Women and Home in Cinema Form, Feeling, Practice

PALGRAVE CLOSE READINGS
IN FILM AND TELEVISION
Women and Home

in Cinema
Form, Feeling, Practice
Louise Radinger Field
Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television
Series Editors
John Gibbs
Department of Film, Theatre & Television
University of Reading
Reading, UK
Doug Pye
Department of Film, Theatre & Television
University of Reading
Reading, UK
Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television is an innovative series of
research monographs and collections of essays dedicated to extending the
methods and subjects of detailed criticism. Volumes in the series – written
from a variety of standpoints and dealing with diverse topics – are unified
by attentiveness to the material decisions made by filmmakers and a com-
mitment to develop analysis and reflection from this foundation. Each
volume will be committed to the appreciation of new areas and topics in
the field, but also to strengthening and developing the conceptual basis
and the methodologies of critical analysis itself. The series is based in the
belief that, while a scrupulous attention to the texture of film and televi-
sion programmes requires the focus of concept and theory, the discoveries
that such attention produces become vital in questioning and re-
formulating theory and concept.
Women and Home in

Cinema
Form, Feeling, Practice
London, UK
ISSN 2634-6133 ISSN 2634-6141 (electronic)

Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television
ISBN 978-3-031-40032-2 ISBN 978-3-031-40033-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40033-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2024
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Paper in this product is recyclable.

To my grandmother Lily Radinger
A refugee who made me feel at home
About the Book
This book looks at representations of home in cinema through the lens of

film practice. It investigates how filmmakers transform solid forms (be
they sets or real locations) into onscreen architecture imbued with mean-
ing and expressivity. It discusses a selection of films made between 1936
and 2013 with the familiar figure of a woman in a home at the heart of the
drama. The book focuses on four filmmaking processes in particular:
découpage, mise-en-scène, sound and editing. Each chapter covers one of
these cinematic ‘building blocks’ and discusses how it is used to reshape
domestic space in contrasting ways. As each process is clarified, its related
critical theory is challenged and reassessed. For these filmmakers this
iconic image acts as a catalyst, lure and provocation. A broader impulse
can be discerned in their work, nourished by the rich and metaphorical
connections that obtain between the architectural interior and the world
of the inner self. The book explores ways in which physical architecture in
the films is shaped by the structural architecture of the films (how they are
assembled, put together, ‘built’). The woman at the core of each film
inhabits several interconnected structures at once. Close analysis reveals a
rich and metonymic chain of association between cinematic syntax, archi-
tectural forms and psychic identity.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: A Woman Walks into a House… 1
2 Découpage: Planning the House 19
3 Mise-en-scène: Creating Rooms 63
4 Sound: Building the Invisible111
5 Editing: Radical Reconstructions153
6 Postscript: Moving House199
Index207
ix
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 The room pre-dissolve in Craig’s Wife25

Fig. 2.2 The stately dissolve in Craig’s Wife26
Fig. 2.3 The final scene of Craig’s Wife34
Fig. 2.4 Mabel marks her territory in A Woman Under the Influence44
Fig. 2.5 Mabel stands on the threshold in A Woman Under the Influence54
Fig. 3.1 Larry watches Maggie leave in Strangers When We Meet64
Fig. 3.2 Plan of Jeanne’s apartment (drawn by author) 70
Fig. 3.3 Georges Perec’s plan of the building in Life, A User’s Manual
(printed here with kind permission from Sylvia Robertson and
provided by Fonds Georges Perec, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal,
Paris, cote: FGP 110) 78
Fig. 3.4 Jeanne comes to a halt in Jeanne Dielman80
Fig. 3.5 Jeanne stands still in her corridor in Jeanne Dielman81
Fig. 3.6 Jeanne taking her regular bath in Jeanne Dielman82
Fig. 3.7 Jeanne in commune with objects in her kitchen in
Jeanne Dielman83
Fig. 3.8 The ‘viewing window’ in Exhibition91
Fig. 3.9 The ‘dreaming window’ in Exhibition93
Fig. 3.10 The ‘spectacular window’ in Exhibition95
Fig. 3.11 The ‘voyeur window’ in Exhibition96
Fig. 3.12 The ‘concealing window’ in Exhibition97
Fig. 4.1 Celia stands between worlds in Secret Beyond the Door129
Fig. 4.2 Celia and Mark in the room of acousmêtres in Secret
Beyond the Door131
Fig. 4.3 Kit cut out of the conversation at Scotland Yard in
Midnight Lace138
Fig. 4.4 Kit alerted by the pink phone in Midnight Lace143
xi
xii List of Figures
Fig. 5.1 Deren steps out of her room onto the beach 154
Fig. 5.2 ...and onto the pavement 155
Fig. 5.3 ...and back into her room 155
Fig. 5.4 Hershey‘s head is forcefully doubled (image from Outer Space
courtesy of the artist and sixpackfilm) 174
Fig. 5.5 Hershey under attack (image from Outer Space courtesy of the
artist and sixpackfilm) 175
Fig. 5.6 Filmstrip with sprocket holes and optical soundtrack attack
Hershey (image from Outer Space courtesy of the artist and
sixpackfilm)175
Fig. 5.7 The House in three-screen projection (image courtesy of the
artist and Kristallisilmä/Crystal Eye) 180
Fig. 5.8 Cow crosses between worlds (image from The House courtesy
of the artist and Kristallisilmä/Crystal Eye) 187
Fig. 5.9 The empty spaces (image from The House courtesy of the artist
and Kristallisilmä/Crystal Eye) 190
Fig. 5.10 ‘The Tent House’ (Ahtila 2004) (image courtesy of the artist
and Kristallisilmä/Crystal Eye) 192
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: A Woman Walks into

a House…
Interiority in films is a spatial construct dependent on visual illusion.

—Maureen Turim
This book explores the metamorphosis of home in cinema into a place

shaped by emotion and suffused with metaphorical power. My aim is to
understand how filmmakers achieve this spatial transformation and to
arrive at a clearer understanding of why they do so. Through this route I
hope to encourage a fresh critical approach towards a series of films in
which the tropic figure of a woman in a home is placed at the heart of the
drama. The task is to examine how filmmakers tackle real-life, solid struc-
tures (be they sets or real locations) and requisition them for their own
creative purposes using the cinematic tools available to them. My concerns
are shaped by what I perceive to be a deep affiliation between the two
structuring arts of cinema and architecture. Both arts structure space and
spatial experience, and understanding ways in which these practices over-
lap, inform, and complement one another becomes generative when delv-
ing into how space behaves onscreen. In her study of the re-framing of
architecture in avant-garde cinema, Maureen Turim formulates their con-
junction in the following manner:
One visual structure, architectonic, stable, fixed, embued with the power to
symbolize, as well as determine the movements of surrounding activities, is
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2024
L. Radinger Field, Women and Home in Cinema,
Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40033-9_1
2 L. RADINGER FIELD
submitted to the bold and active force of another visual structure (that of
the film) to transform. (Turim 1991: 37)
Turim’s concise theorisation of the way architecture and filmmaking inter-

act with one another underpins my overall approach. How do filmmakers
approach the architecture of the home? How do they ‘unbuild’ solid,
material structures and reconfigure them through the ‘bold and active
force’ of the filmmaking process, and to what effect? What do the archi-
tectural structures of home mean to them and how do they make that
clear onscreen? And with regard to atmosphere, how does inside space
‘feel’ and how does one convey that in cinematic terms? Part of this ‘tack-
ling’ activity involves a primary ‘noticing’ of architectonics in the first
place, and a caring about it. All of the films I discuss in this book are sensi-
tive to the architectural space of the home and our imaginative relation-
ship with it. The filmmakers apperceive that the material forms and shapes
with which we are surrounded not only shape the way we lead our daily
lives but contribute towards the way we shape ourselves internally. Homes
are shaped by us, and they also shape us. The cinematic medium is uniquely
able to transcribe this relationship and bring it onto the screen in cinemat-
ically specific ways.
Two spatially structuring devices come together and interact, as Turim
describes, and it is a process which sheds light on the expressivity of both
mediums. But what we also find set into motion through their mutually
informative interaction is a rich and curious interplay between metonymic
levels of signification. The architecture we see in the films is reshaped by
the structural architecture of the films (how they are assembled, put
together, ‘built’). The form of each film is shaped by the form of the
buildings they portray. The women at the heart of the narratives dwell in
a series of nested, analogous structures. They inhabit physical structures in
the films, but at the same time they occupy the audiovisual structures of
the films. Once the film is made, audiences are invited to gaze into the
homes they see onscreen and imaginatively occupy them, albeit briefly.
They also enter into a relationship with the filmic constructions them-
selves‚ and going to the cinema (or watching a film in any context) can be
described as an act of temporary dwelling inside that audiovisual experience.
It is the architecture of the home (or what is less portentously called
‘domestic space’) to which I am drawn and to the modalities in which
women interact with it in cinema. The image of a woman inside a house is
a familiar one. Holland and Sherman coin the bald term ‘woman +
1 INTRODUCTION: A WOMAN WALKS INTO A HOUSE… 3
habitation’ to sum up the figuration.1 This coupling is entrenched in the

cultural and political imaginary and though contested, it remains insistent,
reiterated and reinforced. My aim here is to prise open the figure’s recip-
rocal invocation on film to show its underlying mutability and strangeness.
This requires me to engage with and then move beyond the common
perception of the home as a feminine sphere. House and home have been
key figures in the cultural construction of femininity. It is evident the
home has been viewed as a woman’s domain for a very long time, and that
‘discourses of space and sexuality cannot be separated’ (Mark Wigley
1992: 357). It has been hard for feminist enquiry to find positive valence
to the idea of home. The purposes to which the gendered allocation of the
public and private spheres have been put are specific, insidious, and his-
torically traceable. ‘It is clear that the public-private distinction is gen-
dered’ writes Nancy Duncan in BodySpace. ‘This binary opposition is
employed to legitimate oppression and dependence on the basis of gen-
der; it has also been used to regulate sexuality’ (1996: 128). ‘The attempt
to confine women to the domestic sphere’, states Doreen Massey in her
book Space, Place and Gender, ‘was both a specifically spatial control and,
through that, a social control on identity’ (1994: 179). Tracing the source
of the association back to Antiquity is common in feminist spatial critique.
It signals a diagnostic drive to find out ‘where it all began’ and literature
on the subject is extensive (Colomina 1992; Wigley 1992; Bergren 1993;
Grosz 1994; Bruno 2007, to name a few). ‘For millennia’ writes Iris
Marion Young in ‘House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme’,
‘the image of Penelope sitting by the hearth and weaving, saving and pre-
serving the home while her man roams the earth in daring adventures, has
defined one of Western culture’s basic ideas of womanhood’ (2005: 123).
‘Ulysses has a place of return’ writes Giuliana Bruno, ‘an emotional-archi-
tectural container with a woman in it’ (2007: 80). The delegation of
domestic space to women as an environment which ‘suits’, ‘fits’ and even
physically resembles them can be traced to early architectural discourse,
which drew a connection between the shape of buildings and the shape of
the human body. In ‘The Body as House’ Marjorie Garber provides a
concise account of this association as it evolved in theory and practice
(Garber 2012). ‘The body is a house, the house of the soul claimed a
medieval treatise on the interior of the body’, she explains, but ‘since a
woman’s body was ‘open’, its boundaries convoluted, the inside-out ver-
sion of a man’s, she needed a second ‘house’, a building’ (Garber 125).
The fifteenth century treatise on architecture by Renaissance architect
4 L. RADINGER FIELD
Leon Battista Alberti is equally as definitive. Women were to be seques-

tered ‘deep within the house for their own protection’ and allocated com-
fortable apartments in order to (in Alberti’s words) ‘relieve their delicate
minds from the tedium of confinement’ (126). These inherited ideas were
rooted in archaic thought and culture. The Roman architect and engineer
Vitruvius developed ‘the analogy between the human body and architec-
ture’ and formulated ways in which public buildings should be designed
according to the exact proportions of a ‘finely shaped’ human body
(Garber 123).2 Bodily features, measurements and characteristics were
considered, and their architectural equivalences sought out. Physical attri-
butes and bodily functions (such as those differentiating the ‘lower’ excre-
tory organs from the ‘higher’ bodily organs of heart and brain) became
spatially represented and hierarchised and, inevitably and over time,
increasingly inflected by gender. Vitruvius, in turn, was also influenced by
earlier ideas, particularly those formulated by the fourth century BC Greek
writer Xenophon, who insisted that ‘the gods made women for indoor,
and man for outdoor, pursuits’ (Garber 126). Garber neatly summarises
the bleak formula that emerges from all of this: ‘The man moves; the
woman remains at home. In essence she is the home’ (126). This deep-
seated ‘picture of the world’, as Teresa de Lauretis describes it, has been
‘produced in mythical thought since the very beginning of culture’. It
seems predicated on ‘what we call biology’ and de Lauretis cites the semi-
otic theory of Jurÿ Lotman as an extreme example. Lotman identifies the
basic principle of mythical narrative thus: ‘Woman is the place, man is the
hero’. Lauretis explores the implications of this:
Opposite pairs such as inside/outside, the raw/the cooked, or life/death

appear to be merely derivatives of the fundamental opposition between
boundary and passage;… all these terms are predicated on the single figure
of the hero who crosses the boundary and penetrates the other space. In so
doing the hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as
male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the
creator of differences. Female is what is not susceptible to transformation, to
life or death; she (it) is an element of plot-space, a topos, a resistance, matrix
and matter. (de Lauretis 1984: 119)
But the home is a mutable place in cinema. The houses and apartments
in these films are not fixed, static containers and the women who voyage
inside them are most certainly susceptible to transformation. The
environments we see on screen are all, to a greater or lesser extent, struc-

tured by the mental processes of the characters who live inside them and,
prior to that, by those of the unseen makers who have materially reconfig-
ured their solid forms through cinematic process. The women who dwell
in both house and film are not so easily accommodated, formulated, or
contained. Things do not always stay where they should, audiovisual
boundaries dissolve, objects are not what they seem, spaces overflow and
mutate. Seen from this perspective, these works can be said to chime with
more recent spatial and feminist enquiry which seeks to review the assumed
fixity of home and our relationship with it. ‘Recent feminist thinking’,
write Blunt and Dowling, ‘has drawn on poststructuralism and post colo-
nialism to build upon the more complex notion of home that emerges
from a critique of the simple equation of home with a private sphere’
(Blunt and Dowling 2006: 19). Feminist spatial theorists, geographers
and artists increasingly recognise the ‘fluidity of home as a concept, meta-
phor and lived experience’ (2006: 21). There is a move to unsettle the
home ‘as a fixed and stable location’ (33), and to better position it as a
‘relation between material and imaginative realms and processes’ (22).
The critique of home as a place of confinement where the tedium of
domestic work must be carried out has been contested, particularly by
those for whom home provides a safe space or even a site of resistance.
Home is not something to be taken for granted. The late bell hooks wrote
passionately about what home meant for her as a black child growing up
in a hostile, white community. In ‘Homeplace: A Site of Resistance’ she
describes walking to her grandmother’s house through a poor white
neighbourhood, past ‘those white faces on the porches staring us down
with hate’. ‘Oh! That feeling of safety’ she recalls, ‘of arrival, of homecom-
ing’. In their young minds, she continues:
houses belonged to women, were their special domain, not as property, but
as places where all that truly mattered in life took place—the warmth and
comfort of shelter, the feeding of our bodies, the nurturing of our souls.
There we learned dignity, integrity of being; there we learned to have faith.
(hooks 1990 in Meagher 2008: 175)
Iris Marion Young admits the ‘value of home is ambiguous’ and that it is
a ‘complex ideal’ (2005: 145 & 153).3 Ultimately however, for Young,
home is a place where one can work out who one is and how one connects
to others. ‘The ability to resist dominant social structures requires a space
6 L. RADINGER FIELD
beyond the full reach of those structures’ she writes, ‘where different,
more humane social relations can be lived and imagined’ (2005: 149).
Home, she writes simply, ‘is the site of the construction and reconstruc-
tion of one’s self’ (153). But home is also a place rife with ambiguity.4
hooks, for whom homeplace was so crucial, articulates this well. ‘At times
home is nowhere’ she writes, and continues:
At times one knows only extreme estrangement and alienation. Then

home is no longer just one place. It is locations. Home is that place which
enables and promotes varied and ever-changing perspectives, a place where
one discovers new ways of seeing reality, frontiers of difference.
(hooks 1989: 19)
Translocating these more elastic understandings of home into cinematic

theory, Bruno proposes we replace the term voyeur with voyageuse, thereby
reconceiving our vision of woman in the domestic realm in the cinema
(and the female spectator who watches her) as a cinematic traveller, some-
one who is mobile rather than static. ‘Thinking as a voyageuse’ she suggests
‘can trigger a relation to dwelling that is much more transitorial than the
fixity of oikos, and a cartography that is errant’ (Bruno 2007: 86). Her
proposition may be a somewhat generalised one, but its direction of travel
resonates with my concerns here, shaped as they are by the desire to look
again at the home on film and reposition it not as a single demarcated
point marking the beginning and end of a voyage out, but rather as what
Laura Rascaroli describes as a ‘powerful entry point’ into cinematic story-
telling of the first order.5
While we can discern changes as we progress from early films to later
ones, I should clarify at this stage that sociological reflection on the status
of home as a feminine domain is not my primary concern or destination in
this book. Of course films open doorways into reflection and debate, and
we find ourselves drawn to discuss what it is to feel at home, to be at
home, to have a home at all. Films can act, as Elsasser and Hagener remind
us, as ‘portals (or back-doors) to insights about the workings of our social
institutions and cultural value systems’ (2010: 49). But all of the works I
discuss take us through an everyday door into ‘the spellbinding elsewhere
of the screen’, even if the washing up may need to be done.6 They all jour-
ney into the mythopoetic potential of cinematic space, and what emerges
is a far from straightforward diachronic progression from home as a place
of enclosure to one of liberation. For these filmmakers the trope of a
woman inside a home acts as a catalyst. It is a launch pad, a lure and a

provocation which they go on to subject to a series of manipulations and
mutations for their own reasons. A broader impulse can be discerned in
their work, one nourished by the rich and metaphorical connections that
obtain between the material world of the architectural interior and the
world of the inner self. The history of this perceived respondence between
inner and outer realms, and the figuration of one by another in spatial
terms, is worth briefly charting here.
Homes were once communal spaces. We did not always associate the
interior organisation and decoration of our homes with the expression of
our individual subjectivity. ‘Life was a public affair’ Witold Rybczynski
explains, ‘and just as one did not have a strongly developed self-
consciousness, one did not have a room of one’s own’ (1983: 35). He
quotes John Lukacs, who tells us that ‘as the self-consciousness of medi-
eval people was spare, the interiors of their houses were bare, including the
halls of nobles and of kings. The interior furniture of houses appeared
together with the interior furniture of minds’ (Rybczynski 1983: 36).
Viewing the home as the setting for an ‘emerging interior life’ is generally
regarded to have begun with the evolution of the bourgeoisie in the
United Provinces of the Netherlands, a ‘brand new state’ formed in 1609
after a thirty-year war of independence from Spain (51). It is difficult to
pin down exactly‚ as Rybczynski acknowledges, and ‘dangerous to claim
that there was a single place where the modern idea of the family home
first entered the human consciousness.’ But this was where the ‘seventeenth-
century domestic interior evolved in a way that was arguably unique’ he
writes, ‘and that can be described as having been, at the very least, exem-
plary’ (51). The home became a place in which to develop one’s sense of
self and project that outwards to oneself and others. But our psychic inte-
riority also came to be viewed in spatial terms, as an ‘inner space’. Two
spaces, inside and out, were increasingly viewed as interconnected and
mutually reflective. In the introduction to their volume Interiors and
Interiority (2015) Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Beate Söntgen ask how and
when this perceived connection came about. They identify ‘four distinct
genealogies of the interiorised conception of the self’ (2015: 1–5), which
it is useful to relate. Firstly they indicate its literary genealogy, tracing the
‘origins of the interiorised self-conception to the emergence of autobiog-
raphy as a new self-reflexive form of writing’, most notably in Saint
Augustine’s Confessions. Secondly, they trace a pictorial genealogy which
‘forges a relation between understanding the self as an interior space and
8 L. RADINGER FIELD
the emergence of the suggestive depictions of interiors in seventeenth cen-

