Home is the culmination of both my filmic and artistic view. This short experimental film fuses European art cinema traditions, meditatively questioning grief, loneliness and alienation. It is also, in part, a homage to Antonioni. The film was shot in June 2019, with heavy winds in Silloth. It’s a special place to me personally, as the sea town occupied a large part of my childhood. It ultimately was important to me to showcase the northern landscape in which I grew up - whilst expanding my love of art cinema.

Fraser Cornall is a film student at Lancaster University. The wide, open and windy seaside town of Silloth sets the stage for his debut film. Cornall notes it as a place special to him - as he spent a large part of his childhood there. Adding to those personal touches - is the lead actor - his girlfriend - and the musical score produced by friend Louis Deane with vocals from Esther Walker. Cornall's goal as a film maker, is to create art connected to his northern upbringing; he wants it to be imbued with his friends and family throughout. The story is of an existential journey through grief which reaches it's finale at the beach. The style is an amalgamation of an obsession with slow motion and an adoration for the likes of Fassbinder, Antonioni and Varda, among others. His next step, is a film masters.

The purpose of this study is to explore the lonely woman; the abstract character type, alone in a relationship. This figure appears across European art cinema of the 60s and 70s. My particular case studies rest with Antonioni, Godard and Fassbinder. The research will investigate the formal elements of La Notte (Antonioni, 1961), Contempt (Godard,1963) and Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder,1974), mounting an argument that each lonely woman functions uniquely to each director. The results show the cinematic other is objectified to tackle broader critical arguments: a crumbling Italian society, a French culture built on a woman’s sexuality and a Germany clinging to Nazism. The lonely woman is furthered in Home (Cornall,2020) to bring forward this complex other; bolstering a critique on society; a mediation on grief and loneliness.