Hogg acknowledges Ozu as a reference, but has also said this stasis comes from her love of old Hollywood musicals, where dancers like Gene Kelly were filmed in full-body shot, sometimes the camera moving laterally as the dancer moved, but mostly remaining still.
It’s a distancing technique in many ways, but it also draws you into a space where life seems to be just happening, where the camera just happens to be there to “catch” the events swirling around within the frame.
“The Souvenir Part II” picks up immediately after “The Souvenir,” when Anthony getting sucked into the pages of a women’s magazine, bombarded with consumerist seductions and unrealistic beauty standards—was similarly rejected.
Joyce’s book showed a young man cutting ties with the outside forces on his life, first family, then religion, then country, in order to speak in his own voice as an artist.
She is sobbing, perhaps because Anthony, who worked for the foreign office, isn’t there to witness the momentous event, but perhaps also with joy at the sight of all that unleashed freedom.
I remember all of us screaming and crying as we watched the space shuttle explode but I also think about how the other girls used to mock me for writing in my diary.
At one point she talks with her best pal Marland about how she is not interested in making a crowd-pleasing movie about aliens.
The two films are rich with the “souvenirs” of Hogg’s particular motifs: flowers and trees, lowering thunderclouds, frames within frames of Hogg’s work that makes it unique.
Julie is interviewed during the filming of the music video, and when answering a question about her goals, she says, laughing, that she will wait until she is in her thirties to answer that, because then she will know what she wants to say.