Re Zoe Williams’ thought-provoking article (The crying game: what Hamnet’s grief-porn debate says about women, cinema – and enormous hawks, 16 January), the tensions between grief-art and grief-porn have been around for decades in British cinema, never more so than when Jane Arden’s The Other Side of the Underneath was released in 1973.
In addition to being the only British feature film to be directed by a woman in the whole of the 1970s, this powerful and harrowing work openly declared its theme to be “women’s pain”, and anyone who has seen the film would strongly affirm that it lives up to its brief. There is still nothing else like it, for the rawness of its emotions and the haunting quality of its visuals.
Locked away for years in the British Film Institute’s vaults by Arden’s creative associate Jack Bond, apparently traumatised by Arden’s sudden death in 1982, the BFI bravely reissued the film in 2009. Unlike the makers of Hamnet and H is for Hawk, more recent viewers will have seen that Arden clearly did not have her sights set on Oscars, Baftas or any other mainstream prizes.
But is it grief-porn or grief-art? Emphatically the latter, but it’s the art of that “other Britain”, where lips are never stiff, or upper, and everyone can hear you scream.
Sean Kaye-Smith
Bristol
