Film and Culture: Introduction

As co-editors invited to further the rich collection of essays and reviews of the Film and Culture column, we began enthusiastically imagining themes for future issues. One of the first ideas to present itself was a column devoted to exploring the emergent relationship between a work of modern visual art and a deeply engaged viewer. We wanted to explore the potential “thirdness” in the field between viewer and viewed, and what might happen as established boundaries begin to blur and themes and questions of ownership, reciprocity and affectivity (or lack thereof) started to emerge. As in Jungian analysis, such an approach can function as a portal to exploring personal and cultural complexes, their origins and capacity to be disrupted and or reimagined in service of individuation. We are honoured to have received the following contributions.

In an essay exploring her long relationship with the work of painter and sculptor Maggi Hambling, Juliet Miller finds herself unexpectedly “Breaking Bread with the Dead”. Beginning with her aesthetic, emotional and spiritual engagement with the black aquatint of a heron by Hambling that hangs over her desk, Miller traces the artist's lifelong study of the elegant bodily outlines of the birds who graced the marshes of her childhood and who now haunt Hambling's residence on the banks of the Thames. The bird, Miller notes, belongs to “the world of the beyond, between the human terrestrial world and the hereafter”, creating a bridge between the living and the dead. Miller describes Hambling's process, governed by a daily routine that begins with making unfettered “subconscious drawings”, as mirroring the capacity to relinquish control-a necessary and inevitable aspect of engaging the ageing process and facing death. Miller, with her keen eye and appreciation of Hambling's sculpture of Oscar Wilde emerging from his coffin, notes the capacity of the artist, both here and not here, both dead and alive, to gather up our ambivalence around