field curvature – or the addition of grain, halation, and texture in post-production, have been very common resources to infuse the digital image with analogue qualities and convey a stronger embodied relationship between the filmmakers, their subjects, and the audiences. In his seminal text Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty develops a novel idea through the metaphor of the pool – to which I will come back in section III. The philosopher argued that it is through our bodies that we experience the world, that our relationship to it is thus mediated, mainly through the 'fleshy eye', and therefore the more the medium is apparent the more we can relate to the subject, since there is an analogy between the mediatic nature of our bodies and the apparent mediation of the camera and its elements. The return to a widespread use of analogue cinematography tells us how much filmmakers and audiences seek these qualities. But what makes them more embodied, more apt in making us feel connected to the images and what they are portraying? In essence, I would argue it is the discrete structure of the silver bromide grain, which links us – biological beings – with our own discrete cell structures, to the world that the stock acquires photochemically. In addition to this, each frame (there are generally 24 or 25 frames per second) will have its own unique structure, contributing to a sense of movement and 'organic' quality. To boot, the three layers that compose a colour negative (RGB) have their own separate grain layout, and therefore the movement and discrete qualities of the grain are tripled. All of this stands in contrast with the square structure of the pixel and singular quality of the digital sensor. The mediatic nature of celluloid — its thickness, its apparent, visible qualities, and their

[5] All the technical details – choice of camera, lenses, aspect ratio, stock, etc. – are drawn from Hélène Louvart's interview with Kodak: 'DP Hélène Louvart AFC Mixed 35mm and 16mm Formats and Aspect Ratios to Bewitching Effect for Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera', Kodak, April 15, 2024, https://www.kodak.com/en/motion/blog-post/la-chimera/.

correspondence to our own bodies – allows this embodied, mediatic, and chiasmic relationship between the audience, the filmmakers, and the world and characters they are depicting, and reveals desire, the correlation between subject and object, or, as Merleau-Ponty calls it, the reversibility.[6]

I. Desire in Present Tense Italia's character in the film represents to me the presence in the now, the present tense. The understated romance between Arthur and Italia anchors the film in the immediate and the potential, an interpersonal desire, but also interspersed within the present the potential of a future. The realm of the present, as previously mentioned, was shot on Super16mm on an Arriflex 416 with Zeiss Ultra Primes. The smaller gauge of the 16mm means that the grain is more apparent than larger gauges (35mm or 70mm), and therefore the mediatic qualities of the format are more visible. This choice grants this section of the film a sense of present embodiment. Italia's character and the bond she forms with Arthur anchor this section of the film; it is Italia who brings Arthur out of his reveries and tries to pull him away from the illegal tomb-looting activities. For her, the treasures are not for the eyes of humans: 'la sotto ci sono cose che non sono fatte per gli occhi degli uomini'. Arthur repeats this sentence toward the end of the film, when the precious and coveted head of the Cybele becomes hostage to high stakes within the archeological world. As the tombaroli and Arthur confront Spartaco (Alba Rohrwacher) – a mafioso antiques dealer who has been brokering the sale of the Cybele's head – Arthur drops it in open waters, denying the sale and, with it, the profanation his own chimera and looting had first set in motion. This double relationship with the invisible is relevant here. For Merleau-Ponty, the visible contains the invisible; here, the present contains the past. Italia's superstitious stance reveals her grounding within the present, and the format formally sustains it. 16mm, due to its relative lightness, caters for ease of movement as well as operating the camera handheld. The format is associated with documentary, experimental, and avant-garde filmmaking. These connotations reinforce the present-tense characteristics of the

[6] I develop this argument on the embodied, chiasmic qualities of celluloid at greater length in my doctoral thesis. Op. cit., note 1.

format: it is alive, it moves, it thinks and engages with what there is. It is the desire of the now, and the possibilities of the future. Arthur almost falls for this burning desire of the now – after his adventures with the tombaroli come down following the tense, high-stakes moment with Spartaco – by engaging with Italia's community project in an abandoned station alongside other women and their children. Fittingly shot handheld, this section engages with the possibilities of the future being built in the now, in the intertwining desire between Arthur and Italia. A tender scene in which the two of them engage playfully in the kitchen using 'the Italian sign language' portrays the tension between Arthur's attraction to Italia and his desire for the beyond – be it the underground artifacts, the lost girlfriend, or his visions. In this playful, tender, yet tense scene, the camera often swings between the two characters, creating a moving connection between the two – we could imagine Louvart 'dancing' between the actors, bodily engaging with the playful tension, transcribing through her own bodily intentionality the friction between the conflicting registers of desire. At the end of the scene, after swinging back and forth between the two, they finally find themselves in the same frame, in a classic love-scene two-shot. Arthur signs, 'Me and you, we have a secret liaison'; they then kiss passionately, but Arthur stops the romantic moment with a quiet 'No'. His thoughts, reveries, chimeras, will always take him away from the present, into the past, or beyond. Here, desire is, as Testu – following Saint Aubert and Merleau-Ponty – describes it, a hollow in ongoing motion, filling and emptying itself in a double movement, oscillating between the possibilities of the future and the transcendence of the invisible. II. Desire for the Invisible Strata In contrast to the scenes of daily life, the scenes of Arthur's exploration of the world of the dead, the past, and the Etruscan remnants were all shot on 35mm. The desire for this invisible past, which is rendered visible by its remnants, was shot by Louvart in a more 'ideal' way: with 35mm's finer grain and the use of controlled dolly movements, the format reveals a relatively lesser embodied and mediatic relationship to this past world, a relationship perhaps more imaginary and idealised. 35mm, in contrast with Super16mm and 16mm, is the industry standard for prestige fiction films and is historically associated with Hollywood's polished

narrative and transparency. The discovery of the Cybele – a turning point in the narrative – is a good example of the use of this format. After experiencing a strong 'chimera' in an industrial landscape, Arthur leaves Italia behind – with whom he has been romantically bonding at an outdoor summer party – and, alongside the tombaroli, opens up an intact sanctuary, discovering the precious statue. Shot on 35mm, on a 500T stock, with very little light, there is an ethereal quality to the scene, a sense of reverence. Slow tracks and pans and the use of lanterns and candlelight (with the addition of Arri LED fresnels) lend the scene a sense of spirituality reminiscent of chiaroscuro Renaissance paintings. The neater, more considered imagery enhances the sense of discovering something invisible, perhaps as Italia said, 'not made for the eyes of humans'. Desire here is of a different nature: an urge to be in touch with the invisible bodies of the past, those hiding in the strata of the landscape, what belongs to the spiritual world. Reaching towards the buried Cybele in near darkness is both self-realising and self-dispossessing, and the 35mm format, with its classical transparency, renders this oscillation visible: 'I forget myself in favor of what I relate to',[7] as Testu says, rendering the hollow of desire in its most idealised form. III. Internal Desire The third format, regular 16mm shot on a Bolex – a lightweight, originally amateur camera, with the Zeiss Ultra Primes – shows Arthur's inner world, reveries and dreams, beyond his quest for Etruscan artefacts and his daily life. The 1.33:1 aspect ratio, with the 'dirty' edges visible, brings a distinct dimension to these images. Vignette-like, they poetically show Arthur's dreams and visions. The format appears sporadically and punctuates the film with inner, abstract images of landscapes and skies, as well as Beniamina's red thread – his Ariadne's thread. The thick, mediatic nature of the format, with its apparent traces, is distinctly the most embodied of the formats. It brings the audience inside Arthur's head, his vision and body, via Louvart's bodily investment and the camera, stock, and lens characteristics – revealing a desire to detach himself from the world, to take flight. The opening sequence of the film brings together the two 16mm formats. It opens with a POV shot of Beniamina — we later understand it to be through Arthur's eyes — shot on

[7] Testu, op. cit., p. 92.

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

Super16mm. The opening shot introduces the strong mediality of the film from the very beginning: a film camera shutter, with its characteristic sound, opens up at one frame to reveal Beniamina playfully looking through the camera. It closes again, then opens up, before we hear Arthur's voice talking to her. She then turns back to reveal her back and a small tattoo of the sun. This shot is then cut, intertwined chiasmically with the first dream image of the film, shot on the Bolex on regular 16mm. The shot shows a landscape in movement, with the sun at the centre of the frame – shaped by the iris blades of the Zeiss Ultra Prime lens – flaring, and creating dapples which encapsulate both the shape and light of the sun and the structure of the lens elements themselves. Filmed through the windows of the train, the image passes through yet another layer of glass, its movement carried by the train's motion. Everything about this image speaks to us about mediality, literally illustrating and mirroring Merleau-Ponty's pool passage.

When through the water's thickness I see the tiled bottom of the pool, I do not see it despite the water and reflections; I see it through them and because of them. If there were no distortions, no ripples of sunlight, if it were without that flesh that I saw the geometry of the tiles, then I would cease to see it as it is and where it is – which is to say, beyond any identical, specific place.[8]

This first dream image sharply encapsulates what Merleau-Ponty is describing here. The more the image shows the mediums through which it was shot, the more embodied it appears to be, the more we can relate to it as coming from within, expressing our – or here, Arthur's – chiasmic relationship between the inner and the outer. The traces of the bodies – Louvart's, the camera's, the lenses', the stock's – reveal this connection, express the reversibility, and thus, as Testu puts it, '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'.[9]

[8] Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, p. 143. [9] Testu, op. cit., p. 86.

These dreams and images appear regularly throughout the film, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, but always revealing Arthur's inner longings and desires. We see Beniamina's red thread again – which prefigures the end, as I discuss below – this time shot on the Bolex and intersected with Italia's presence, desire in the present tense. The medium, its characteristics, and their chiasmic relationship with light, the natural world, and the different subjects – the character, the actor, and the authors – always makes itself present through different traces: overexposure, halation, the bodily movements of the operator – expressing the reversibility between the inner and the outer. The intertwining formats, from the opening sequence onward, become in themselves a thread through the maze of the film, just as Beniamina's – Ariadne's – thread foreshadows the end, where desire is transcended, where the visible becomes invisible.

IV. Beyond Desire: Death and the Invisible The end of the film combines the three formats, and by doing so it vehicles a sense of transcendence, transcending desire into the beyond, the invisible. Arthur becomes part of the invisible, of the strata of time. As he senses a new underground tunnel, alongside a new and unknown set of tombaroli, they force him to go into the tunnel first, then bury him to his death. Although the intellectual culprit of this trap is never revealed, we could of course suspect Spartaco. As Arthur goes underground, lit only by a candle, he finds himself trapped. This section was shot on 35mm and is reminiscent of the scene of the Cybele's discovery – only now it is himself who is becoming part of the landscape, the invisible. After the soil dramatically collapses and leaves him trapped underground, we find ourselves in complete darkness. After a few seconds, Arthur lights the candle again and tries to make his way through the tunnel as he desperately struggles to find a way out. Eventually, he finds Beniamina's red thread hanging off the tunnel's ceiling. As he pulls it, a well of light opens up. We then cut to the exterior, where Beniamina is pulling the thread. Shot on Super16mm – the format of the everyday, and reminiscent of the opening shot – this is now transcended, as we have trespassed the world of the living. The shot also echoes the earlier scene with the red thread shot on the Bolex, which was in Arthur's mind. Arthur has been pulled out of the maze of desires to be reunited with the departed; the film ends in a tender embrace, the desire transcended into the beyond. After a cut to black, the credits put us back in Arthur's body with the 16mm footage, shot on the Bolex, eliciting a tension between the transcended desire, death, and the embodied reveries. Coming back to Testu's reading of Merleau-Ponty:

(...) [W]e must grasp the relationship of being with desire as a negativity (...) It is not the opening of a gap, or a void, nor the constitution of a fully formed subject. There is nothing positive in the intentionality; it is indeterminate, blind, but is nonetheless not nothing. Desire as a blind intentionality, the negativity of the flesh, is undefined, since it neither anticipates nor searches for something in particular.[10]

At the end of La Chimera, the three formats collapse; they co-exist, and the different types of desire are merged into one. The literal, material blindness which Testu mentions leads us to an intentionality, a reversibility – the chiasmic relationship between formats – materially and mediatically transcribing the chiasm between desires, subjects, landscape, past, present, the interior and the exterior. Conclusion Desire leads and pulls Arthur in different directions, and these different types of desire provide different interactions between the different subjects and objects. Rohrwacher and Louvart's choice of formats reflects these differences, the chiasmic, intertwining relationship between subject and object, enhancing or softening the mediating, embodied qualities of each medium, contingent on the nature of the desire. Desire in the present tense, where Italia is the center of force, was shot on the more embodied Super16mm, smaller gauge with thicker grain and handheld movements; desire for the past, the invisible strata, was shot on the prestigious 35mm, which denotes its ideal, invisible nature; and Arthur's reveries, the most embodied, mediatic, inner images, were shot on regular 16mm on the Bolex – rendering the medium visible, reminding us strongly of Merleau-Ponty's fleshy eye and the metaphor of the pool. 'I do not see it despite the water and reflections; I see it through them and because of them'[11] – inner desire is the most corporeal, where the medium appears in its thickest iteration, present, as a body chiasmically intertwining between the subject – Arthur – the landscape, and the memory of Beniamina. The end brings the three formats together after

[10] Testu, ibid. [11] Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p. 143.

desire is transcended by death, by a moment of literal blindness, to then collapse everything conjointly and become all the more chiasmic, as if transcendence and death remained embodied, communicating in a continuum of being. Cinematography here seeks to communicate desire by participating in it, by embodying it. With its different bodies – stock, lenses, the operator's body itself, light – cinematography porously vehicles the communion between different bodies, different times and spaces, visible or invisible.

