The classical conventions of filmmaking, established within Hollywood cinema, provide limited grounds for rendering feminist issues and representing women onscreen. As a result, female filmmakers have been forced to seek other means by which to do so – experiments in discomfort. These cinematic experiments are characterised by a rejection of the ‘rules of filmmaking’, negating ‘expectations of women as subordinate objects by cultural representations.’[1] In line with this idea, this essay will chart how feminist representations in British cinema have transformed and changed over time through an analysis of the following films: The Other Side of the Underneath (1972), Morvern Callar (2002) and Aftersun (2022). The analysis will ultimately reach a conclusion regarding the extent to which such representations can be attributed to the zeitgeist of their production and release; charting how representations of British women in film have transformed over time. Each film will be analysed in chronological order, employing a critical engagement with feminist film theory and socio-political contexts in order to deconstruct the creative choices employed.

The Other Side of the Underneath is the only British feature film released in the 1970s to be solely directed by a woman.[2] Written and directed by feminist playwright Jane Arden, the film was adapted from her original play A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches, resulting in a wildly experimental and radical depiction of schizophrenic women that employs conventions of the horror genre. Members of Holocaust, a radical feminist theatre group formed by Arden in 1970, constitute the ensemble cast that embody the film’s performative nature.[3] Its release coincided with the advent of second-wave feminism, a revival movement that was characterised by ‘radical gestures of rejection and separation from male domination’.[4] This subversion was reflected within the cinema of the period; a visual revolution that emerged in American culture as a result of the studio system’s disintegration and the abolishment of the Hays Code, resulting in a departure from the stylistic and thematic conventions of classical Hollywood cinema.[5] Whilst this era, dubbed the ‘New Hollywood’, is typically attributed to mainstream films, such as those ‘about women’s lives by male filmmakers’ radical, cinematic protests from marginalised groups found their true, unexpected home within Britain.[6] This is exemplified by the inclusion of The Other Side of the Underneath as part of The Women’s Event at Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1972, organised by Claire Johnston, Lynda Myles, and Laura Mulvey. In her more recent work, Mulvey has reflected on the 1970s as an era characterised by great social and political unrest, manifesting itself in cinema as ‘the utopian desire to fuse radical aesthetics with radical politics’.[7] Arden’s film embodies this idea, employing schizophrenia as a feminist critique of the patriarchy in a harrowing encapsulation of the zeitgeist and a breakthrough for British cinema.

As well as writing and directing, Jane Arden starred in the film as a therapist to the schizophrenic women; self-direction which conforms to Robin Wood’s definition of the incoherent text, films that embody a ‘discernible intelligence’ and ‘exhibit a high degree of involvement on the part of their makers’.[8] From the outset, The Other Side of the Underneath establishes a distorted, unconventional world that seeks to normalise taboo subjects including female pleasure, menstruation, fetish, and masochism. To do so, Arden has created a pastiche composed of dreamlike, surrealist imagery and excessive theatricality. The term ‘theatricality’ here encapsulates Arden’s employment of an ascetic mise-en-scene, stylised cinematography and jarring audio-visual effects; frequent disturbance of the diegesis for an artistically experimental effect.[9] Images of naked children running freely, punctuated by jaunty music and sounds of women wailing, are intercut with grown women dressed in the recurring motif of white, childlike frocks whilst displaying bizarre behaviour - presenting a juxtaposition between innocence and perversion. The unconventional combination of such images by editor David Mingay, constructs a film resembling a vaudeville show.  For example, a character, referring to herself as Meg the Peg, consistently reappears to terrorise one of the patients, adorning a bright orange beak, bald cap, and colourful makeup. If Mary Russo posits that ‘making a spectacle out of oneself seemed a specifically feminine danger’, Arden embraces that danger wholeheartedly through ‘bold affirmations of feminine performance’ for the purpose of harking attention to the dilemmas of womanhood.[10]

