Présages
2023 · 11m · UK
Directed by Joanna Hogg
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
British filmmaker Joanna Hogg wanders Los Angeles in winter — its empty hotels and shuttered cinemas — meditating on memory, mortality, and a story that has not yet revealed itself to her, delivered as a fragmented first-person monologue over static shots of an indifferent city.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A film about not being able to make a film, disguised as a Los Angeles travelogue — only someone deeply annoying could make this work, and Joanna Hogg is exactly that annoying in the best possible way.
Hogg treats her own creative block as subject — a Pompidou commission about the film that doesn't exist yet, in the Marker / Varda first-person essay tradition. Quiet, recursive, only fully legible to her admirers.
Joanna Hogg doing a Centre Pompidou-commissioned first-person essay on her own creative block while wandering empty winter LA is exactly the kind of unflashy, watchful work I'd queue for. Marker/Varda lineage is doing some lifting in the comparisons, but Hogg's eye for the indifference of architecture is well-suited.
Reviews
Présages feels diaristic in the good and the bad ways — revealing and mysteriously meaningful; oblique and somewhat dull.
There is so much history here and maybe it's the constant regeneration that creates layers of ghosts, the layers of the past.
Festivals
- D'A Film Festival 2025