[

Belén: A Call to Arms from Argentina Jamie Garwood

Set in the province of Tucumán, Argentina, Belén follows Julieta Gomez, a young woman accused of infanticide, and Soledad Deza, the bold lawyer who risks everything to take on her highly controversial, precedent-setting case. As the trial unfolds, Julieta’s plight becomes a flashpoint in the battle against a conservative legal system —sparking a groundswell of outrage and a growing wave of solidarity that transcends borders. A film in the same vein of the Oscar winning film from Brazil I’m Still Here (Walter Salles, 2004) and its compatriot Argentina 1985 (Santiago Mitre, 2022) focusing on a social injustice and the wrongs of society upon the individual; the film takes great pains to focus on the power and camaraderie of the community through demonstrations and peaceful marches. From the outset, Fonzi takes the decision to make the film a documentary style. The intrusive camera is observing the action which sees Julieta arrive at the hospital with her loving mother. Julieta is taken to a bed for observation and then wishes to go to the toilet. She stumbles to the toilet and there the camera stops, respecting her privacy in the bathroom until she is found by a worried nurse. Then follows the arrest on the treatment table of Julieta, alone and handcuffed to a gurney whilst her Mum is in the corridor waiting patiently unknowing. The notion of a young woman committing a crime such as abortion when not knowing she was pregnant to begin with is mind-boggling and the scene albeit brief due to the invading camera it feels like a living nightmare for Julieta. The case for Julieta begins two years later with a title card. There is a stillness in the world before the battle commences. We revert to a normal camera set up – medium close ups of Fonzi herself portraying making her centre of the frame. She is a woman and a parent at a PTA meeting when we first encounter her; diligent and loyal to her family as well as her community. Walking through the corridors of power, Deza is not someone to be messed with. She overhears the cries for help by Julieta’s mother and sister to a civil officer. The People want a trial and a life sentence being banded about. Her mother says it was a miscarriage and her

statement was never taken by police at the time, Julieta has been ignored from the outset as well as her family. The hospital proposes peritonitis but there are many contradictions throughout the case and that is what Deza is hoping to unravel. Reminiscent of many American dramas – Dark Waters (Todd Haynes, 2008) or A Civil Action (Steve Zaillian, 1998)– showing the legwork required in legal films; the balance of family life for the people on the outside in contrast to the imprisoned other. In this instance, the person on trial is a woman, her right to choose what happens to her body not a conglomerate or corrupt corporation. A film about social injustice depending upon what side of the argument for life or choice you fall, there is much to be said for this film as a women’s picture – directed and written by women, the strong moral characters it provide as the rallies get bigger so does the stakes for all involved. A well-constructed production that seeks to show all sides of the arguments – there is a slow burn start when the tragic act occurs from the outset, our heroine is imprisoned and then the wheels of justice and appeals start in the second hour as the supporters ramp up their work as they get closer to the truth. The second hour has a gripping pace that is unrelenting as the truth becomes closer to the surface. We as the audience are on this journey with them finding out things the same time, Soledad experiences threats to her life herself as well as physical pain and Julieta must overcome attacks in prison. There are two telling moments in the film; the first occurs after a close call in a car crash, Soledad and Julieta have an exchange where the prisoner states ‘When I saw you on the TV, I knew you would get me out of here’ this moment brings to light what is at stake and this borrows from other wrongly imprisoned films such as In The Name of the Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993) where the strength to survive is there for one person to make true. This coupled with the other pivotal scene on a daytime talk show when Soledad engages

in a discussion about abortion and gets hijacked by an uneducated panel who end up talking about pets instead – this film endeavours to educate those who are too ignorant to understand. There is sometimes a difficulty in such docu-dramas where the result or outcome of proceedings is already known to a viewing audience. The drama is not from the outcome but the journey to the outcome; this employment of female protagonists goes in juxtaposition to the work of Laura Mulvey’s and the famous 1975 essay in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In a nutshell, Mulvey argued that the male gaze theory positioning women as passive objects of male desire, reflecting patriarchal power structures and the privileged heterosexual male perspective. Namely, the film is directed by a female, she stars in the film also as lead counsel; the film tells the story of a female protagonist who must overcome the patriarchal structure (male characters in the film are characterised as unhelpful or stern); the one male character who does help the women in finding evidence in a lock-up is only a mere substitute and his naivety comes to their rescue while the other male stalwart was merely on break. The male dullard rewards the women in that instance. Mulvey calls women ‘the bearer of meaning and not the maker of meaning’ by that intuition, Julieta is both the bearer and maker of the narrative with her body the driving force of the story. Her body is neither eroticised nor objectified in the traditional sense, she is violated by having her civil rights excommunicated undeservedly. Since the release of her essay, the world has changed tumultuously, the gaze has altered and while a high majority of films may maintain that gaze; the tide has turned somewhat. When Mulvey wrote the essay no women had ever been nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards (the first was in 1976 when Lina Wertmuller was nominated for Seven Beauties), since then three women have won the award (Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Campion and Chloe Zhao) With a whiff of homage to All The President’s Men (Alan Pakula, 1976) in the shoe leather the ladies have to do to find the files showing the truth of the case against Belén – and how seeking to find the truth can bring danger upon those seeking it.

Shot modestly and humbly – there is a stark stillness permeating throughout at times - but due to the not-too-distant recent history and the seismic change it caused in Argentinian law, the film succeeds in telling an important story without being flashy or grandiose in standing on a soapbox. Change can occur if enough people are there to fight for it, as in this story. The ending offers a resounding finale to the power of community and the continuing battles women must negotiate today even more so.

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

Goddess of Cinema: the Divine Gaze of Maya Deren Sophie Dushko

“What I do in my films is very, oh I think very distinctively, I think they are the films of a woman.” [1] In her striking, surreal short films of the 1940s and ‘50s, avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren developed a decidedly feminine visual language. In black and white, through altered time and surrealist perspectives, women slip in and out of frame and out of selves, refracting off of surfaces and each other. Objects are never just objects: symbolic status is placed on everything in frame as her characters, often played by Deren herself, play games of chess or play with knives. If one has been conditioned to think of a woman’s body as an object – of desire, of resistance, of repulsion – the viewing of a Deren film will challenge not only the notion of such objectification but one’s own relationship to the corporeal form. Through her use of symbol, distorted time, mirrors, and repetition, Deren’s films inhabit dreamlike landscapes of the unconscious mind. Free from the constraints of reality, Deren was able to explore and embody a woman’s inner desires and express a way of being that is subjective rather than objective, endlessly becoming, searching, and shifting. Her characters seem to be on eternal journeys, often cycling through repeated loops, retracing their steps and gathering accomplices and information to aid them in their quest. What is it they’re looking for, these ever evolving women washing up on shores and entering abandoned houses? The answer is deceptively simple: a home in one’s self. This palpable desire is a direct reflection of a personal life defined by metamorphosis and an ever evolving yet eternally uncompromising artistic spirit that made Deren one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th Century despite her relatively small catalogue and tragically short life. Born Eleonora Solomonovna Derenkovskay in Kyiv in 1917, the first half of Deren’s life was marked by transformation and migration. An only child of a psychologist father and artistic mother, her upbringing steeped her in languages both cerebral and creative that would later

[1] Deren, Maya in Kudlácek, M. dir. In the Mirror of Maya Deren (2001),

Amanda Woolrich, Deren, 2026, Monotype on cotton paper

reverberate through her work. In 1922 the family immigrated to the U.S., escaping antiSemitic pogroms in their native Ukraine. The impact of this immigration is deeply felt in her work: her characters, often played by Deren herself, are travelers, wanderers, seekers. This is echoed in her peripatetic early adulthood, during which she bounced between New York City and Los Angeles, working as a writer and seeking community and political activity through Socialist Groups. In the late 1930s, Deren met Black dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham and traveled the segregated South with her eponymous dance company as Dunham’s secretary. Though not much is documented of their time together, the bond between Deren and Dunham was clearly strong as Dunham’s work with choreographic ritual and her scholarship on Haitian vaudun are echoed in Deren’s later films and writings. Both women were keenly interested in the idea of possession – by spirit, sure, but also by a creative force which animated their work. Dunham once wrote of the ritual-influenced work she was making with her company, “(we danced) as I imagine dance must have been executed when the mind and body were more united.” [2] This aim for reunification of body and spirit can be felt in Deren’s earliest work where she, as both director and star, seems to be attempting to unite her creative mind and physical body before us, on camera. How did the assistant, copywriter, and seeker become the auteur we recognize? Always an artist, Deren did not pick up a camera (or adopt the name Maya) until meeting her second husband, Alexander Hamid, in 1942. Multi-lingual and incredibly articulate, Deren was a natural storyteller but felt creatively stifled by the limits of written language when working in poetry and fiction. Discovering first photography then film, Deren felt, “like coming home,” [3] the camera fitting not just her hand, but her mind like a glove. She wrote in 1953, “When I was writing poetry, I had, constantly, to transcribe my essentially visual image… into verbal form. In motion pictures, I no longer had to translate.” [4] As an immigrant, Deren had spent the majority of her life filtering her ideas into a second or third language, losing the original impulse in the translation required to be understood. This made her a skilled shapeshifter, but imagine the relief (and release) of discovering a medium where she could explore and express herself unfiltered. She made her first, and most well-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon, the following year with Hamid. [2]Dunham, Katherine. A Touch of Innocence : Memoirs of Childhood. University Of Chicago Press, 1994. Pp 109 [3] Deren, Maya, in In the Mirror, op cit. [4] Ibid

While Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) may be a collaboration with her male partners – Hamid is her co-director and co-star, and her third husband, Teiji Ito, composed the film’s score nearly a decade later – the film has a distinctly feminine perspective. Meshes of the Afternoon follows a woman, played by Deren, arriving home, falling into slumber, and embarking on a cyclical and unsettling journey through her subconscious. Mirrored Mayas refract against one another in the film, retracing her path to the house and chasing a lost key and a mysterious cloaked figure with a mirrored face. The film relies heavily on evocative symbols, such as a poppy picked up in the opening sequence recalling Hades abduction of Persephone, and the aforementioned key which is swallowed by Deren and later transformed into a knife. The mirror itself is a symbol which, combined with the doubled and later tripled Derens, points to a search for self palpable across much of Deren’s work. By choosing to star in her own films, Deren creates a uniquely female gaze that defies objectification and insists on a complex, layered subjectivity. In Meshes of the Afternoon, she articulates a multiplicity of self that holds space for curiosity, fear, desire, and violence. Centering herself both behind and in front of the camera, Deren creates a sense of safety in her cinematic world, allowing her to explore taboo or unsettling impulses without alienating her audience. Were Meshes directed by a man and Deren simply its star, or even if Deren had cast a different actress in the role, the danger and violence of the film would be felt as something external. By embodying her own artistic vision, Deren creates a unique expression of female interiority, leading us into the labyrinth of her subconscious with a ball of twine: this is how I see it, this is how I feel it; I’m in charge and I’m doing this to myself. Meshes of the Afternoon and its mirrors multiply that self, giving us Deren as dreamer, as victim, as aggressor. This multiplicity could be interpreted as a psychic fragmentation, a common trauma response, yet her authorial intent feels more metaphysical than diagnostic. By mirroring her physical form, Deren complicates the film’s relationship to gaze, subjectivity and objectivity, by literally gazing at herself. We the audience are watching Maya, but then another Maya emerges watching herself, making her directorial gaze palpable and removing any trace of objectification until the film’s final moments when what has been

been a kaleidoscopic exploration of a woman’s inner life is interrupted by the entrance of a man, played by Hamid. This shift in perspective startles the viewer out of Deren’s feminine interiority and plunges us into the external realities of being a woman in the world. Ending the film with a new masculine presence amplifies rather than detracts from the femininity of Deren’s gaze, placing her singular subjectivity within the context of a heterosexual relationship, the metatheatricality of casting her husband and collaborator in the role further blurring the line between subject and self. Deren also stars in her second film, At Land (1944), in which she washes up on the shore of a beach in a visually arresting image that calls to mind the work of 1970s body artist, Ana Mendieta, specifically her 1974 film Ocean Bird (Washup). While Deren was working decades before the body art movement, viewing her work through this lens gives context to her use of her own physical form. Body artists such as Mendieta and Carolee Schneeman created and performed rituals in which they were both object and subject, placing themselves in front of the gaze of spectators and critics. Their use of their own, often naked bodies was a direct response to the objectification of the female form in art history, an insistence on their own subjectivity through embodiment. “I am not showing my naked body, I am being my body,” [5] said Schneeman. Deren’s films employ this embodiment, albeit with less nudity, while also owning the gaze as she is both behind and in front of the camera, a fact which we are reminded of before the action even starts with a title card reading “Conceived and Directed by Maya Deren”. The perspective is undeniably and entirely hers: it is often her body we see on screen but it is also her blocking and cinematic choreography, her story, her final cut, and she plays with this control with editing and cinematography as well as performance. At Land along with Meshes of the Afternoon, Ritual in Transfigured Time, and many of her films, uses editing techniques, specifically slow motion, to create a subjective sense of time. After washing up on shore, Deren pulls herself to her feet using a piece of driftwood, her effort amplified by the slowing down of the footage, evident through the way the wind moves through her curls. Slow motion is used in the film deliberately, only when Deren’s character is completely alone, expressing a woman’s inner rhythm in contrast to the rhythm

[5] Schneeman, Carolee. “Letter to a friend”. 1960.

of society Deren describes this unique relationship to time in her work as inherently feminine, saying, “Woman has the strength to wait… time is built into her body in the sense of becomingness…this is a woman’s time sense and I think it happens in my films almost more than anyone else’s.”[6] This quote recalls Chantal Akerman’s, “with my films you’re aware of every second passing through your body,” [7] and one feels the lineage between these two filmmakers, working decades apart, in their use of duration to document a woman’s interiority. At Land once again uses masculine presence as contrast dye to reveal the film’s uniquely feminine perspective. With cameos from Hamid as a handsome stranger who interrupts Deren’s solo journey by walking a parallel path before outpacing her and John Cage tucked in up to his chin under a white sheet in an abandoned house, Deren illustrates the intrusion of the male gaze on a woman’s search for self definition. While she may be known for her mirrored selves, the inclusion of men in her work (and her later focus on the male form) is an important part of her uniquely female gaze, creating a fuller picture of the experience of being a woman in the world and establishing a feminine authorial view on the male form. As a woman who loved men (she was married three times to male artists), her inclusion of men in her work acts as yet another mirror, revealing truths that can only be seen through the eyes of the other. A pioneer of avante-garde cinema, Deren’s films were initially rejected by feminist critics but have since been reclaimed by women who not only see but deeply feel the at once unique and universal depiction of a woman’s inner life. An anthropologist and mystic as well as a filmmaker, Deren connected her art practice to the divine feminine, referencing the Haitian goddess of love as, “that of being everything that is human,”[8] and continuing to propose that, “taken from this point of view, there is not reason at all why women shouldn’t be artists, and very fine ones.” Maya Deren’s films embody this notion of divine humanity, expressing through her visionary cinematic language what is inaccessible in words and offering an exclusive invitation into the mind of a woman untethered to place or patriarchy, endlessly becoming more and more herself. [6] Deren, Maya, in In the Mirror, op cit. [7] Akerman, Chantal. “Interview upon Release of ‘La Folie Almayer.’” Cinergie.Be, 2012.

[8] Deren, Maya, in In the Mirror, op cit.

