Last year, I enjoyed Charlotte Wells’s film Aftersun.

I recently learned that Wells had made a previous 11-minute short film which was particularly well-regarded: Tuesday. The whole thing can be streamed for free on her website.

It’s a short film centred on a Scottish sixteen-year-old girl’s experience of grief, most of it—like most of the emotion in Aftersun—unexpressed and repressed.

I noticed that Tuesday felt like it was, emotionally, at a remove from the viewer. I felt like an observer, rather than someone involved in the central character’s emotional life. This was similar to my response to Aftersun, and it’s made me reevaluate it: perhaps that was, in fact, Wells’s intent in both films.

There is something interesting about casting the viewer as an observer, about keeping the characters at a distance. It’s also something that must be difficult to achieve when the emotions explored in both films are such strong, universal feelings.

You already know that I know nothing about cinema; this short film made me realise that I perhaps missed the point, the artistic intent, of that longer one.

Maybe I’m learning… though writing about ‘Tuesday’ on a Monday perhaps shows I could learn a little more about good blogging technique.