Further dealing with the grotesque is evident in close-up shots emphasising the recurring motif of mirror images, the women’s eyes, and the tears they leak. In The Forms of the Affect, Eugenia Brinkema argues that, ‘The tear functions as semiotic block, what must be read and cannot be understood immediately or without interpretation’.[11] Through non-linear narrative and montage-style editing Arden presents an ‘interpretable sign of the hysteric’s truth’; a distressing soundtrack of wailing and weeping women underscores and juxtaposes images of the same women dancing, engaging in sexual activity and clutching one another affectionally.[12] Like the tear, the film itself wavers ‘at the boundary between pleasure and pain, grief and satisfaction’.[13] Touching scenes of homoeroticism precede scenes of brutal attacks; demonstrating the creation of a diegesis in which women are no longer governed by oppressive social norms, but free to unbind themselves from their demons and release their innermost, repressed desires – no matter how sexual or violent. As a result, Arden aligns with arguments that ‘find assertions of the intriguing pleasures of tearing’.[14] The Other Side of the Underneath is thereby a vaudeville show constructed for the purpose of female spectatorship. At a time when women were beginning to ask, ‘serious questions about their role in both the home and the workplace’, Arden provides women with sadistic escapism and immense cathartic release from monotonous daily life under the patriarchy.[15]

Not only does the release of Arden’s film coincide with developments in feminism, but the film itself reveals countercultural influences related to the anti-psychiatry movement, consciousness, and madness.[16] The anti-psychiatry movement emerged in the 1960s, characterised by a protest against mainstream psychiatric thinking. Whilst schizophrenia is not explicitly mentioned until the final act of the film, in a scene which sees two women engaging in conversation whilst sat in a picturesque, suburban-looking park, the film’s central theme becomes clear: ‘to be a woman in society was to be condemned to madness’.[17] This scene is presented in stark contrast to the film viewed so far, with high-key lighting and saturated colours, communicating that the audience is no longer in the mind of the schizophrenic woman. Instead, a static, objective wide shot allows the viewer to observe the therapist (Jane Arden) as she attempts to define schizophrenia for her conversation partner, ‘We'll have to see the whole family because we can't fit this into context.’[18]

Here, Arden anchors the psychoanalytic stance encoded throughout the film so far. A woman dancing in lingerie sings, ‘It’s your castrating mama’, a newly wed bride says, ‘I want to sleep with daddy’ and a topless woman calling herself ‘daddy’s girl’ touches herself before a cross; such images echo Sigmund Freud’s ideas surrounding ‘the connection between death and sexuality’ and the Oedipus complex.[19] Crucially, Mulvey argues that ‘1970s feminist theory is associated with the influence of Freud and the use of psychoanalytical ideas for a feminist critique of patriarchy’[20] aligning with E Ann Kaplan’s idea that psychoanalysis enables women to ‘unlock patriarchal culture as expressed in dominant representations’.[21] Following the release of Psycho in 1960, the horror genre emerged as the most prominent in reflecting such arguments, with the filmic incarnation of Stephen King’s Carrie presenting the most successful example.[22] Horror provides a filmic space for the unleashing of female rage, misery, and madness; Arden harnesses this through depictions of abject material. For example, towards the beginning of the film, the main character abruptly wakes to find her white frock and bedsheets stained with blood, between her legs. This image is repeated in circular narrative form towards the film’s end, when the same character is crucified wearing only rags to cover her genitals – rags which are soaked with blood. Such intertextuality and biblical imagery serve as a criticism of the patriarchy, denoting a narrative in which women are burdened by religious guilt and punished for sexual deviance. Such themes are at the centre of Carrie; intertextuality that establishes The Other Side of the Underneath as wildly progressive and neoteric at the time of its release. In accordance with Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, as established in Powers of Horror, Arden’s film reveals itself as a ‘work of abjection’ due to its dealing with blood, saliva, and tears.[23] Abjection refers to that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order’, suggesting an inclusion of such material within Arden’s work favours a depiction the monstrous-feminine, capable of ascending corporeality and the sex-gender paradigm.[24]

