Composite Memory, Reparative Pleasure and the Shedding of a Filmic Skin: Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir

The Souvenir, Hogg's autobiographical fourth feature film, opens with stark, grainy black and white photographic stills of Northern England, Sunderland, during its industrial height.1 The bleak immensity of industry and labour is evoked through monochromatic images of steel, light and air. We move from post-war buildings and their neat rooftops to shipbuilding machinery, angular concrete spaces and smoky skies (fig. 1). Such images encourage viewers to attend to the pictorial rendering of objects and their material qualities, as objects in the frame, as well as the formal matter of the photographs themselves. Furthermore, the very slow and precise unspooling of such images open up viewers to states of recall and an ambiguous nostalgia which is here examined and re-imagined. Above all, the objecthood of these images is acutely prescient of the centrality of materiality in Hogg's film. Our attentiveness to this process is key. Indeed, this epigraph haunts us long after we have entered into the subsequent, diegetic space of Julie's apartment, transmitting a very tangible and vivid sense of the past which, as we shall see, will only come into sharp focus through our close attention to its abstraction.