tury Dutch painting’. This style of painting focuses on domestic space in
particular, and the tradition flourished during the period in Holland and
the evolution of the bourgeoisie described above. This leads to the third
strand, the architectural genealogy alluded to earlier, in which gradual
changes in individual needs and notions of selfhood began to be spatially
transcribed in the home so that ‘while architecture was being individual-
ized, both in its built form and in its representation, the notion of the
individual became spatialized [sic]’ (3). The final element is arguably the
most salient to my work in this book. ‘Last but not least’ they write, is the
‘psychoanalytical model for thinking about the mental realm as an interior
space’. The notion of an analogous relationship between the space of a
house and the internal structure of the mind is not in itself new of course,7
but Lajer-Burcharth and Söntgen make the more precise assertion that the
‘psychoanalytical model’ of the psyche as an internal structure with its own
topology originated with Sigmund Freud, who conceptualised the ‘struc-
ture of psychic life… in spatial terms’ (4). Each of these genealogical
strands has contributed towards a spatial figuration of the psyche. It is a
metaphorical and poetic tendency woven deep into the fabric of all the
film texts discussed in this book.
Cinema inherited the trope of a woman alone in a house from the liter-
ary and theatrical melodrama which preceded its invention, and the figure
appears frequently in early films. Suspense, written and directed by Lois
Weber in Hollywood in 1913, is a good example. Abandoned by the
domestic servant who can no longer abide the lonely location and with her
husband away at work, a young woman (played by Weber) is left alone in
a house with her baby. An opportunistic vagrant (Sam Kaufman) sees the
maid leave with her suitcase and turns off the deserted road onto the path
leading to the house. In a notable point of view shot taken from a window
above, the camera looks down on the stranger as he approaches the back
door. His body, topped by a hat and foreshortened by the verticality of the
camera angle, slides into frame from the bottom left-hand corner. He
stops, slowly raises his head and looks upwards directly into the camera
lens. It is an affective moment—he becomes a menacing gaze poised on a
pair of feet. Weber is obviously playing with scale and threat. But she is
also working with the potential of her medium (what Maya Deren might
call its ‘aspect’) to conflate represented space with cinematic space. We see
that the tramp invades two spatial constructs—house and frame—at the
same time. Once he has entered (the maid has conveniently left the key
under the mat), he makes his way through the spaces inside the house;
from kitchen to hallway to staircase to bedroom, where the woman
crouches in terror clutching her baby. The layout of the house is enlisted
wholeheartedly into the storytelling process, its spatial topology recruited
to perform as a narrative technology. The vagrant moves from room to
room through time and space as relentlessly as the film moves through the
projector. In his analysis of a similar sequence in D W Griffith’s earlier film
The Lonely Villa (1909), John David Rhodes describes how ‘the suburban
villa is a kind of medium and a kind of spatial technology’ which ‘endows
the narration with a floor plan of suspense’—which is a very fine way of
putting it (Rhodes 2017: 40 & 43). On a practical level, placing narratives
within the boundaried location of a house was useful to early filmmakers.
The limited structural contours allowed them to work out an emergent
cinematic vocabulary. Issues of lighting and spatial organisation were at
stake, being laboriously pieced together and understood.8 But the attrac-
tion between the house and the cinema overflows such wholly contingent
concerns. Cinema has been invested in portraying images of houses and
homes from its very inception and shows no sign of losing interest. The
house, as Rhodes puts it, ‘is everywhere in cinema’, and I am keen to
explore the nature of its magnetic attraction in this book.
I look closely at nine films made between 1936 and 2013: Craig’s Wife
(Dorothy Arzner 1936), Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren 1943),
Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang 1947), Midnight Lace (David Miller
1960), A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes 1974), Jeanne
Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman 1975),
Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassy 1999), The House (Eija-Liisa Ahtila 2002)
and Exhibition (Joanna Hogg 2013). While my choice was guided largely
by personal fascination and, as I was to find out, an unconscious awareness
of underlying and rhizomatic connections between the films, my close
analysis is grounded in a study of material process. I take the view that the
more we find out about how films are made and why particular creative
decisions are taken, the better we understand what those films are saying
to us. As Gavin Lambert succinctly puts it: ‘Until we know how a film is
speaking to us, we cannot be sure what it is saying’ (Gibbs and Pye 2005:
7). There is much that divides these films, but much that binds them
together. The homes in question vary from grand mansions to small flats.
In some films the woman arrives at her home for the first time at the start
of the narrative, while in others she has lived there for some time. In only
one film, The House, is it made explicit that the woman owns her own
10 L. RADINGER FIELD
house. “I have a house” the voiceover announces at the start of the film.
Otherwise each character has come to their home as part of a marriage
contract or through the economically superior status of her husband. The
one exception might be Hogg’s film Exhibition, in which it is never made
entirely clear who owns the house, who bought it and by what financial
means. But whatever their status with regards to ownership may be, char-
acteristic to all of the films is the fact that none of the female characters feel
wholly ‘at home’ in their homes. The women move through domestic
topographies like psychic Geiger counters, aware of their emplacement
but at the same time of feeling out-of-place. Paradoxically however, these
characters are the buildings’ true occupants. They are the ones who fully
inhabit these dwellings and engage with whatever psychic truths their
architectonic structures embody, transmit or seek to contain. It is not a
question of how many hours are spent inside them or how much house-
work they do or do not perform. The women cohere in and interact with
the spatial structures around them in ways not made available to their male
counterparts.
There are many ways I could have approached this subject. I decided to
work with the analogy between cinema and architecture that subtends this
book. A film can be seen as a form of assemblage; a spatio-visual-aural
construction assembled into a whole through a variety of material pro-
cesses not unlike the architectural processes involved in designing and
constructing a building. I base each chapter around a particular filmmak-
ing process or cinematic ‘building block’: découpage, mise-en-scène, sound
and editing. In reality of course, these four processes are far from separate.
Cinematic elements work in context with one another to generate mean-
ing and viewing them separately is something of a contrivance. Filmmaking
processes are interconnected and interdependent and come together to
form what Gibbs and Pye call a ‘complex tapestry of decision-making’
(Gibbs and Pye 2005: 10). Therefore although the chapters are self-
contained, they cannot be wholly impermeable. It is difficult to discuss the
mise-en-scène of a film without mentioning its découpage at some point
and vice versa, or sound without editing and so forth. As V F Perkins
observes:
If we isolate cutting from the complex which includes the movement of the
actors, the shape of the setting, the movement of the camera, and variations
of light and shade—which change within the separate shots as well as
between them—we shall understand none of the elements (and certainly not
the editing) because each of them derives its value from the relationship
with others. (Perkins 1993: 23)
But focusing separately upon each process is useful, nonetheless. It clari-

fies what those processes actually are and allows one to probe more effec-
tively into why decisions are made and for what reason. Moreover, there is
mise-en-scène criticism as well as mise-en-scène practice and asking
découpage-based questions means we need to be clear about what découp-
age is. As a consequence, we learn that some films—particularly the more
recent art films—present a challenge to the film theorist. There are film-
making processes I could have chosen to discuss such as lighting (‘varia-
tions of light and shade’), costume, music (or lack of it), performance,
gesture and ways of directing actors. All of these (and more) contribute
towards the ‘complex tapestry of decision-making’ that is filmmaking and
I do not claim to cover all of the ground. But the ground I do cover is that
which most pertains to my overarching interest in the cinematic construc-
tion and rendition of poetic space. Like these filmmakers, I too am lured
towards the figure of home.
In each chapter I draw two films into critical dialogue with one another
(except for the chapter on editing in which I discuss three). Chapter 1,
Découpage: Planning the House discusses the nature and function of
découpage in Craig’s Wife (Dorothy Arzner 1936) and A Woman Under
the Influence (John Cassavetes 1976). These two films and the homes rep-
resented in them are totally at variance. Can a process of découpage be
discerned in either of these works and if so, what shape might it take and
why? Initially I engage with how we might best define découpage, distin-
guishing it from its parallel activity mise-en-scène and clarifying its con-
tested history in film practice and theory. Critical work by Christian
Keathley (2012), Timothy Barnard (2014), and Douglas Pye (2015) is
helpful in this regard. Craig’s Wife is a studio film made in 1936 while A
Woman Under the Influence is an independent film made forty years later.
Their découpage is entirely different. Yet, despite this, the films resonate
with one another in surprising ways and bringing them into reflective dis-
course engenders insight into the work of both directors. I explore what
the reasons for the difference in découpage might be, and how through the
placement of the camera and arrangement of shots each film articulates the
subjectivity of its central protagonist in spatial terms.
Chapter 2, Mise-en-scène: Creating Rooms looks at the mise-en-scène in
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman
1975) and Exhibition (Joanna Hogg 2013). As in the previous chapter, I

clarify my critical understanding of the term and practice and am aware
that this has shifted over time. I do not include camera placement or posi-
tion in my analysis, as the previous chapter provides me with space to
discuss this in detail. I look closely at what is organised within the space of
the frame. Related film theory has traditionally been concerned with how
mise-en-scène functions expressively and non-verbally to evince meaning
in classical films. But these modernist film texts do not speak in an overtly
symbolic register, and rather than press meaning into existence through
‘things’ and the way they appear, the films often seek to conceal or obfus-
cate meaning from the audience. This presents a challenge, and not only
to the audience. I am required to re-evaluate my critical understanding of
mise-en-scène, what it is and how it functions. I draw on theory that reas-
serts the relevance of mise-en-scène criticism (Kessler 2014; Gibbs 2002,
2013), and challenges its traditional modes of analysis (Adrian Martin
2011, 2014). Akerman’s film also presents a cinematic dispositif at work. I
discuss what this means in context with mise-en-scène and explore how
Akerman deploys her dispositif as a creative constraint and for what reason.
Hogg’s later film echoes Akerman’s formalism, but whether or not we can
detect an equivalent rigour in the patterning of cinematic elements is
debatable. What becomes clear is that while the stylistic stance of each film
resists aspects of traditional mise-en-scène criticism, there are other struc-
tures of signification and fascination at work in both texts which I work to
prise open and uncover through this critical route.
Chapter 3, Sound: Building the Invisible explores the sonic dimension
and the shifting modalities in which two Gothic heroines occupy this
invisible domain. Sonic space, although unseen and by its very nature
utterly unseeable, is nevertheless as constructed a space as that which we
see onscreen. But how do these filmmakers build their invisible space? And
how does that amorphous space interact with the visible? Sound signals
towards spaces we cannot and will never be able to see, creating what
Elsaesser and Hagener describe as ‘cinema’s imaginary topography’ (2010:
130). But it also has the ability to influence and modulate that which we
do see, so that we see it differently. The subject of sound is vast and poten-
tially as amorphous as that which it seeks to grapple with theoretically, so
I narrow my focus here to concentrate on how the female voice behaves in
two gothic narratives, The Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang 1947) and
Midnight Lace (David Miller 1960). I look closely at (or listen closely to)
how the voice of each actress ‘inhabits’ each film, and how this can be
configured in spatial terms as a series of interlinked ‘bodies’: their onscreen

physical body, the onscreen building in which they live, and the audiovi-
sual corpus of the film itself. Unspoken realities and feelings make their
presence felt and heard through the invisible conduit of sound, which of
course is something each of these gothic narratives makes fine use of. What
we also find in both films is a curious rift between sound and image,
despite technical efforts to weld these two cinematic elements together.
This leads me to review notions of female containment within the sonic
domain as memorably theorised by Silverman (1988) and Doane (1988).
Chapter 4, Editing: Radical Reconstructions explores how spatial logic
can be dismantled and reconfigured through the editing process so that
physical buildings become more formally yoked to and structured by the
unconscious realm. I discuss three films: Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya
Deren 1943); Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky 1999); and The House
(Eija-Liisa Ahtila 2002). Each filmmaker achieves their transformations
through material means, yoking together ‘cinematic syntax, architectural
space and subjective experience’ (Butler 2012). Their aims are similar, and
I trace a thematic line from Deren’s seminal early work through to the two
later films. Each seeks to radically disturb and disrupt idealised notions of
a unified, straightforward and coherent self. There is an ethical impulse
behind each work which becomes clear as we pursue how their makers
distort space and why. As in previous chapters, I start by clarifying my criti-
cal understanding of what editing is, and what it involves. Jacques
Aumont’s monograph on the process—although it is called Montage—
provides clarification and historical perspective (2014). As well as film and
spatial theory, in this chapter I draw on archival information as each film-
maker has reflected extensively on their work in interviews and in writing.
Women dwell in ‘extraordinary rooms’ in these films.9 The resem-
blances between spatial organisation and internal, emotional states can be
formally represented on film in ways unique to the medium. Film seems to
be able to speak about space extremely well. But it is also able, as Anne
Goliot points out, to make space speak.10 In other words we come to expe-
rience something we have all experienced at some point or other in our
lives, which is the interiority of space itself or to be more specific, how the
homes themselves feel. This book finds itself on the wave of a ‘spatial turn’
in the humanities and runs alongside new visions of home in artistic prac-
tice and theory. When I began my PhD research into the subject several
years ago, there were few books on the subject. Several works have
appeared in the interim which make excellent companions to the close
readings I offer here. The recent volume Film and Domestic Space (Stefano
Baschiera and Miriam de Rosa 2020) is a welcome addition to the field.
The collected essays draw our attention to how various domestic spaces
are represented on film, how they ‘look’. But, in close affinity with my
work here, they also consider the analogous relationship between these
built structures and the film structure which re-frames them, what de Rosa
describes as a ‘mutual implication’ between ‘cinematic and architectural
components’ (2020: 194). ‘While a representational take on domestic
space in cinema has been the dominant one so far’ they write, ‘we shall
contend that, in its double concept of home/house, this plays a rather key
role in relation to the cinematic dispositive [sic]’ (2020: 5). Rhodes also
draws generative connections between film and architecture in The
Spectacle of Property (2017). ‘Cinema and the house should be seen to
communicate’ he writes, ‘Cinema and architecture open onto one another,
and in doing so, they also open up to one another’ (2017: 11). Rhodes
focuses on American houses in American cinema, but his perceptive close
analysis and the politically engaged nature of his discussion has made a
valuable contribution to my work here. Bruno’s book Atlas of Emotion:
Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (2007) also draws cinema and
architecture into conjunction. The wide-ranging nature of her book dif-
fers from the specificity of my focus on material process, but her general
desire to shift the way we view women, domestic space and cinema chimes
with my own. ‘Despite the richness of the fields of feminist theory, geo-
graphical studies, and film scholarship’ she writes, ‘a merging of the three
disciplines has yet to occur. By rethinking each through the others, one
might expand the range of all these fields’ (2007: 85). I would agree. But
while I draw on these theoretical strands in my exploration of home in
cinema, I always return to process, to material decisions and to the mate-
riality of filmmaking. This method allows me to remain level with what
George Toles calls the ‘“eye” of the work’, no matter how bewildering
that may seem at times or how vulnerable it might make me feel as a theo-
rist. It also allows the films themselves to tell me about themselves and the
way they work. It grants them, as Toles puts it, ‘an occasion to look back
and take our measure’ (Toles 2001: 170). Through this critical route I
hope to contribute towards fresh filmic commentary on deceptively famil-
iar ground, and to recalibrate the gendered attribution of cinematic space
with which it has been so habitually and reductively associated. The house
on film is a special, poised object. The way we view its spaces and the
women who move inside them is, as Mary Ann Doane might put it, not
strange enough.
Notes
1. An equation coined by Norman N Holland and Leona F Sherman in their
essay ‘Gothic Possibilities’ in New Literary History 8.2: 279–294 (1977).
2. In his architectural treatise De Architectura (written between the years
30-20 BC),
3. Young’s essay points us towards a ‘chain of interlinked essays’ written on
both sides of the fence, and provides a good overview of the debate. It is
included in the volume On Female Body Experience “Throwing like a girl”
and Other Essays (Oxford University Press 2005).
4. A reference to John Rennie Short’s introduction to the volume At Home:
An Anthology of Domestic Space. 1999. Ed. Irene Cieraad (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press).
5. This quote is taken from Rascaroli’s essay ‘No, Home, Movie’ written in
reference to Akerman’s film of the same name. She writes: ‘As is typical of
Akerman’s work, the banality of the everyday is a powerful entry point into
broad considerations that are at once autobiographical and universal’
(Baschiera and De Rosa 2020: 164).
6. Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost (1998: 1).
7. The use of imagined spatial interiors as an aide-memoire is a good example.
This mnemonic, developed by the ancient Greeks and inherited and
recorded by the Romans, involved placing separate thoughts inside differ-
ent loci in an imagined building, and recalling one’s journey through this
building in order to remember long and involved speeches. Ideas explored
in depth in The Art of Memory by Frances A Yates 2010.
8. These ideas are taken up in depth by Brian R Jacobson in his excellent
exploration of how the architecture and technology of the first film studios
contributed towards the emergence and shaping of cinematic space. Studios
before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic
Space (Columbia University Press 2015).
9. A reference to Dziga Vertov, who wrote: ‘I am kino-eye. I am a builder. I
have placed you, whom I’ve created today, in an extraordinary room which
did not exist until just now when I also created it.’ From ‘Kinoks: A
Revolution’ in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Ed. Annette
Michelson, University of California Press 1984: 17).
10. My translation of Anne Goliot, taken from her article ‘Introduction à une
narratologie de l’espace: Gaslight ou le récit-architecte’ in Iris: Revue de
Theorie de l’Image et du Son 1991, 12: 71.
References
Aumont, Jacques. 2014. Montage. Montreal: caboose.
Baschiera, Stefano, and Miriam de Rosa, eds. 2020. Film and Domestic Space:
Architectures, Representations, Dispositif. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Bergren, Ann. 1993. The (Re)Marriage of Penelope and Odysseus. Architecture
Gender Philosophy Assemblage 21: 6–23.
Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. 2006. Home. London & New York: Routledge.
Bruno, Giuliana. 2007. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film.
New York: Verso.
Butler, Alison. 2012. Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Cinematic Worlds. In Eija-Liisa Ahtila:
Parallel Worlds, 173–189. Gottingen: Steidl/Moderna Museet/Kiasma.
Colomina, Beatriz. 1992. The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism. In Sexuality and
Space, 73–128. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
De Lauretis, Teresa. 1984. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Doane, Mary Ann. 1988. The Desire to Desire: Woman’s Films of the 1940s.
Basingstoke & London: Macmillan Press.
Duncan, Nancy. 1996. BodySpace. London: Routledge.
Elsaesser, Thomas, and Malte Hagener. 2010. Film Theory: An Introduction
Through the Senses. New York & London: Routledge.
Garber, Marjorie. 2012. The Body as House. In The Domestic Space Reader, ed.
Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei, 123–127. Toronto, Buffalo & London:
University of Toronto Press.
Gibbs, John. 2002. Mise-en-Scène: Film Style and Interpretation. London &
New York: Columbia University Press.
Gibbs, John. 2013. The Life of Mise-en-Scène: Visual Style and British Film
Criticism, 1946-78. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press
Gibbs, John, and Douglas Pye, eds. 2005. Style and Meaning: Studies in the
detailed analysis of film. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Goliot, Anne. 1991. Introduction à une narratologie de l’espace: Gaslight ou le
récit-architecte. Iris: Revue de Theorie de l’Image et du Son 12: 71–83 (Iowa &
Paris: University of Iowa).
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Women, Chora, Dwelling. ANY Architecture New York:
Architecture and the Feminine: Mop-Up Work 4: 22–27.
Holland, Norman N., and Leona F. Sherman. 1977. Gothic Possibilities. New
Literary History 8 (2): 279–294.
hooks, bell. 1989. Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.
Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 36: 15–23 (Wayne State
University Press).
———. (1990) 2008. Homeplace: A Site of Resistance. In Philosophy and the City:
Classic to Contemporary Writings, ed. Sharon M. Meagher and Sharon
M. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Kessler, Frank. 2014. Mise en Scène. Montreal: Caboose.
Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, and Beate Söntgen, eds. 2015. Interiors and Interiority.
Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, Inc.
Martin, Adrian. 2011. Turn the Page: From Mise en Scène to Dispositif. Screening
the Past 31: 1–15. Accessed October 21, 2023. https://www.screeningthepast.
com/issue-31-first-release/turn-the-page-from-mise-en-scene-to-dispositif/
Martin, Adrian. 2014. Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to
NewMedia Art. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Perkins, V F. 1993. Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies. Boston: Da
Capo Press.
Rascaroli, Laura. 2020. No/Home/Movie. In Film and Domestic Space:
Architectures, Representations, Dispositif, ed. Stefano Baschiera and Miriam de
Rosa. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Rhodes, John David. 2017. Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rybczynski, Witold. 1983. Home: A Short History of an Idea. Middlesex:
Penguin Books.
Silverman, Kaja. 1988. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and
Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Toles, George. 2001. A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film. Detroit:
Wayne State University Press.
Turim, Maureen. 1991. The Displacement of Architecture in Avant-Garde Films.
Iris: Revue de Theorie de l’Image et du Son 12: 25–38 (Iowa & Paris:
University of Iowa).
Vertov, Dziga. (1923) 1984. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Edited by
Annette Michelson. Berkeley & Los Angeles, University of California Press.
Wigley, Mark. 1992. Untitled: The Housing of Gender. In Sexuality & Space, ed.
Beatriz Colomina, 327–389. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Young, Iris Marion. 2005. House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme. In
On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays, 123–154.
New York: Oxford University Press.
CHAPTER 2
Découpage: Planning the House
Découpage may simply be the term for how cinema works.

