Film and Domestic Space: Architectures, Representations, Dispositif

Although film and media studies have widely engaged with the different aspects of social space, domestic space in film has rarely been studied in its multiple dimensions. Drawing on a broad range of theoretical disciplines and with case studies of directors such as Chantal Akerman, Agnes Varda, Claire Denis, Todd Haynes, Amos Gitai, Martin Ritt, John Ford, Ila Beka and Louise Lemoine this book goes beyond the representational approach to the analysis of domestic space in cinema, in order to look at it as a dispositif. Adopting this innovative two-fold approach that couples representation and dispositif, the home is studied as an architecture, as the place that embodies, defines and perpetuates the family history, as the milieu of gender and generational struggle, as well as the first site where manifestations of power unfold. All chapters contribute to explore, unpack the complexities and expand on the richness encapsulated in the notion of domesticity and dwelling in its fascinating relation to moving images.

Table of Contents:
Introduction by Stefano Baschiera and Miriam De Rosa Chapter One: Architectures of Ubiquity: The Colonial Revival in Film and Television, by John David Rhodes Chapter Two: No Down Payment: Whiteness, Japanese American Masculinity, and Architectural Space in the Cinematic Suburbs, by Merrill Schleier Chapter Three: Resist, Redefine, Appropriate: Negotiating the Domestic Space in Contemporary Female Biopics, by Victoria Pastor González Chapter Four: Liminal Spaces, Lesbian Desire and Veering off Course in Todd Haynes’ Carol, by Anna Backman Rogers Chapter Five: A Home on the Road in Claire Denis’ Vendredi Soir, by Maud Ceuterick Chapter Six: Acoustic Ectoplasm and the Loss of Home, by Beth Carroll Chapter Seven: Our House Now: Flat and Reversible Home Spaces in Post-War Film and Television, by Adrian Martin Chapter Eight: From Myth to Reality: Images of Domestic Space in Post-Soviet Baltic Films, by Lukas Brašiškis and Nerijus Milerius Chapter Nine: No | Home | Movie: Essay Film, Architecture as Framing and the Non-House, by Laura Rascaroli Chapter Ten: At Home with the Nouvelle Vague: Apartment Plots and Domestic Urbanism in Godard’s Une femme est une femme and Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, by Stefano Baschiera Chapter Eleven: Dwelling the Open: Amos Gitai and the Home of Cinema, by Miriam De Rosa Chapter Twelve: What Is Cult When It’s At Home?: Reframing Cult Cinema in Relation to Domestic Space, by Iain Robert Smith Chapter Thirteen: High Fructose Cinema and The Movie Industrial Complex: Radicalizing The Technology of Representation in a Domestic Kind of Way, by Bryan Konefsky

About the Author :
Stefano Baschiera is Professor of Film Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the co-editor of Italian Horror Cinema (2016, EUP), Film and Domestic Space (2020, EUP) and World Cinema on Demand (2022, Bloomsbury). Miriam De Rosa is Research Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University. She researches and publishes on film theories, experimental cinema, artists’ moving images and screen media arts. She is the author of Cinema e Postmedia (2013), the editor of Post-what? Post-when? Thinking moving images beyond the postcinema condition (with Vinzenz Hediger, 2016) and of the forthcoming Gesture (2019). De Rosa also works as an independent film and exhibition curator.

Review :
Film and Domestic Space is a very well-curated and thought-provoking collection which brings together varied conceptual and methodological approaches to domestic space. It is a welcome addition to scholarship on space and place in cinema and an extremely useful resource for both research and teaching. Film and Domestic Space is a rich and thought-provoking edited collection that successfully manages to show how domestic space is far from being a stable concept. Overall this collection characterizes very convincingly the domestic as a liminal space, a threshold where the relationship with the external world is constantly reframed and never fully contained. [...] the attention to shifting forms of spectatorship provided by many of these essays can only add to this timely book’s general appeal. Film and Domestic Space offers a robust investigation of the myriad relations between film and domestic space. With attention to the different kinds of domestic spaces represented across various global cinemas, the volume considers the central place of home in the cinema, and of the cinema in the home.