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

Shot partially on location, but mainly on the Warner Brothers studio lot, the main action of the film takes place at the Kowalski apartment on the edge of the French Quarter - a location that explores a raw, sexual atmosphere - the Quarter historically housed strip shows and brothels (Lightman). Setting the majority of the film in the apartment only highlights Blanche’s disruptive presence. Overall, Kazan, was true to the material and did not cinematically expand the world with any grand flashbacks or location shifts - only leaving the apartment for three moments - Blanche’s arrival, the bowling alley, and Blanche’s date with her would be suitor, Mitch. Stradling had the challenge of filming a story within almost entirely one location. To create a cinematic feel, Kazan and his cinematographer chose interesting camera movement and stark low-key lighting that favored honesty and realism, as opposed to Hollywood glamour. This choice allowed the characters of Blanche and Stella to feel naturalistic. The film was shot on 35 mm in black and white - both for technical prowess and in service of the story. Black and white was chosen to capture the grittiness of Kazan’s original stage production, but also to match the psychological, shadowy descent of Blanche, while also masking some of the film’s more sensual moments. Removable or “wild” walls permitted camera set-ups from every angle, permitting Stradling’s gaze and compositions to give the film its full cinematic effect. Stage director L. Peter Callendar observes of Stanley, “there was a rhythm to his life – he would come home, he would eat, he would make love to Stella, then he’d go bowling. Or he would go away for two weeks but when he came back they would go at it for a week! But all this changed during the five months of Blanche’s visit… Stella’s rhythm changed also” (Schoenberger 77-78). Through Blanche’s presence, Hunter’s Stella and sexual rhythm becomes externalized. She cannot have consistent sex with Stanley; her sister is sleeping in the apartment’s only other room, divided from the couple’s bedroom only by portieres. The following afternoon after Blanche’s unexpected arrival, she soaks in the bathtub. Stanley returns home from work to discover Blanche’s trunk has arrived. This whole sequence between Stanley and Stella is carefully choreographed by Kazan and the majority of the scene is captured in one, fluid take. With careful camera movement, the scene is approached as a repressed sexual dance between the couple: a hand carefully grazes past the camera their touches and kisses are brief, but passionate: each character’s sexual agitation growing through each frame.

Later the end of his poker night, Stanley hits Stella in a drunken, blacked out rage, likely from what would now be diagnosed as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Walker). The hit is off-screen, but its full effect is felt in a masterful scene that is as raucous as it is terrifying. Stella retreats, with Blanche, to her neighbor, Eunice Hubbell’s apartment upstairs. In the most iconic moment of the film, Brando’s Stanley yells “STELLA!” towards the upstairs balcony, as the camera looms above him from the perspective of his wife. Stella’s iconic walk downstairs is one of the most powerful sequences in cinematic history. The camera tracks her at an upward angle, so that her face is slanted, almost directly above the lens - her lips slightly apart, her neck and chest wet against her robe, soaking in the humidity of the New Orleans night. Underneath her, Alex North’s sensual score is slow, jazzy and full of languid anticipation. The original sequence seen in the film today, was the restored version, when the cut footage was found in a Warner Brothers vault in 1993 (Turan). The censors demanded Kazan trim and edit about three minutes of the footage before the film’s original release (Turan). The original sequence shows Kazan, Williams and Hunter’s original intention to fully explore her complicated, sexual relationship with her husband. The next morning, the camera captures

Stella asleep, covered in a sheet. She is interrupted by her post-coital bliss

by a distressed Blanche. Stella and Stanley, notably, do not have twin beds. Another significant change happened at the end of the film - censors would not allow Stella to stay with Stanley, as she does in the play after his rape of Blanche. Stella yells her last line in the film to Stanley: “I’m never coming back to you, never, never, never!” as she retreats upstairs to Eunice’s apartment. Through visual cues and language, Feminist Scholar Keri Horn in Women and Method Acting, explores the possibility that Stella and Eunice, had a codependent, and perhaps queer relationship during the war. Horn’s interpretation is further proof that Hunter’s commitment to showing Stella’s sexuality and desire resulted in an unprecedented, diversely interpreted onscreen performance. If Stella’s sexual desire is more overt, Blanche’s is rooted in deep shame. In the opening moments film, an overhead wide shot of a train barrels along the Gulf Coast towards

New Orleans. Leigh’s Blanche exits the train in a fog - in gauzy, overdressed attire that protects her from the summer heat and the dirty city. In the opening stage directions of the play Williams describes Blanche as a ‘moth’ - and it is through this description that Stradling took his lighting direction of Blanche. Blanche is afraid of harsh light, and throughout the film Stradling and his gaffer, Robert Campbell, bathe her in shadows, soft light - through fabric, her figure sometimes obstructed. This approach has even more thematic resonance. Through lighting and technical prowess, Blanche is hiding her truth from the audience. In the story, Blanche presents as a demure and pure lady, a fragile woman fighting against her spinsterhood, yet Blanche’s actual history reveals her to be exactly the opposite. Blanche is a tragic heroine whose ultimate shame lies in the suicide of her homosexual husband Allan Grey, which occurred shortly after their marriage when she was just a teenager. The entire backstory of Allan is cut, the reason for his death is not revealed in the film. After his death and Stella’s departure, Blanche stays in the small town of Laurel, Mississippi for years, searching for acceptance and trying to maintain her family home, Belle Reve. Blanche teaches English at the local high school and eventually seduces a seventeen year old student. After she is fired from the school, Blanche struggles - turning to sex work at a dingy hotel to make ends meet after facing severe financial hardship, after losing her job and simultaneously trying to save Belle Reve and her dying family. The ability to convey this backstory cinematically in a censored film proved incredibly challenging. Blanche’s entire being is rooted in sex, and the film’s title A Streetcar Named Desire stems from Blanche’s road to desire, and ultimately, her death. In the film, Blanche’s original line from the play to her suitor Mitch changed from “yes, I’ve had many intimacies with strangers” to “meetings” with strangers. In the 1940s, the Hays Code often forced female characters into “the fallen woman” or like Blanche, the tragic heroine. The actual backstory and strength behind such characters was often left out due to censorship, leaving audiences to make assumptions about the history of the character. Streetcar was filmed in an era of cinema history that would simply not allow Blanche’s true story to be told, and Leigh had to work doubly hard to convey the character’s sexual past and hidden internal life.

Cathy Lomax, Blanche Left, 2014, oil on canvas

Another visual and storytelling cue into Blanche’s sordid past is her interaction with the young collector. Blanche’s attempted seduction of the young man who is collecting for the newspaper at 632 Elysian Fields is captured in a sort of an artificial yet magical, afternoon light despite the darkness, predatory nature of the encounter. This visual cue harkens back to the seduction of her seventeen year old student, and the death of her teenage husband her fading youth, and the young men she yearns for, but cannot sexually possess. Blanche’s secrets and juxtaposing physical appearance is calculated exquisitely by Stradling; as the film progresses she is captured in harsher light - making her unraveling more palpable. The carefully constructed performance, and design of Blanche is a marvel. Blanche’s sensuality, though “subdued” is felt in every frame - and was challenged by Kazan who directed Leigh to play every single scene differently (Bray). The shoot was difficult for Leigh, who spent two months on the soundstage - often feeling alienated from the other “method” actors. She later confessed that the shoot took a toll on her already frail mental health, Leigh was schizophrenic, and claims the role “tipped her into madness” (Schoenberger 81).

Blanche’s makeup recalls a different time - with her powdered face and drawn eyebrows reminiscent of the 1920s and 1930s. Her hair (a wig, overseen by the renowned wigmaker Stanley Hall) is styled in a perfectly coiffed short bob, which grazes her shoulders and stays virtually untouched throughout the film, until her final demise. Blanche’s stifled, pastel and romantic wardrobe is reminiscent of her desire to remain in the past and unchanged - a pale flower in the brutal, changing world. Leigh’s Blanche uses her physical appearance in a somewhat misguided way to represent her believed importance of physical beauty, though she is internally and externally unravelling. From the moment Blanche arrives in New Orleans, she is on the prowl - in survival mode, she arrives at her sisters but knows that a man, and her desire - can both save and destroy her. Leigh’s subtle, but carefully constructed physicality give Blanche the implied essence of a sexual creature: batting of her lashes, her ballet like movements, her wardrobe: full of antiquities, yet also provocative slips and furs. Even the heart shaped choker Blanche wears around her neck indicates a kind of symbol of a fallen woman. During the poker game at the apartment, she flaunts her slip through the portieres to attract the attention of the men. The central conflict of the film is the sexual conflict between Stanley and Blanche, two characters who innately recognize each other, despise each other and want to dominate the other. Blanche’s journey is briefly aided by the character of Harold “Mitch” Mitchell, played by Karl Malden, who also originated the character on stage. Mitch is an army vet friend of Stanley, whose physical appearance and good guy, simple demeanor could not be more different than Brando’s Stanley. Blanche’s actual love for Mitch is questionable, but her desire to be wanted becomes fully realized when she expresses her anxiety to Stella in preparations for their date. Blanche is the most truthful with Mitch, she reveals to him her difficult past, showing a vulnerability to her desire that is denied by the feral, animalistic Stanley. In turn, Blanche denies Mitch a consummation of their relationship, and hopes for marriage, which only drags Mitch along in her destructive quest. Eventually, Stanley reveals Blanche’s history, only to drive Mitch away.

The most controversial and difficult scene in the play - the scene of Blanche’s rape, is an interesting and equally complex sequence in the film. The scene is a complicated dance between Brando and Leigh in their quest for power. Due to code, the end of the scene ends with a shot in the broken mirror with a frozen Leigh looking bewildered, followed by a quick cut to a sprouting fire hydrant; water visually implies rape - for the actual sexual encounter could not be shown, though it is often more fully seen on stage. Sex in cinema has remained fluent and controversial. In 1951, sex could not be seen on screen. In today’s filmmaking, intimacy coordinators work with actors and directors to achieve comfortability, safety and believability of intimacy on screen. Streetcar, though revelatory in its time, could not fully explore the intimacy and sexual boundaries between the characters. Contemporary theatremakers have continued to explore this text and its themes surrounding female desire since its Broadway premiere; it is one of the most produced plays in the world. Despite the impact of the characterizations of Stella and Blanche in the original film, it would be interesting to see how their stories would be told in contemporary cinema; with an exploratory and radical approach - that fully reflects the female characters’ innate desires and without the constraints of the Code.

Art Works Featured Blanche Left 2014, oil on canvas Film Diary 58: 16/12/13 They were still playing cards, 2016, oil on paper Film Diary 50: 23.06.13 They were still playing cards, 2016, oil on paper All by Cathy Lomax Works Cited "AFI Catalog – A Streetcar Named Desire. AFI Catalog, https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/53428. Accessed 30 June 2026. Bray, Robert. Elia Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Cambridge University, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/modern-american-drama-on-screen/eliakazans-a-streetcar-named-desire/B62241E78C3761A7A76A776776C6015F Lewis, Maria. "Early Hollywood and the Hays Code." ACMI, https://www.acmi.net.au/stories-andideas/early-hollywood-and-hays-code/. Accessed 30 June 2026. Lightman,

Herb

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https://theasc.com/article/a-streetcar-named-desire-cinematography-stradling/. Accessed 2 July 2026. Schoenberger, Nancy. Blanche: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams's Greatest Creation. Harper, 2023. Turan, Kenneth. "COMMENTARY: A 'Streetcar' Named Entire: With Censored Footage Newly Restored, Elia Kazan's Film of the Tennessee Williams Play Can Now Be Seen for the Landmark It Is." LA Times, 26 Sept. 1993, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-09-26-ca-39041-story.html. Accessed 2 July 2026. Walker, Dave. "Master Sergeant Stanley Kowalski, Tennessee Williams's Portrait in PTSD." Historic New Orleans Collection, 28 Apr. 2022, https://hnoc.org/publishing/first-draft/master-sergeant-stanleykowalski-tennessee-williamss-portrait-ptsd. Accessed 30 June 2026. Wiegand, Chris. "Gillian Anderson Goes Back to Blanche for Prequel to A Streetcar Named Desire." The Guardian, 15 Feb. 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/feb/05/gillian-anderson-blanchestreetcar-named-desire-prequel-young-vic-departure.

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

Rainer Werner Fassbinder once claimed, “Everyone must decide for himself whether it is better to have a brief but more intensely felt existence or to live a long and ordinary life” [1]. His cinema wrestled with the near-impossible difficulty of human relationships – the ache of wanting, the pleasure of a fleeting connection – and rendered it all with images of striking beauty: painterly compositions, luminous faces, and gorgeous sets that seemed to emote just as much as the actors on screen. Fassbinder’s films were about, above all, what the heart wanted. It’s no wonder he was deeply indebted to Douglas Sirk. In so many ways, cinema itself, with its power to imbue maximum emotion from the most mundane of circumstances, is indebted to Sirk. The German emigré projected the passions of middle America onto the big screen with a dazzling delirium. Prolific from the mid 1940s to the late 1950s, Sirk’s films explored the meaning of daring to follow one’s desires in Eisenhower’s America, celebrating those who did and lamenting those who didn’t through the lens of his baroque black-and-white dramas and his glistening Technicolor romances. His films dealt in heightened emotion, following characters who begged to be understood, ached for something more, and felt trapped within the comforts of their own lives- where even the smallest decisions carried the weight of life or death. In other words, he dealt with melodrama. With films like Magnificent Obsession, There’s Always Tomorrow, The Tarnished Angels, and his masterpiece, All That Heaven Allows, Sirk dug into the emotionally fraught trenches of postwar middle-class America and used what was presented to him- the well-dressed suburbanites, the glamorous homes, the beautiful backdrops of New England and California- and amplified their visage with color, light and soaring camerawork until the picture perfect postcard of the mid-century looked less like an ideal to strive for and more like an overbearing, exasperating cage.