—Timothy Barnard
Craig’s Wife (Dorothy Arzner 1936) ends on a moment of revelation.

Alone in her house at last, Harriet Craig (Rosalind Russell) wakes up to
reality. Her eyes open wide to fully absorb her surroundings for the first
time and what she sees fills her with fear. The audience is invited to watch
this climactic scene with an equally wide-eyed attention. We have come to
know well this pristine suburban palace Harriet calls home. We are familiar
with its open spaces and its nooks and crannies; the little cupboard where
Harriet’s husband Walter (John Boles) stows his hat and coat, the small
breakfast room where he hides himself away to read the paper, the strangely
empty kitchen, the neat bedrooms, grandiose staircase, the huge living
room which serves as the main stage of the drama. But in this scene, as
Harriet stands transfixed in the hallway, we ‘re-see’ the house as we watch
her ‘re-seeing it’ and, like her, we suddenly see its strangeness. All this is
achieved visually. There is no dialogue for there is no one left to talk to.
Harriet realises this when she speaks her final words of the film, an unfin-
ished sentence that trails into thin air as the front door closes upon her
self-isolation. Arzner directs these closing moments using the deceptively
simple approach with which the entire film has been shot. It is precisely
the way in which she has constructed filmic space through the creative use
of the camera which enables these final moments to be as piercing and
effective as they are. This creative positioning of the camera and the

Switzerland AG 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40033-9_2
resulting organisation of filmic space is a process that can be described as

découpage.
In this chapter I look closely at the process of découpage in two con-
trasting films, Craig’s Wife and A Woman Under the Influence (John
Cassavetes 1974). Both films concern a woman, her house and the rela-
tionship between them, yet they are filmed in markedly different ways.
Before continuing, it is worth providing a clarification of my use and
understanding of the apparently untranslatable French term découpage.
The history of découpage as a film practice, related concept and theo-
retical term, along with its mistranslation from the French language and
the path of its loss and retrieval as a useful tool in film analysis, has been
well set out by Timothy Barnard (2014). His monograph on the subject
traces the complex history of the term since its inception in the 1910s. A
major focus for Barnard is the mistranslation of the word ‘découpage’ into
the English words ‘editing’ or ‘cutting’, most notably by Hugh Gray in his
translation of André Bazin’s collected articles in the volumes What is
Cinema? (1967 and 1971). Barnard’s account shows how this mistransla-
tion contributed significantly to an obfuscation of the word and subse-
quently to a fundamental misunderstanding of its meaning, which in turn
contributed towards its virtual disappearance from English language film
studies. The ‘enigma known as découpage’ writes Barnard, is today ‘virtu-
ally absent from film theory and debate in any language, even French’
(2014: 3). In his review of Barnard’s book in Movie: a journal of film criti-
cism, Douglas Pye offers a pithy summary of the debate around découpage
and the areas of confusion that adhere to it, particularly with regards to
the critical history of its parallel term mise-en-scène (Pye 2015: 97–100).
That there is no word in the English language equivalent to ‘découpage’ is
only part of the problem. What is at stake is the complexity of filmmaking
and how best to understand and describe its processes. Pye draws our
attention to the critical work of Christian Keathley who, having had the
concept clarified for him through reading Barnard’s re-translation of What
is Cinema? (published by caboose in 2009), uses it to great analytical
effect in his analysis of Otto Preminger’s 1938 film Bonjour Tristesse
(2012: 67–72). Keathley’s close look at a reoccurring set of shot patterns
in Preminger’s film is a solid example of découpage based criticism, and this
attentive work makes what Pye calls an ‘eloquent case for its potential role
in style-based criticism’ (Pye 2015: 97).
The position I take here is based on the understanding that découpage
arises from an attitude taken towards the dramatic narrative that is to be
2 DÉCOUPAGE: PLANNING THE HOUSE 21
filmed so that it is filmed by the camera in a particular way in order to say

or highlight particular things. This attitude guides where one places the
camera, how one moves it around (or not) and what lens or focal length
one uses. In short, découpage is how one decides to sculpt narrative and
profilmic space with the camera. Importantly, the activity also involves
how one preplans or visualizes how a film might be filmed. ‘Découpage is a
formal plan’ stipulates Keathley, ‘prepared in advance of shooting, a visu-
alization that is designed in relationship to the narrative/dramatic mate-
rial’ (2012: 69). This process of preplanning includes not only how
individual shots will be framed but also an awareness of how each one will
relate to or follow on from the next. In other words, découpage is an
imaginative process as well as a practical one, in which one considers (or
imagines) the relationship that will develop between shots. In this way
découpage adumbrates that moment when shots come to be materially
placed beside one another in the editing process, which as we know hap-
pens after filmmaking has taken place. Crucially however, this does not
mean that découpage is equivalent to the editing process. The two pro-
cesses cannot be conflated into one. The similitude between découpage
and editing has caused a measure of confusion, and not solely as a result of
the mistranslation of the term.
Luis Buñuel, writing in 1928, described découpage as the ‘intuition of a
film’, how one first imagines it by ‘creating through segmentation’
(Barnard: 3). Preplanning or ‘the découpage technique’ in classical
Hollywood was an essential part of film production, mitigating any poten-
tial for financial loss. Motion pictures ‘became costly to produce’ explains
Keathley, ‘and studio heads—always with a close eye on the balance
sheets—demanded a plan in advance of shooting that would make sched-
uling easier and budgeting clearer’ (2012: 70). Keathley chooses to focus
on this ‘formal plan’ aspect of the practice in his study of Preminger’s film,
with fruitful results. However some filmmakers, as becomes evident in my
analysis of Cassavetes’ film, do not have a ‘formal plan’ that is ‘prepared in
advance’, nor do they wish to. In fact, they resolutely avoid it. In which
case, is it possible to identify and interpret a style of découpage in their
work? If we evolve our view of it as a form of decision-making with the
camera that occurs not only prior to but during the filming process, we are
more in touch with the reality of how creative decisions form along the
way as possibilities reveal themselves to filmmakers. This recognition was
always part of earlier understandings of the practice and formulations of
the term. Initially and at its most basic level, découpage referred to a
shooting script or storyboard prepared in advance of filming, ‘the final

written (and visualised) text in the scriptwriting process… complete with
camera indications, stage directions for the actors and even changes of
shots’ (Barnard 2014: 4). But at a certain point (Barnard places this in the
late 1920s) the term ‘split’ into ‘the découpage technique—this same shoot-
ing script on paper—and, without the article, découpage, through which
questions around film form were taken up’ (4–5). In 1959, filmmaker
Georges Franju described découpage as a ‘spatial attitude’, implying that
the way one chooses to shape space with the camera is not only guided by
the demands of the narrative but by the nature of the space in which one
is filming and the attitude the filmmakers hold towards it (cited in Barnard
2014: 22). Franju’s identification of a ‘spatial attitude’ recalls and reframes
ideas about sculpting space with the camera formulated thirty years earlier
by Béla Balázs. Balázs wrote that, ‘Each set-up [Einstellung] of the camera
indicates an attitude [Einstellung] in the viewers mind’ (Barnard: 27). The
German word Einstellung has several meanings. It is a ‘curious’ word
Barnard explains, ‘in that it means, among yet other meanings, both atti-
tude and, even in Balázs’ day, a camera set-up or take’ (28). The conflation
of camera ‘set-up’ with mental ‘attitude’ is fundamental to our under-
standing of découpage. Barnard continues:
I like to think of Balázs’ clever expression Einstellung zur Einstellung as the

camera’s posture, a word that combines the sense of creating spatial disposi-
tion and physical relations between things on the one hand and of adopting
a mental attitude towards them on the other. (Barnard 2014: 28)
Clearly the camera is not an object that operates by itself. There are
people ‘behind’ it making decisions and it is their attitude towards what
they are filming which determines its posture. But the inference is there.
To refer to découpage is to refer to a decision-making process which,
according to Barnard, can be ‘nebulous, ineffable, diffuse, creative’ (19).
One might add ‘collaborative’ to the mix of ambiguities. But while
Barnard’s observation may be true, it need not preclude clarity in our criti-
cal work. Pye points out that, ‘the ‘ineffable’ dimensions of découpage […]
may be ‘suggestive’ or even seductive, but may be best avoided’ (Pye
2015: 100). Barnard too encourages us to ‘adopt a greater critical dis-
tance’ and persevere in our enquiry into how filmmakers use the camera
creatively, despite any apparent ineffability that may arise along the way.
To fully engage with the process and its implications we need to plunge
‘deeper into the work’ and, as I aim to do here, ‘into the work of creating
the work’ (Barnard 2014: 19). As I ‘plunge deeper’ into these two films,
I hope to avoid nebulous interpretations or conclusions by attending
closely to ‘the work of creating the work’. If the study of découpage is to
be intrinsically productive and enriching as a theoretical tool, leading
towards a better understanding of how films work, then it is worth seeing
how—and indeed if—it can be usefully studied in two stylistically diverse
films. In the case of Craig’s Wife and A Woman Under the Influence, the
former demonstrates a distinct and recognisable découpage at work while
the latter presents the film theorist with a challenge.
The découpage in Craig’s Wife avoids elaborate camera positioning.
There are no odd or intriguing camera angles, nor are there any quick or
deliberately surprising shifts from one camera position to another. A stylis-
tic tone which one could describe as cool and steady is established from
the beginning of the film and the spectator becomes attuned to it. This is
what makes the final moments of the film so extraordinary, because they
are achieved with the minimum of cinematographic fuss. However, woven
into this steady and processive unfolding of cinematic space there are cin-
ematic flourishes. These flourishes are made all the more prominent and
articulate by virtue of their rarity and precision.
The opening of the film is worth close examination. The credits fade to
an empty frame, into which the fleshy face of housekeeper Mrs Harold
(Jane Darwell) suddenly swoops up crying “Mazie!”. The camera follows
Mrs Harold as she dashes across to the fireplace to admonish poor Mazie
the maid (Nydia Westman), who has been unwisely dusting an ornamental
Grecian urn on the mantelpiece. “Take your hands off that!” Mrs Harold
cries, quickly establishing how obsessed the mistress is with the house. She
continues with a breathless list of perceived threats: “If there was such a
thing as a pin out of place… she’d lose her mind… catch the first train
home… you’d catch it from her alright if she was here!”. This scene takes
place in one shot with both women held in the frame. Mrs Harold ends
her tirade with the injunction, “Mazie, never forget, this room is the holy
of holies!”. On this solemn pronouncement, we switch perspective entirely
from close intimacy with these two characters to what is the widest and
deepest shot of the film.
This shot takes in the plenum of the room (floors, walls and ceiling), the
entire ‘holy of holies’, as well as the opening in the far wall through which
we see a hallway and a grand staircase rising beyond. The camera is situated
where the invisible fourth wall in a theatre might be, the cinematic frame
effectively acting as a proscenium arch. The housekeeper and maid, stand-

ing to the right of the picture, are dwarfed by the space which surrounds
them. We see and understand that this is a room full of symmetries; squares,
verticals and the orthogonal convergence of lines. The opening which
leads into the hallway is framed by white mock-classical pillars each flanked
by tall, black candlesticks. In the distant hallway another statuesque black
candlestick striates the pristine, white space. The furniture is laid out with
precision; chaise longue in the middle, grand piano and fireplace to the left
and right respectively, identical white cabinets in each far corner echoing
the pillars which frame the steps up into the hall. Tall windows are bor-
dered by long and sculptural drapes, an impressive chandelier carrying
dark candles hangs from the centre of the ceiling. The mathematical order
which inheres in the room is underpinned by a chequerboard pattern on
the floor. This room is a three-dimensional matrix in which nothing moves
and nothing is out of place—except for the two nervous little figures to the
right. Arzner holds this picture, allowing us time for its absorption. There
then begins a slow and steady dissolve into the next scene. As we watch
one room turn into another, we realise it is a highly organised dissolve.
The vertical lines and upright bodies in one room are precisely aligned
with the tall candlesticks standing on a table which slowly appear in
another—a dining room where a man and woman (Walter Craig and his
aunt, Miss Austen) are finishing their supper. A slow dissolve such as this,
so exacting and with ‘not a pin out of place’, is never repeated in the film.
Situated at the opening of the film, it actively situates us within a process
of reading images in a particular way. A room set out like a matrix dwarfing
the two figures who move within its grid is systematically dissolved into
another room which also contains vertical shapes and two figures. Such
diagrammatic découpage and symmetrical mise-en-scène within the frame
indicates a schematised mode of thinking. It sets the tone, the immediate
purpose of which is not at first apparent to us, but which surely has some-
thing to do with refining the way we watch the film and with teaching us
about how space is organised within the house. Something is being
described for us and a way of watching is being inculcated. This dissolve is
conceptual, and it initiates us into how to read significance into the spatial
organisation of the film’s themes (Figs. 2.1 and 2.2).
In her study of space and meaning in seventeenth century Dutch art,
Martha Hollander looks at a painting tradition which specifically explores
the pictorial language of space. It is of interest here because this was a
tradition in which artists explored the spatial illusionism of domestic space
Fig. 2.1 The room pre-dissolve in Craig’s Wife
in particular, ‘based on the placement of figures and architectural elements

in relation to one another’ (Hollander 2002: 23). Hollander traces the
‘evolution of pictorial syntax in the West’ and how it enabled and gener-
ated the visual representation of conceptual thinking in European art (18).
Various visual strategies evolved in the Middle Ages as an earlier, aural
tradition gave way to a ‘visual system of pictures and writing’ (19).
Hollander describes how artists invented ways to incorporate rhetorical
play into the image. Illustrated margins, ‘speech bubbles’, recessive spaces,
doors opening into other worlds, geometric shapes and interplays between
border and centre were all methods by which artists could make their pic-
tures discursive, multi-layered, and eventful. ‘This new organization of
signs—the diagram—was the essence of visual thinking’ she writes, and ‘a
variety of figures or motifs could be displayed simultaneously on a page,
automatically establishing certain relationships among them—explana-
tory, oppositional, or comparative’ (19). Artists learnt how to make art
that was both representational and conceptual. Patterns, visual
Fig. 2.2 The stately dissolve in Craig’s Wife
relationships and multitudinous events within a single overall frame could

tell a story and promote allegorical thinking. Hollander observes how
similar techniques evolved in writing and refers us towards Angus Fletcher’s
study of the development of allegory in literature. Diagrammatic and geo-
metric forms in writing indicate a ‘highly schematized means of thinking’
writes Fletcher. ‘By such abstractive means the poet can isolate the forms
of nature and human conduct and can subject them to analysis’ (Hollander
2002: 23). Arzner’s precisely aligned and carefully paced cinematic dis-
solve is an example of what Fletcher calls a ‘visualising, isolating tendency’
and is functional in this diagrammatic way. It aims to refine and sensitise
our viewing processes, asking that we be attentive as we watch her film and
become attuned to what Hollander describes as ‘conceptual thinking in
visual terms’ (22). The dissolve also indicates a style of découpage is
at work.
The film portrays a woman who aligns herself with her home and its
objects so utterly that she is incapable of human intimacy. In fact, we learn
that it is because she is incapable of human intimacy that she organises

herself in this way. “You want your house Harriet,” says her husband’s
perceptive aunt Miss Austen (Alma Kruger), “and that is all you do want.
And that’s all you’ll have at the finish”. Harriet successfully alienates each
member of the household, driving every one of them away until at last she
reaches her destination: a woman alone in her home, a woman-domus, a
‘house-wife’.
But in these final moments she is stricken and suddenly feels profoundly
not ‘at home’. Made in 1936 when the societal role of women was in flux,
Craig’s Wife was generally regarded as a film which would be of primary
interest to women. Yet critical reception was shot through with misan-
thropy. Were women to relate to Harriet Craig as a mistress of the home
and seeker of independence from patriarchy, or were they being warned
away from such behaviour as it leads to one ending up alone and lonely?
Were audiences to feel satisfaction at her ‘comeuppance’ (some audiences
are reported to have cheered when Walter Craig finally walks out) or to
feel compassion for her and perhaps even identify with her? Arzner’s film
is remarkably ambiguous. Yet this is not in itself surprising. Jeanine
Basinger points out that these kinds of internal contradictions characterise
the woman’s films of this period. In A Woman’s View: How Hollywood
Spoke to Women, 1930–1960 she writes:
Thus, what emerges on close examination of hundreds of women’s movies

is how strange and ambivalent they are. Stereotypes are presented, then
undermined, and then reinforced. Contradictions abound […] But they are
more than plot confusion. They exist as an integral and even necessary
aspect of what drives the movies and gives them their appeal. These movies
were a way of recognizing the problems of women, of addressing their
desire to have things be other than the way they were offscreen.
(Basinger 1994: 7)
Within the film’s carefully composed frames there is primarily similarity,

