Wed, Oct 9, 2024, 12:15 –12:50 pm Auditorium 140 Artist Talk Image This essay will compare Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir II (2021), with recent work by the self-taught actor turned director, Mia Hansen-Løve. Hogg’s project painstakingly recreates her early experience of film school while Hansen-Løve’s film, Bergman Island (2021) depicts a young filmmaker working against the prescriptive models, themes, and contexts of creation set by that of the male auteur. While Hansen-Løve specifically resists autobiographical readings, Hogg’s practice is more intentionally autobiographical, with mother and daughter Tilda Swinton (Hogg’s longtime friend) and Honor Swinton Byrne cast as younger versions of the director as a film student and her own mother. I argue that these films are contemporary examples of autotheory, as defined by Lauren Fournier, in Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism in which the author comments on a recent autotheoretical trend or turn in culture with legacies to earlier feminist practice. As works of performance, each presents a self-conscious reflection about the way in which film itself allows one to explore, extend, and reflect on previous experience. I will show how the films use formal experimental and aesthetic practices and strategies that call attention to their own processes of making, blurring the line between fiction and documentary in casting, setting, and set design by showing links to potential art filmic feminist legacies (Varda, etc.), as well as the aesthetics of experimental televisual genres like music video.