[1] DeLellis, Trae. “Peter Von Kant: Ozon in Fassbinder’s Shadow.” IntoMore, 11 Nov. 2022, intomore.com

Sirk’s propensity for tragic beauty can be directly seen in the forlorn faces he placed at the center of his films. His most celebrated on-screen partnership was with Rock Hudson, one of the great hulking symbols of 50s male masculinity. Hudson was at his prime when working with Sirk, his statuesque body and soft eyes utilized to startling effect in films like Magnificent Obsession. Obsession features Hudson as Bob Merrick, a wealthy, carefree playboy whose recklessness leads to the death of a celebrated small-town doctor, leaving him to form a forever connection with the doctor’s widow, Helen Phillips, played by the tender Jane Wyman. What results from the film’s preposterous domino-effect of a story, where Phillips eventually loses her sight because of a freak accident (caused by none other than Merrick), and Merrick’s resolve to go back to med school so he can cure Phillips’ subsequent blindness, is the proclamation of the power that can only come from the wills of the heart. Sirk constructs each scene of Obsession like the final movements to a symphony. Revelations are revealed under rising musical crescendos. Wyman’s eyes constantly widen as things get worse and worse. Rear projections of fluttering California greenery and sparkling deep blue water envelop the film’s trembling characters until they feel like the last people left on Earth. It’s all bigger than life. And this is exactly what it feels like to try to shift one’s ways, to do right by those you’ve done wrong- every second is another chance to prove oneself. Magnificent Obsession is far from believable, but Hudson’s breathtaking shift from smug rich kid to guilt-ridden miracle worker results in a kind of magic that ends up feeling agonizingly true. Hudson’s closeted sexuality became public knowledge only decades after his major collaborations with Sirk came to an end. And yet their films allowed Hudson to project a sense of romantic yearning that felt exclusive to the movies of the 50s. With Obsession, smoldering under the haze of three-strip Technicolor, Hudson could finally be his true self. Sirk was a master at displaying the truth, especially within the extravagance of Hollywood. He was constantly in a dialectic with the small characters of his films and the grand productions he used to tell their stories. There’s Always Tomorrow is one such story. Tomorrow follows Fred MacMurray’s Clifford Groves, a toy manufacturer who craves affection from his wife and

children, if only as a means to keep him from wallowing in the humdrum malaise of his midlife, middle-class existence. His days are painfully staid and stilted. In the opening, we are introduced to Cliff as someone who finds immense joy in the development of a toy robot- a clear example of the amount of life that’s lacking from his world. Soon, there is a push-and-pull: Clifford wants his wife and children to give him the love he craves, yet when they reject his needs, he cautiously allows himself to receive it from Norma, a former employee of his, portrayed with great sensitivity by Barbara Stanwyck. Norma enters Cliff’s life like a tornado, pulling him closer and closer into her vortex until he throws himself into her arms. Norma doesn’t know what she’s doing to him, and she refuses to let her kindness be mistaken for infatuation. However, Norma herself is soon drawn into Clifford’s affections; he sees her clear attachment to him well before she even realizes it. Their desire becomes undeniable, but they remain hesitant, circling one another, unable to fully act on what they feel. Clifford’s world is rendered in a rich black-and-white that stretches across its Cinemascope frame, transforming the film’s California suburbs into something closer to a Cold War battleground than a white-picket-fence fantasia. Cliff and Norma have to be impossibly careful- under the guise of his nosy, awful children, one wrong move with Norma and Cliff’s life will shatter. “Love is a very reckless thing…When you're young and in love, nothing matters except your own satisfaction. The tragic thing about growing older is that you can't be quite as reckless anymore” [2], says Norma. Cliff refuses to believe this, but the steely shafts of light that cut through Sirk’s frames tell us loud and clear that these would-be lovers are trapped in a prison. They are doomed to be stiff and helpless- lifeless, like rusting robots. Sirk’s best films are reflections of Americana. He had a penchant for mirrors, characters refracted through shards of glass, their emotions seeping through the cracks. With mirrors and windows, Sirk showed us the glistening, glowing artifice of middle-class American life, bringing us closer and closer into this ideal milieu until the glass itself started to break. Soon enough, he plunged us into a world of delirium and confusion. He was always showing us our true selves, through a glass darkly. [2] There’s Always Tomorrow. Directed by Douglas Sirk, performances by Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, Universal International, 1956.

And what better place to reflect American idealism on itself, in glorious, backwards fashion, than in New Orleans? If desiring outside of the status quo is almost impossible in America, then New Orleans is the only place where chasing one’s wants is second nature- it’s how to live in the city. Set during the debauchery of Mardi Gras in the 1950s, The Tarnished Angels brings us into the world of Carnival with an eye of both horror and fascination- nowhere else in America is a freewheeling lust for life so cherished and celebrated, making this picture one that revels in the outright revelry, telling a cautionary tale and a paean for redemption all at once. Sirk gives us Hudson as Burke Devlin, a Times-Picayune reporter eager to cover the lives of a pair of dramatic airshow carnies who have rolled into town to put on a show. The carnies include Robert Stack as Roger Schumann, a former World War I flying ace turned barnstormer who soars in his rickety biplane, and his platinum-blonde parachutist wife and partner, LaVerne, played by a lovestruck Dorothy Malone. Schumann wants the skies more than he wants LaVerne, risking his life day in and day out as he turns tricks thousands of feet in the air, if not for anyone’s entertainment except his own. Even as Schumann ignores LaVerne’s pleas for him to retire, to find a trade that doesn’t involve death-defying stunts, LaVerne’s desire for Schumann stays steadfast, seemingly growing in tandem with her husband’s chances of losing his life. Devlin gets tangled up with these tarnished angels. Eventually, inevitably, he falls in love with LaVerne, pining for the same affection from her that she can’t even receive from her husband. Sirk captures the high in the sky barnstormer scenes with the same feverish intensity as the carnival festivities playing out on the streets. As the three characters lose themselves in each other’s orbits, the freewheeling bacchanalia of Mardi Gras keep their passions soaring, preventing them from ever finding solid ground. And as the film goes on, and the parade keeps rolling, it’s impossible to see any of these characters making it past Fat Tuesday in one piece. Sirk relishes this rare opportunity to give us a look at Americans in an unmitigated pursuit of pleasure, resulting in a film that feels as joyful and solemn as the morning comedown on Ash Wednesday.

Sirk believed that great artists always “thought with the heart” [3], and with All That Heaven Allows, Sirk wore his heart on his sleeve, delivering a breathtaking Technicolor masterpiece unlike any other film Hollywood has made before or since. Reuniting Wyman and Hudson, Heaven tells a story of Cary, an older upper-class widow in mid-century New England who falls in love with Ron, her younger, lower-class gardener, much to the total shock of her friends and family. Sirk brings us into this story with the trickling leaves of Autumn- a sign of shedding, seeing things anew. Cary’s lust for Ron is impossible to deny. His towering confidence and affliction for the pastoral ways of life are an immediate magnet for the newly available matriarch. Her middle-aged community, with its black-tie country club parties and gossip-filled community gatherings, is completely sexless. She needs more, and she’s found a man to give it to her. Sirk navigates the treacherous terrain of suburban renouncement with flashes of total beauty. Cary’s small town is a snowglobe of idealized America- perfectly pruned gardens and frosted windowpanes are awash in light blues and warm reds that drench the screen in shimmering, ever-shifting Technicolor. Sirk’s camera soars and swings through it all, pulling us through the hysteria that erupts in this sleepy town because one woman decides to choose her heart over anything else. Her friends gawk at her wanting to be with her gardener, and her children claim that they’ll never speak to her again if she follows through with her relationship. Fassbinder said, “After seeing this film, small town America is the last place in the world I would want to go”.[4] Completely true. If this is the American dream, who would want to take part in it at all? Alas, Ron won’t budge- he sees Cary’s slightest hesitation as proof of a lack of commitment. What Cary comes to realize, and only after the falling leaves have been replaced with falling snow, is that Ron’s way of life can accommodate Cary, but Cary’s life isn’t able to do the same for Ron. Who’s in the wrong here? Ron for his stubbornness? Or Cary for her doubt? Neither one of them, Sirk says. To desire is a gift and a curse- we should strive for the ideal, but to keep asking for more is something close to sin. There is pleasure and joy to be felt, but it’s limited to only what heaven will allow.

[3] Lehman, Peter. “Interview with Douglas Sirk.” Wide Angle, vol. 3, no. 4, 1 Jan. 1980, pp. 42-47. [4] Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ‘Six Films by Douglas Sirk’, New Left Review, vol. 91, May–June 1975.

Sirk’s cinema blazed through Hollywood in less than 20 years’ time, taking over the screens of the 40s and 50s with films that put complicated characters up on a pedestal. He asked his audiences to identify- his films made it impossible not to. Decades on, his pictures have urged us to look at the thrill and terror of desire. To live for what you want is a kind of superpower in Sirk’s eyes. Fassbinder saw what Sirk was getting at, that we can choose between long, ordinary lives or a deeply felt existence, if even for a short period of time. We can either cement the direction of our lives by giving in to our hearts, or reject ourselves completely and refuse to take a step towards something more, leaving us to rot in our big, velvet-draped houses. I can’t think of anything worse. We should be grateful for the beauty of Sirk’s cinema, for he showed us what it means to live and love from the heart in ways that only the movies can.

Real Ugly: The Enduring Legacy of the Great Susan Hayward Ashlyn Frank

Objects remain at rest until imposed upon by an outside force, communism is not to be tolerated, and if a young woman is to dazzle the silver screen, she must be beautiful. These were just a few of the governing rules of the American cultural political zeitgeist in the 1950s. In no way, shape, or form am I suggesting that the titular titan of this article is in any way hideous, unsightly, or even homely. Quite the opposite. In fact, Susan Hayward was renowned for her remarkable beauty, her fiery red hair and her lean, slender build. Lured to Hollywood as a Scarlett O’Hara hopeful- equipped with a sharp wit and that quintessential New York grit, Hayward quickly garnered a formidable reputation that extended far beyond the enchanting sparkle in her hazel eyes. Born Edythe Marrener in the summer of 1917 to parents Ellen and Walter in their tiny Brooklyn tenement apartment, Hayward grew to disdain the poverty she was born into. Though fond of her father, a former Coney Island barker, she detested his inability to provide a comfortable life for his family, who often lived off stale scraps of bread and spent endless days in dirty, tattered clothes. It was a difficult, cheerless childhood for Hayward, and she spent most of her adolescence daydreaming how to make her great escape. The first glimmer of joy arrived in the form of a school play in which she was given the starring role. This first experience inspired her love of acting, and drove her to the local cinema where she traded her precious pennies for a front-row seat. She was a particular fan of Barbara Stanwyck, a popular actress at the time also from Brooklyn, who sparked the idea of how she could make her fortune. But the question remained, how could a nameless young woman from Brooklyn make it all the way to the silver screen? While most hopefuls who dreamt of stardom seldom reached the stars, Hayward was utterly determined. Calculated and strategic, she was able to put herself in the right place at the right time, which in 1934 meant in front of the camera.

Color photography was all the rage in the 1930s, and photographers were specifically searching for one subject matter in particular- women with vivid red hair. Securing a modelling contract with the Thornton agency at just the age of sixteen, Edythe Marrener posed her way to a respectable living, becoming the agency's top earner. She was pictured in numerous advertisements of the decade, which in turn brought attention to her face and her name, eventually affording her that coveted one-way ticket to Hollywood. The opportunity she had always prayed for, and all too happy to leave Brooklyn far behind, she claimed she would never return. Thus, the death of Edythe Marrener and the birth of Susan Hayward. Over the next forty years, Susan Hayward led a transcendent career in the entertainment industry, spanning nearly 80 films, 19 awards, and 2 husbands. A remarkable feat, considering many would argue Hayward had the wrong personality for Hollywood entirely for like her hair, she could be fiery and combative. She was opinionated and fierce, armed with a sharp tongue and a spine of steel. From the moment she first stepped on set in 1946, she made it abundantly clear she did not want to play the simpering damsel- nor was she too keen on the one-note femme fatale either. Though the studios at the time were not offering complex, nuanced roles for women, Hayward would lead the charge that reflects the vast types of female portrayals we see in films and television today. Early on in her career, it was evident that Hayward was uniquely talented, touched by Melpomene and Thalia, the muses of tragedy and comedy. She could take a cliché script and turn it into something true and raw. She possessed unrelenting control of the screen and command over her text. Noted for her superb delivery and nuanced performances, she was simply better than the material she was given. So much better, that roles were actually written to serve Hayward’s undeniable talents. Standouts include I Want to Live, a 1953 drama in which Hayward plays Barbara Graham, the first woman sentenced to die in the electric chair. Hayward delivers a brutal and chilling performance that won her the Oscar and proved to Hollywood executives that audiences would indeed pay to see pictures in which leading ladies played irredeemable, ugly characters known for ruthlessness and cruelty as opposed to beauty and naivety.

Garnering five Oscar nominations with one win, two BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, and appearances in over 80 films, Susan Hayward’s impact upon the entertainment industry during the twentieth century is unmistakable. And yet, as time moves on, we seem to have forgotten her. Ironically, Hayward herself once said, “When you’re dead, you're dead...” Insisting it is only what we do with our time above ground that actually matters. And while that may be true, her legacy certainly continues every time a woman takes on a nuanced, gritty, ugly role. While she may have had the wrong personality for Hollywood, it is to her credit that the industry evolved, exponentially expanding the kind of stories being told and finally removing the layers of meticulously placed make-up, revealing the raw spectrum of the female experience.

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

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1919, Phylis Lee Isley performed under the stage name “Jennifer Jones”. The fact of her name change is not uncommon; many major stars had them altered to, or supplanted entirely by, something more glamorous, more marketable. But what does it signal? Perhaps, that some part of her did not, by some standard, belong in the movies. The double dose of luscious consonants, the alliteration, the modern first name and the classic surname – there is something at once sensual and rigid in “Jennifer Jones.” Perhaps, too, the ambivalence behind her name lends figurative credence to the ambiguity at the heart of three of her most indelible performances. In Ernst Lubitsch’s final masterpiece Cluny Brown (1946), Cluny’s curiosity and determination push against her uncle’s injunction to “know her place”. In Vincente Minelli’s adaptation of Madame Bovary (1949), Emma’s cutthroat social maneuvering and adultery reveal the curdling of her childhood ideals. In King Vidor’s Ruby Gentry (1952), Ruby’s calculated revenge is a rejection of her social exile. In all these characters, whose proximity to and achievement of class mobility fuel an intense desire to belong, Jones renders emotions in vivid ambiguity. Cluny appears in the doorway of a chic London apartment, to the surprise of society man Hilary Ames and Czech philosopher and political refugee Adam Belinski, to fix a faulty sink pipe. The question Cluny asks of herself as she bangs away at the stopped up pipe – why shouldn’t she go have tea at the Ritz if she has the necessary pound in her pocket? – is answered simply by her being. Lubitsch allows, in fact slyly implores, the viewer to take Cluny, guileless and sincere, who dreams of rising above her station or, at least, visiting somewhere outside of it, at face value. His use of the door frame, then, is simple: what we see is what we get. If not for the ambiguity of Jones’ performance, though, how else could we even entertain the possibility of Cluny’s happiness with a partner as unsuitable as the pharmacist Jonathan Wilson, a fastidious, nasally prisoner to, and enforcer of, the English class system? With unceremonious duty, he courts Cluny, who is delighted at the chance of a higher station, on