echo and reflection. The preponderance of horizontals and verticals in the
mise-en-scène (statues on plinths, candles on stands, lines and stripes on
bedcovers and the stringent horizontality of venetian window blinds) bol-
ster this symmetry while indicating a repressive impulse at work. Within
the frame, and within the house within the frame, there are no opposites
or alternatives, no ‘rhetorical strategies of comparison and opposition’
(Hollander 2002: 18). We may have depth of field in the pictural
representation of the vast living room and hallway but, unlike the far
worlds lying beyond the near ones found in Medieval paintings, no differ-
ent far-away world or alternative way of thinking is remotely suggested.
Instead we see only more of the same. This is Arzner’s intention; to create
a recursive world, a space continually folding back in on itself in a never-
ending narcissistic urge. However, because such care is taken to preserve
this ‘sameness’ it is all the more shocking when something is actually out
of place. When we encounter things within the frame that do not concur
with the symmetry, we know they cannot be borne by Harriet. They
become polluting stains and the film is full of them. Cigarette butts flow-
ing over the ashtray onto the coffee table, a white scratch on the brillian-
tine black floor, a Grecian urn out of place, wrinkles on the chaise longue,
fallen rose petals on the piano—even Mazie the maid’s boyfriend appears
out of place in the pristine kitchen. Arzner draws our attention to these
stains so we become aware of them before Harriet does, and thereby await
her response. In one scene her husband is talking to the little grandson of
their neighbour Mrs Frazier (Billie Burke) outside the house. The pictur-
esque scene is framed in the doorway, and this is precisely how Harriet sees
it when she comes down the stairs. We know what her response will be.
Arzner is aware of the rhetorical power of such ‘stains’ within the image
and uses them economically. The length apportioned to each shot and
their slow and steady concatenation towards the film’s climactic end,
enables such ‘stains’ to accumulate and build up in pressure. There are no
close-ups or ‘cutaway’ shots to overly emphasise or draw our attention to
these visual aberrations. Instead, their alien-ness is allowed to bleed relent-
lessly into the image. This is particularly apparent in an early scene, in
which we first meet Harriet as she returns home from visiting her termi-
nally ill sister in hospital. She is bringing her niece Ethel (Dorothy Wilson)
home with her on the train, ostensibly to give her a rest although we soon
learn that such generous motives are not to be attributed to her. During
their conversation it becomes clear that the stranger seated between the
two women with their back to them will never be referred to but will never
go away. What is especially curious is that this person appears out of
nowhere. Arzner cuts to a few close-up shots of each woman as they dis-
cuss marriage, love and independence. “I married to be independent” says
Harriet. “You don’t mean independent of your husband too?” answers her
niece, as we cut to her. “Independent of everybody” is Harriet’s unequiv-
ocal reply. On this reply the shot cuts back to the wider shot of the two
women, and in between them a large, dark seat with its back to us has been
inserted. Someone is sitting in it; we can just perceive the top of their hat.
We cannot be sure if it is a man or woman, which contributes to the fig-
ure’s ambiguous presence. Neither seat nor figure were there before,
although there is a rather more oblique seat behind Ethel in which an
elderly man has been seated throughout. The conversation continues with
this huge, unknown figure sitting obtrusively between them and its anon-
ymous presence slowly but surely inflects the rest of the scene. When
Harriet proclaims, “No one can know another human being well enough
to trust him”, the ‘stain’ of this stranger visually reiterates her mistrust.
The stage is set for the unravelling of the marriage which will take place
when they arrive at Harriet’s house. What we are seeing at work here is a
conscious mise-en-scène, but also the spatio-temporal organisation of that
mise-en-scène via découpage.
Arzner provides contrast within the shots themselves. But she does the
same in the way she places the shots next to one another. This is the defin-
ing feature of découpage that has been most confused with the editing
process. It is not hard to see why. The nature and source of this confusion
is clarified in Barnard’s book, and he quotes several filmmakers and theo-
rists on the subject. Luis Buñuel distinguishes between the ‘material seg-
ments (editing) and ideal segments (découpage)’ (Barnard: 3). In other
words, the physical act of cutting bits of film together differs from the
mental act of imagining how they might work together. André Bazin
describes découpage as ‘the aesthetic of the relations between shots’
(Barnard: 6), which is surely dangerously close to what editing can be.
Barnard clarifies, ‘Today we view these relations as the work of editing, but
Bazin conceived shots as something created by the camera and their
sequencing as envisioned at an earlier stage of a film’s creation.’
(Barnard: 6).
Arzner makes full use of this relationship between shots in her presenta-
tion of the house next door, which provides a stark contrast to the Craig
residence. Mrs Frazier is inseparable from the roses she grows in profu-
sion. “My roses will never take any prizes, but I love them”. We first meet
her outside watering her garden, “poor darlings, they get so thirsty after
these long, hot days”, when she and Walter have a neighbourly chat. This
scene occurs at the beginning of the film before he drives off to visit a
friend—something we come to realise he is able to do only because his
wife is away visiting her ailing sister. Surrounded by abundant foliage that
pays no attention to boundaries and has no truck with symmetry, Mrs
Frazier is a vision of fecundity and goodwill. It is the lively movement of
nature that we notice; the leaves and flowers moving in the breeze around
her, growing recklessly through the latticed fence (a healthily porous bor-
der), the flickering shadows, the messiness and unpredictability of living
things. There are no frozen statues or straight lines here. Mrs Frazier and
her garden are brimful of vitality while the Craig residence feels as if it
contains, in Miss Austen’s words, “rooms that have died, and are laid
out”. When Walter leaves the house for the last time at the end of the film,
he drives away into this lively world of movement. We register the flicker-
ing light under the trees, the play of shadows through leaves, a young boy
riding a bike (who seems to look towards the house), the unpredictable
flow of life outside. When Arzner cuts back inside to show us Harriet’s
erect figure watching through the venetian blinds, their shadows falling
like bars on the wall behind her, we inwardly choke with claustrophobia.
Inside nothing moves nor must anything be moved. Mrs Frazier makes
several appearances in the film, bringing roses to Walter’s aunt and even
bringing her small grandchild into the house. All these visitations are
rebuffed by Harriet. She cannot abide them. The roses will drop petals in
the house, the child will disturb the furniture—fecundity and growth must
not defile the sterile order just as Walter must not mess up the bed by sit-
ting on it.
Let us return to look more closely at the exquisitely paced final scene.
Walter drives away for good, and Harriet is left alone in silence. She turns
away from the window, and at this point some gentle music starts which is
hesitant but not unhappy. She moves across to the chaise longue (where
Walter spent his final night), straightens the covers slightly and tidies away
the cigarette butts left by him the night before. But her movements are
half-hearted and she leaves these tasks incomplete. Looking up, she sees
the mirror over the mantelpiece and approaches it as if seeing something
that needs to be done. She shifts the two ‘classical’ busts at either end of
the mantelpiece closer together. Yet her eyes flicker a little too quickly
between them and her face is unsteady. Although she has her back to us,
we can see her expression clearly in the mirror. Our attention remains unbro-
ken, particularly as so far this scene has been filmed in one long take. We
notice she becomes aware of an empty place between the two statues. This
is where the Grecian urn once stood, the one Mazie mistakenly moved at
the beginning of the film and which Walter flung to the floor and smashed
to pieces once he understood his marriage was a sham. It is not insignifi-
cant that this urn was Harriet’s most prized possession. An urn is a fune-
real object, one which personifies “rooms that have died and are laid out”.
But now it is no longer there and Harriet falters. Her hands flicker into the
gap as if trying to retrieve something that is lost. It is a small gesture, but
an eloquent one. As Hollander says about a tiny yet insignificant figure in
a Dutch painting, it is ‘like a grace note, small but transformative’
(Hollander 2002: 167). The pace and organisation of the film’s découpage
has taught us to notice such little things. Indeed, it has provided us with
time to do so. At this moment the doorbell rings. One could say that this
ring is a call to attention, part of the slow and gradual ‘calling to attention’
of Harriet.
It is the young boy seen earlier on his bike, bearing a telegram. Arzner
cuts to a shot outside the front door behind the boy’s back, deliberately
breaking the scene and our reflections upon it. But as Harriet signs for it
and turns around to go back inside, we witness the real reason Arzner
shows us the door—Harriet forgets to close it. She leaves it wide open,
something she has never done before. In fact earlier in the film she admon-
ished Mazie for not closing it.1 Harriet walks through the hallway and
down the few steps into the living room reading the telegram, and we are
now given the luxury of a close-up. As suspected, it is not good news. The
close-up allows us to observe Harriet’s emotional shift (and indeed to
appreciate Russell’s performance). Her eyes move up from reading, her
tears break, and she collapses downwards out of the frame. This telegram
surely announces the final departure from Harriet’s life—the death of her
sister. Arzner cuts to show us Harriet lying on the chaise longue, weeping
into its suddenly disregarded silken covers. It is the first time in the film
that see her horizontal. She has been upright throughout, as staunchly
vertical as the statues and pillars with which she surrounds herself. There
is a palpable sense of release, and we feel we are at last seeing her vulner-
able. It is an odd moment too, because for once we feel the scene may not
be stringently organised and has no obvious narrative destination. For why
would it? She is alone and only she generates the action now. There is no
plan, no order, a void has opened up.
But in the distance the doorbell rings again, another awakening in this
slow process of agnition. Arzner takes us outside the front door once
more, where we stand behind Mrs Frazier who is bearing roses. She gin-
gerly steps through the unexpectedly open door. Arzner need not have cut
to the front door at this point. We could have remained with Harriet cry-
ing on the chaise longue, heard the doorbell ring in the distance, and
watched through the archway as the distant figure of Mrs Frazier entered
the hallway behind. However, in taking us back outside Arzner echoes the
earlier cut to the telegram boy. This reiteration is deliberate and serves to
emphasise the slow, carefully paced concatenation of events. These scenes
outside the front door were filmed and their relationship with those shot
inside the house were envisioned prior to being physically put together in
the editing suite. Arzner is ‘creating through segmentation’ to use
Buñuel’s words. In his distinction between ‘material segments’ and ‘ideal
segments’, he writes:
The authentic moment in a film, creating through segmentation. A land-

scape, if it is to be recreated in cinema, must be segmented into fifty, a hun-
dred or more bits. Later, these will follow on one after the other vermiculously,
arranged in colonies, to compose the film… (Barnard 2014: 3)
Returning us to the previous wide shot of the living room with Harriet
crying in the foreground, we see Mrs Frazier venturing nervously into the
empty hallway behind. She looks up the staircase and sensing no-one is
there, approaches the steps into the living room. Harriet hears her and
starts up. “I hope you’ll forgive me for walking in like this…” says Mrs
Frazier as she steps down into the room. Unaware that Harriet has driven
everyone away, she explains that she is bringing Miss Austen some roses.
“She seemed to like them so much and I have so many…”. She trails off.
Harriet thanks her, something she has never done before, and takes them
from her without thinking. This poignant gesture is tinged with irony, as
we remember how all such offerings were unceremoniously rejected by
Harriet in the past. Understanding something must be wrong, Mrs Frazier
asks after Harriet’s sister and our fears are confirmed. Harriet tells Mrs
Frazier (and us) that her sister died that morning at six o’clock. Mrs Frazier
asks if there is anything she can do, her eyes sparkling with genuine sym-
pathy.2 But Harriet replies softly as if to herself and from a great depth “I
don’t think there’s anything anyone can do… that anyone can do…any-
one can do”. As she repeats these words she turns and slowly sits back
down, staring into space, the camera staying with her as she does so. Mrs
Frazier backs away, reversing out of the frame. Arzner provides no cutaway
shot of her departure. Our interest is to remain with Harriet and to pay
attention to the enormity of the psychic transformation that is taking place.
Harriet seems trance-like. “I’m all alone in the house now. I’m all alone
here.” She speaks with a childlike quality that is new and touching. She
continues, “So if you wouldn’t mind, I…” and looks up hopefully, a smile
on her face, only to see there is no one there. In a sudden panic she stands
up and races into the hallway, clutching the roses and the crushed tele-
gram. It is an awkward, childish little run, as if she is trying to avoid slip-
ping on the shiny floor in her shoes and long dress. But it endears her to
us because her movements until now have been so rigid, poised and con-
trolled. She comes to a halt, looking at the door. We then cut to what is a
rare cinematographic event in this film, a reverse shot. We see what Harriet
sees, which is the front door closing slowly and silently as if by itself. It is
an uncanny moment, deliberately so, and seen from Harriet’s point-of-
view. We then cut to a reverse shot looking back at Harriet from the door.
Her arm reaches out towards the door (and us) in a gesture of appeal. She
realises there is no point and lowers her arm. No one will come. Mrs
Frazier, the last trace of human contact, has gone. The house has literally
closed itself in upon her and she is finally alone.
Now we approach the finale, heralded in by a musical refrain first heard
in the opening credits.3 We cut to a meticulously composed shot in which
the camera is placed in the living room, looking up at Harriet from below.
She stands still in mid-frame, tall and dark-haired in the empty hallway,
marmoreal in her pale robe, flanked on either side by dark pedestals with
the massive white staircase curving up behind her. This moment is held,
giving us time to appreciate it. Like a statue coming to life, Harriet then
begins to move. She slowly revolves her body to turn and look up the
stairs. It is an unusual movement. So far in the film Harriet has moved
back and forth in straight lines, with an upright, rigid and purposeful gait
bordering on the militaristic. Now her body seems propelled into a new
somatic language of curves and softness. She is effectively ‘turning’ not
only physically but mentally. Arzner’s camera follows this action closely,
moving round behind Harriet’s figure in order to show a close-up of her
face as she arrives in this new position. She looks intently upstairs and then
all around her, her eyes searching, ears listening. She looks incredulous
(Fig. 2.3).
This scene is filmed with an observance commensurate to the magni-
tude of the moment. It demonstrates an attentive and meticulous découp-
age which rises to meet the measure, pace and enormity of the psychic
awakening taking place. Harriet continues with her turning movement,
and the camera moves back to the other side to watch closely as she spirals
round to face the living room. The camerawork and performing actress are
working together slowly and carefully, because this moment of revelation
cannot be rushed. Harriet’s dark eyes widen as if seeing everything for the
first time. She moves forward to take more in. We know she is gazing at
Fig. 2.3 The final scene of Craig’s Wife
the living room behind where the camera is now placed. But the film does
not cut to show us what she is seeing. Instead, the film cuts to a shot along
its present trajectory but set much further back in space, thus framing
both the living room and Harriet surveying it from the steps. It is clear
that we are to be more concerned with watching Harriet in the process of
seeing than we are to be with what she is seeing. In her essay ‘Missing in
Action: Notes on Dorothy Arzner’ Beverle Houston suggests that Arzner’s
withholding of a the more traditional and customary reverse shot here is a
sign of the subversive impulse in her work. After all, as Houston asks, ‘Did
she refuse, rethink, reformulate any elements of classic cinema, in whose
history she is so repeatedly and insistently denied the place that may be
understood in terms of these very interventions?’ (Houston 1984: 26).
Houston theorises that this refusal to provide the audience with the reverse
shot it would normally expect to occur at this point denies them ‘the pri-
mary mechanism of suture and of mastery through identification’ (1984:
31). The film ‘denies the viewer access, not to the woman, but to what she
sees as she herself pursues an aggressive act of looking’ (25). Houston

draws on the problematics of cinematic address as theorised by Mary Ann
Doane. In ‘The ‘Woman’s film’: Possession and Address’ (originally pub-
lished in 1984), Doane claims that the female gaze in the woman’s film,
rather than assuming agency over the process of viewing, becomes turned
in upon itself and the ‘process of seeing is designed to unveil an aggression
against itself’ (Doane 1994: 288). Houston goes on to suggest that
Harriet’s prolonged look at the room, followed by an answering shot
which refuses to frame—and thereby show ownership of—what she is
looking at, serves to underline how Harriet cannot ever possess what she
sees. ‘The woman who looks possesses nothing’ writes Houston, ‘yet she
continues to look defiantly, so that we understand that to look is her crime’
(Houston 1984: 31).
But Arzner does not completely eschew the point-of-view shot, as the
previously discussed shot of the closing front door shows. She retrains the
spectator not to expect or be satisfied by a countershot which confirms the
seen object, but instead to discern in the held image that which does not
fit. The film invites us to read the screen carefully and to spot the stains
that Harriet has yet to see. Thus, what we see in this final scene is that it is
Harriet herself who does not fit. This impression is deepened as Harriet
leans against the wall. Not only is ‘leaning’ a physical act we have never
seen Harriet doing, but her diagonality is at odds with the orthogonal
matrix around her. She no longer fits into the grid. We notice this because
Arzner has inculcated in us the propensity to read the film’s images in this
way. Her découpage gives us time to observe and understand the extent of
Harriet’s psycho-spatial alienation. The film now cuts to the final shot of
the film, which is a close-up of Harriet’s face. Arzner judges it important
for us to fully see Harriet emerge from her emotional paralysis and wake
up to the empty stage set that is her life.
In her article about the film (and more specifically about the collabora-
tion between Arzner and the uncredited production designer William
Haines), Lee Wallace writes:
In Craig’s Wife—this tendency of inanimate objects to come to symbolic life

in the vicinity of the camera [a feature of melodrama’s mise-en-scène] is
reversed in the climactic scene of the film, in which a flesh-and-blood char-
acter takes on the quality of stone. (Wallace 2008: 397)
Giuliana Bruno reads this final scene in a similar way:

For Harriet the housewife, “house” and “wife” have been incorporated to
such an extent that the wife has become the house. This shift is epitomised in
a long shot in which Harriet Craig looks like a column as she stands in front
of the staircase of her home. She has become the pillar of the house… By the
end of the film, she has, tout court, become the house. (Bruno 2007: 90–91)
Bruno and Wallace see Harriet as having become another object in the
house. We have well understood the over-signification Harriet places on
objects throughout the film. Yet to say she has now become one herself is
not quite accurate. What we have been able to gradually apperceive, and
what has been made clearer to us as this final scene unfolds, is that these
objects are there to serve one purpose only, which is to mask the psychic
abyss Harriet cannot abide within herself. Their material presence prevents
empty space from becoming apparent. When Harriet comprehends that
the urn on the mantelpiece is no longer there and her hands move anx-
iously into the gap as if trying to find it, she is beginning to feel something
authentic. It is not yet a moment of agnition, but a movement towards it.
Arzner’s deceptively simple découpage invites us to follow a series of small
steps and incremental moments, recorded in detail and in turn as Harriet
proceeds towards what one might call the psychological ‘grand reveal’.
This is the joy of these moments. They have a treasure-trail quality to
them. We know where the treasure is, but the heroine does not and Arzner
is in no rush to reveal it to her or to us.
To return to the suggestion that Harriet has become absorbed into the
house as an object at the end of the film, I would argue these interpreta-
tions fail to recognise the more radical aspects of Arzner’s project. While
they may be a response to ideological and feminist concerns undeniably
raised by the film, they do not wholly account for the estranging effect the
house has upon Harriet.
Audiences and critics at the time responded to these ideological con-
cerns, inevitable given the subject matter. As Kathleen McHugh writes in
‘Housekeeping in Hollywood: The Case of Craig’s Wife’, ‘For audiences
in the twenties and thirties, the condemnation of a rigid, controlling,
compulsive housewife would resonate with new cultural priorities stress-
ing the importance of sex and romance in marriage’ (McHugh 1994:
128–9). She goes on to quote a review from Variety, which noted Harriet’s
‘abnormal passion for householding at the expense of every other homely
and affectionate relationship between man and wife’ and coined her as a
‘married spinster’ (129). The same magazine wrote:
Every neighbourhood has its Mrs Craig whose husband is a sympathetic

concern for other women… Men will secretly hope that overly meticulous
wifes [sic] will see the show and that also should nudge the gate. (McHugh
1994: 124)
McHugh recognises how this critical perception of Harriet as an ‘inap-

propriate’ wife accords with prevailing ideas about domesticity at the time.
She points out that these reviews perpetuate the character of Harriet as
‘representative of a certain social type’ and acknowledges they only take
the film at face value. For McHugh, the film tells a more complex story,
and this complexity is located in what she terms the ‘fixed debate’ between
‘two historically chronological versions of marriage and domesticity’
(McHugh 1994: 124). Basinger also raises the issues of complexity within
the audience. ‘Let that be an appropriate warning to all the women in the
audience’ she writes about the ending of the film. But she continues, ‘And
yet, with true contradiction, how many women out there would have been
happy enough to have been left to themselves in a substantial house when
they got home from the movies?’ (Basinger 1994: 247).
But the film is more than an exploration of the old adage that the
‘woman’s place is in the home’ and the traditional positioning of the man
as its master. Even as Walter lashes out at his wife, “The brass of you! And
the presumption! You set yourself up to control the very destiny of a
man!”, this is an issue that raises its head along the way somewhat in the
manner of a placard. It is something he is feeling, not an ideological issue
we are meant to particularly align ourselves with or against. His reaction is
woven into a film text that, I suggest, is attempting something more com-
plex. If one is to read the final scene as the film’s apotheosis, as I believe
we are called upon to do, we can see the film is investigating the idea of
being ‘at home’ in a more profound sense. It is a portrayal of psychic
estrangement, and broader issues of dwelling and a sense of our emplace-
ment in the world are at stake. In ‘The World and the Home’ Homi
K. Bhabha writes about a similar moment in Henry James’ novel The
Portrait of a Lady (1881): ‘The unhomely moment creeps up on you as
stealthily as your own shadow, and suddenly you find yourself, with Henry
James’s Isabel Archer, taking the measure of your dwelling in a state of
‘incredulous terror” (Bhabha 1992: 141). Harriet stands still and aghast
in her hallway, but not because she has at last become one with her beloved
objects and the house itself. In fact the opposite has taken place. The
house and its contents appear utterly alien to her, and she from them. Far
from becoming one more object among many, Harriet experiences herself
as alive and breathing among their deathly and inert array. They have
effectively lost their ‘sense’. Their meaningfulness to her, which is a useful-
ness the German philosopher and phenomenologist Martin Heidegger
describes as the ‘ready-to-handness’ (or readiness-to-hand) of objects, no
longer applies. They have been decontextualised, stripped of all relevance.
Once this meaning-making ‘ready-to-handness’ of her familiar objects is
stripped away, in other words once the objects in her house no longer
serve as props to support that which is unsupportable in herself, Harriet’s
space becomes, to draw on another Heideggerian concept, ‘de-worlded’.
This moment when the curtain is drawn back as it were, is what allows
Harriet’s sense of her own ‘being-ness’ to become recuperable to her. To
be suddenly stricken by an awareness of one’s ‘being-ness’ or ‘being-in-
the-world’ is a process theorised by Heidegger as becoming aware of one’s
‘Da-sein’ or Dasein (translated as ‘there-being’ or more correctly in
English ‘being-there’).4 Such moments of openness and clarity cannot be
predicted. They wake us up, alerting us to a usually dormant sense of our
own presence and dwelling in the world. What Arzner’s film opens out for
our consideration is that we cannot feel fully ‘at home’ anywhere if we do
not also acknowledge the empty space that lies behind everything, if we
are not aware at the same time that all homes are constructs, that they do
not wholly define or stabilise us, and that in some way it is important to
realise we are also homeless. ‘Dwelling for Heidegger’ explains Matt
Waggoner, ‘is an act of placemaking in which, by setting ourselves in rela-
tion to existing elements, we fashion ways of living together in the world’
(Waggoner 2018: 48). Such notions are of course abstract and contest-
able. Homes may very well be constructs but we need their shelter, none-
theless. Yet behind any cinematically constructed image of home lies the
threat of its shadowy double, the non-home, and our ejection from one
into the other. I introduce these ideas here because Harriet’s re-look at her
home invites us to do the same, and Arzner’s film can be seen as a starting
point for the rest of this book. Her gaze is a radical one, because the vener-
ated image of home is cast in an alien light. Homes are set up onscreen,
just as they are constructed in real life. But how we dwell in them is the
important question, and it is no straightforward matter. This is a subject
which subtends this book and to which I shall return when prompted by
the films themselves to do so. As Laura Rascaroli observes in her essay
exploring the architecture of home in Akerman’s film No Home Movie,
‘What we are given to see, in spite of the tidiness, pleasantness and even
elegance of spaces, of the reassuring familiar objects, furniture and orna-