Aligning with Kristeva’s ideas, feminist critics writing in the seventies argued that ‘women were positioned by cinematic representations as emotional, domestic and dependent’.[25] Morvern Callar, a film by Scottish director Lynne Ramsay, subverts this belief and exhibits further progression in the representation of women since Arden’s work.[26] Along with Andrea Arnold’s work and films such as Bend It Like Beckham, Morvern Callar exhibits an influx in British social realism films directed by women, demonstrating an explicit on-screen protest against the patriarchy through the elevation of narratives centring on working class women.[27] The morbid, and often jarring, nature of the film serves to reflect the post-9/11 world into which it was released; a world in which nihilism runs rampant.[28] Whilst Morvern Callar does not explicitly conform to the horror genre - typical of cinema that seeks to embody the 9/11 experience - Ramsay’s work is cohesive in its dealing with personal horrors; anti-heroic, working class protagonists struggling to cope with death-related trauma. The opening scene of Ramsay’s film sees titular character Morvern Callar (Samantha Morton) awaken next to her dead boyfriend on Christmas morning, who has committed suicide during the night. The film charts the protagonist’s journey of emotional self-discovery as she navigates the grieving process; enriched with a melancholic tone which seeks appeal in an audience that witnessed the horrific events of September 2001, through ‘heightened senses of insecurity, vulnerability, meaninglessness, hopelessness, bleak despair and uncertainty’.[29] The film is based on Alan Warner’s novel of the same name, which begins in the following manner: ‘He'd cut His throat with the knife. He'd near chopped off His hand with the meat cleaver.’[30]

In adapting such a graphic description to the screen, the film opens with a handheld establishing shot of Morvern’s apartment as she unknowingly sleeps on the floor beside her boyfriend’s corpse. The frame’s deep depth of field and adherence to the rule of thirds draws attention to a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. Morvern runs her hand along her deceased boyfriend’s arm, as she reaches for his hand the tracking camera reveals a deep gash on his wrist. Whilst not explicitly horror, the film is established from the outset as an example of ‘abjection at work’, not entirely dissimilar from Arden’s film in its use of psychological themes and hallucinatory images.[31] Furthermore, considering the source material of the film, Walker’s capitalisation of the letter H in ‘he and ‘him’ provides an interesting insight into Callar’s thoughts and feelings towards her boyfriend. Traditionally, in literature, the capitalisation of such pronouns are used to reference God. Through drawing on biblical semantics, Walker encodes a commentary on the unsolicited idolisation of men by women in patriarchal societies and, like a child separated from their mother, Morvern is lost and unguided without her boyfriend. His death serves as the inciting incident that propels the protagonist onto a journey of self-discovery and regaining of independence; she ‘refuses to have this tragedy draw her further into the mundane existence she has been living’.[32]

The slow cinema style of Ramsey’s feature reflects Callar’s eerily calm and stoic demeanour, as she avoids telling her family and friends about the death of her boyfriend. Such emotionless characterisation echoes Freudian understanding of repression. Throughout the novel, Walker consistently and deliberately incorporates grammatical errors, slang terms and misspellings, such as ‘I says’, ‘knickies’ and ‘diddleypush’ - infusing the novel with a peculiar style of narration that constructs a protagonist of extremely childlike nature.[33] This is furthered as Morvern is depicted covered in her boyfriend’s blood in the bath, which Creed would argue invokes, “a pleasure in returning to that time when the mother–child relationship was marked by an untrammelled pleasure in ‘playing’ with the body and its wastes.”[34] In line with the source material, and through Ramsay’s dealing with psychoanalytical meaning, Morvern’s immature, reckless nature can be understood. However, in the three decades following the release of Arden’s film, developments in film theory emerged that negate psychoanalytic film theory and the politics of the patriarchal unconscious, particularly as a method for reading feminist films. Two years prior to the release of Morvern Callar, Vivian Sobchack identified a gap between the actual experience of cinema and the theories that seek to explain this experience; defining film as a phenomenological medium. Phenomenology emerges in film as an attempt to visualise ‘the union of mind and body, mind and world, and the expression of one in the other’.[35] Considering such ideas in relation to Morvern and her experience of the world, the film’s phenomenological focus on her process of grief emphasises an unspoken tension between conscious and non-conscious states. In a scene which takes place in a washroom in Spain, her affinity aligns with a character who is having a disturbing psychedelic experience; this minor character reverberates and diffuses into Morvern’s state. The same happens when she meets and engages in sexual activity with a man whose mother recently died.