her days off from her new, ill-fitting job as a parlormaid. When Wilson plays his harmonium, she is so impressed by his interpretation that she leans against the wall, moved to tears; all we can do is watch her future, guided by Wilson’s labored, emotionless droning, trudge grimly in front of her eyes. Jones, however, is able to complicate Cluny’s seemingly simple reaction to Wilson’s playing. For a woman as animated by purpose as she is, it seems impossible she doesn’t, even for a moment, recognize Wilson’s sole purpose is terminal security – that of a sheep born for slaughter. We can neither accept nor dismiss Cluny when she says Wilson’s playing, and, by extension, her future life with him, is beautiful because Jones' makes it difficult for us to locate the emotional register of Cluny’s tears as relief or resignation. In doing so, Jones’ performance never precludes the possibility that Cluny knows as much as we do. Emma Bovary represents perhaps the most ambiguous and daring of Jones’ performances. Under Minelli’s direction, this controversial novel takes the form of high melodrama whose consistently rising stakes see Emma transform from innocent farm girl, to doting housewife, to scheming social climber, to fallen woman. Within this heightened framework Jones pitches her performance as Emma in a more melodramatic register. Jones’ first two scenes signal her and Minelli’s stylized approach to constructing the young Emma Rouault. The first introduction is easy to miss, because Charles Bovary, a local doctor, enters the Rouault household to treat Emma’s father and, right away, dominates the scene. Meanwhile, foregrounded for the viewer but hidden to Charles is Emma. Draped in unflattering work clothes, she ducks behind scenery and escapes upstairs without revealing herself to Charles. In this moment, Jones makes Emma’s insecurities legible without preempting the scene that follows. The first time we see Emma’s face is the following morning, when she stages an elaborate breakfast for Charles. The manicured table, the hearty food, and her impractical white gown signal not only her marital availability, but suitability. Emma’s physicality, proper and upright, almost robotically so, proves Jones’ clever interpretation of the source material. She draws out Emma’s childish interpretation of the novelistic fantasies upon which she grew up

so that they’re imitated rather than embodied, a series of awkwardly molded gestures that simultaneously endear her to and befuddle Charles. At the end of the film, when Emma once again proves her availability – this time without suitability – to a scorned lover, Jones transforms what initially came across as stilted mannerisms into unconscious ticks. There, in his drawing room, pleading for money so she doesn’t lose her house, Emma’s gestures bear a manic sparkle, her eyes darting to and fro, mouth squirming against every rebuked flirtation. What Jones once directed inwards now follows the trajectory of Minelli’s heightened melodrama to become outward projectiles plainly visible to the viewer. Maneuvering around and careening through the socio-economic strata of 19th-Century France, her performance has the affective legibility, otherwise harder to place in Lubitsch’s delicately calibrated comedy, that melodrama calls for. The thrill of this emotional crest is not from the narrative stakes, for we all know the story, but in Jones’ delivery. Even at Emma’s lowest, Jones doesn’t let us gauge with total assurance the sincerity of Emma’s desperate promises. King Vidor uses a door frame to very different ends in Ruby Gentry than Lubitsch does in Cluny Brown. He introduces Ruby as a silhouette, a manifestation of pure physicality. From the moment the town’s new doctor sees her, he’s entranced by the pitch of her hips, the bend of her knee, the drape of her arm. Jones’ Ruby is quite literally statuesque, poised, before the light of her family’s hunting cabin, in a contrapposto that inspires distant awe and intimate obsession. “Don’t let it shake you, Doc, it’s just anatomy,” we hear. Ruby loosens her seductive pose, lolling back and forth like her thick, husky Carolina drawl until she realizes it’s Jim Gentry, her quasi-adoptive father, who’s arrived with the doctor, and not her long-absent childhood lover, Boake. Jim hands her a present, a shiny new gun, and, delighted, the seductress suddenly dissolves into the backwoods girl next door. The first scene in the final act of Ruby Gentry, during which Boake appears unannounced in Ruby’s office after learning of her scorched earth business dealings, is the distillation of Jones’ ability to embed ambiguity inside clear emotional states. As Ruby crosses the room to greet Boake, Jones lets innocence, suspicion, and cunning flicker across her face in a barely concealed panic. The instability belongs to Ruby, but Jones calibrates it, rendering each shift with the necessary precision to seem instinctual. When Ruby finally speaks – “I expected you a

couple of days ago” – the line arrives not as the culmination of that emotional scramble, but as

its sudden suspension. In the tilt of her head, the subtle lift of her brow, and the flutter of her eyelids, Jones tests the viewer just as Ruby tests Boake. How do we respond to a woman with nothing to lose and whose tricks we’ve seen time and again? That question injects the encounter with an erotic, almost dangerous, charge. Cluny marries Belinski and moves to America. She will never serve meals again, but, as the penniless Belinski warns her, she might also miss out on them. But has Cluny cast off all social expectations or just replaced some with others? Emma, too, faces a paradox, forgiven for her sins just as she succumbs to an arsenic overdose. In forgiveness, can the fictional tale of Emma Bovary have any bearing on the morality of the real world? For her merciless revenge, Ruby is banished from both her homes. Is her present-day job as a skipper aboard a fishing boat a worthwhile alternative or just another form of exile? The ambiguity Jones brought to her performances enriches the endings of each film, fortifying them with the existential questions art can never fully answer.

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

The Hunted and the Hunter Powell and Pressburger’s Gone to Earth is a faithful adaptation of the 1917 romantic novel by Mary Webb, whose work is often unfairly dismissed as cloyingly sentimental. Gone to Earth however is not a standard romance, instead it foregrounds the battle between sexual excitement, domestic security and independence, and Hazel, as with Webb’s heroines more generally, is an independent women defying convention. The reoccurring image of Hazel and Foxy being hunted by a pack of men is especially telling and strikingly illustrates Webb’s concern over the status of women within a patriarchal society. The prevalence of hunting in the film recalls the traditional folk song ‘Hares on the Mountain’ in which hunting is a metaphor for sexual desire. Shirley Collins, in her version of this suggestive song, enacts a gender swap over earlier renderings, which positions women as the hunters:

If all you young men were hares on the mountain How many young girls would take guns and go hunting […] If all you young men were fish in the water How many young girls would undress and dive after.[4]

This feminist twist promotes the fulfilment of womanly passion over the more usual tale of submitting to the lust of men, and it is here that we can position Hazel’s desire for her handsome villain. Despite Hazel’s strong will, the progressive nature of Collins’ song is somewhat mediated by Hazel’s enactment of a ceremony from her mother’s spell book to determine whether to leave her new husband (who believes he is being kind by not having sex with her) to consummate her passion for Reddin. Although her actions are based on wrongly attributing non-magical music to fairies, it matters little, as nature itself concocts its own hypnotic spell to ensure that she and Reddin indulge their passion. This is poetically set out by Mary Webb in her description of the atmosphere at Undern – Reddin’s imposing home which Hazel immediately moves to:

[4] Shirley Collins, ‘Hares on the Mountain’, 1965 (based on a traditional song)

The cattle drowsed in the meadows, birds in the heavy trees; the golden daylilies drooped like daughters of pleasure; the very principle of life seemed to slumber. It was then, when the scent of elder blossom, decaying fruit, mud and hot yew brooded there, that the place attained one of its most individual moods – narcotic, aphrodisiac. [5]

Cathy Lomax, Two creatures taken in a snare, 2026, oil on paper

The affinity Hazel has with nature is continually emphasised throughout the film, most often in her close relationship with Foxy. ‘If you’re a lost I’m a lost’ she tells the fox after their initial brush with the hunt. Later Hazel observes that Reddin ‘looks like a hound dog’ and has ‘the blood of little foxes on him’. As the narrative progresses and she leaves Marston to satisfy her desire for Reddin she reluctantly leaves Foxy behind to keep her safe. Folklorist Roy Palmer observes that ‘Hares on the Mountain’ ‘is not merely a series of sexual metaphors, but an echo of the ancient songs and stories of metamorphosis, in which the pursued woman runs out of transformations and falls to the man.’[6] In Gone to Earth transmogrification is also key, most particularly Hazel’s identification as a fox. Reddin sees her sexual attractiveness as ‘foxy’ and describes her as ‘a little vixen’ when she returns to Marston. In her relationship with Marston Foxy effectively stands in for her. Rather than

[5] Mary Webb, Gone to Earth (Virago, 1992), 29 [6] Roy Palmer, English Country Songbook (Littlehampton Book Services, 1979)

embracing or touching her when he proposes marriage, he is all the while holding and stroking Foxy. The supposed lovers are joined not by looking at each instead their eyes are only on the fox. Hazel and Foxy are also related in their wild nature. In the novel Hazel’s father informs her that if the fox kills any more chickens ‘it's the water and a stone round her neck’. Hazel tells the creature: ‘You was made a fox, and you be a fox, and its queer-like to me, Foxy, as folk canna see that. They expect you to be what you wanna made to be. You'm made to be a fox; and when you'm busy being a fox they say you'm a sinner!'[7] With this philosophising Hazel might have been talking about herself. Most particularly the desirous feelings she has for the loathsome Reddin which although wild and exciting she wishes she didn’t have. When she returns from her sexual sojourn with Reddin she, like Foxy, is ostracised by polite society and marked as a sinner. At the film’s dénouement Hazel and Foxy are once again running at full pelt across the hills pursued by the hunt. Hazel who runs with the freeness of a wild animal wears a russetcoloured top that coordinates with the fox she holds in her arms. Jennifer Jones perfectly pitches the expression of terror on Hazel’s face, as Reddin, at the head of the pack shouts, ‘Give her to me you little fool, give her to me’. Ignoring his cries she heads towards God’s Little Mountain, her home with Marston and a safe place for Foxy. Still holding Foxy, she raises her free arm to acknowledge Marston, who has heard the hunt and come to find her. As the mineshaft appears in front of her, she raises her chin, her mouth opens and twists, and she and Foxy disappear down the deep chasm. The huntsman’s shout of ‘Gone to Earth’ acknowledges that the chase is over, and just like that Hazel and Foxy are effectively bound together for eternity.

[7] Mary Webb, Gone to Earth, 47

As Mary Webb notes, both Reddin and Marston see Hazel as they wanted her to be, not as she was.[8] Despite this she manages to confound the traditions she is expected to conform to. In Hazel’s final run from the hunt, she effectively transforms into a fox, and it is in this form that her death, although tragic, allows her to escape from the men (her captors) that have never really seen her. As for Jennifer Jones, although her performance was appreciated by her director, she and the film did not receive good reviews. The American co-producer (and Jones’ husband), David O’Selznick, was so unhappy with the film’s gritty strangeness, that he added, deleted and reshot scenes – notably more close-ups of Jones in which she wears something akin to a Hollywood glamour makeup. This new US version, The Wild Heart, appeared two years later and swiftly disappeared. Despite the apparent failure of the film the original version, along with its visionary directors, has been reappraised and a screening of it in its restored glory at the 2023 Powell and Pressburger season at the BFI in London, was rapturously received.

[8] Ibid, 125

The Destruction of Desire: Girlhood, Performance, and Splendor in the Grass Jaclyn Bethany Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower We will grieve not; rather find Strength in what reminds behind - William Wordsworth "Splendor in the Grass” Stanza X, Ode: Intimations of Immortality The poem is recited by Deanie (Natalie Wood) in a voiceover in the final scene of the film; connecting the title and her character’s full circle, lost innocence.

Elia Kazan’s film Splendor in the Grass was groundbreaking for many reasons, but mainly in the bold exploration of a young woman’s desire. Splendor follows Deanie Loomis (played by twenty-two year old Natalie Wood) and her romance with her high school sweetheart, Bud Stamper (played by Warren Beatty, in his film debut) in 1920s Kansas. Over the course of the film, Deanie struggles to understand her deeper self which both breaks her and propels her into maturity. Although the psychological and existential moments faced by characters in coming of age films have not necessarily changed over time, - the characters' circumstances certainly have changed. Cell phones, internet, or social media did not exist in 1961 Hollywood, nor in 1928 when Splendor’s story begins. The film’s main themes: longing, sexual exploration, identity, and loss of innocence defined the root of modern cinema’s exploration of the teenage psyche. More specifically, the film harbors a connection between desire and shame, especially in reference to the experience of girlhood. The exploration of the coming of age genre has been a part of storytelling since the nineteenth century. The term bildungsroman, coined by Johann Karl Simon Morgenstern, and later Wilhelm Dilthey evolved into the coming of age novel, and then of course, later, this storytelling trope developed into the coming of age film (Hadi). The focus on desire, and a sexual coming of age is explored through two different actresses in Splendor: Natalie Wood and Barbara Loden. These women’s characters, Deanie and Ginny, represent different facets of female desire. In addition, Natalie and Barbara’s individual careers shaped screen acting - specifically, the legacy of female identity and sensuality in cinema.

Natalie Wood Natalie’s role as Deanie Loomis helped the actress transition from a bonafide child star - her first film was at five years old, and she later stole America’s hearts in Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Similar to Deanie in the film, Natalie had a controlling and overbearing mother. Throughout her entire life, Wood held audiences and Hollywood industry in the palm of her hand - under the spell of her remarkable, unique beauty. When first introduced to Natalie’s Deanie, she is in a passionate embrace with her sweetheart, Bud in front of a beautiful, thunderous waterfall. (The film shot in Upstate New York, though is set in Kansas). Immediately, the audience is swept up in Deanie’s desire to be loved, and understands her longing to escape from the grip of her mother, Mrs. Loomis (Audrey Christie). The film follows Deanie’s passionate, uninhibited and unrequited love for Bud, a wealthy athlete destined for greatness - throughout high school and beyond. Deanie’s upbringing was sheltered - and Bud, with his good looks, confidence and societal influence - dissipates her coyness and brings out her repressed sexuality.

Cathy Lomax, 25.11.11 She was in love, 2012, oil on paper, 23 x 30.5cm

The confusion between love and desire, is at constant play with the character of Deanie. Through Deanie, more than any other character in the film we understand the preciousness of girlhood: her pastel, childhood bedroom, her perfectly coiffed hair and wardrobe - she is covered up, controlled - but seeks to break free of her forced, prolonged adolescence. In one of the most pivotal scenes in the film, Wood’s Deanie fights with her mother in the bathtub. She explodes vigorously as her mother questions her morals. The performance is raw, sweaty and unapologetic, framed in close ups and mediums by cinematographer, Boris Kaufman. The cinematography and subsequent edit feel heightened and tense, specific to Deanie’s sexual awakening. The water is symbolic for the character - Deanie is attempting to purge herself of any imperfections and her innocence. After Bud rejects Deanie at a school dance, she tries to escape with another classmate, Toots, who forces himself upon her; Deanie descends into madness and is sent to an institution. This outcome brings to light what little support or understanding was available for women who experienced assault or psychological trauma in Depression-era America. At the end of the film, after returning from the asylum, Deanie returns home and drives to see Bud, who now lives on a farm with his pregnant wife, who is a kind of doppelganger to Deanie, and their young son. At this point, Deanie is engaged to a Doctor whom she met at the asylum. Deanie discovers Bud has rejected any kind of affluent life, even after attending Yale. It is at this moment in the film, that Deanie feels fully changed, and affected, their meeting a full circle moment sought by Deanie to close this chapter of her life. Wood’s brave performance in Splendor catapulted her out of child stardom and into the next phase of her Hollywood career - as a serious actress. Her total trust in Kazan, even though she was not a method trained actor, led to industry wide recognition, including a Best Actress nomination at the 1961 Academy Awards®. Wood's natural command of dramatic text, written by William Inge — who won a Screenwriting Oscar® for it — has stood the test of time. Wood’s approach to her performance highlights how audiences remember her best: the deep, dark eyes that are both soulful and innocent all at once; her careful, yet impulsive movements that feel restrained or subject to each specific action, and her uncrushable, vibrant sexuality. Deanie’s desire leads her to anguish and a breakdown. She survives. The other major female character, Bud’s sister, Ginny, does not.