ments, is the substantive, irremediable homelessness that subtends the
modern condition’ (Rascaroli 2020: 169).
Will this revelatory moment transform Harriet? We might be tempted
to read this into the final seconds of the film. Harriet’s eyes sparkling with
tears move upwards as if to heaven and her face is lit more intensely. But
we cannot be expected to accept any last-minute referral to a higher power
as a convincing resolution. Arzner’s quasi-conventional ending is decep-
tive. The film has a built-in ambivalence towards its subject: the ‘holy of
holies’ that is the American Family Home. Harriet’s gaze upward dissolves
into the image of an open book on whose pages we read: ‘People who live
to themselves, are generally left to themselves’, an admonishing adage
reeled off earlier to Harriet by Miss Austen. The book slowly closes and
the words ‘The End’ appear onscreen. But Arzner’s ending is not a closed
book and would have elicited more questions in the female (and male)
audiences of its day than the above quoted critical responses might sug-
gest. Does Harriet see the light? In one way she does. But not in any
conventional, tidy sense. This might be an opportunity for her to change
her life, something hinted at by her raised face and the uplifting music
which accompanies it. After all, Miss Austen and Mrs Harold team up
rather remarkably to go off together on a world tour. Arzner poses a set of
questions, and the proverbial quote at the end is not intended as a neat
assumption. Houston rightly points out that the audience is left ‘uneasy’.
Arzner does not leave the audience feeling ‘uneasy’ through her indeci-
sion as a filmmaker. If we look at how she prepared for the film, we see
quite the reverse to be true. She signed up to direct Craig’s Wife in 1936
and proceeded to make the film entirely on her own terms. She arrived as
an independent director at Columbia Studios in 1934 having been a stu-
dio director at Paramount until 1932. She negotiated her contract to
ensure significant control over production, a formal agreement which also
exempted her from attending the story conferences traditionally held on
producer Harry Cohn’s yacht. Cohn was happy to concede to her demands
as he had wanted her to work at Columbia since 1927. But Arzner went
on to enrage Cohn by casting the relatively unknown actress Rosalind
Russell without his approval. According to McHugh, ‘Cohn retaliated by
ordering a set, ‘Columbia fashion’, for the film’. However, this too Arzner
took issue with. She had a distinct vision as to what the Craig interior
should look like. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster describes how Arzner:
famously insisted that the set for the Craig house be designed to look as cold
and uninviting as a museum. She asked the art directors at Columbia to
make the set of the house (a character in itself) appear to be very fake, like a
giant overdressed dollhouse, but she was not at all happy with the results.
(Foster 2014)
The set was gigantic. Wallace quotes a review from Modern Screen in 1936
describing the set as ‘undoubtedly one of the most artistic and complete
interiors ever constructed on the lot. A ten-room house was built in its
entirety, with an estimated cost of $60,000 in furnishings’ (Wallace 2008:
405). Cohn threatened to fire Arzner after this expense was revealed. But
Arzner was unhappy with how the set had been designed and with the art
directors’ choice of furnishings. McHugh relates how Arzner simply ‘hired
interior designer William Haines and the two of them “sneaked into the
studio at night and transformed the set according to Arzner’s wishes”’.
(McHugh 1994: 127). Once Arzner and Haines had prepared the set in
this subversive way behind the Columbia Studio executives’ backs, Arzner
set about filming it in a way that ran counter to standard Studio procedure.
Most of the film’s action happens inside the Craig’s house. This spatial
limitation afforded Arzner the chance to shoot the film chronologically.
In an interview with Francine Parker in 1973, she claims to have deliber-
ately shot the film ‘in the right order as though it were a play’ (Wallace
2008: 397). Filming the action as it progresses in the story enabled actors
and crew to graduate sequentially towards the film’s conclusion. The dra-
matic action could unfold inside the house and travel processively towards
the end, gathering momentum along the way. This unusual procedural
decision provides a connective point on which to pivot towards the sec-
ond film in this chapter. Apart from a few scenes and exterior shots, A
Woman Under the Influence was also filmed in a single location and in
chronological order. But the house and its inhabitants are utterly unlike
those found in Arzner’s film and, crucially here as we probe into the prac-
tice and critique of découpage, they are filmed in an entirely differ-
ent manner.
The Longhetti home is a ‘blue-collar’ household situated in the
Hollywood area of Los Angeles, while the ‘white-collar’ household of the
Craigs is set in an unnamed, affluent suburb on the East Coast. Despite
this contrast in socio-economic status, it must be noted that neither of the
central female characters works, nor is expected to. Nearly forty years may
have passed between the making of these two films (Craig’s Wife was
made in 1936, A Woman Under the Influence in 1974) and a catastrophic

world war occurred in the meantime, but the image of a woman in a pri-
mary association with her home prevails and persists. However, as we will
see in all the films I look at, the formula of ‘woman-plus-habitation’ is a
starting point only. It acts as a seed, a generative impulse and a provoca-
tion to each filmmaker.
The first scene in A Woman Under the Influence shows Nick Longhetti
(Peter Falk) and a group of men wading out of an urban canal. We soon
learn that Nick manages a team for the municipal waste and water depart-
ment of Los Angeles. We never see Walter Craig at work, nor learn the
source of his wealth. It is just to be assumed and the separate spheres of
home and work do not dissolve into one another. Walter simply comes
home from work, hangs up his coat and hat, contentedly reads the news-
paper and chats to his aunt or neighbour—although we do see him visit an
unhappy work colleague at one point in the film. The everyday impact of
hard, physical labour and the rough camaraderie of the workplace is felt
directly in Nick and Mabel’s home. That the Longhetti family exists uneas-
ily somewhere on the border between the working and middle classes does
not mean the family is any less ‘house-proud’ than the Craig family how-
ever.5 They do not have domestic staff of course to help keep things clean
and in order. For a middle-class household in the 1970s, and a financially
struggling one at that, to have had a domestic servant would have been an
anomaly.6 Even Harriet Craig’s housekeeper and maid are on the verge of
leaving their employment and seeking a better life elsewhere. But over and
above issues of the general decline in domestic service in the United States
and elsewhere, it is clear that in stark contrast to the fastidious symmetry
so keenly upheld in the Craig residence, the Longhetti house is messy and
mutable. The Craig couple and their uniformed staff move in prescribed
routes around a rigid domestic geography in which nothing and nobody
is out of place. The home of the Longhetti family is a far less stable and
predictable domain.
Their modest home is an original Craftsman-style bungalow of the
larger variety (i.e., on two floors) in Hollywood. This style of housing
became popular in the early years of the twentieth century as demand for
housing in Los Angeles increased, largely due to the rapid growth of the
Hollywood film industry.7 The space downstairs has an open plan quality
with three main rooms opening through into one another, a mark of the
modernising impulse behind this new architectural style. There are few
dividing walls or doors downstairs (other than to the bathroom and
kitchen), and a wide pair of sliding glass screen doors divides the large
entrance area from the dining room. There is an ergonomic fluidity and
porosity to the space. The dining room is also where Nick and Mabel
sleep. The Craig marriage bed is inviolate, and it is evident that not much
sex, if any, goes on beneath its unruffled covers. By contrast, the Longhetti
bed is a site of ongoing intimacy. It functions as a sofa during the day and
a double bed at night. It is open to all as well as the couple themselves;
occupied in turn by their three children, Mabel’s mother, even a man
Mabel picks up in a bar. I have explored ways in which Arzner alerts us to
her themes through the way she spatially represents them with her camera-
work on set. What we now need to ascertain in Cassavetes’ later film is
what kind of découpage is deployed to portray what becomes an emotion-
ally and spatially chaotic home environment, and to what effect. From the
moment the film begins, we witness a formal approach totally unlike the
terse and resolute shapeliness found in Craig’s Wife. In fact, it might seem
as if Cassavetes is resisting any form of designated découpage whatsoever.
I opened my discussion of the previous film with Harriet’s final scene.
Here I begin with the first time we meet Mabel Longhetti, the character
at the heart of A Woman Under the Influence. Mabel (Gena Rowlands) is
in the hectic process of packing her three children off to her mother’s
house for a sleepover. We know that she and Nick have a special evening
planned, as in the previous scene he refuses to work an extra shift no mat-
ter what the emergency may be. Mabel dashes frantically to and fro on the
front lawn making sure everything is packed into the car. The breathless
quality to her movements is caught by and reflected in a mobile, darting
camerawork and sudden cuts between shots. The camera is on the move
with Mabel, rushing around as if trying to keep up. This frenetic and at
times comic scene teaches us much about the Longhetti family dynamics
and the character of Mabel herself. It is clear she adores her children and
is overflowing with childlike energy and ebullience. But we also intuit a
nervous character prone to high anxiety. She attends to each worry as it
occurs to her and there is pressure on every moment. Finally, the family
are ready to go. She waves them off, then turns back towards the house
muttering “I shouldn’t have let them go…”. As she runs across the lawn
she loses and retrieves one of her shoes. Before she reaches the porch the
film cuts to the interior of the house.
Inside all is calm and still. Coming inside before Mabel shifts the pace
and emphasis of the film away from the hectic activity in the sunlit street
and we sense a quieter, interior world within. No longer restless, the static
camera is positioned at one end of the house looking along the entire
width of its downstairs space. In front of us the large and open entrance
area leads through to a dimly lit room in the distance. It is a well com-
posed, deep focus shot at odds with the darting, mobile camerawork out-
side. The front door on the left is flung open and Mabel rushes in,
slamming the door behind her. She pauses and we wait to see what will
happen. The camera remains still. After a moment, she turns and walks
towards the camera. As she comes forward into the living area and into the
fullness of the screen space she performs a series of odd gestures, pointing
towards individual corners of the room as if marking them out and making
small vocal sounds as she does so. We are not sure what these gestures
mean exactly but recognise in them some kind of stabilising emplacement
within her environment. ‘This is where the door is, this is where the stairs
are, nothing has changed…’ The house may be empty and the children no
longer there, but everything else remains in place. The familiar space of
her home has become infused with absence, and therefore de-familiarised.
She is in effect treading the delicate line Freud identified as lying between
what we experience as heimlich (the homely) and unheimlich (the
unhomely, more often translated as ‘uncanny’). Freud observed how easily
these two words and their related experiential states flip over from one to
the other when pushed to their extreme. ‘Thus heimlich’ Freud writes, ‘is
a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it
finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich’.8 Mabel finds herself walk-
ing into the de-familiarised, un-homely place in which Harriet was last
seen, the obvious difference being of course that this is the point at which
Cassavetes’ film begins (Fig. 2.4).
Mabel turns away and walks towards the room beyond. The camera
remains where it is, allowing us to observe her figure recede into the axial
depth of the house. The composition of this shot and the way the charac-
ter moves within its visual architecture recalls the way in which domestic
spaces are often framed in the films of Yasujirō Ozu. Shots such as these
are characterised by a dimly lit interior in which a figure walks away from
the camera into a receding perspective of architectural lines and contours.
The stylistic imprint is echoed in Cassavetes’ film by the presence of the
screen doors seen between the open hallway and the far room. Made of
glass and latticed with wooden frames, they resemble the shoji screens
traditionally used in Japanese homes. Shoji screens act as moveable, sliding
walls and are a notable feature in Ozu’s spatially attuned mise-en-scène.9
With regards to this shot, what is curious is that the space of the house is
Fig. 2.4 Mabel marks her territory in A Woman Under the Influence
never as aesthetically composed, dimly lit and shot with such a depth of
field as it is on this occasion. It is an eloquent moment, one which cine-
matically poeticises Mabel’s solitary existence in her home. For Cassavetes
however, such an effect is easy enough to obtain. He discusses the distinc-
tive framing of this shot in an interview in 1975, and his comments are
useful as they make clear where his priorities lie:
[…] we all know how to make something lonely. You go far away and you
light it very dimly here and there and very sketchily and very beautifully
depending on how you want to do it, and you shoot wide-angle and you let
a woman wander through a house. It’s easy to make a woman lonely.
(Carney 2001: 342)
But he continues, ‘What’s important is that Gena [Rowlands] goes out

and takes her kids and sends them away from her house so she can be
alone with her husband’. This qualification and the somewhat dismissive
manner in which he describes how easy it is to ‘make a woman lonely’ on
film reveal an ambiguous attitude towards the considered and authored
nature of cinematography as evinced in this particular shot. Setting up a
beautiful shot of the hallway may be possible and achievable, but it is not
his prime concern—nor is it to be ours. In fact, he frames the activity as
something ‘easy’ that ‘we’ could all do. No special skill or heightened
relevance is to be attributed to it. The emotional texture of the scene and

the audience’s apperception of that is more important. The history behind
this shot is informative. It was set up by Caleb Deschanel, a ‘star student’
at the American Film Institute, who Cassavetes initially hired as director of
photography as part of a deal struck with the Institute. In order to get his
independent film financed and made, Cassavetes had to be inventive. He
suggested to the AFI that he become their ‘filmmaker-in-residence’ and
be given access to their equipment and facilities. In return Cassavetes
would allow students and fellows at the Institute onto the set of his film to
observe and learn. In effect however, these students became the full-time
crew. There is a subversive element to Cassavetes’ actions in this regard,
reminiscent of Arzner’s secret work on the set with Haines. As Carney
explains:
What he didn’t tell them, of course, was that he was desperately in need of
free offices, equipment and crew, and the AFI wouldn’t merely be assisting
an existing project, but partially underwriting a movie that probably couldn’t
have been made otherwise. (Carney 2001: 317)
But the creative collaboration between Deschanel and Cassavetes did not
go well. Deschanel had been trained to craft shots in the conventional way,
a process which entails time-consuming camera and lighting set-ups and
requires actors and crew to wait around for long periods until needed. For
Cassavetes, such lengthy pre-planning was neither necessary nor produc-
tive and, crucially for him, it prevented actors from working well. He
viewed it as a process that obstructed the creative atmosphere he wished
to inculcate on set. Unsurprisingly, Cassavetes dismissed Deschanel a few
weeks into the shoot, not without acrimony, and several crew members
went with him. Only a few of Deschanel’s shots remain in the film, the
hallway shot being one of them. However, there is a moment in which the
camera’s placement (or, referencing Balázs’ term Einstellung or ‘attitude’,
we can say its ‘posture’) changes in this scene.
As she enters the room in the distance Mabel repeats the same odd
gestures before turning to her right. Were the camera to remain where it
is, Mabel would effectively walk out of our view. So Cassavetes cuts to a
closer shot, allowing us to peer through the screen doors and see Mabel
thwack a large box down from the top of a cupboard. It is an idiosyncratic
gesture that reveals much about her excitement and natural sense of bra-
vura but which we would have missed had the camera remained further
back as before. Cassavetes then returns us to the previous camera position,

and we continue to watch from afar as she opens the box and brings out a
pink negligée and a matching pair of fluffy mules (items of clothing obvi-
ously not worn often, if ever, and being brought out for this special ‘love
night’ as Nick has called it). This deep, long shot of the house has given
us time to appreciate how Mabel physically and mentally grounds herself
in, and is grounded by, the space of her empty home. We may not fully
understand her private gestures, but that is no matter. We have had time
to observe them. But we have also become aware of a contrast in the way
the film communicates with us. The camera, and the cinematic gaze it
instantiates, is so tied to the character that it does unexpected things. One
moment it rests still, and we are immersed in observation. The next it
jumps up close as if unable to resist. Moreover, bearing Cassavetes’ reveal-
ing comments on this shot in mind, it seems clear that Cassavetes is inter-
rupting Deschanel’s urge to ‘frame’ and therefore overly accommodate
Rowlands. What is transmitted to the audience is a sense that the con-
sciousness guiding the camera, the ‘attitude’ behind it, that which shapes
the way the action is filmed and therefore goes on to shape (as Balázs
describes) the attitude ‘in the viewers mind’, is in an affiliated relationship
with Gena Rowlands, not only in her role as Mabel Longhetti but also—
and perhaps even as much as—with her creative and undulating persona as
a performing actress.
These two opening scenes with Mabel (inside and outside the house)
are placed next to one another in the film’s découpage. Unlike Craig’s
Wife, there is no consistent shaping mechanism—no singular way of look-
ing. Outside we have a mobile, unpredictable camera that follows a char-
acter about. Inside we have a still camera that remains distant, but which
is prone to being interrupted by the impulse to get a closer look. The
difference in the style of these two scenes cannot wholly be attributed to
the premature departure of Deschanel, although it may account for the
hallway shot’s stand-alone nature. This oscillation between still and mov-
ing shots is a stylistic feature which patterns the entire film.
The production situation goes some way to explain this variation in
cinematographic attitude. Part of the equipment on loan from the AFI
was a large 35 mm Mitchell BNC camera. This heavy camera could not be
moved around easily. Cassavetes used the Mitchell in combination with a
lighter, hand-held Arriflex camera. Mike Ferris or Al Ruban shot static and
wide shots on the Mitchell, while Cassavetes shot close-ups and moving
action shots with the Arriflex. There is more than one camera, more than
one cameraman, and more than one camera posture. But there is a third
notable feature in the film’s découpage. At certain close moments of inti-
macy, characters walk away from the camera altogether.
Such a feature occurs at the end of this scene. Mabel realises Nick is not
coming home. It is only after she sits immobilised with drink and disap-
pointment late into the night that we find out what has happened. The
film cuts to a chaotic scene downtown with water gushing everywhere,
emergency vehicles, flashing lights and men in yellow jackets. Nick had to
work after all and has failed to let Mabel know. He finally calls from a
phone box to explain but it is too late. “I’m fine Nick, please believe me
it’s fine”, she says. But we have watched her mood descend and know
otherwise. When she slams the phone down the camera is close enough
for us to register her face twitch and twist with turmoil. But at this point
of intimacy with the audience, Mabel stands up and walks away from us.
The camera is quite literally left behind and we can only watch the back of
her dress as she withdraws. It now seems as if the découpage is working in
a contradictory manner. Or, as Gilberto Perez puts it in his discussion of
the way films ‘speak’ to us, the film is adjusting its term of engagement. In
his book The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium Perez writes this way
about conventions in art:
For a convention in art is not just an established rule—that red at a traffic

light means stop, for example—but an agreement on the part of the audi-
ence, a consent to what the work is doing, to a way of doing things the work
proposes. Whether this is a well-established way or a bold new departure, it
must gain an audience’s agreement—it must be accepted as a convention—if
the work is to get across to that audience. (Perez 1998: 21–22)
Cassavetes’ film may aim to show us everything about Mabel, as evidenced

