̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - screen media

Grand designs: the role of the house in American film

amb206 — Fri, 27 May 2016 13:51:41 +0000

̽��ֱ��Lonely Villa tells the story of four women subjected to a terrifying break-in by intruders. A woman barricades herself and her daughters into the house as her absent husband, alerted by a phone call, hastens to their rescue. In the opening shot, the villains are seen lurking in the shrubbery of the handsome all-American home that stands in splendid isolation, an icon of the property-owning dream.

Rhodes’ exploration of the house in American cinema has taken him deep into the history and theory of both film and architecture, and will result in a book due for publication in 2017. He is Director of the newly launched Centre for Film and Screen, which brings together researchers from subjects as diverse as English, philosophy, history of art, architecture and languages, and continues a tradition of teaching and research on the subject of film since the 1960s.

“Houses are built to be lived in but also to be looked at – and you only have to switch on your television to see how much they fascinate us,” he says. “In watching cinema, too, we are forever looking at and into people’s houses. Cinema’s preoccupation with the house stems from cinema’s strong relation to realism and to the representation of human lives, a large portion of which plays out in domestic interiors.”

Central to Rhodes’ research into films that range from Meet Me in St Louis and Gone with the Wind to Psycho and Citizen Kane is the idea of property and possession as well as their opposites – alienation and dispossession. It’s a theme that flows through the cinematic experience right to the temporary possession of the seat in which the viewer watches a film and enters the intimate spaces of other people’s lives. “Property reigns in many aspects of the cinema experience,” he says. “Not just in the drama unfolding on the screen itself but also in the process of film-making, practices of production, distribution and exhibition.”

Rhodes suggests that the pleasure we take in immersing ourselves in the visual and sensual experiences of entering other people’s worlds has an antecedent in country house tours and, most specifically, the collections known as ‘cabinets of curiosities’. Objects acquired to display and impress, these museum-like collections are examples of belonging and, by the same token, of not belonging. “At the heart of visual pleasure is a constant negotiation of property boundaries,” says Rhodes. “It’s a question of mine but not yours – of inviting in yet keeping out.”

Revealed to a chosen few guests, cabinets of curiosities and their modern equivalents speak powerfully of their owner’s taste. A short film titled House: After Five Years of Living (1955) perfectly encapsulates the house as an object of desire and as a container for carefully curated possessions. Directed by designers Charles and Ray Eames, it shows their modernist house – one they designed themselves – in a series of stills that venerate this landmark building and its collection of modern and folk art, textiles and design objects. Neither of its owners appears yet their presence is palpable through the framing, shot by shot, of the house they created to work so beautifully in its Californian context.

Ownership is not confined to buildings but extends to those who live and work in them. Rhodes says that his thesis is implicitly feminist. His forthcoming book will draw attention to the ways in which, in film and in real life, women are forced into uncomfortably close relationships with the home, becoming part of the same parcel of ownership.

An even more tightly binding relationship is played out between servant and home, particularly in the representation of African American slavery in the American South following the Civil War. Two thirds of the way into Gone with the Wind, the servant girl Prissy looks up at her employers’ newly constructed mansion and exclaims: “We sure is rich now!” ̽��ֱ��viewer is apparently invited to laugh both at her delight and at her naivety, and in a manner that only repeats the film’s explicit racism. Yet the spectator is also the butt of this joke.

“This shot is a kind of ‘hall of mirrors’ of property relations,” says Rhodes. “ ̽��ֱ��cinema audience looks at the image which was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s property. Inside the image, the servants gaze up at the property of the house. But if we look carefully we see that there is no house there: what they are really looking at is either a painted background or else a matt painting inserted in the post-production process. Whether or not the image was there when the scene was shot, what they are looking at is a ‘prop’.”

̽��ֱ��word prop is, of course, an abbreviation for property. ̽��ֱ��house, as the ultimate prop, takes many forms, its physical form acting as a powerful pointer. ̽��ֱ��mansion and the bungalow, the rambling shingle and stick-style residence, the modernist home with its picture windows: all convey messages (about status, class, race, politics) and shape the action that takes place within them.

“In much of the US, the possession of land, even if it’s a tiny strip of grass separating one house from another, is fundamental to a feeling of ownership. ̽��ֱ��bungalow was initially seen as a space for easeful, convenient living – but this modest home quickly came to spell failure,” says Rhodes. “If you think about entrances and exits, a suburban home with a hallway allows for a gradual transition from outside to inside while a bungalow offers none of that dignity. ̽��ֱ��cramped space of the bungalow leads to too much intimacy and to uncomfortable confrontations.”