Barbara Loden The free-spirited flapper, Ginny Stamper, is played by actor and arthouse filmmaker Barbara Loden. Loden’s Ginny is not the favored child in the Stamper household, that title belongs to Bud. Ginny is a rebel at heart who wants more than her small town can offer and to escape the grasp of her domineering Father. Deanie and Ginny barely interact in the film, though she and Bud do travel to the family’s cabin together with Ginny and one of her paramours. At this stage, Ginny represents the kind of woman Deanie might become. Ginny’s desire is expressed in a much more physically forward way than Deanie - through her revealing slip dresses, her flirtations and relentless partying. Her sense of girlish innocence seems lost long ago. The casting of Loden herself in this role is coincidental, as much like her character, Loden was met with insurmountable hardship in her career, and died at age forty eight from cancer (Gorfinkel 16). Loden’s presence in the film feels important for a number of reasons. She had a long affair with Kazan and eventually married him, often resulting in supporting acting roles in his films, with Ginny being the most visible. She was often insulted and demeaned by Kazan, which is a clear parallel to her character in Splendor. Loden’s character undergoes arguably the most painful and tragic sequence in the film. The scene takes place at a grand New Year’s Eve Party, filled with pastel streamers and everyone in town - where Ginny is intoxicated. The scene drifts away from Bud and Deanie, with Kazan’s camera intentionally following Ginny. Men grab her and won’t leave her alone, as she struggles on the way to her car to escape. The scene is disturbing - and brings to the forefront the problem with the character of Ginny. She cannot be herself, nor open in her sexuality, without being punished by society. Highlighting the connection between the character’s desire and shame, and the consequences, this sequence in particular feels very entwined with the male gaze.

Ginny is an important character, yet from the filmmaker’s point of view, little

information about Ginny’s life is offered. The staging of the sequence feels particularly tricky given Kazan’s relationship with Loden. Besides this crucial, heartbreaking sequence the viewer never experiences Ginny’s perspective.

After her appearance at the party, Ginny disappears from the film. Later, it is mentioned she died in an automobile crash. Kazan successfully sidelines diving into the tragic history of Ginny, but it is Loden’s performance: lively and loud, brash and glamorous, that steals the film. She is daring and unapologetic, two qualities that Loden brought to every character she played, in her short career and her own feature film Wanda, almost a decade later. Watching Loden as Ginny is heartbreaking, throughout her character’s downfall, she is living every breath. Loden did not grow up in Hollywood, like Wood, but rather came from the theater. She retained a natural, lived in quality that Kazan preferred in his actors. There is a famous picture from the set, where Kazan is standing in for a man in the party scene, embracing Loden’s Ginny - perhaps a symbol that neither woman had any control over their life or desires.

In addition to Warren Beatty, the film serves as the film debut of another future Hollywood star - Sandy Dennis. Dennis features as Kay - a small role, one of Deanie’s friends who accompanies Bud to a dance. It feels fitting for Dennis to debut in Splendor, as a trained theater actor, she found a small role that embraced her neurotic qualities. Several years later, she won her Oscar® for Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - where she played Honey, whose own desires warrant their own study. The poem that carries the title of the film comes from the longer poem Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wordsworth (Wordsworth). The character of Deanie held up a mirror to young women who felt ashamed by their feelings, hormones, and desires. The character of Ginny, who might be called a “loose woman” had a tragic fate. Ginny’s life ended in ruin and death. Perhaps this film provided a warning for young women: beware your desires and your sex, they may destroy you.

Works Cited Hadi, Shana E. “A ‘Coming of Age’ for All Ages.” The Stanford Daily, 24 Sept. 2019, https://stanforddaily.com/2019/09/23/a-coming-of-age-for-all-ages/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2026. Gorfinkel, Elena. Wanda. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025. Wordsworth, William. Ode; Intimations of Immortality. 2015.

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

Claire Downes Whitehurst, Blue, 2020, monotype on paper

Desire Interrupted: Death, Grief and Sublimation in Father of My Children Irene Gómez-Emilsson

I have always regarded Father of My Children as the most poignant film within Mia HansenLøve's body of work. It is perhaps the most tragic of them all, yet it is not the tragedy in itself that draws me to it, but the subtle yet so poignant way in which she tackles passion, grief and the sublime, and by extension the workings and processes of desire, with her particular dedramatized style, in which attention is focused on duration rather than plot. As I wondered how to approach the film, psychoanalysis and, specifically, the theories of French Psychoanalyst, Linguist and Philosopher Julia Kristeva came to mind. Although I didn't have in-depth knowledge of her works, I intuited that her theories on desire, melancholia, grief and language, following Freud and Lacan (as well as Hegel and Husserl), would be fitting for this analysis. Father of My Children is based on the real story of renowned producer Humbert Balsan – whom Hansen-Løve had met and worked with briefly. In an interview, she states that he represented French cinema at its best.[1] In the film, we follow Grégoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), a successful arthouse Parisian producer. We see him in his daily life at work and with his family: charismatic, sly, playful, warm, astute; loving and attentive to his family. However, as the film progresses the viewer understands that he is dealing with insurmountable debt which inevitably brings him to a tragic end. I am interested in considering how the film stages desire through its formal elements, with particular attention to dialogue, which is at the centre of Mia Hansen-Løve's cinematic approach and at the core of Kristeva's theories. I will examine how desire is born, lost and recovered – using Kristeva's psychoanalytic framework found in two of the thinker's major texts, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) and Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989). For Kristeva, desire is the positive outcome of the tension between the semiotic and the symbolic. The semiotic is constituted by the pre-linguistic drives, rhythms and bodily energies associated with the maternal, whereas the symbolic is governed by structured language, law, and moral and societal codes, and is associated with the paternal. This tension, for the

[1] Hansen-Løve, Mia. Interview by Daniel Graham. Father of My Children. DVD, Artificial Eye, 2009.

psychoanalyst, is ruled by negativity. Negativity, in Kristeva's Hegelian-inflected sense, is the dynamic force that prevents the subject from settling into fixed positions and keeps it in constant movement – dividing, rupturing and uniting it – producing what she calls the subject-in-process. Its primary mechanism is rejet, the original rejection of the maternal body that allows a separate, independent subject, and which continues, allegorically, throughout the subject's life as a repeated puncturing of symbolic closure by semiotic pressure. This ongoing oscillation – the subject in movement, always pushing the semiotic against the symbolic – is what sustains desire. Masochism, and finally the death drive, is what occurs when this oscillation is disrupted. I analyse the film in three sections. The first deals with the interruption and loss of desire, and with how the symbolic overwhelms the semiotic, as the subject – namely Grégoire – sacrifices himself to the symbolic (debt, societal pressure, law). The second section seeks to understand how the film examines Grégoire's family's grief, and how these grief processes seek to re-establish a healthy oscillation between the two registers and regenerate desire. In the third section, I look at the sublimation process that, although present throughout the film, is a major mechanism by which the family processes Grégoire's death, overcoming grief and recreating a desire that allows them to carry on. Finally, I touch upon the film's own mechanism as a sublimatory process. I. Desire Interrupted The first half of the film shows Grégoire mostly on the phone, at his office, or at meetings dealing with issues from either the sets or the financial affairs of his production company. It slowly becomes apparent that he is dealing with huge debt from the financial risks he has taken over the years. A slow spiral builds up through the film to arrive at a point of no return: Grégoire kills himself. When I first saw the film, more than a decade ago, I thought his suicide was unexpected; but now I see how the spiral softly takes off and envelops his life and his psyche. His devotional love and passion for auteur filmmaking, his deep commitment to it, his willingness to take risks and support new and complex voices in cinema, is what desire — sustained by the ongoing friction between semiotic and symbolic — looks like when it is alive and generative.

But this same drive-energy, once the symbolic forecloses any outlet for it, is what takes him to the edge and finally kills him. It is not desire itself that is dangerous, but what desire becomes once the oscillation that sustains it collapses: no longer mobilized toward beauty and risk, but annexed entirely by negation. Mia Hansen-Løve is a master in telling stories from what I call here the obverse, the nomoments. The plot is built from fragments of the everyday – moments that are seemingly unimportant, anecdotal – slowly and subtly building up to construct the story, the drama, the tragedy. Hansen-Løve expresses Grégoire's desire for art and beauty, and the tension between the ideal and the reality of it, in a way that subtly and elegantly, yet tragically, leads us through Grégoire's descent. The semiotic – Grégoire's need to produce meaningful auteur films, to make distinct voices thrive – and the symbolic – the economic reality of auteur filmmaking – are in constant tension within the first half of the piece. Formally, this tension is constructed around a dynamic edit, showing Grégoire constantly on the phone – two flip phones, in fact – walking or driving; he is in constant movement and the camera follows him, as if catching up with his delirious pace. He seems unstoppable and able to handle any situation: commanding yet diplomatic and humorous, and always charming. Although, the suicide often comes as a surprise for first-time viewers, it actually does not come unannounced. Grégoire mentions suicide twice before he kills himself, as indicators, as omens of his own fate. First he mentions a suicide committed by a crew member of a problematic film, — directed by Stig Janson (played by Magne-Håvard Brekke) — le film de trop, the one too many (which will be a thread throughout the film). Then, when his lawyer briefs him on his situation, he says he might jump out of the window. Another relevant line in the film — which foreshadows the suicide, again an omen — is when he meets up with his best friend, also a producer, Serge (Éric Elmosnino), who questions his involvement in Saturne, jokingly calling him a masochist: ‘Pourquoi tu produis des films pareils? Stig Janson… mais t'es maso ou quoi?' ‘Why are you producing such films? Stig Janson… are you a masochist or what?' For Kristeva, following, extending and questioning Freud's theory, masochism is the primary, originary form of the death drive, and thus a premonitory symptom of Grégoire's selfendangering energy. Masochism, and later suicide, mark the collapse of the oscillation between

the semiotic and the symbolic by which negativity sustains desire: rather than desire simply disappearing, the drive-energy that constituted it is fully annexed by a negation that no longer reopens the symbolic but closes it definitively — leaving no remainder from which desire could be renewed. For Kristeva, when this oscillation ceases, the body becomes the sacrificial ground to the symbolic. In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva argues that:

The second boundary is constituted by the stopping of desire to the extent that a subject has attempted to remain on its path. When language is not mixed with the drives and, instead, requires an extreme repression of the drives' multiplicity (…) what results is a culmination of the subjugation under the Law of the Signifier in which the living person himself becomes a sign and the signifying activity stops. This is the masochistic moment par excellence, autocastration.[2]

The hustle and bustle of his young daughters may distract the viewer from Grégoire's depression; the death drive is slowly infiltrating his life, calling him. The life drives become repressed and his speech comes to be exclusively functional; rhythm fades. In Black Sun, Kristeva describes this phenomenon:

Let us keep in mind the speech of the depressed — repetitive and

monotonous.

Faced

with

the

impossibility

concatenating, they utter sentences that are interrupted, exhausted, come to a standstill. (…) Finally, when the frugal musicality becomes exhausted in its turn (…), on account of the pressure of silence, the melancholy person appears to stop cognizing, as well as uttering, sinking into the blankness of asymbolia or the excess of an unorderable cognitive chaos.[3]

[2] Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Columbia University Press, New York, 2024, p. 130. [3] Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Columbia University Press, New York, 1989, p. 33.

Then, as the suicide becomes imminent, Grégoire grows silent — with the slow disappearance of dialogue, desire retreats; there is a literal cessation of the oscillation. He moves less, speaks less; there is a mirroring effect in the other formal aspects of the film — the camera movements slow down or cease, the shots are longer, the pace slower. For Kristeva, desire is the positive outcome of the tension between the semiotic and the symbolic. If negativity does not have an outlet within that tension — 'soothed' by the semiotic, which keeps the subject moving and creates desire — and the symbolic overwhelms the tension instead, then the death drive is activated. The single, unexpected shot of Grégoire's death halts the viewer and lingers for a long eight seconds that feel almost eternal, the sound of the gunshot slightly anticipating the austere image of a suited man lying face down in a deserted suburban street. The symbolic has taken over and allowed the death drive to come into effect. Then comes the aftermath: grief. How does his family cope with his death? How does Hansen-Løve depict grief, and how is desire woven into the process? II. Grief and Desire The pace slows down in the second half, in sheer contrast with the frenetic pace of the beginning. A slow reckoning with what is left in both the symbolic and semiotic realms begins. The first shots after the suicide are long, filled with silence. The family and colleagues gather, trying to comprehend and deal with the shock of Grégoire's death. Shortly after, Sylvia (Chiara Caselli) — Grégoire's wife — takes on the task of dealing with the debts and finishing the films that had already started production. She deals with the symbolic as a way of grieving Grégoire. She would like to defend her late husband's legacy, yet the task turns out to be impossible. The symbolic once again takes over; however, this time it operates without the underlying life drives that animated Grégoire's — there is less friction between the semiotic and the symbolic — and although this brings in a second grief, the healthiest decision, after trying different avenues, is to declare bankruptcy and liquidate the company. Despite a surge of energy in the characters — namely Sylvia and Grégoire's colleagues at Moon Films — as well as in the edit and the camera movements, the chaotic, almost manic drives of Grégoire are gone. The attempt to salvage the company is in vain. The more sensible part remains, and the semiotic realm, in Sylvia's case, aims to protect the company's legacy rather than the company itself, as well as the future of her own family.