in the close shot of her reaching for the box and the painful close-up on
the phone described above. The camera has an umbilical connection to
the character and the actress who plays her—as it has to all the actors at
some point or other in this film. But we are also being asked to accept a
measure of restraint and must readjust accordingly. Perez describes this
adjustment as a renegotiation. Even ‘the most innovative work’ he writes,
‘cannot just disregard convention but must negotiate its audience’s accep-
tance of its innovations—even if it is an unsure acceptance, an acceptance
forever renegotiated’ (22). Is one to conclude that the camera, which
stands in for our own involved gaze, can never be capable of seeing
everything? If we do arrive at this understanding, which I believe the para-

doxical nature of the film’s découpage invites us to do, this reveals some-
thing significant about the director’s views on reality. What this ‘walking
away’ shot implies is that Mabel, a character made intimately available to
the audience for so much of the time, can never be fully known or accom-
modated. She has the freedom to walk away from the trifold gaze of cam-
era, director and audience, no matter how fascinated that curiously
imbricated gaze may be. This third stylistic feature confers a privacy back
onto characters that the film (via the work of the camera) at the same time
works assiduously to probe into. A key observation made by Cassavetes
helps us arbitrate this apparent contradiction. ‘All people are really private’
he says, ‘as a writer and a director, you understand that that’s the ground
rule: people are private’ (Carney 2001: 335).
In a recorded discussion with Rowlands and a live audience,10 Cassavetes
says the following things about camerawork:
It’s much easier for an operator to follow action that’s free and natural than
staged action… But if the action is wrong and you don’t believe it and
you’re not zeroed into it and it’s phony and it stinks—your photography
stinks, you know?
I think it’s much easier not to stage, much easier—but of course, you
must be prepared! The sound must be prepared, film has to be in the cam-
era… For example, we’re in a lecture room here, and I have a camera and I
gotta shoot everybody in the room. That’s the problem… you gotta be a
good focus puller, gotta have good depth… (Carney 2001: 345)
These statements exemplify a crucial tension at the core of Cassavetes’ film

practice. He states plainly that no amount of wonderful photography will
matter if the action is ‘phony’, yet fully acknowledges that one ‘must be
prepared’. Cassavetes is unequivocal and unapologetic about his resistance
to any form of schematic pre-planning. Witness the following polemic
(italics are in the text):
Only a schmuck comes on the set day after day, every day, and says it has to
be this way, we have to follow that decision. The film goes its own way,
makes its own demands, and you go with it. If you don’t, you’re dead. They
say, ‘You always change your mind.’ Yes! I change my mind! I change.
(Ventura 2007: 78–79)
Yet as we learn from many interviews with the director and his team,
Cassavetes’ sets were ‘surprisingly disciplined’ places. For example, when
actors came onto the set:
they were expected to leave their ordinary identities behind and become the
strangers they are in the film. Actors were to stay in character, or at least not
to blatantly come out of character. That meant that they were forbidden to
discuss their characters and roles with each other; and were not allowed to
indulge in chit-chat. (Carney 2001: 322)
His filmmaking environment was free-wheeling and controlled, his cam-

erawork roving and still. Can a workable balance be struck between these
two positions? And how does an audience read a découpage shaped by such
a reactive and vacillating process?
Earlier in this chapter I explored how Arzner filmed the Craig house
and its inhabitants in a way that spatially evoked the respondence between
interior space and the inner architecture of the self. The consistent pat-
terning of Arzner’s découpage is part and parcel of her spatial exploration
of the film’s themes. The Craig house does not just stand there mute, like
a ‘silent shell’ (Schaal 2013: 54). The set becomes a physical manifestation
of Harriet’s psyche and Arzner films it so that we apperceive this. The film
encourages us to make connections between interiors and interiority, one
of the reasons it is so enjoyable to watch. But can Cassavetes’ film possibly
function in the same way? We have seen how intrinsically connected his
camerawork is to the actor and how he resists any striven attempt to coerce
their work into shape with intrusive cinematography as this would be an
unnecessary interference. But can anything be understood or gleaned
from the formal shaping of the film, the way the shots are taken and are
placed together, or are we simply required to lose ourselves in what Carney
calls the ‘expressive disarray’ of the characters (1991: 109)? Does his
instinctive, impulsive and primarily actor-led working method, prevent the
director from recruiting the expressive potential of the architectural envi-
ronment in which his characters live so that it contributes to our under-
standing of their inner lives? Does the home space matter? Let us look
more closely at the Longhetti house and the way it is filmed.
The physical environment of the house had a direct impact on the film-
ing process. Cassavetes made the decision to film both wide shots and
close-ups with long lenses, allowing actors to be filmed in close-up
without being obtruded on by the camera. There were formal conse-

quences to this approach:
I knew it would be technically impossible to do it all in focus. The operator

and the focus puller couldn’t possibly be in concert because there’d be no
way of knowing where the actors would be at any one moment. It had to be
a natural thing: certain things would come and go in focus because there
were so many points of interest switching back and forth all the time.
(Carney 1985: 199)
But this decision was also a practical response to the space of the house
itself. ‘One of the reasons we used long lenses especially for all the work in
the house, was to avoid a feeling of confinement’ recalls Cassavetes. ‘So
much of the picture takes place in the Longhetti house there’s a real dan-
ger of getting a feeling the actors are locked in by the camera’ (Carney
1985: 188). It was not an easy house in which to film. Yet the choice of
location was far from random.
Cassavetes claimed he looked at around 150 houses in Los Angeles
before settling on the house in Taft Avenue.11 The home had to suit the
socio-economic status of the family and be somewhere they could realisti-
cally afford.12 It needed to be well-worn as this family would not be able
to afford home improvements, nor be much interested in pursuing them.
The house has an awkward topology. The large family bathroom is down-
stairs with two doors leading into it; one from the kitchen (which is at the
end of its own narrow corridor leading from the hallway), the other from
the dining room. A steep staircase leads upstairs to the first floor, where all
three children share one bedroom. Nick and Mabel sleep in the main liv-
ing/dining room downstairs, unfolding the sofa at night. Space is limited,
but the house is in fact larger in real life than it appears in the film. The
extremely tight budgetary constraints meant that film equipment had to
be stored on site and production offices installed upstairs. Some crew
members slept in the house throughout the shoot and naturally used its
facilities. The house therefore formed itself around the needs of the whole
production community, becoming a ‘house of requirement’, a nexus
between fiction and reality. Like the fictional Longhetti family, cast and
crew also inhabited the space. It seems inevitable therefore that boundar-
ies became blurred and a porous relationship between house and film, real
people and fictional characters, evolved. Carney records how:
Rowlands said that since the cast and crew worked together in such a small
space for such long hours, almost living together as a kind of big happy fam-
ily, by the second week of shooting she felt that she actually lived there—
that it really was her house. She moved through the spaces, from room to
room, naturally. (Carney 2001: 320–1)
These porosities and spatial overlaps are echoed in the architectonics of

the house itself. Most action takes place downstairs in a room which dou-
bles as both a public and a private space. The communal dining room is
also Nick and Mabel’s bedroom. The marriage bed is a sofa during the day
which turns into a double bed at night. This all-purpose room is divided
from the hallway not by a door but a pair of sliding screen doors. Sliding
open from the middle and made of glass, they act as a membrane between
rooms rather than a firm door set in a solid wall. These transparent screen
doors are neither wall nor door. The ‘new spatial relations’ they instigate
present what Katherine Shonfield describes as an ‘uneasy architectural
ambiguity’ which ‘works in contrast to the strict control of access tradi-
tionally determined by the radius of an opening door’ (2000: 65). They
can be locked from the inside preventing access from the hall. However
the room can be entered via a circular route through the kitchen and bath-
room. Thus, if the screen doors are locked one can simply go around the
other way. Although covered with net curtains, the wide weave fails to
entirely block the view into the room. Set at one corner of the house, this
multifaceted room has two large windows on adjacent sides of the bed.
These are covered by venetian blinds which, like the net curtains, do not
provide full privacy or entirely shut out the light from outside. The room
lacks privacy. But facing the sofa/bed on the opposite side of the room is
a closed door on which is attached a large, official sign reading ‘PRIVATE’.
This door leads directly into the bathroom which in turn leads into the
kitchen and back round (via a corridor) into the hallway. As we become
acquainted with this odd spatial topology and how the family navigate
their way through it, we realise that thresholds are not stable in this house
and privacy is impossible to maintain. One can see into the bedroom from
the hall and eat in the same room in which Nick and Mabel sleep. The
screen doors can be locked but fail to keep anyone out. At one point, find-
ing them locked and wanting to speak to a non-responsive Mabel within,
Nick simply goes through the kitchen. She cannot keep him out even if
she wants to. The bathroom has a sign emblazoned with the word
‘PRIVATE’ and yet the door is easy enough to open and walk through. In
fact, one must go through that door to get into the kitchen, albeit via the
bathroom. There is a touch of farce to this house. Any attempt to instate
borders or privacy quickly become absurd. Is this why the bathroom door
carries such an outsized and somewhat inappropriate, official-looking
sign? It looks like something indicating an area reserved for staff, so to
whom is it addressed? Perhaps Nick brought it home from his municipal
workplace and put it up in recognition of the lack of privacy to which the
couple are subjected. These small hints towards farce and humour, deliv-
ered without words but told in the non-verbal spatial language of architec-
ture, reveal something important about the nature of the house’s
inhabitants. As we watch the characters move through this unstable
domain, we come to understand how the house functions as a topographi-
cal representation of their unstable psychic lives. One can go further and
say that it has grown up around this instability, been formed by it and
serves to support it. Like an inconsistent parent who resorts to imposing
arbitrary rules on their children whenever they feel out of control, borders
are either wholly disregarded or suddenly and randomly applied. This
applies not only to the way the Longhetti’s behave with each other and
their children, but to the way they shape and are shaped by their home. As
the years have passed and this family has grown up inside its space, the
house has grown around them. We can say the house is in an active, mutu-
ally reflective relationship with its inhabitants, formed by and forming
them at the same time. Cassavetes became acutely aware of this intimate
and interdependent relationship during the making of the film. ‘There’s
the outside world and there’s the inside world’ he said afterwards, and
continued:
The inside world is your home, your family, the things that create emotions
within you. The outside world is you: where you are going and how you
move and where you fly, you know? And they are two worlds. I really
believe—after making the picture, not before—that the inside world really
holds you, really contains you, can cause you pain that you didn’t show
outside, and that is why no one ever talks about it. (Loeb 1975)
That the audience is able to apperceive this psycho-spatial osmosis, that it

becomes communicated to them in visual terms, is attributable to the
efforts of Cassavetes to remain responsive with his camera not only to his
actors but to the space that surrounds them. There is a fine example of
sensitivity towards the architectonics of the Taft Avenue house in the

film’s final sequence.
Mabel’s behaviour becomes progressively more erratic the more she is
unsupported by her husband. In a moment of great treachery and encour-
aged by his dominating mother (formidably played by Cassavetes’ own
mother Katherine Cassavetes) and the family doctor (played by non-actor
Eddie Shaw), Nick has Mabel committed to an asylum. Six months later
she is released, and we move towards the final act of the film. Their recon-
ciliation is sudden. Nick surpasses himself in insensitivity by inviting a
crowd of friends, acquaintances and strangers to welcome Mabel back. His
mother realizes to her credit that this is a mistake, and asks them all to
leave. Only close family and the family doctor remain. Mabel arrives, well-
dressed and subdued. Once inside, she shyly requests to see the children
who are waiting patiently in the dining room. Mabel slowly slides open the
screen doors to go inside and see them. In the following scene our look is
closer to her than at any other point in the film. The scene was shot by
Cassavetes with a handheld camera. Because he is so close yet shooting
with a long lens, Rowlands’ face sometimes goes out of focus or slips out
of centre frame. But the dynamic découpage of the film has accustomed us
to such cinematographic informalities and we are not disturbed by them.
Our reward is intimacy with Mabel. We watch her face intently and unin-
terruptedly as she reacts to the waves of love flowing up to her from the
children. We cannot see them as they are two small to be in shot, but their
enfolding voices become more eloquent as a result. “Are you feeling bet-
ter Mom?” “Have you got any more stomach aches?” “And have you got
any more headaches?” “No…” she whispers, “I’m just trying very hard
not to get excited… no emotions now, I really wanna be calm”. We know
how much she adores her children and they her. We also know she is
acutely aware of how she must present herself as coherent and ‘sane’ and
that she needs to return to the living room to face the family gathered
there. As Mabel prepares to leave the children’s embrace, we cut to the
living room. Framed in a wide and static shot on the large Mitchell cam-
era, this grim group anxiously awaits her entrance. We watch as they stare
towards the screen doors, which we then hear sliding open and being
closed off-camera. Only then do we cut to see their point-of-view. Mabel
stands still in front of the doors with her head bowed, still wearing her
coat, her children just visible through the net curtains behind. It is a dev-
astating portrait of a woman suppressing her liveliness, divided from her
children and from the energy and love of that encounter—not by any
massive, unscalable barrier, but by an ineptly screened glass door. This is

the way families work. Psychic rules are played out spatially in the topog-
raphy of their homes. None of this is stated in words, but all is conveyed
visually. This scene would not have been planned beforehand in the way of
classical découpage. Cassavetes prepared no storyboard and planned no
series of shots in advance. This meaningful and eloquent shot was uncov-
ered during the process of filming and is pieced together by us as we
watch. Rather than pointing things out, this form of découpage allows
things to be discovered (Fig. 2.5).
The ending comes quickly. After an awkward attempt at a family meal,
Mabel struggles not to be ‘inappropriate’ but finally gives way to her natu-
ral ebullience. She tells jokes and the children laugh, get excited and stand
on their chairs. A dangerous energy is let loose. Inevitably Nick loses his
temper and shuts the effervescence down. “Siddown that’s the end of the
jokes!”, he yells at them all. “Now we kill the jokes and we just talk! Hello!
How are you! Conversation! Weather! Conversation!” After her father
fails to stand up for her, Mabel has a relapse. Retreating into the privacy of
her own world (for there is certainly none to be found in the house itself)
she ends up standing on the sofa humming the dying swan music from
Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake. This refrain has imaginative significance
for her, and we remember her playing it at the children’s party earlier in
Fig. 2.5 Mabel stands on the threshold in A Woman Under the Influence
the film (a party violently ended by Nick and his mother) as she encour-
aged the children to dance in the garden. After looking on helplessly the
defeated family leave and Nick and the children are left alone with her. In
the ensuing struggle Mabel rushes into the bathroom and attempts to slit
her wrists. Nick forces the razor out of her hand surrounded by the
screaming children. She runs back to the sofa and stands on it in a trance,
her hand dripping with blood. Shockingly, Nick resorts to knocking her
down onto the floor. All this action would have been filmed with the
mobile Arriflex camera. The actors’ movements in this scene were largely
improvised and would have been too unpredictable to have been shot in
any other way.
As she lies recovering on the floor, Nick struggles to carry the three
children upstairs. Undaunted, they repeatedly storm back downstairs to
protect her. Once again, this scene borders on the farcical. We see them
being hauled up the dark and narrow staircase by Nick and then clamber-
ing down again. Finally, Mabel gets up. The children surround her, and
Nick gives up trying to corral them. “They wanna know if you’re alright”,
he says with a smile. An invisible tension is suddenly released. Mabel seems
to come out of a trance. Together they take the children upstairs. She
bonds with each one in turn as the couple put them to bed. The camera
gets as close as possible to Rowlands so we can see how Mabel touchingly
says goodnight to each child in a special way. These moments too would
have been shot by Cassavetes on the Arriflex. “You know I’m really nuts!”
she says as they go back downstairs. “I don’t even know how this whole
thing got started!” Nick washes and dresses her hand and they start to
clear the table. We watch them go through a series of humdrum motions,
walking back and forth into the kitchen with trays, switching off lights in
the living room. They then prepare the bed. They move the table and
chairs back, unfold the sofa, get out the bedding from a chest of drawers
and, importantly, ignore a ringing phone. They are putting their broken
life back together via these simple household rituals. What we notice at
this point is that there is no more close, anxious following around of Nick
and Mabel by the camera. Instead it hangs back in the hallway, still and
observant, watching them sort their space through the open screen doors.
Nick turns to perform one more ritual. He slides these doors together in
front of us and draws the net curtains across the glass. We can just see
them chatting and laughing through the veil. But we are no longer allowed
into their life. The position of the camera makes it clear that this is as far
as we go, there is no more for us to see. It is a singular point in the film
because it is one in which we feel borders are for once being drawn
definitively.
Carney proposes that Cassavetes wants to teach his viewers ‘radically
new ways of knowing—new ways of understanding themselves and oth-
ers’. In order to achieve this goal, he continues, ‘the filmmaker fully
understood that disorientating his viewers, attacking their viewing habits,
making them uncomfortable might be the necessary first step in this direc-
tion’ (Carney 1991: 106). This would suggest that Cassavetes’ fractured,
seemingly improvisational camerawork is not merely following the flow
but is consciously designed to divert the audience away from their habitual
and traditionally held expectations about how classical cinematic narra-
tives normally behave. Carney again:
In comparison with the schematic crises and externalized struggles of other

films (where characters face clear problems with well-defined solutions),
Cassavetes’ work explores twilight areas in our lives: subtle self-betrayals,
secret bewilderments, and failures of self-awareness. That is, I believe, what
he was getting at when he once said that contemporary filmmakers must
move “beyond the artificial conflicts of melodrama,” in order to define
“new kinds of problems” deeper than those generated by external conflicts.
(Carney 1991: 106)
But even the messy ‘twilight areas’ in our lives need shape for an audi-
ence to comprehend them as such. Moreover, as we have seen in Craig’s
Wife, a more ‘schematic’ approach does not foreclose ambiguity. It just
enables it to be received and understood by the audience in a different
way. Given that Arzner operated within the strict confines of Hollywood
Studio practice and was embedded in a narrative system that upheld what
Cassavetes perceived as the “artificial conflicts of melodrama”, it is aston-
ishing that the ending to her film manages to be as unusual as it is. Arzner
does not employ her camera in any radical way. But the steady, terse shape-
liness of her découpage allows her film to proceed unflinchingly towards its
shocking conclusion. As a result, her film has a contemporaneity that
reaches beyond its inherited strategies of classical storytelling and obvi-
ously ‘dated’ 1930s specificity. The découpage of Cassavetes’ film is delib-
erately kept receptive in order to give space to the actors to create and
perform. But equally, the tension between intimacy and privacy plays out
in this camerawork, as we have seen. The camera brings us close to the
actors by following their every move with a mobile camera and long lenses.
But it also holds back in mute acknowledgement of their privacy, and

thereby separates them from us. Both positions—or ‘attitudes’—towards
his subject are an attempt by Cassavetes’ to negotiate a way through this
tension. Close analysis reveals how the camerawork, while it may be recep-
tive and responsive, is not passive. It can function actively to create mean-
ing. ‘Balázs confers upon camera set-up a meaning that elevates the camera
beyond the mere pictorial’ explains Barnard, ‘to something, like Franju’s
intuitive découpage, that adopts an attitude towards the profilmic subject.
The camera becomes an agent, an active creative force’ (2014: 28). It is
more useful to discuss what kind of découpage this is, rather than whether
it exists at all. One could call up conventional categories of ‘classical’
(Arzner) versus ‘modern’ (Cassavetes). But such binary oppositions are
problematic and open to debate. Linda Williams points out in ‘“Tales of
Sound and Fury…” or, the Elephant of Melodrama’ that, ‘Hardly anyone
spoke of a “classical” cinema during what many agree was its heyday’
(2018: 209). She continues:
The vast majority of early observers, especially the classically inclined French,
admired the energy, speed, and dynamism of the cinema—attributes associ-
ated with modernity that seemed in direct opposition to what they observed
in the classicism of art and drama. (Williams 2018: 209)
In her discussion of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick 1969), a film

she claims redefines not only ‘the content of cinema’ but ‘its “shape of
content”’, Annette Michelson offers a dual description of filmic style as
both the ‘structural and sensuous incarnation of the artist’s will’ (Michelson
1969). ‘As all who care more than casually for movies know’, she writes:
the point at which one begins to understand the nature of the medium
comes when one sees the image before one, not as a sequence of events
evolving past or within the frame, but rather as a structure organised in
depth and in relation to the frame by the camera itself. (Michelson 1969)
We could describe Arzner’s découpage as ‘structural’ and Cassavetes’ as

