Joanna Hogg, who at the time was part of Derek Jarman’s circle, got her start in cinema during her studies at the National Film and Television School when she directed the short film Caprice (1986), one of the first cinematic works to feature Tilda Swinton. But it was with Unrelated (2007), a feature-length masterpiece made at the age of 47, that the British filmmaker carved out space for her films to come.

Produced on a modest budget of 150 thousand pounds and filmed with an amateur camera, a Sony Z1, Unrelated, just like Hogg’s most recent film, The Eternal Daughter (2022), explores family dynamics and fictionalises autobiographical details. Anna (Kathryn Worth), a British woman of around 45 years, like the director in the year production of the film began, visits an old school friend, Verena (Mary Roscoe), during their family holidays in a villa in Tuscany. The title — “Unrelated” — speaks volumes, on multiple levels, regarding both the intrigue and formal logic of the film, and the breakdown of the relationship between content and form. In the narrative schema of Unrelated, Anna is a disconnected character, intermediate and interstitial, still becoming herself, somewhere between youth (the group of teenagers and, above all, Oakley, an explosive debut from Tom Hiddlestone) and maturity (the middle-aged adults), the working class and the British bourgeoisie, night and day, outdoors and indoors, and between Britain, her home country invoked by telephone calls with her partner Alex, and the Tuscan landscape. This multifarious disconnection — or un-belonging — of the protagonist results in singular narrative-temporal and spatial configurations.

Its narrative construction based on a remarkable use of the episodic within an overall configuration (the fragmentary weaving of sketches, segments and situations), as well as of the ellipsis (note the elliptical dimension of the accident, and the out-of-shot dispute between Oakley and his father that we hear but do not see), Unrelated presents itself structurally as a centrifugal circle. At the beginning and end of the film, Anna arrives and leaves the Tuscan villa alone, dragging her suitcase. And this circularity — or cyclicity — not only pushes Anna towards the nucleus before expelling her to the edges (in one of the final scenes, she states that she will remain “forever on the periphery of things”), but also de-centres the representational, territorial and temporal field itself. Hogg is working beyond what is concretely portrayed, bringing out a geopolitical and historical out-of-shot context: the North/South axis and the colonial history of the United Kingdom — manifested by, among other things, the way the group of British tourists occupies this space — alongside the political history of Italy, evoked here by the sofa that belonged to Mussolini in the Republic of Salò.

In parallel, Ana’s disconnectedness takes on a spatial dimension, expressed formally in the tension between shot, countershot and audible out-of-shot, as well as between backdrop and figure, in the composition of frames — the proliferation of “frames within a frame” [1], outlines of one rectangle inside another (as in the geometry of windows and doors) — and in the use of depth of field. In the opening sequences of the film, Anna is always filmed in long or medium shots, an approach that destabilises the principle of individuation and, later, holds back the process of identification between the viewer and the protagonist. Later variations of scale do not, however, reduce the isolation of the character. If the Rohmerian summer intimacy between Anna and Oakley in the scenes filmed in the streets of Siena — paradigmatic of a certain interpenetration between the representational systems of fiction and documentary —suspend, temporarily, this formal logic, it is very quickly reimposed, culminating in the sequence in which the family comes home after visiting the aristocratic mansion, in a clear evocation of Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972), by Buñuel, as well as Uccellacci e uccellini (1977), by Pasolini. However, this disconnected, loose position gives Anna a status of observation and action. First and foremost, Anna is an observer of her own body, of a body that, progressively freer and untethered, crosses natural and urban spaces, placing itself in opposition to the middle-aged grouping’s immobility. But this intermediary body, walking and interactive, is also a visualisation device through which class relations become recognisable: right away, between Anna and her bourgeois hosts, but also between the British family (and the protagonist herself) and the Italian workers of Tuscany, “regione rossa”. In this sense, by centring itself on social and cultural sameness (and no longer on alterity), Unrelated defines itself as an auto-ethnographic film.

Anna’s observing body is also an observed body — by Oakley, as well as by the autonomous point of view of the camera —, in the framework of a discontinuous conception of space based on the principle of a multiplication of perspectives.

And if Unrelated’s formal refinement — in particular the work of the fixed front shot and durational shots —, its familiar context and its historical-political background evoke the Zen cinema of Ozu, then the proliferation of shots, at first glance subjective, of fragments of landscape that neither correspond to nor refer back to the perspective of any of the characters, but to an empty place [2] (see the river sequence), in rupture with the principle of narrative continuity, is also inscribed in the aesthetics of the Japanese filmmaker. These disconnected shots self-reflexively produce a de-centring of the spectator from the narrative of the film and operate, in parallel, a disjunction [3] or a transitory disconnection between content and form. No longer ensuring, as in classical cinema, a narrative function (and, above all, of narrative continuity), disconnected from the point of view of the characters and, moreover, breaking the raccord between shot and countershot, the disconnected shots constitute an instance of autonomisation of form in relation to content. The epitome of disconnection as the formal motif and motor of Unrelated, these shots become one of the main stylistic hallmarks of Hogg's cinema — following the example of a filmmaker like Robert Kramer in Cités de la plaine (2000).

[1] Aumont, Jacques and Marie, Michel. Dictionnaire théorique et critique du cinema. Paris: Armand Colin, 2016.

[2] Moure, José. Vers une esthétique du vide au cinéma. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997.

[3] Panofsky, Erwin. Die Renaissancen der europäischen Kunst. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990.