Dwelling places are objects of desire – especially so in the affluent Western world. Our homes absorb our money and eat into our time: perhaps, in the process of acquisition, they own us just as much as we own them. As backdrops to our lives, they tell stories about the kind of people we are and would like to be. In film, and on the screen, houses convey multiple meanings – not just about class and status but also about childhood and our relationship with history.

When a house is broken into, a dream is shattered. In Griffith’s ̽��ֱ��Lonely Villa, the ruffians are hampered by the solidity of the house’s doors and the weight of the furniture pushed up against them. All ends well when the mother and daughters are rescued, just in time, by the man of the house. But property is fragile and, in the final reckoning, all ownership is a question of controlling impermanent and shifting borders.

Inset image: Credit, ̽��ֱ��District.

It’s black and white, silent and just short of ten minutes in length. But D.W. Griffith’s 1909 classic ̽��ֱ��Lonely Villa inspired Dr John David Rhodes, Director of Cambridge’s new Centre for Film and Screen, to look at the role and meaning of the house in American cinema.

Houses are built to be lived in but also to be looked at – you only have to switch on your television to see how much they fascinate us.

John David Rhodes

Biograph Company Production

Screenshots from D.W. Griffith’s ̽��ֱ��Lonely Villa (1909)

Centre for Film and Screen

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has fostered teaching and research on the subject of film since the 1960s, with pioneering work undertaken in the 1970s-80s by influential figures such as Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe. Over time, film studies rose in prominence across the ̽��ֱ��’s faculties. In 2008, Cambridge’s strengths in this subject were consolidated with the launch of the ̽��ֱ��’s first MPhil in Screen and Media Cultures.

From this heritage of Cambridge’s thoughtful consideration of the art of the moving image, the new Centre for Film and Screen has been developed. Although based mainly in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, the Centre is truly interdisciplinary, featuring researchers from across subjects as diverse as English, Philosophy, History of Art, Architecture and Languages.

This year, the Centre is launching the ̽��ֱ��’s first ever PhD programme in Film and Screen Studies, to complement the existing MPhil course and to enable doctoral students to join the active and varied film and screen studies research culture at Cambridge and participate in the Centre’s teaching, research and seminars.

Cambridge itself is a cinematic city. Its architectural beauty and history have, over the years, made it a very attractive location for film production. ̽��ֱ��city is home to a thriving art cinema and numerous film and arts festivals, including the annual Cambridge Film Festival. Many of the Colleges of the ̽��ֱ�� have film screening programmes and host visiting filmmakers.

̽��ֱ��broader culture of the ̽��ֱ�� has long been associated with creativity and dynamism in the arts and humanities, and continues to produce some of the most noteworthy names in the film and television industry, such as actors Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston and director Sam Mendes. Cambridge’s postgraduate degrees in Film and Screen Studies combine the wealth of the ̽��ֱ��’s humanistic traditions with innovative inquiry into the contemporary culture of the moving image.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Death and the image: an introduction to palliative filmmaking

bjb42 — Tue, 29 May 2012 14:17:41 +0000

You don’t see her slip away, even though you are watching. A woman lies motionless in bed for 13 minutes, attended at intervals by nurses and her daughter – the artist Sophie Calle. Without these intrusions you might think you were looking at a still photograph. By the end of the film clip the woman has moved from life to death, but the point at which she dies remains invisible.

̽��ֱ��clip is part of an art installation by Calle called You Couldn’t Capture Death, which is one of the contemporary artworks explored by Professor Emma Wilson from the Department of French in her new book Love, Mortality and the Moving Image. In the book, Wilson’s research involves moving image artists who are working with the space between life and death in a variety of ways – from home movies to photographic collages.

Wilson, who is also Course Director of the ̽��ֱ��’s MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures, examines the way different artists use both moving and still images to generate works as a coping mechanism for the emotional wrench that comes with the death of loved ones – and how we use visual media to see the dead as living, helping to manage the pain of loss.

“I’m interested in artists who are using their own intimate experiences to test how far a moving image artwork can offer recall of the deceased as still responsive,” said Wilson. “Art and its creation can be used to organise experience, the editing process allowing a sense of control in the face of brute, annihilating emotions.”

“I wanted to investigate moves from family acts of mourning to more public acts – the instigation of dialogue around death through moving image displays. In the case of Calle, the installation was a space that could be entered, opening the private experience up to other views and opinions.”