‘sensuous’. We might also categorise the former as ‘theme-led’ and the
latter as ‘actor-led’. What is certain is that the way both films are shot is
informed by their subject matter and how the makers feel about it. Arzner’s
style is as symmetrical and schematic as the house in which her characters
live. She creates a character who arranges her life along strict and
emotionally arid lines. By following a systematic route, Arzner can insert

oddities and anomalies into this grid which do not fit. Eventually she can
overturn the system and lead us calmly towards an epiphany of surprising
alterity. American suburbia and its promise of normative stability are cast
into doubt. Cassavetes’ camera remains in the service of his actors, giving
them plenty of space to perform and invent. He is more interested in
exploring the unpredictability of human nature than he is in reassuring us
of its consistency. As a result the découpage of his film is as mutable and
unstable as the characters themselves and house in which they live.
Through this difficult route Cassavetes can bring us towards a closer
encounter with the messy complexity of our inner lives. But that is not to
say there is no formality, no shaping, no ‘spatial attitude’. What we learn
to read as an audience is a stylistic flexibility shot through with a formality
which asserts itself when needed but which is prone to interruption and
open to impulse. The Craig and Longhetti homes are polar opposites, but
Cassavetes’ messy house is no less expressively rendered through découp-
age than Arzner’s preternaturally tidy one.
Victor Perkins writes in Film as Film that, ‘In the cinema style reflects
a way of seeing, it embodies the filmmaker’s relationship to objects and
actions’ (1993: 134). He does not use the word découpage, preferring the
phrase a ‘way of seeing’. The ‘way of seeing’ in each of these films, their
découpage in action, reveals the aims and worldviews of two very different
filmmakers working in different contexts. One is nested subversively inside
the studio system, the other is subversively working outside it. Close anal-
ysis shows how, although their strategies differ, each film achieves what
Turim describes as the ‘filmic transformation of architecture into a con-
ceptual rather than a referential space’ (1991: 29). These films resonate
with one another across time and space. Cassavetes may be trying out new
things and resisting what he viewed as out-dated classical tropes, but
underneath his modernism the old themes so compelling to family melo-
drama are still being played out: the hysterical woman, the controlling
man, the confining house. Arzner’s film inverts this equation with her
construction of a controlling woman and an oblivious man. Both films
end with a woman who wakes up as if from a trance. In the earlier ‘classi-
cal’ film Harriet wakes up to her existence, her Dasein, and the ending
remains open and uneasy. In the later ‘modern’ film Mabel returns to the
marriage, order is restored, and the bed is remade. But we have seen her
been struck with force by her husband and are left uneasy, nevertheless.
Notes
1. We notice this forgetfulness in the same way that we notice Jeanne’s slip-
ups in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, a film discussed in more detail
in the next chapter.
2. Burke radiates goodness in this scene, a quality brought out in her por-
trayal of Glinda the Good Witch of the North in The Wizard of Oz three
years later (Victor Fleming 1939).
3. Audiences may not consciously notice this musical circularity, but they may
register its ‘full-circle’ ‘what-goes-round-comes-around’ significance on an
unconscious level. As with many films made within the classical Studio
system in Hollywood, the composers of the film are uncredited. There
were however three composers on the film who all had long, productive
and largely uncredited careers: R.H. Bassett, Emil Gerstenberger and
Milan Roder.
4. These ideas are explored in depth in Heidegger in Being and Time (origi-
nally published in 1927). Pertinent to my work in this book and to its
‘spatial turn’ are the philosopher’s meditations on ‘dwelling’, as found in
two key texts in spatial studies, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ and
‘Poetically Man Dwells’ (1951). Presented as lectures in 1951 and printed
in Leach 2010.
5. Among the many simmering tensions in the film is that which exists
between Mabel’s father and Nick. The two families are from different
socio-economic backgrounds and while this is never referred to in the film,
subtle (and not so subtle) distinctions between class and race the 1970s
America rear their heads at various points in the film. For example, Mabel’s
father refuses to stay for lunch at one point because he cannot stand pasta.
The level of hostility with which this is uttered far outweighs simple dietary
concerns. A longer discussion of these concerns is beyond the remit of this
book. Rhodes pays attention to the way racial tension plays out in the film
during a pivotal scene in which Nick’s workmates come to lunch (for pasta)
in Spectacle of Property (2017).
6. Domestic servants declined in number in the USA after World War II for a
variety of socio-economic reasons, as they did in the United Kingdom.
(Phyllis Palmer 1989 reissued 2018, Vanessa May 2011; Lucy
Lethbridge 2013).
7. I discuss the spatial properties of the California Bungalow in more detail in
Chap. 5, as Maya Deren’s home was one, and its architectonics play a role
in her film Meshes of the Afternoon.
8. Freud’s foundational essay ‘The Uncanny’ written in 1919, is a work (and
term) so frequently referred to in spatial studies of cinema that it runs the
risk of becoming what Richard Martin calls ‘a rather over-familiar reference’
(2014: 64). A contemporary translation of Freud’s essay can be found in

The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock. 2003. (London: Penguin Books).
9. The architectural echo is no coincidence. Twentieth century architects in
the United States were influenced by Eastern architecture and the design-
ers of the California Bungalow borrowed heavily from the Japanese ver-
nacular style in both design and building materials.
10. This was held in 1975 to publicise the film and is archived in Ray Carney’s
2001 book. You can find this interview and a wealth of archived material
on the film at: https://cinephiliabeyond.org/a-woman-under-the-
influence-cassavetes-intense-and-emotionally-exhausting-slice-of-life/
11. This figure differs from that given by Elaine Kagan, who, in a filmed inter-
view, describes how they looked at ‘30, 40 or 50 homes’ (‘Interview with
Elaine Kagan, Cassavetes’ long-term assistant’ by Tom Charity, extra fea-
ture on A Woman Under the Influence’ DVD in The John Cassavetes
Collection, (Optimum Releasing 2005).
12. Cassavetes created the believable backstory that Mabel’s parents helped
finance the purchase of the house.
References
Barnard, Timothy. 2014. Découpage. Montreal: caboose.
Basinger, Jeanine. 1994. A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women,
1930–1960. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd.
Bhabha, Homi K. 1992. The World and the Home. Social Text, 31/32: 141–153.
Accessed January 10, 2023. www.jstor.org/stable/466222
New York: Verso.
Carney, Ray. 1985. American Dreaming: The Films of John Cassavetes and the
American Experience. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.
———. 1991. The Adventure of Insecurity: The Films of John Cassavetes. The
Kenyon Review 13(2): 102–121. Accessed January 14, 2021. http://www.
jstor.org/stable/4336423.
———. 2001. Cassavetes on Cassavetes. London: Faber and Faber Ltd.
Doane, Mary Ann. 1994 (originally published 1984). The ‘Woman’s Film’:
Possession and Address. In Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama
and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill, pp. 283–298. London: BFI
Publishing.
Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. 2014. The Narcissistic Sociopathy of Gender: Craig’s
Wife and The Hitch-Hiker, Part 1. In Film International (March). Accessed
January 10, 2023. http://filmint.nu/the-narcissistic-sociopathology-of-
gender-craigs-wife-and-the-hitch-hiker-part-1/.
Freud, Sigmund. 1919. The Uncanny. Accessed March 6, 2023. https://web.mit.

edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf.
Heidegger, Martin. 2010 (First published 1951). ‘Notes on Building, Dwelling,
Thinking’, ‘Poetically Man Dwells’. In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in
Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach, pp. 100–109, 109–119. New York & London:
Routledge.
Hollander, Martha. 2002. An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in
Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Houston, Beverle. 1984. Missing in Action: Notes on Dorothy Arzner. Wide
Angle 6 (3): 25–31.
Keathley, Christian. 2012. Bonjour Tristesse and the Expressive Potential of
Découpage. Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, Issue 3 January. Accessed
January 10, 2023. www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/movie/contents/bon-
jour_tristesse_final.pdf.
Leach, Neil (ed.). 2010. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory.
New York & London: Routledge.
Loeb, Anthony. 1975. John Cassavetes, March 5, 1975. Accessed January 2,
2023. https://cinefiles.bampfa.berkeley.edu/catalog/9234
Martin, Richard. 2014. The Architecture of David Lynch. London & New York:
Bloomsbury Academic.
McHugh, Kathleen. 1994. Housekeeping in Hollywood: The Case of Craig’s
Wife. Screen 35(2): 123–135. Accessed January 10, 2023. https://doi.
org/10.1093/screen/35.2.123
Michelson, Annette. 1969. Bodies in Space: Film as Carnal Knowledge. Art Forum
7(6). Accessed January 10, 2023. https://www.artforum.com/print/196902/
annette-michelson-on-stanley-kubrick-s-2001-a-space-odyssey-36517
Perez, Gilberto. 1998. The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium. Baltimore &
London: John Hopkins University Press.
Perkins, V.F. 1993 (originally published 1972). Film as Film: Understanding and
Judging Movies. London: Da Capo Press.
Pye, Douglas. 2015. Calling Things by their Right Names: Découpage and the
Caboose Connection. Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism 6.
Schaal, Hans Dieter. 2013. Learning from Hollywood: Architecture and Film.
Stuttgart & London: Edition Azel Menges.
Shonfield, Katherine. 2000. Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City.
London & New York: Routledge.
Ventura, Michael. 2007. Cassavetes Directs. Harpenden: Camera Books.
Waggoner, Matt. 2018. Unhoused: Adorno and the Problem of Dwelling. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Wallace, Lee. 2008. Dorothy Arzner’s Wife: Heterosexual Sets, Homosexual
Scenes. Screen 49(4): 391–409. Accessed January 10, 2023. https://doi.
org/10.1093/screen/hjn056
Williams, Linda. 2018. ‘Tales of Sound and Fury…’ or, The Elephant of
Melodrama. In Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and National
Cultures, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, 205–217. New York:
Columbia University Press.
CHAPTER 3
Mise-en-scène: Creating Rooms
There is a ground for taking the house as a tool for analysis of the
human soul.
—Gaston Bachelard
At the end of Richard Quine’s film Strangers When we Meet (1960), archi-
tect Larry Coe (Kirk Douglas) and his neighbour Maggie Gault (Kim
Novak) visit a newly built house in the Los Angeles hills. Larry designed it
and it has been in construction throughout the film. Their first illicit meet-
ing took place on the site when it was just an empty plot of land. Maggie
helped him measure out the area, they literally marked out the plot
together. This is the first time Maggie, and the film audience, see the long-
awaited house. It is beautiful and contemporary; made of wood, perched
on the hilltop overlooking the valley, spacious, Japanese inspired, full of
coloured glass and light.1 But it is to be their last meeting. Larry realises
he cannot break up his marriage. As they explore the empty rooms (the
client has not yet moved in), they realise it has been their house all along.
It personifies a relationship they dream about but can never have. They
must return to their conventional ‘all-passion-spent’ marriages and subur-
ban homes. The fabric of stability is maintained for the good of all. As
Larry turns to watch Maggie leave, three pools of coloured light remain
on the floor where she has been standing, a trace of her presence. Over his
right shoulder we see a balcony looking out over the hills beyond, gestur-
ing towards a future they will never journey into. None of this is expressed
verbally, the two can barely talk to each other, yet all of it we comprehend.

Switzerland AG 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40033-9_3
The building of this house has been so deeply imbricated with their grow-
ing relationship that we cannot help but ‘read’ this scene in this way. The
house speaks for itself. The rhetorical power of the image is augmented by
the skilful use of CinemaScope, a screen ratio which provides an extra wide
screen within which to visualise this encounter. It is a width almost double
that of the previously more common Academy format.2 In her analysis of
architectural space in the film Gaslight (Cukor 1944) film scholar Anne
Goliot draws our attention to the innate ability of film to sculpt space and
make it meaningful. Film, Goliot suggests, allows two things to happen; it
both ‘speaks of space’ and ‘makes space speak’ (Goliot 1991: 71, my trans-
lation). This final scene from Strangers When we Meet is one example of
just how eloquent space on screen can become through mise-en-scène
(Fig. 3.1).
Let us turn to two films which ‘speak of space’ and ‘make space speak’.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman
1975, hereafter referred to as Jeanne Dielman) and Exhibition
(Joanna Hogg 2013) portray women who are spatially and imaginatively
enmeshed with and enraptured by their homes. While this situation is
made clear to us in ways I shall explore, it is neither explained nor pre-
sented as something that needs to be. These are modernist film texts and
any impulse to read the mise-en-scène for clues as to the exact psychologi-
cal whereabouts of each character is frustrated. The shot from Strangers
When We Meet described above, at the moment it occurs and when all the
Fig. 3.1 Larry watches Maggie leave in Strangers When We Meet

3 MISE-EN-SCÈNE: CREATING ROOMS 65
elements of mise-en-scène are gathered into coalescence with one another,

is one which aims to generously provide. It visually lays out on the cine-
matic palette as clearly and as abundantly as possible, an incarnation of
male, romantic regret. It occurs inside a space that has been especially
prepared for this moment, a space ready for action in a Heideggerian
sense. Space, suggests Heidegger, is something that has been ‘made room
for, something that is clear and free, namely within a boundary, Greek
peras. A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks
recognised, the boundary is that from which something begins its presenc-
ing’ (Heidegger 2010: 105). The dream house was being built at the same
time as the film in which it was to feature was being ‘built’; two construc-
tions were therefore taking shape alongside one another in what was, to
borrow a pertinent phrase from Michelson, a ‘synthesis of imagination and
industry’ (Michelson 1969). Its construction was a costly architectural
and technical endeavour, one that required and requisitioned extravagant
amounts of natural materials and manual labour. At the moment the house
was completed, the actors ready to enter and the scene ready to shoot, this
most grandiloquent of sets needed to perform. In short, it needed to earn
its keep. But this hilltop house with commanding views is not a neutral
space. It is a hypostasised fantasy of an ideal relationship with a beautiful
woman, designed, built, and filmed by proudful, industrious men.3 A
wide-eyed Kim Novak is led by a man through its visionary spaces as if
through a magical kingdom. It is a place she may wish for but can never
truly inhabit. The two films I look at in this chapter were made by indus-
trious women, and each seeks to explore how female characters feel about
the space in which they already live and in which they are heavily invested.
Spatial theorist Elisabeth Grosz writes that the ‘ways in which space has
been historically conceived have always functioned either to contain
women or to obliterate them.’ (1994: 26). While this polemical statement
speaks true, it does not speak for all women all of the time, nor does it
account for the complexity of their lived experience within the spaces of
their homes. Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig) and D (Viv Albertine) rely on the
spatial inscription of themselves into their respective homes to provide
them with a sense of psychic emplacement and stability. But their feelings
are rooted in ambivalence. It is worth investigating whether their onscreen
dwelling places offer any more ambiguous or multidimensional readings
than the bleak alternatives posited by Grosz and if so, how this is achieved
and communicated to us through the use of mise-en-scène.
Critical literature on mise-en-scène is extensive and definitions have

shape-shifted over time. But as Frank Kessler proposes in his recent mono-
graph on the subject (2014, published by caboose in the same series as
Découpage) film theorists and critics must ‘come to grips’ with mise-en-
scène, ‘embracing it, rejecting it or simply trying to grasp the possibilities
it offers, the effects it can produce and the functions it can fulfil’ (Kessler
2014: 49). The trajectory travelled by the concept in film theory is charted
by Kessler as well as by John Gibbs (2002, 2013) and Adrian Martin
(2011, 2014). These works situate the concept historically and culturally,
which helps to explain how and why definitions differ. Although Kessler
concludes that mise-en-scène ‘remains an utterly elusive term’ (2014: 49),
we find a variety of useful and succinct definitions offered in these works:
‘the contents of the frame and the way that they are organised’ (Gibbs
2002: 5); ‘to shape and give body to the diegesis, the world in which the
story occurs’ (Kessler: 33–34); ‘the art of arranging, choreographing and
displaying… what is staged (predominately, actors in an environment) for
a camera’ (Martin 2014: 15). The concept of mise-en-scène has come
under some scrutiny. Gibbs, Kessler and Martin all set out to ascertain
how it is ‘holding up’ and to reposition it as an indispensable critical tool
for film analysis. The final scene from Strangers When We Meet shows how
generative mise-en-scène analysis can be when applied to a classical
Hollywood film. But this critical methodology is challenged when faced
with films which deliberately withhold meaning and employ fragmentary
and non-communicatory ways of telling a story.
The characters in Jeanne Dielman and Exhibition may not consciously
ascribe meaning to the spaces and objects with which they are surrounded,
but we as theorists and audiences certainly tend to. That there is a world
of significance embodied within and emanating from mute environments
and objects which the characters are not themselves consciously aware of
but which the mise-en-scène draws to our attention has been identified as
one of the primary operating drives of melodrama in the cinematic
medium. As Laura Mulvey succinctly puts it, ‘The investment of meaning
in mise-en-scène and certain privileged objects has generally been consid-
ered to be a defining characteristic of the melodrama’s aesthetic’ (Mulvey
2016: 28). However, one might not immediately identify these two films
as melodramas. Both valorise the undramatic ‘everyday-ness’ of life and
show us such prosaic events as washing-up, making the bed, looking out
of a window and walking down a road. Ivone Margulies’ book about
Akerman’s work is not inappropriately titled Nothing Happens (1996). Yet
Jeanne Dielman culminates with a murder and Exhibition with a sudden

and wrenching move out of a beloved house. Domestic settings may pose
as zones of the everyday and the banal. But as we know from lived experi-
ence, and as spatial theorists seek to remind us, home ‘is both a place or
physical location and a set of feelings’. It is a relation between ‘material
and imaginative realms and processes, whereby physical location and
materiality, feelings and ideas, are bound together and influence each
other, rather than separate and distinct’ (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 254).
The boundaried topology of home can act as a concentrating mechanism.
Home is a primal site in which powerful, repressed, and unarticulated
emotion becomes distilled, amplified and finally erupts. Family dramas
build in ‘claustrophobic intensity’ and melodramatic situations are brought
into being (Mulvey 1989: 74). In her seminal introduction to Home is
Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, Christine
Gledhill points out that this is exactly where the world of melodrama takes
its stand, in the ‘material world of everyday reality and lived experience’
(1994: 33). She corrects the erroneous assertion that contemporary ‘non-
dramatic’ realism usurps old-fashioned ‘dramatic’ melodrama (33). On
the contrary, she writes, ‘as realism offers up new areas of representation,
so the terms and material of the world melodrama seeks to melodramatise
will shift. What realism uncovers becomes new material for the melodra-
matic project’ (31).
We can better identify Jeanne Dielman and Exhibition as ‘melodrama
manqués’. Louis Bayman introduces us to this concept in his study of
post-war Italian cinema, itself a contribution to Melodrama Unbound
(Gledhill and Williams 2018). This recent anthology revisits the melodra-
matic ‘field’ as first theorised by Gledhill in 1987 and redraws it into a
‘mode’. As part of this renewed theoretical impulse, Bayman alerts us to
the ‘melodrama mancato’ or ‘manqué’. These are what one might call
‘“failed” melodramas’, in as much as they are films in which an avoidance
of the excessive emotion traditionally associated with the melodramatic
form becomes the main directive. Bayman cites the films of Michelangelo
Antonioni as exemplary of the ‘melodrama manqué’, because in them we
find a ‘deliberate removal of melodramatic expressivity’, conflicts which
are ‘not played out to their resolution’ and a narration that ‘appears not to
care about bringing us closer to the inner processes that constitute person-
hood.’ (2018: 280). Bayman counters Deleuze’s assertion in Cinema 1:
The Movement Image that the general move away from ‘action’ characters
in the 1960s towards those who wander ‘displaced and disoriented
through the ruined spaces of postwar breakdown’ marks a shift into new
aesthetic territory and the beginning of a new art cinema. He points out
that psychic and physical displacement is actually a feature familiar to
melodrama rather than one set up in opposition to it, writing that ‘failed
action is as much a characteristic of melodrama as of European art cinema’
(278). Such films, Bayman suggests, ‘refunction for the purposes of art
cinema what is in fact a common melodramatic figure of the disoriented
protagonist lost in an alienating environment’ (278). We could describe
both D and Jeanne in this way; as displaced, alienated figures who do not
feel ‘at home’ in their environments, their homes. But if one identifies
these films as ‘failed melodramas’ (melodramas ‘manqués’), can we assume
their mise-en-scène functions in the same highly expressive manner, one
that ‘proceeds to force into aesthetic presence identity, value and pleni-
tude of meaning’ (Gledhill 1994: 33)? Is the ‘plenitude of meaning’ com-
monly associated with melodramatic visual excess negated by the
de-dramatising tendency of these films? Is meaning sucked out of the
mise-en-scène—or is it perhaps located elsewhere?
Let us look more closely at how the space of the home is presented in
each film. Both films were shot in real locations; an early twentieth century
bourgeois apartment in Brussels in Jeanne Dielman and a late twentieth
century modern house in west London in Exhibition. It is useful to recall
Turim’s basic formulation of how the two structuring practices of archi-
tecture and film come together and work on each other in the filmmaking
process:
One visual structure, architectonic, stable, fixed, imbued with the power to
symbolize, as well as determine the movements of surrounding activities, is
submitted to the bold and active force of another visual structure (that of
the film) to transform. (Turim 1991: 37)
Turim describes how architectural structures are re-structured by the cin-