Desire here operates against loss and is a vehicle for healthy grieving; it is the energy that negativity keeps mobilizing between the semiotic and the symbolic. In Black Sun, Kristeva argues that: “Naming it, exalting it, dissecting it into smallest components – that is doubtless a way to curb mourning, to revel in it at times, but also to go beyond it, moving on to another form, not so scorching, more and more perfunctory…”[4] This is what Sylvia puts into action: a dissection of what took her husband's life, the symbolic realm, in order to process death, to mourn, and to desire, and thus seek a positive outcome. Clémence (Alice de Lencquesaing) — the couple's eldest, who is around sixteen — grieves through the semiotic; she seeks to understand who her father was by delving into both his personal and professional archive. She reads letters Grégoire wrote to Sylvia, but also finds out he had a first-born child with another woman, who wanted to keep the baby as they were separating. She goes so far as to visit the former partner unannounced. In parallel, she delves into Grégoire's body of work as a producer by attending screenings of his films. At one of the screenings she meets Arthur (Igor Hansen-Løve), a young filmmaker whom Grégoire wanted to produce just before his death. They bond, and the film subtly suggests a tender and initiatic love affair. Clémence's coming of age, her passage into adulthood, her semiotic impulses, are profoundly linked to her grief; in a double movement, her desire to understand her father and his legacy works as a growing pain — as she sublimates her father's figure, she grows into her adult self. The shots in her storyline remain lingering and contemplative, letting grief and desire operate in a slow, understated way, making space for the emotions and her adult self to take form. I am interested here in Kristeva's concept of the Thing — borrowed from Freud and Lacan, then redeployed specifically to tackle melancholia and depression in Black Sun. The Thing, for Kristeva, is the unnamable object of mourning, which isn't a clean, tangible or nameable structure but something inconclusive and unsymbolisable (Kristeva 1989: 42). Clémence's process is to partially convert the Thing (her father's death and memory) into signs, learning to signify rather than remain fused with unsymbolised loss. The younger children, Valentine and Billie (Alice Gautier, Manelle Driss) — around six and eight — symbolise a different kind of grief. As young children, they remain in the purest concept of Kristeva's semiotic realm; they are led by the chora without fully grasping

[4] Kristeva, Black Sun, op.cit. p. 97.

symbolic — namely debt, loss, death (Kristeva 2024: 25). Their grief is affective and embodied, and is not rooted in language and meaning-making; it is through their games, their high energy — which may mirror Grégoire's in the first section — their play-pretend and their infantile needs, that they grasp and integrate, in their own way, the novel pressure of the symbolic. Telling is the scene when the family visits the production office one last time and the children rummage through their father's office possessions; they want to keep souvenirs — some old celluloid outtakes and his business cards — and, as they playfully jumble, they ask serious questions regarding the liquidator, who is waiting outside the office. Comically, they shake his hand with playful energy and bid him farewell with a loud and lively ‘Au revoir Monsieur le liquidateur!' (‘Goodbye Mr Liquidator') to his and everyone's surprise and bemusement.Here their semiotic world playfully meets the symbolic, and creates a desire to understand and embody the adult world. It is this friction that generates desire, and this is what brings about the process of grief. In Revolution, Kristeva considers this transition and negotiation from the purely semiotic to the integration of the symbolic. Although her thesis here concerns the primary, literal passage from the pre-linguistic to the symbolic — converting maternal severance into a symbolic relation to the Other — this quote functions to posit the ongoing friction between the semiotic and the symbolic: the mechanism that continuously operates through a subject's life.

[S]ignification itself appears at the stage of the signifying process – not so much its base as its boundary. Signification is placed “under the sign of the preconscious”. Ultimately the signifier/signified transformation, constitutive of language, is seen as being indebted to, induced and imposed by the social realm. Dependence on the mother is severed, and transformed into a symbolic relation to an other (…)[5]

Each member deals with grief in their own way, corresponding to their own stage of life. Their own unique approach to loss enables them to generate the desire to keep going. However each of these approaches is somewhat incomplete: Sylvia's does not fully engage with the semiotic; in Clémence's case, the Thing cannot be fully apprehended and remains

[5] Kristeva, Revolution, op.cit., p. 47.

ambiguous; and, as for the children, their process is pre-reflexive — it engages with the symbolic through the semiotic. I am therefore interested in investigating the process of sublimation within the film, not only in the grief process — which is critical for the family as they deal with loss — but generally, as an ongoing thread that binds the film together at all stages and through all its registers.

III. Desire, the Spiritual and Sublimation Throughout the film there is an element of spirituality that is interspersed both within the narrative and the formal, structural elements of the piece. It exists in the quieter, more contemplative moments of the film, interrupting, in the first section of the film, Grégoire's manic pace, then becoming, more prominent as the family grieves: slow shots of the family walking in nature in near silence, around their weekend country home or on holiday in Italy, bathing in a thermal river. A beautiful long shot of Valentine, lying flat in the opaque blue water with her head out, gives a contemplative, painterly feeling, close to a religious tableau. The presence of the spiritual is reinforced by Grégoire's interest in religious history, art and architecture, which he passes on to his children by narrating to them stories and details about a Templar Chapel near their weekend home, and the significance and symbolic elements of the Byzantine mosaic of the Basilica di Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy. These moments communicate with Grégoire's love of art and beauty in his work, and his lifelong quest to champion auteur filmmakers.

Religion, nature and art — in one word, the spiritual — and, by extension, the film itself and Mia Hansen-Løve's intentions with it, work as a sublimation process that counteracts the crises the film puts forward: debt, failure, death by suicide, grief. Sublimation, in Kristeva's terms, is the conversion of the unsymbolisable semiotic into form through the symbolic, without denying the loss or being annihilated by it. It is a positive outcome of desire, reattached to something sustaining and sustainable, offering relief in the form of something that can take shape — rhythm, duration, sensory presence. It holds the loss, the conflict, without resolving or erasing it. In Black Sun, Kristeva considers the question of sublimation through beauty, examining Freud's texts and drawing her own novel conclusions.

Sublimation's dynamics, by summoning up the primary process of idealization, weaves a hypersign around and with the depressive void. This allegory, as lavishness of that which no longer is, but which regains for myself a higher meaning because I am able to remake nothingness, better than it was and within an unchanging harmony, here and now and forever, for the sake of someone else. Artifice as sublime meaning, for an on behalf, of the underlying implicit non-being replaces the ephemeral. Beauty is consubstantial with it.[6]

For Kristeva, sublimation is a secular correspondent to the religious process — which is itself one of the receptacles of the tension between the semiotic and the symbolic. The eternity that sublimation promises, ‘here and now and forever', is ‘for the sake of someone else', an agnostic or even atheist process in which what is more permanent than us — nature, art, architecture — can be grasped, thought and apprehended as a continuous element that speaks allegorically to the past and the present, to the departed and to the ones to come. This is how the family grieves together: they sublimate Grégoire's death through contemplative moments, in silence. They return to the ruins of the Templar Chapel near their weekend home, light some candles to the Madonna, and gather themselves — mirroring, in its quiet, and mourning form, their previous excursion to the site and to the Basilica di Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. This scene is surrounded in the film by languid shots of the family walking by the river and other contemplative shots of nature that bring the natural world into the process of sublimation — the tangible and durable — and successful meaning-making that slowly alleviates the loss. It is also a communal process that brings them together in a holistic manner: their own individual processes kept them somewhat apart, whereas sublimation binds them as a unit. The sublimation Grégoire's family is performing to process his death — and life — through shared secular spirituality (namely art, ritual, and nature) mirrors Hansen-Løve's operation at

[6] Kristeva, Black Sun, op.cit. p. 99.

the level of the film itself. Indeed, the film's own origins are inseparable from loss: it is inspired by producer Humbert Balsan's suicide, which deeply affected the filmmaker and the wider film industry in France and beyond. The inner workings of the film mirror, in a mise-enabyme, the film itself as an act of sublimation. Conclusion Desire, born of the friction between the semiotic and the symbolic, had been Grégoire's driving force until the symbolic overcame him and extinguished it with his death. His life's labour — his films — was the fruit of his desire. Desire is also what the family's individual grief processes seek to recover, and finally attain, through a collective process of sublimation. Desire, through sublimation, gives loss a form, where it finds a sustainable object again. Mirroring this is Mia Hansen-Løve's own process as a filmmaker and artist, where the film itself sublimates Humbert Balsan's death and, perhaps more widely, acknowledges cinema's and art's complex mechanisms, in which the semiotic and the symbolic are always in constant friction. It is in her own grieving process, taking form in the piece, that a collective mourning and transcendence through sublimation is allowed — not only of the producer's death, but of a general object able to hold a sustainable allegory with which to face death in the face of the threats of the symbolic. It reactivates desire. More broadly, it highlights cinema's general function as sublimatory, in order 'to remake nothingness, better than it was and within an unchanging harmony, here and now and forever, for the sake of someone else.'[7] Father of My Children is a piece that sublimates death through art — from nothingness it brings out desire, the healthy, sustainable outcome of the conflict between the semiotic and the symbolic, giving us an object to process our mourning and allowing the filmmaker, and the viewer, to go on.

[7] Ibid.

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

In Mia Hansen-Løve’s Goodbye First Love, desire is not directed toward a person but toward a temporal version of the self. The film resists the conventional structure of romantic drama: separation does not produce narrative closure, and reunion does not restore emotional continuity. Instead, the past persists as a condition of perception. Camille does not simply remember Sullivan; she inhabits the duration of having once loved him. Desire therefore emerges not as longing for another body, but as an attachment to a former mode of being in time. Hansen-Løve constructs this through ellipsis rather than confrontation. Breakups occur off-screen, years pass without emphasis, and emotional crises are displaced into ordinary gestures. The spectator is not asked to witness decisive events but to experience continuity. What remains is not the relationship itself but the sensorial structure it left behind — a rhythm of waiting, expectation, and recognition that reorganizes Camille’s present life. When Sullivan returns, the narrative does not culminate in reconciliation. Instead, the encounter reveals an asymmetry: the beloved has changed less than the temporal position from which he is perceived. The impossibility of restoring the relationship exposes the true object of desire not the person, but the time in which that person once existed as necessary. In the adult reunion between Camille and Sullivan, the film avoids emotional confrontation and instead emphasizes distance. Their conversation is ordinary, almost neutral, revealing not the return of love but the gap created by time. Camille reacts less to the person before her than to the difference between who she was and who she has become. The past does not come back; it simply no longer fits the present. The scene therefore produces suspension rather than resolution. Desire cannot be reactivated because it was never attached only to Sullivan, but to a specific moment in life adolescence and expectation. What Camille encounters is not the loss of love, but the impossibility of returning to the time in which loving him once made sense.

This temporal structure of desire finds a different articulation in One Fine Morning (2022) where the relation between love and time is no longer governed by nostalgia but by coexistence. If Camille’s experience is defined by an attachment to a past that cannot be recovered, Sandra’s is shaped by the impossibility of fully inhabiting the present. Her relationship unfolds not as a return to an earlier emotional state, but as something partial, contingent, and constantly interrupted. The film situates desire within a broader field of loss, most notably through the gradual disappearance of her father’s memory. This parallel structure displaces the centrality of romantic attachment: desire does not organize the narrative, but exists alongside processes of deterioration, care, and responsibility. In this context, love is no longer invested with the promise of permanence, but emerges as something fragile, defined by its limits rather than its intensity. Hansen-Løve thus shifts from a cinema of longing to a cinema of presence, where desire is not oriented toward what has been lost, but toward what can only be experienced temporarily. If Goodbye First Love reveals the impossibility of returning to the past, One Fine Morning suggests that the present itself cannot be stabilized. Desire persists, but only as something that must continuously adapt to the instability of lived experience.

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

Desire, if it were not an abstract noun, could be stretched between two people like a taut line. It slackens, then pulls again across bedrooms, train platforms, summers, and the humiliation of the passing of time. In the films of French director Mia Hansen-Løve, desire rarely ends; instead, it reorganises the spaces and durations through which her characters move. Across her early work—from All Is Forgiven (2007) to Father of My Children (2009)—love and longing repeatedly disrupt the apparent stability of life. But in Goodbye First Love (2011), Hansen-Løve moves further: desire becomes something that persists across years, transforming without ever fully disappearing. The film begins with adolescent intensity. In 1999, fifteen-year-old Camille (Lola Créton) and the slightly older Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) inhabit that familiar cinematic fantasy in which the world seems to exist primarily to witness the couple. Hansen-Løve films their Paris as intimate and enclosed: bedrooms, walks, fleeting touches. Their relationship carries the urgency of first love, when desire feels indistinguishable from destiny. Whether this is also Sullivan’s first love remains ambiguous; the film is guided by Camille’s intensity. She says that if he leaves her, she will jump into the Seine, a melodramatic declaration that Sullivan later recounts with amusement. Yet the threat introduces a motif that will return years later: water as the place where Camille imagines time stopping. But if desire's line pulls people together, it will inevitably slacken, too. Sullivan wants to leave for Venezuela with a friend. He wants his freedom: he can't be pinned down anywhere, which is exactly what Camille metaphorically attempts to do, sticking pins into a map of South America and tacking it to her teenage bedroom wall, marking the places he has been, according to the addresses in his letters. A trail of colourful pins moves around South America as he narrates his writing in the voice-over. And then, the letters stop arriving. There are tears. There's a suicide attempt.

But there is also time, supposedly the great linear healer. Camille recovers. She discovers her love of architecture and starts university, and we're almost led to believe that her desire for Sullivan has waned—but the screen shows us her diary. It's been four years, she writes. And not a single word. Perhaps time is less linear than we imagine, and desire is less finite. Hansen-Løve's narrative travels between paradoxes, moving between what's permanent and what's ephemeral, and questions the assumed linearity of feelings. She gives complexity—and dignity—to the intensity of a teenager who's experiencing love for the first time, along with all its side-effect emotions, from passion to longing, from desire to desperation. In an interview with Film Comment in 2012, the director spoke about being confronted by viewers who find Camille’s grief “too extraordinary,” defending the seriousness of her adolescent drive. “Feelings have always been the most important thing in the world to me; it is what makes us fall in love and want to be with those that we love,” [1] she says, suggesting that desire is not a youthful phase to be outgrown but a way of knowing the world, and of being injured by it. Camille’s line “I have you inside me like a disease” is often cited for its melodramatic diction and precise effect. Desire here behaves like an infection of time: it colonises her memory in advance. What hurts is the sense that the future has been contaminated, so much so that she prefers to die. She is, at this point, unaware that the pain will eventually go away (and also eventually return, just as painful and, surprisingly, just as novel). This is one of Hansen-Løve’s most rigorous moves: she films desire as something that reorganises temporality. It makes the “after” feel counterfeit, as if life is happening in a secondary register while the primary story has already ended. At the same time, Hansen-Løve exposes the gendered asymmetry within romantic narratives: Sullivan’s desire is framed as movement, exploration, and becoming, while Camille’s desire risks appearing excessive, even ridiculous. Male freedom is often treated as an existential necessity, and female attachment becomes melodrama. Sullivan does not leave because he loves Camille too little, but because he still experiences love as something secondary to becoming himself.