Wrapping, soothing, holding

Calle’s controversial installation contained details of the last book her mother read, her last trip to the coast and the inscription she wanted on her gravestone. A sense of the active planning for death that mother and daughter went through becomes part of the artwork. In this way, aspects of these artworks could be seen as ‘palliative’, providing a framework to assist with preparation for eternal separation.

In health care terms, palliative refers to ‘end of life’ care in which treatment protocols are established and the emphasis is on well-being and dignity as an individual prepares to conclude their life. Artworks like Calle’s can be seen to feed into this ethos, regarding death as a natural process that to an extent may be planned for.

Palliative derives from the Latin word ‘palliare’, meaning ‘to cloak’. Moving image art can contribute to this ‘cloaking’ in a number of ways. Cloaking can be allied with covering, enclosing, wrapping, soothing and holding. One of the works that Wilson gives a close reading of in the book strives for this embracing of a dying loved one through moving and still images – both commemorating and ‘cloaking’ them with the camera.

In her work Jacquot de Nantes, the filmmaker Agnès Varda interposes still images of herself and her husband Jacques Demy with moving film footage she took of him during the last months of his life. They knew Demy was dying, and Varda wanted to build a collage of her husband by overlaying different forms of visual tribute.

Varda created a photographic inventory of Demy as he existed – close-ups of his hair, skin, eyes and so on – and blended it with reconstructions of Demy’s childhood and extracts from his films to create a sensory impression of the person, the idea of the palliative seen in the attention of the camera to the body and the subjectivity of the person facing death – the same type of respect and tenderness.

̽��ֱ��use of photography for direct commemoration that addresses death without flinching dates back to the 19th century, when common memorial practices included mortuary photography, the creation of daguerreotypes depicting the bodies of loved ones as if they are sleeping. For many people, the only pictorial record of their existence came when they had ceased to exist.

Hidden memory

Some argue that photography innately carries the reminder of death by ‘stilling’ a person – capturing a moment that will never be again. “There is a range of theory around this subject. ̽��ֱ��theorist Roland Barthes tells us that mortality is inherent in all photography, it creates a ‘temporal slip’ that draws attention to the emotion frozen in time,” said Wilson. “ ̽��ֱ��moving image as a medium however can present the subject as living by depicting action – so that boundaries between living and dead are, if only in illusory form, disturbed.”

Bringing the dead ‘to life’ as it were through moving images is also addressed in the book’s analysis of Alina Marazzi’s film For One More Hour With You, in which the filmmaker reconstructs a vision of her mother through home movies and family photos. Marazzi’s mother committed suicide when the filmmaker was a young child, and Wilson explores how Marazzi creates a version of her mother, and develops a relationship with a woman she barely knew through the imagery.

“Home movies have been used in acts of mourning since the earliest available cameras,” explained Wilson. “In this work, Marazzi both creates and seeks the kick of hidden memory. As this was recovered footage it gives the illusion of a fresh glance of the dead still living, allowing her to address a part of her past previously uncharted.”

“I use Marazzi’s film to examine representations of childhood memory in moving images, and how it can be a conduit for emotion, as the filmmaker is introduced through film to her mother as a child, and how this relates to memories of her mother from her own childhood.”

̽��ֱ��camera can be seen to allow access to the dead as living, or to the trauma of a loved one dying – Calle has said that having the camera in her mother’s room as she died was her way of being there in every respect that she could. But the camera can also create distance, reflecting and acknowledging the fact that death is ungraspable.

Alternative narratives

In palliative health care, thought is given to pathways and the stages that one faces. For Wilson, artists exploring this area can offer opportunities to imagine a variety of journeys through the extreme emotions involved in losing people to death.

“It’s not about finding a programmatic way of coping through art, but looking at how this kind of work can offer alternative narratives of death – by inviting people to share an example of how one person managed the loss of a loved one.”

Visually invoking and describing the dead will continue to be reinterpreted as technologies progress. Today, the images of those we’ve lost linger in the photo indexes of our smartphones and Facebook pages – testament to the power of the image, moving or otherwise, to prolong the illusion of a living presence, at the same time as it embodies the fleeting nature of all life, by trapping forever a moment never to be recaptured.

Love, Mortality and the Moving Image by Emma Wilson is available from Palgrave Macmillan.

A new book by Professor Emma Wilson from the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages looks at how death is addressed through modern artworks based in visual media.

Art and its creation can be used to organise experience, the editing process allowing a sense of control in the face of brute, annihilating emotions.

Professor Emma Wilson

Agnès Varda

Still from the film ̽��ֱ��Beaches of Agnès (2008), directed by Agnès Varda

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