Thus, an affective analysis of Ramsey’s film is embarked upon, an analysis that aligns with Laura U. Marks’ argument that, ‘an incapacity to think, to bring together what we perceived and what we felt, can function as a painful marker for a thought yet to come’.[36] Marks’ statement unveils the film’s narrative function as a polysemic text; the protagonist’s reaction to finding her boyfriend dead lends itself to the unclear meaning the audience may infer after viewing and how their life will ensue as a result. Ramsay thereby presents nuance and individualism within emotion, as Callar’s grieves in a subversive manner; a poignant and progressive characterisation combatting stereotypical representations of women as hysterical and irrational – ruled by emotion. Whilst Callar’s complacent reaction to her boyfriend’s suicide is initially confounding, and therefore uncomfortable, Morton’s embodiment of the protagonist prompts an affective response that re-assesses internalised misogyny condemning female emotion, instead revealing a twisted story of female empowerment. Callar seeks to disguise her boyfriend’s death by severing his body into smaller pieces, as well as lying to her friends, claiming he broke up with her and moved abroad. However, the ensuing world-building reveals a young, impoverished working class woman living in small Scottish town alone at Christmastime. Thus, her boyfriend’s death – along with the unpublished manuscript he left behind - presents an opportunity for Morvern to transform her life. Albeit warped, Ramsey ultimately chronicles the story of a marginalised woman capitalising on an unfortunate opportunity, thus providing evidence that, by solely analysing the conceptual and narrative content of a film, a viewer risks missing how the film works; inference is instead gained through analysing one’s affective response to such material.[37]

In comparison, Scottish director Charlotte Wells’ debut feature film, Aftersun, employs a non-linear narrative and mixed media format to centre on the relationship of a young father, Callum, and his daughter, Sophie.[38] The main timeline of Wells’ film frames 11-year-old Sophie on a summer holiday with Callum in Turkey. In centring on the rarely represented relationship of a father and daughter, Wells moves away from psychoanalytical ideas, a progressive choice considering Freud’s misogynistic dismissal of women throughout his work, which strengthened “the association between femininity and the enigmatic (…) that which is ‘other’”.[39] Instead, Wells retains the phenomenological aspects seen within Morvern Callar, released exactly two decades prior. This is particularly evident during a scene in which Sophie encounters a gay couple kissing in the hotel, an instance which distinctly changes the trajectory of her life. Towards the end of the film, Sophie awakes on her 30th birthday next to another woman – her partner and mother of her child.

Aftersun thereby depicts developments in feminist studies towards intersectionality; a convergence in gender and sexuality studies with feminist theory, strongly influenced by Judith Butler and bell hooks. This aligns with the film’s production as an original screenplay, heavily based on Charlotte Wells’ own experiences with her father. Whilst Arden and Ramsay’s films were both produced from adapted screenplays, Aftersun demonstrates an emerging space within new British cinema championing the elevation of women’s personal stories and life experiences. The #MeToo movement, and the subsequent launch of Time’s Up in January 2018, are likely an influence of such developments. Supporters of the initiative argued that the lack of women filmmakers ‘created power imbalances that facilitated sexual harassment in Hollywood’.[40] Demand increased as a result, with 37% of the films screened at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival directed by women.[41]

It is important to note, however, that Aftersun’s success as an original film does not discredit the work of female filmmakers throughout film history in paving the way for an industry crying out for gender equality. Considering the film as a new release, difficulty is found in deciphering the cultural impact of the film; limited academic sources currently exist that incorporate Wells’ work in feminist film discourse. Therefore, individual response and experience is the criterion by which an analysis of Aftersun must be governed, particularly considering Wells’ leverage of the power of nostalgia and affectivity. Furthermore, as a new instalment in the ever shifting, evolving state of feminism in cinema, Aftersun can be traced back to the release of Arden’s sophomore film in 1972 as the blueprint for championing the reclamation of space for women in film. Considering Arden’s role in The Women’s Event at the 66th Edinburgh International Film Festival, Theresa Heath posits that the radical political act of space reclamation seen within (primarily queer) film festivals today ‘can be conceptually understood in relation to film events of the 1970s’.[42] Furthermore, Morvern Callar recently received an exclusive 20th anniversary 35mm screening at the 75th Edinburgh International Film Festival; the same festival which was opened by Aftersun in 2022. An article published by The Scotsman identifies similarities between the Scottish directors’ styles, specifically ‘the innovative way Wells uses rave sequences as a framing device, echoing Ramsay’s then pioneering depiction of club culture’.[43]

