Husband and Wife: Affect, Movement and Female Interiority

Monika lives alone in a small city on the east coast of Poland. She is travelling to London to arrange her husband’s funeral. He left his wife and his country and moved to England to earn money and create a better life, but the paradise of London proved false. In February 2016 Monika’s husband committed suicide.

Monika has to maneuver through London and tackle unfamiliar bureaucratic systems and rules in order to take possession of her husband’s body and return him to Poland. Along the way, Monika battles the national embassy and local councils in order to give her husband a funeral. Her struggle exhausts her, but she is not giving up fighting for her rights as wife and a citizen.

The film mixes personal interviews with an observational style, whilst the form of the film takes an affective, tonal approach to the representation of female otherness and her own agency. The film attempts to capture the creative force of action of the character, as well as her interior subjectivities. Theoretically, the film draws upon Lucy Bolton’s mobilisation of Luce Irigaray’s feminist critique and the concept of female interiority. Bolton notes that rhythm, gesture and light have the potential to constitute a visual language for depicting female interiority (Bolton, 2015: 52). The film reflects the rhythm of interior and exterior movements, from the physical to political. It concentrates on the body in space: the journey between the UK and Poland, the movement through the streets of London, small gestures, and engagements with personal objects. Through an affective visual form, the film presents a physical and emotional journey of a woman regaining some form of autonomy.

Rereference: Bolton, L. (2015 [2011]), Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.