[1] Hansen-Løve, Mia. Interview by Francisco Valente, Film Comment, March-April 2012, https://www.filmcomment.com/interview-miahansen-lve-director-of-goodbye-first-love/

The apex of her desperation is not when Sullivan leaves France, it's when the letters stop arriving. Camille's desire doesn't even require its object to be in the same space—it is that genuine, that persistent. The letters would have sufficed. But now, space is another variable that challenges Camille, adding another layer to the film's complexity: it opens outward as Sullivan travels and Camille discovers her love for architecture. This is not incidental. While Camille begins to study how space itself can be structured, Sullivan travels through geographical space. Architecture becomes a counterpoint to desire; where love once dictated the architecture of her life, she now learns to design structures that can endure beyond a single relationship. First love had made space unstable; every street became attached to Sullivan, every room vulnerable to memory. Architecture, by contrast, proposes endurance, proportion, and structure. It is perhaps not accidental that Camille turns toward a discipline concerned with permanence after experiencing a love defined by disappearance, by silence. It's Camille's way to transform space from something haunted into something inhabitable again. Her first love's letters are fragments of elsewhere, and that “elsewhere” becomes the place where he is becoming himself, while Camille is stuck in the humiliating labour of staying. Even when she begins to recover, the film refuses the clean arc of healing. It gives us instead a more uncomfortable truth: desire can be mutable without becoming minor. Camille’s later relationship with Lorenz (Magne-Håvard Brekke), an older architect and professor, does not erase Sullivan. The first love becomes an internal landmark she navigates around, its pull still quietly present until she sees Sullivan's mother on the bus, and immediately shares her number in case he wants to catch up. He does, and they reconnect. Yet their reunion does not produce the romantic clarity that cinema often promises. Camille still loves Lorenz; Sullivan is no longer the boy she once built her world around. Hansen-Løve refuses both nostalgia and closure. Time changes people, but only partially. Some emotional structures remain stubbornly intact beneath adulthood, compromise, and experience. When Sullivan leaves again, Camille is still hurt by it, because first love leaves behind a kind of permanent architecture. The tragedy is not that they fail to reunite, but that they finally meet again as people capable of understanding why they cannot. Time, again, is what allows that interpretation to blossom—the fifteen-year-old Camille would simply find romance in her own star-crossed lovers story.

Amanda Woolrich, Goodbye First Love, 2026, Monotype and dry point on paper and digital manipulation

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.

Camille steps into the water wearing jelly shoes. The river, which she had visited with her first love, does not cure her desire. It does not erase him. Instead, it situates that love within a larger flow of time, even when the space remains the same. Water, in this sense, becomes the film’s philosophy: the first love never dies, it simply flows. And desire can ebb and flow, too. I am reminded of the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade in “Beach Consolations”: “the first love is gone the second love is gone the third love is gone but the heart carries on.” Hansen-Løve seems to film something similar. Love disappears, returns, mutates, but the emotional current persists. Can the line of desire that once connected two people ever truly be snapped? I must have watched Goodbye, First Love around the time it came out, or maybe a couple of years later, in my early twenties. I remember sobbing uncontrollably the first time I saw it—I felt Camille’s pain as my own. I have returned to the film many times since. When I watched it again recently, at thirty-six, I realised something strange: I didn’t cry at all. Certain films do not merely preserve stories, they preserve earlier versions of ourselves. The absence of tears felt strange. It's as if the emotional architecture that the film once inhabited inside me has changed shape. Perhaps I am done with my dying, too. Or perhaps, like Camille standing in the river, I have simply learned that desire still moves through space and time.

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.

These divergences take further shape in the character’s individual pilgrimages in “Bergmanland.” While Tony is dragged into a dull “Bergman Safari” aboard a school bus to all the holy sites, Chris leisurely drifts across Fårö. She meets others, hears the islander’s reticence toward the local genius, and experiences the very real beauty of the place while returning Bergman to human proportions: his grave is a simple stone, with a view of sea. She escapes Bergman’s fiction onto the island itself. While it remains a backdrop for Tony, she has acquired a sense of place, and can start to make it her own. These different explorations and attitudes mirror the diverging results of their writing, their personalities, and what nourishes their work. If Bergman is the initial surface, the undertow is what they cannot share. The movie shows the couple writing in separate buildings, making out their respective workplaces from afar. It is the nature and limit of their professional intimacy. Though they share a child, sharing their work is another matter. Though caring interactions diffuse outward signs of discontent, the one enduring chasm is the impossibility of communicating their work. When Chris runs out of ink, she goes to Tony’s office in his absence and takes a look at his notes: obscure scribbling and violent sexual sketches. When she complains he doesn’t tell her anything about his work, he says it’s going well and is about “How things circulate between a couple.” Her own narration of her screenplay is interrupted by his producer’s phone calls. When she despairs at finding an ending, and asks, “Can you help me?” he answers that he doubts it. And that he might not be the right person to be discussing it with her. “Why not?” she asks. “Why do you think?” he retorts. What echoes he has heard in the story are left unspoken. The story that Tony will not comment on is the mingling of Chris’ island wanderings with the enduring themes she has brought with her. It is here that fact and fiction entwine, and the story she needs to tell emerges. As in other movies by Hansen-Løve, subtle thematic echoes filter from one passage to another, seamlessly weaving different strata of experience. “Through poetic

connections feeling is

heightened,

and the spectator

is made more

active.He becomes a participant in the process of discovering life, unsupported by readymade deductions from the plot,” wrote Andrei Tarkovsky[3] in a passage that applies to

[3] Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. by Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), p. 20.

the experience of this film. Throughout Bergman Island and its gradual symbolic thrust “the subject grows within, and begins to demand expression.” This occurs near the halfway point of the movie. If the first part was ultimately the process that allowed the writing of the screenplay –filling in the spaces of the island and the blank page– the second part is its narration. The darker footpaths of the marriage are left unexplored, or obliquely sublimated in the forthcoming story-within-the-story. In a sense, the movie begins in earnest when we see Chris’ own movie, first through her tentative voice off, then taking over the film entirely. Again, Tarkovsky: “The method whereby the artist obliges the audience to build the separate parts into a whole, and to think on, further than has been stated, is the only one that puts the audience on a par with the artist in their perception of the film.”[4] We have accompanied Chris throughout her process, on par with her search. The results she presents to us henceforth are the reworkings of our common experience, blending with the intuited and unstated. The movie we now witness focuses the film’s rhythm and narration, its emotional heft and Chris’ hitherto tentative voice. It’s set on Fårö and tells the last episode of a love that has never reached its conclusion, that of Amy (Mia Wasikowska) and Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), former lovers reunited at a wedding. In their years apart, Amy has become a director, has had a daughter, and even made Joseph a character in one of her films, but she is excited to see him again. Bergman’s presence is by now a conversational afterthought, and what unfolds is a counterpoint to his own depictions –as in his My Summer with Monika– of young passion set on an island. What we witness is closer to the emotional pangs of ABBA in the background than the Swedish director’s pathos, and successfully so. Over three days and nights, Amy and Joseph flirt, crisscross the island as we have, rekindle, make love, and betray. They reenact past heartache and heartbreak, but now time has passed. This time it is final. They’ve reunited when no longer free, and their conclusions are irreconcilable. He’s unfaithful, she says, “I love two people, that’s different.”

[4] Tarkovsky, p. 21.

A question grows as this second film’s contrast carries us along: do we prefer the meandering and the unsaid of the main story, or this whirlwind fiction within? In terms of narrative impulse, the conclusion is that fiction is more interesting than life. The overall film’s success is their complementarity and the ultimate function of creation. For Chris, the things worth saying, confessing, or expressing to her husband and in her work are best said through filming, as a result of all the searching and stuttering of living. The conclusion of Mia and Joseph’s story, however, still eludes Chris. She has yet to find one for her own couple. The solution comes when the narrative returns to Chris and she sets out on the island to find her denouement. As she unfolds a piece of paper given to Mia in her fiction, with the address of Bergman’s main residence, the parallel narratives merge. Once in Bergman’s house, Chris meets Joseph, no longer her character but now an actor in her film, which is wrapping up. An ellipsis has occurred, and the screenplay we have been narrated has been shot. Joseph has come to say his goodbyes. His farewell to the actress who played Mia is merely collegial. When he parts with Chris, his director, we feel that they share a past. This suggestion of autofiction resembles what Hansen-Løve, by her own admission,[5] employs in many of her movies. Here it might be most obviously expressed in the characterization of the couple formed by Chris and Tony, in light of its similarities with her own relationship with director Olivier Assayas, from whom she separated the year she wrote the script on the island. If Bergman’s influential ghost has been exorcized, it has been to leave place for others to come forth: the ghosts of past relationships that echo in the present, and the desires that still haunt the resulting work. Ultimately, Bergman’s role in the movie represents the emancipation from the artists we admire, which once inspired us, and the passions we shared and must eventually move on from, somehow express and leave behind.

[5] As in, Annabel Nugent, ‘“Honestly, I Wish I Could Make Films Less Connected to Myself”: One Fine Morning Director Mia Hansen-Løve on

Life Spilling into Fiction’, Independent, 15 April 2023.

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.

Contributors

Lucy Cade is a UK based artist whose paintings translate mid-century cinematic memory structures into fixed, oval architectures. Working from analogue photographs taken directly from film screens she treats the image as already mediated and unstable. The oval format, historically associated with devotional portraiture, is repurposed as a device of containment: a frame that both isolates and constricts its subject. Built through successive layers of wet oil, the surfaces operate as temporal accumulations rather than direct representations. The cinematic dissolve becomes painterly suspension; narrative progression is replaced by delay. Repetition across the series produces subtle shifts in gaze, gesture and tonal density, establishing a disciplined visual language that holds psychological charge without resolving it.

Chris Cassingham is a film worker based in Brooklyn. His practice spans criticism, reporting, programming, producing, and distribution. He is currently an editor at In Review Online, an independent, digital publication of film criticism. As a freelancer, he has bylines at Filmmaker Magazine, Reverse Shot, Public Parking, Documentary Magazine, and MUBI Notebook. He also runs the newsletter, Dark Optimism, focusing on American filmmaking on the margins of the industry. Chris received his MA in Film Studies, Programming and Curation from the National Film and Television School in the UK.

Adriana Comi Pretelín is a multidisciplinary artist based in Mexico City, where she directs Axolotl Lab, an experimental studio exploring the intersection of sculpture, animation, and graphic expression. A graduate of UNAM and the Architectural Association, London, she synthesizes architectural rigor with tactile craftsmanship. Her practice is deeply rooted in traditional Japanese Sashimono woodworking, a craft she utilizes to bridge the divide between manual labor and technology. Focusing on the “memory of time,” her installations create immersive sensory experiences. Her work has been featured at the Academia de San Carlos and the Woodcut Print Art Festival in Ulsan, among others.

Diego Courchay is a Mexican-French cultural journalist of varying locations. He has published reviews and essays for outlets across the Americas, such as Letras Libres, GIJN, LitHub, Atlas Obscura, and Revue Europe, and he also pens the newsletter for Writerland. He has previously reported from Mexico City, New York, Washington, D.C., and Miami. He is a graduate of Columbia University, and writes and reports in English, Spanish, and French.

Claire Downes Whitehurst is a New Orleans painter, printmaker, and ceramicist whose work draws from the landscape and atmosphere of the Deep South. Her practice explores queer space, religion, and botanical structure through form, color, and composition. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, a Post-Baccalaureate from PAFA, and a BFA from the University of Mississippi. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and featured in New American Paintings, Oxford American, The Iowa Review and Harvard Divinity School’s Peripheries, among others. In 2028, she will present her first museum exhibition at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art.

Sophie Dushko is a playwright, director, and performer with an affinity for heightened text, ritual, eroticism, and brazen theatricality. Recent work includes her solo show, vérité, an experimentation in intimacy and performance, ‘Три сестри’, an adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and directing a site specific production of Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends in a West Village Townhouse. Her play galatea 2.0 premiered in 2023 at Brooklyn Art Haus presented by Invulnerable Nothings. As an actor, Sophie has worked with Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, Invulnerable Nothings, and Commonwealth Shakespeare Company. See sophiedushko.com for more info.

Ashlyn Frank is a Writer and Director based in New York City. She writes plays for the stage and screen as well as short tales of speculative fiction and horror. Recent publications include: Ellipses Magazine, Rooted Literary Magazine, and Apricity Magazine. You can follow Ashlyn on instagram @ash.grace.frank, and view her work on ashlynfrank.com.

Jamie Garwood is a freelance film reviewer based in Essex, England. Life-long lover of film of all formats and genres from around the globe be it animation or silent film. From Almodovar to Herzog; Loach to Wyler. Will be found happily sitting Next to the Aisle and always willing to talk film with fellow cinephiles over a beer or cocktail.

Zain Hashmat is a New Orleans-based filmmaker. He has spent the past five years working to uplift the next generation of filmmakers as a programmer for the New Orleans Film Festival, an educator at the New Orleans Video Access Center, and a collaborator on various sets throughout the city. He is deeply interested in contemporary Southern stories told through a tender, comedic lens that heightens the everyday. His own films explore contemporary struggles told through a nostalgic viewpoint rooted in film history, the machinations of the cinema, and Southern culture. He is a member of Palestine Film Day, NOLA Freedom Forum, and is a regular contributor for Antigravity Magazine. Much like his favorite films, he’s short and sweet.

Christie Johnson is a researcher and educator based in London. As an art historian originally trained in languages, literatures and Islamic studies, Christie brings an interdisciplinary perspective to questions of cultural production, focusing on performance, the voice and religion. Christie’s educational research includes two core projects: one on designing a vocal curriculum for educators and the second exploring the links between vocal flexibility, creativity and social participation. The short essay on Hedda included here aims to capture how the film supports a broader turn towards revaluing overlooked media subjectivities.

Yessica Klein is a Brazilian writer and artist based in Berlin, Germany. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Kingston University in London (UK). Her writing and artwork have been featured in publications like Banshee Lit (Ireland), The Moth (Ireland), and The White Review (UK). She was shortlisted for the 2023 White Review Poetry Prize, the 2022 Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize, and the 2017 Jane Martin Poetry Prize. She's working on her first novel and also running a newsletter called That Poetry Thing, focusing on writers’ desks and their creative habits.

Cathy Lomax is a Research Fellow at the University of Brighton and a practising artist. She completed a PhD at Queen Mary University of London in 2023 and her monograph, Making Up the Star: Makeup, Femininity, Race and Ageing in Hollywood is published by BFI/Bloomsbury (2026). Other publications include ‘Ghostly threads: Painting Marilyn Monroe’s white dresses’ in Film, Fashion and Consumption (2015). In 2016 Lomax won the Contemporary British Painting Prize, her paintings are widely exhibited and have featured on numerous book covers, including three volumes from the BFI Film Classics series.

Anna Vlachou is a Greek actress and film enthusiast based in Athens. Alongside her work in film and television, she is passionate about cinema criticism, world cinema, and contemporary auteur filmmaking. Her interests focus on storytelling, performance, and the ways cinema reflects social and personal experiences. She regularly attends film festivals, theatre performances, and industry workshops, and enjoys exploring international cinema through both acting and writing.

Amanda Woolrich is a graduate of UNAM’s Faculty of Visual Arts, she is a Mexican filmmaker, animator, and visual artist whose practice moves between drawing, printmaking, and moving images. Her short film Shifting (Trasiego), co-produced with Canada, premiered at Annecy and screened at festivals including Tricky Women, Sommets du Cinéma d’Animation, FICM, GIFF, and the Cannes Short Film Corner, where it received the Best Mexican Short Film Award at CutOut Fest. She has collaborated as an animator, art director, and visual artist on numerous films and documentaries. Alongside filmmaking, her graphic work has been exhibited in Mexico and internationally.

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