On Relating: Reflection of Photographer, Andersen’s “Somewhere Else Entirely”

I had the privilege of viewing my PhD supervisor Emily Andersen’s film portrait of poet Ruth Fainlight, which is a deeply poetic experience. It does not just present a life; it reflects a sensibility. Sharing its title with Fainlight’s 2018 poetry collection, the film acts less as a biography and more as an extended metaphor, an exploration of how presence is held in absence, how people live on in words, in memory, in landscape, and in light.

What resonates most is how the film captures the human presence that saturates Fainlight’s work, not through direct depiction, but through what remains: books, letters, objects, fragments of nature, textures of time and place. People appear as shadows, as impressions in language, as gestures in a room. Andersen’s camera does not simply observe; it listens. It absorbs the silence around things, allowing them to speak. Each shot carries the rhythm of a line of poetry, pauses, breaths, small hesitations that feel intimately connected to Fainlight’s voice and vision.

This is a film built on relationality, not just between the filmmaker and the poet, but between the poet and the world: between Ruth and the rooms she inhabits, the books she has touched, the places she has walked. The human is embedded in the inanimate. The lens lingers not just for aesthetic beauty, but because something or someone has passed through. There is an emotional archaeology at work. Traces of life are revealed in the folds of curtains, the grain of wood, the light filtering through leaves.

Andersen’s photographic sensibility gives the film its visual richness. Her use of light, colour, and texture brings a kind of reverence to each frame. There is so much light in this film, so much colour, and with it, a deep respect. Not just for Ruth Fainlight, but for all that surrounds her: for the poetry that holds people inside it, for the landscapes that remember them.

Two scenes in particular have stayed with me. One features a strip of pale blue. At first, I thought I was back in Ruth’s house, staring at a white wall and the familiar texture of a sofa. I believed I was watching the soft flickering of outside the window trees, their shadows  sparkling on the sofa's surface blue. For a moment, I was mesmerised by the interplay of movement and light, certain I was witnessing an interior stillness. But then, the realisation startled me. It was the sea. And the white was the sky. In the next shot, Ruth stood on (Brighton?)  beach. The seamless blending of landscape into domestic texture made me pause. Andersen had gently disoriented me, asking me to look again, to truly see, and in doing so, reframed my assumptions about what holds memory, emotion, and presence.

The second moment was a shot of the night sky with the sharpest, clearest crescent moon. It hit like a shock. It was the first time the film had gone fully dark. While darkness had been spoken of earlier, in memories of grief, in references to Sylvia Plath or Ruth’s late husband Alan, it was here that the emotional gravity became embodied in the visual. The navy almost black sky, pierced by that sliver of moon, held both the silence and the brutality of grief. But the moon also echoed something else: presence. A whisper of “I am still here,” a residual energy. And even in the darkness, the blue lingered.

The structure of the film mirrors Fainlight’s poetry with remarkable precision. Every silence, every return to a previously seen object, mimics the recursive rhythms of a poem that reveals more with each reading. And in this mirroring, the film becomes a poem itself, one concerned not just with language, but with memory, time, and human connection.

One moment from the evening in particular stays with me. Ruth reading her poem The Motorway. In her voice, I felt time collapse. It returned me to childhood road trips, to pylons, hills, and the vastness of a landscape that once seemed endless. Now, as I look out at those same roads, I search the horizon for the point where both sides meet, where past and present, self and other, word and world come together.

In Somewhere Else Entirely, people are everywhere, even when unseen. They live in the textures of place, in the quiet power of objects, in the enduring presence of language. It is a film about the poetry of living and the traces we, and the people we love, leave behind.

To cite:

Rowlands, E (2025), On Relating: Reflection of Photographer, Andersen’s “Somewhere Else Entirely”, (this hyperlink)