Therefore, as an attribute of the 2022 festival circuit, Wells’ debut feature embodies the legacy of the #MeToo movement and the unconventional, pioneering work of Ramsey and Arden in reclaiming filmic space for women. Despite this, whilst The Other Side of the Underneath is successful in its criticism of the patriarchy, Aftersun demonstrates that the depiction of women as monstrous is no longer a necessary device for elevating female voices and feminist issues. This is emphasised by the subtlety of the film’s ending, which omits an explanation regarding the state of Callum’s mental health and sexuality, along with Sophie’s subsequent grief, as the final scene depicts her rewatching videos from their trip on her birthday. Through the soundtrack and incorporation of subjective shots recorded via mini-DVR format, Charlotte Wells and Director of Photography Gregory Oke frame the story as a ‘bittersweet nostalgia trip’ framed through a child’s eyes.[44] Running motifs of hang-gliders and underwater scenes are woven together by 1990s chart music and shaky handheld footage. An arm cast, meditation books and blackouts form the indexical signs of Callum’s emotional damage but, much like Sophie, the viewer is unable to decipher such symbolic sentiments until the film’s ending. Ramsay’s rave sequences serve to depict a ‘subversive portrait of grief’ and Wells uses such scenes in a similar manner, framing the story as it exists in Sophie’s memories.[45] Now the same age as Callum was on their holiday, adult Sophie aligns herself with her father as they dance ‘together under the flashing lights of a crowded, kinetic dancefloor’.[46] The overwhelming nature of the mise-en-scene disorientates the viewer and, in its final rendition, is soundtracked by Queen’s Under Pressure, encapsulating the queer undertones of the film and enhancing the affective intensity of the scene.

To conclude, whilst the films vary in genre and theme, all three works embody an unconventional style that rejects explicit story exposition, harking back to the definition of ‘experiences in discomfort’ as established within the introduction to demonstrate an overt subversion of filmic expectations in favour of elevating women’s voices. A pattern can be detected that attributes Jane Arden’s work as vital in establishing and perpetuating feminism within British cinema through engagement with psychoanalysis. Whilst Arden ascribes to explicit feminist protest against psychiatry, Ramsey and Wells are less unequivocal in their political commentary; advocating instead for a slow cinema that depicts marginalised working-class, queer characters and their personal stories of grief and trauma. Thus, charting the progression of feminist representations in British cinema since the 1970s demonstrates a correlation with cinematic narratives and the socio-political context of their production. Whilst the likes of Kaplan, Creed and Kristeva provide important theoretical framework for analysing feminist cinema, their work is limited in interpreting the intersectionality evident in new British cinema, which is capable of representing a much more diverse female spectatorship through engaging phenomenology.

Bibliography

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Brinkema, Eugenie. The Forms of the Affects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. London; New York: Routledge, 1993.

Culpepper, Scott. “Long May She Reign: Portrayals and Interpretations of Mary, Queen of Scots, in Popular Media”. Dordt University, 2014.

Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator.” Screen 23 no. 3-4 (1982): 74–88. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/23.3-4.74.

Gaal-Holmes, Patti. A History of 1970s Experimental Film: Britain’s Decade of Diversity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

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Hillstrom, Laurie Collier. The #MeToo Movement. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2019.

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Key, Andrew. “Girl Interrupted: Revisiting Jane Arden’s The Other Side of the Underneath.” The Quietus, February 25, 2022. https://thequietus.com/articles/31203-film-jane-arden-other-side-underneath-50-anniversary.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Chapter 4: The Film and the New Psychology” in Sense and Non-Sense. Translated by H. Dreyfus and P. Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. pp.48-59.

Morris, Regan. “Is #meToo changing Hollywood?” BBC News, March 3, 2018. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-43219531

Mulvey, Laura and Anna Backman Rogers. Feminisms: Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press: 2015.

Ryan, Michael and Douglas Kellner. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/projects/camera-politica

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Tarratt. Margaret. “Monsters from the Id,” in Film Genre Reader IV, edited by Grant Barry Keith. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012.

Walker, Alan. Morvern Callar. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995.

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[1] Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica, 137.

[2] The Other Side of the Underneath, DVD, directed by Jane Arden (1972; UK: British Film Institute, 2009).

[3] Andrew Key, “Girl Interrupted: Revisiting Jane Arden’s The Other Side of the Underneath,” The Quietus, February 25, 2022, https://thequietus.com/articles/31203-film-jane-arden-other-side-underneath-50-anniversary

[4] Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 136.

[5] Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan… and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press: 1986), 49.

[6] Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica, 138.

[7] Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers, Feminisms: Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press: 2015).

[8] Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond, 47.

[9] Ilia Ryzhenko, “Cinematic Theatricality, Queer Anachronism and The Favourite.” Screen 63, no. 3 (2002): 346.

[10] Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 1994), 53-54.

[11] Eugenia Brinkema, The Forms of the Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 14.

[12] Brinkema, The Forms of the Affect, 14.

[13] Brinkema, The Forms of the Affect, 8.

[14] Brinkema, The Forms of the Affect, 5.

[15] Scott Culpepper, “Long May She Reign: Portrayals and Interpretations of Mary, Queen of Scots, in Popular Media” (Dordt University, 2014).

[16] Patti Gaal-Holmes, A History of 1970s Experimental Film: Britain’s Decade of Diversity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2015), 106.

[17] Key, “Girl Interrupted: Revisiting Jane Arden’s The Other Side of the Underneath.”

[18] The Other Side of the Underneath, 1972

[19] David Lester, Suicide from a Psychological Perspective (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1988), 9.

[20] Mulvey and Rogers, Feminisms, 20

[21] Elizabeth Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (London; New York: Routledge, 2017), 3.

[22] Carrie, DVD, directed by Brian De Palma (1976; UK: Warner Home Video, 2013).

[23] Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 28.

[24] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.

[25] Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica, 137.

[26] Morvern Callar, DVD, directed by Lynne Ramsay (2002; UK: Universal Pictures UK, 2003).

[27] Bend It Like Beckham, DVD, directed by Gurinder Chadha (UK: Lionsgate, 2002).

[28] Kevin J. Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2012).

[29] Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema, 1.

[30] Alan Walker. Morvern Callar (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 1.

[31] Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, 28.

[32] Josef Steen, “Some Velvet Mourning: Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar at 20,” The Quietus, November 1, 2022. https://thequietus.com/articles/32282-film-morvern-callar-20-anniversary

[33] Walker, Morvern Callar.

[34] Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, 32.

[35] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Chapter 4: The Film and the New Psychology” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H. Dreyfus and P. Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

[36] Laura U. Marks, “Affective Analysis” in Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research Methods, ed. by Celia Lury et al. (London: Routledge, 2018), 156.

[37] Marks, “Affective Analysis”, 156.

[38] Aftersun, MUBI, directed by Charlotte Wells (2022; UK: BBC Films, 2022).

[39] Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator.” Screen 23 no. 3-4 (1982): 74. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/23.3-4.74.

[40] Laurie Collier Hillstrom, The #MeToo Movement (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2019), 70.

[41] Regan Morris, “Is #meToo changing Hollywood?” BBC News, March 3, 2018. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-43219531.

[42] Theresa Heath, “Saving space: strategies of space reclamation at early women’s film festivals and queer film festivals today”. Studies in European Cinema 15, no. 1 (2018).

[43] Alistair Harkness, “Edinburgh International Film Festival Diary: 12 August,” The Scotsman, September 12, 2022. https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/edinburgh-festivals/edinburgh-international-film-festival-diary-12-august-3804401.

[44] Brando Ledet, “Aftersun (2022),” Swampflix, last modified December 8, 2022, https://swampflix.com/2022/12/08/aftersun-2022/

[45] Steen, “Some Velvet Mourning.”

[46] Beth Webb, “Aftersun”, Empire, December 2022, 43.