ematic endeavour. As real structures are transformed into filmic ones and
‘submitted to the bold and active force’ of the filmmaking process, certain
architectonic features are transformed and become hyper-signified. On a
less concrete level, what one might perceive as an abstract tendency or
atmosphere emitted by a place in real life can also become accentuated on
film. In order for such transformations to occur one must first pay atten-
tion to the qualities and architectonic features of the spaces themselves
and have a relationship with them. Both Akerman and Hogg spent time in
their locations prior to filming to become familiar with its characteristics,

potentialities and limitations. Babette Mangolte (the cinematographer on
Jeanne Dielman) describes the importance of the location in this way:
What was important is that it was not shot in a studio but in a real apart-
ment. In the two weeks preparation before the shooting we did the shot list
together at the kitchen table of the apartment… We would read through the
script and decide, ok, this line will be this shot, and we would basically come
up with the shot list of every scene by going into the room to look with a
viewer how to frame each action. We shot everything according to each
room and each angle except the last shot of the film. For example, we shot
all the dinner scenes one after the other… Jeanne has a life, which is locked
in, disciplined, so the static camera totally goes with the subject matter.
(Cronk 2017)
Mangolte emphasises the functionality and usefulness of getting to know

the space before filming inside it. But she was also able to travel into the
mood of the space in the process, something less tangible but none the
less important. Her comments chime with those made by filmmakers
whose work is particularly attuned to architectural space and place. Wim
Wenders for example, finds it crucial to ‘travel inside the site [location] to
know it and describe it’ (Bruno 2007: 34). Antonioni has a similar meth-
odology. ‘I believe’ he explains in The Architecture of Vision, ‘the best
results are obtained by the “collision” that takes place between the envi-
ronment in which the scene is to be shot and my own particular state of
mind at that specific moment’. He goes on to describe how the ‘most
direct way to recreate a scene is to enter into a rapport with the environ-
ment itself; it’s the simplest way to let the environment suggest something
to us’ (Antonioni 2007: 27). The precise attention Akerman and her team
pay to the apartment and its décor and the spatial specificity which marks
the film lead us to assume Jeanne’s apartment is indeed at number 23,
Quai du Commerce. How could it not be? The street exists after all, one
can find it on Google Maps. But only the outside of the building, the
entrance hall and the lift were filmed at this location. The inside of the
apartment was in fact shot elsewhere, in an apartment block not far away
near the Bois de la Cambre. It was here, not there, that Akerman,
Mangolte, art director Philippe Graff and the rest of the creative team
meticulously created Jeanne’s world. This ‘dis-location’ serves to remind
us that homes on film are constructed fictions.
Fig. 3.2 Plan of

Jeanne’s apartment
(drawn by author)
Akerman devised a strict set of rules for herself and her creative team.
As those who have seen the film are well aware, all of the action is filmed
from a series of repeated and reiterated camera angles. The camera is
placed either frontally or sideways (although there are a few exceptional
diagonal shots) and always at a low height (apart from the murder scene at
the end of the film), suggestive of Akerman’s perception of her diminutive
height and the height of an observant child. There are no point-of-view
shots, countershots or close-ups. As a result of this rigorously maintained
cinematographic attitude towards the profilmic space, we come to know
the layout of Jeanne’s apartment well enough to draw a plan (Fig. 3.2).
This patterned organisation of cinematic elements can be described as a
dispositif. In ‘Turn the Page: from Mise-en-scène to Dispositif’, Adrian
Martin clarifies how this singular term applies to artistic activity:
A dispositif is not a writing or painting from a formless real; nor is it some-

thing arrived at, on the set, spontaneously, intuitively or mystically. It is a
preconceived, or organically developed, work of form… it is about the inte-
grated arrangement of form and content elements at all levels, from first
conception to final mixing and grading.
He goes on to define a dispositif film more specifically:
a dispositif film is both a conceit… and a machine. Above all, it is a conceptual

film… that usually announces its structure or system at the outset, in the
opening scene, even in its title, and then must follow through with this
structure, step by step all the way to the bitter or blessed end. (Martin 2011)
Akerman’s dispositif submits the architectonics of the apartment to a very

particular structuring process, which acts as Turim’s ‘bold and active
force’. What becomes clear as we watch the film is that Akerman’s way of
filming the space (her formal dispositif ) coincides with the way in which
Jeanne’s life is regulated within that space. We discover the apartment is
itself a spatial dispositif, a physical machine geared towards regulating
Jeanne’s behaviour. Effectively we have a dispositif within a dispositif. Or
better still, we can say that the two dispositifs (architectural and cinematic)
work hand in hand, collaborating with and structuring one another. This
aesthetic, patterning stance is well understood by the audience. Once it is
established, the interaction between formal and spatial dispositifs functions
as a device to generate drama in an ingenious way.
Before I explore this further it is important to clarify how, and indeed
if, I can include the notion of a dispositif within the context of mise-en-
scène analysis. Are these interpretative approaches at odds with one other
or do they overlap? In ‘Turn the Page: from Mise en scène to Dispositif’
Martin tackles this thorny theoretical issue and, referring to the idea of a
‘dispositif’ as a ‘tendency’, he asks whether this tendency:
has been marginalised or literally undetected by the protocols of mise en

scène critique, with its inevitable, in-built biases and exclusions? A tendency
which is not the opposite of mise en scène or its negation, but a particular,
pointed mutation of it? (Martin 2011)
By ‘biases and exclusions’ Martin is referring to the weight mise-en-scène

analysis traditionally places on two things in particular: the perception of
films as dramatic texts that can be divided up into discrete scenes, and the
notion that these scenes are made expressive through some kind of inef-
fable and often spontaneous process of creative inspiration. Regarding film
‘as a matter of theatrical scenes’ is, he suggests, a ‘crippling limitation’

directly inherited from our understanding of how mise-en-scène functions
in the theatre. It is an approach which needs to be critically revised, and he
draws on Raymond Bellour’s investigation into the subject. He clarifies
their objections:
For with the assumption of the centrality of the scene comes a great bag-
gage, which is precisely the baggage of classicism in the arts: continuity,
verisimilitude, the ensemble effect in acting performance, narrative articula-
tion, the necessity for smoothness and fluidity, centring, legibility and for-
mal balance… (Martin: 2011)
As well as a misguided and outmoded emphasis on the ‘centrality of the

scene’, Martin questions the valued notion of mise-en-scène as an expres-
sive outflow from the inner inspiration of an artist. The idea of ‘creating
form from the formless’ he explains, corresponds to the ‘philosophy and
ideology of grand Romanticism’ with its attachment to ‘unfettered cre-
ativity’ and the ‘Romantic instant’ of the painter’s inspired brushstroke.
How might a process such as this correlate with the multifaceted, techni-
cal, time-consuming, and collaborative act that is filmmaking? Referring
directly to Bellour on this point, he continues:
This is what Raymond Bellour suggested in 1997 when he proposed that

la-mise-en-scène… is a classical approach that corresponds “to both an age
and a vision of cinema, a certain kind of belief in the story and the shot”, but
that it is ultimately only one of the available “modes of organising images”
in cinema. (Martin 2011)
Martin probes the issue further in Mise en Scene and Film Style (2014). He
discusses Abbas Kiarostami’s short documentary film No, made in
2011, which portrays a group of young girls who each say “no” when
asked whether they would submit to having their hair cut short for a film.
Martin asks when the idea occurred to Kiarostami to structure his film
formally and rhythmically around the repeated use of the word ‘no’. The
answer ‘matters little’ he writes, ‘whether grasped by chance during the
process, or manoeuvred at the outset, Kiarostami has structured a splen-
did, miniature dispositif’ (Martin 2014: 187). That the idea for a formal
mode of arranging No (the film’s dispositif ) may have been planned in
advance or ‘grasped by chance during the process’ seems to allow for
precisely the kind of creative, on-set decision-making that Martin earlier

ascribed to received notions of mise-en-scène. But formal decisions and
aesthetic stances are often decided well in advance and are by no means
limited to on-set flashes of inspiration. What is clear, and what Martin
rightly acknowledges, is that a dispositif is not a rigid, mechanistic system.
It is ‘more like an aesthetic guide-track’ he suggests, ‘open to as much
alteration, surprise or artful contradiction as the filmmaker who sets it in
motion decrees’ (2014: 192).
It seems sensible to agree with Martin’s suggestion that we view mise-
en-scène as only a part, a ‘layer, screen or element’ of the cinematic
endeavour (2014: 197). But whether or not I concur with his revisionist
suggestion that ‘It is more on the side of the conceptual dispositif than the
freewheeling caméra-stylo that the ex-cinema of the future—i.e., the cin-
ema of now—is to be found’ is not something to debate here (Martin
2011). Instead, I venture a basic and useful definition of terms and apply
it to my close analysis. A cinematic dispositif is a formal arrangement of
elements, conceived before the film is made and carried through into the
editing process. It involves a series of decisions which primarily function as
creative constraints. Such decisions can vary from deciding the film will
contain 13 tracking shots travelling from right to left with ten minutes
between them (as in Varda’s 1985 film Vagabonde), to the decision to film
in black and white as in Cuarón’s film Roma (2018). Mise-en-scène is
what is ‘put into place’ within the overall framed world of the film, and it
is put there for expressive purposes. This involves not only the design of
the physical environment but the way the actor(s) move about within and
relate to that environment. There are overlaps between a dispositif and
mise-en-scène, but one is more orientated towards a deliberate structuring
or restraining of elements for purposes of creative constraint than the
other. Jeanne Dielman presents a highly evolved dispositif at work, and this
is part and parcel of Akerman’s overall mise-en-scène. However, when
engaging with the mise-en-scène of this film there is one more complicat-
ing factor. The way in which objects and décor function in Jeanne Dielman
does not entirely accord with the way in which they are expected to func-
tion in traditional mise-en-scène analysis.
Jeanne’s apartment is a system of control and a controlling system. It
functions as a mechanism to support emotional repression, and Jeanne
must keep it well-oiled and shipshape. It is a finely tuned, infernal machine.
Jeanne cannot leave a room without turning the light off nor enter it with-
out turning the light on and the same applies to the opening and closing
of doors. She walks purposefully back and forth across the corridor, up
and down along it, in and out of rooms on either side, performing a series
of daily, repeated gestures and activities that conform to a strictly main-
tained regime. The camerawork supports this system—her personal dis-
positif—by filming her actions from a repeated and regular series of angles.
The aural dimension of the film also plays its part. The sounds of doors
closing and opening, lights being switched on and off, and Jeanne’s mili-
taristic footsteps click-clacking across the parquet floor, all contribute
towards our apprehension of Jeanne’s world as a mechanistic apparatus.
But, despite the apparent flawlessness of this regime and the rigour with
which it is maintained by both Jeanne and Akerman, we know this joyless
existence cannot continue, that it is a defensive edifice against an invisible
anxiety that threatens to warp and disrupt the system, and that such a
system cannot be borne.
How do we know this? Because crucially, the system has gaps. Not
everything adds up as it should and into these gaps floods ambiguity.
Jeanne’s routine famously comes undone on the second day when she has
an unplanned orgasm with one of her clients.4 Things feel off-kilter when
Jeanne emerges with her client from the bedroom without turning on the
hall light as usual. She hurriedly corrects her mistake. We also notice her
hair looks a little messy and ruffled. This disruptive oddness or ‘out-of-
place-ness’ is reiterated formally. The camera takes up a noticeably new
position in the kitchen (a new ‘spatial attitude’ as discussed in the previous
chapter). Waiting by the now overcooked potatoes on the stove, it faces
the door and looks towards it as if in rebuke. We have never seen the
kitchen from this angle before.5 The machinery of the film itself is register-
ing Jeanne’s mistake in timing and alerting us to a grievous malfunction in
the system. We find such disturbing oddities and discrepancies at work
throughout the film, all of which mutely signal towards something subver-
sive at work under the surface, a ‘sub-rumbling murmur’ beneath Jeanne’s
closely monitored system of self-surveillance.6 For example, Jeanne’s cor-
ridor is sometimes overwhelmed by a notable, swallowing darkness not
entirely attributable to the lack of electric light in that area. Continuing
this theme, the night-time walk that Jeanne and her son Sylvain (Jan
Decorte) take each evening is never explained. They simply put on their
coats, go outside and recede into a Stygian gloom only to emerge from it
a while later—and we are none the wiser as to where they might have been
during the ellipsis. They are simply swallowed up by an inscrutable and
mysterious darkness.7 The apartment has two unknown and unopened

areas. One might not notice these at a single and uninterrupted viewing.
But if we pause, rewind or replay the film, a door between the bathroom
and Jeanne’s bedroom can be made out. What might be in that room?
More obviously, next to the coat closet in the hall is another recess screened
by a curtain. Although seen clearly from the living room, it is neither used
nor opened. These areas resemble those ‘blind spots’ which evade the all-
seeing gaze of a surveillance camera which, framed in psychoanalytic
terms, can be figured as the relentless monitor that is Jeanne’s superego. I
have indicated both areas in the apartment with question marks in my plan
(Fig. 3.2). The apartment is therefore not as systematic as the spatial dis-
positif would have us believe. It has areas of ambiguity and a recurring
darkness which floods the corridor, plunging the apartment into obscurity
and making it difficult to see. It is a space machine, but it has dark areas,
places not entirely under Jeanne’s vigilant control.
Despite Jeanne’s attempts to regulate her life by the minute, her apart-
ment is also a flawed time machine. On the surface, the film adheres to a
strict timescale and chronology. But on closer inspection its internal chro-
nology is open to doubt, and we find temporal overlaps and superimposi-
tions. The film is set in the seventies. But the décor of the apartment—part
of the mise-en-scène—evokes earlier times, the fifties and before, so much
so that we experience Jeanne’s electric coffee-grinder as a something of a
mod-con. In this special ‘apartment time’ past co-exists with time present.
Jeanne moves among a palimpsest of accrued objects, and these play their
role in this swimming around in time. The beer bottle at the dinner table
is set down ritualistically every night, but while we see food being pre-
pared, put onto plates and eaten in some detail, we never see this bottle
opened. So why is it there at all? Is it perhaps a hang-over from when the
father, the man of the house, was alive? Does it function as a reminder, a
memory or even as a substitute for him? It sits mutely yet suggestively on
the table like an innocent object from a dream. The knick-knacks we see
Jeanne dusting sit arrayed in the glass cupboard like objects in a museum
(or on a film set), hardly attended to and no longer looked at. From where
do they come? Past holidays? Presents from dead loved ones? Jeanne
Dielman is not as realistic a film text as it would have us believe, and a dif-
ferent kind of truth emerges from its gaps and ambiguities. This points us
towards a crucial element in Akerman’s process that needs to be recog-
nised. Akerman understands that for a dispositif to work in a generative
way there must be a waywardness at work deep inside it, something which
defies and destabilises the system and which, effectively, allows restless and
repressed truths to break through and make their presence felt. Such
breaks in the pattern act as dramatic triggers. It is true that Jeanne’s
orgasm on the second day generates an unpredictable chain of events. But
there is a subversive energy at work in the system itself, nestled in the gaps,
darkness, dislocations and ambiguities. It is useful at this point to bring
Akerman’s creative explorations in this field into reflective discourse with
another artist exploring the liberatory potential of formal constraints, the
French writer and filmmaker Georges Perec. There is much in common
between these two artists. They share an underlying stance towards work,
life, and artistic practice. ‘One of the few French writers I really love’
Akerman tells us, ‘is Georges Perec’ (Béghin 2011).
Both artists were born into families who had suffered greatly under the
Nazi regime. Perec was born in Paris in 1936, Akerman after the war in
Brussels in 1950. Not a huge amount has been written on the connective
threads between these two artists, although there is some valuable scholar-
ship in the area (Salgas 2006, Penz 2018, Flitterman-Lewis 2019; Pollock
and Silverman 2019).8 The matter and material of the everyday is their
base text. ‘The dull totally shattered me’, said Akerman, ‘I had the impres-
sion, and I still do, that it is at the core of everything’ (2004: 49 my trans-
lation). ‘Force yourself to write down what is of no interest’ wrote Perec
in Species of Spaces in 1974, ‘what is most obvious, most common, most
colourless’ (2008a: 50). Perec’s short film L’Homme qui Dort (The Man
Who Sleeps 1974), adapted from his earlier novel of the same name, is
about a young man unable to leave his small attic room, or ‘chambre de
bonne’. Akerman’s early short film Saute Ma Ville (Blow Up My Town
1968), is set almost entirely in the tiny kitchen of her small flat. Jeanne
Dielman first screened in 1975, while Perec’s book on everyday space
‘Espèces d’espaces’ or ‘Species of Spaces’ was published in 1974 and his auto-
biographical work ‘W or the Memory of Childhood’ in 1975.9 For my pur-
poses here, I shall focus in particular on a feature of his 1978 novel ‘La Vie
Mode d’Emploi’, or ‘Life, A User’s Manual’ (2008b). Like Akerman, Perec
employs architectural structure as a spatial dispositif to shape his narrative.
More importantly, he also inserts gaps into his system.
‘Life, A User’s Manual’ charts the separate yet interconnected lives of
the inhabitants in a large apartment block in Paris. The book’s narrative is
structured by a complex system of spatial patterning and numerical game-
playing. Perec drew an imaginary grid of 10 × 10 over the façade of a fic-
tional building (11 Rue Simon-Crubellier to be precise, a specificity
coterminous with that of 23 Quai du Commerce) and each square of the

grid corresponds to one of the 100 rooms and spaces inside (including
stairways and communal areas). He compiled extensive lists of objects and
themes which he then distributed into each space according to further sets
of gameful restraints. Once everything was in ‘put in place’, he needs
to set this vast story-generating machine into action. He transposed the
Knights move in chess from its familiar 8 × 8 numeric onto his spatial grid
of 10 × 10 (with a good deal of mathematical difficulty). It is the unique
movement of the chess piece (the Knight’s Tour) which then determines
the author’s direction of travel from character to character, room to room,
chapter to chapter. Perec has made a system for himself—a dispositif (or
indeed a series of interconnected dispositifs) which he employs to organise
his work in much the same way as Akerman organises her film. But cru-
cially, like Akerman, Perec recognises that ‘if he allowed it to work per-
fectly, his system would have no life’ (Bellos 1999: 601). Creativity
emerges not from the rigid system but from the gaps or faults in that sys-
tem and the generative tension between the two. The system of constraints
is elaborately laid. But, as Perec explained in a later interview, it must also
be destroyed. ‘It must not be rigid’ he continues, ‘there must be some play
in it, it must, as they say, “creak” a bit’ (Pawlikowska 1983, Motte 1986:
276). Perec fully developed this aesthetic approach once he had joined
OuLiPo in 1967, a group of writers and mathematicians dedicated to
exploring the creation of new writing through constraints.10 The group
identified the ‘error in the system’ as the ‘clinamen’, a term borrowed
from Ancient Greek atomic theory. The notion of the ‘clinamen atomo-
rum’ or ‘serve of atoms’ was theorised by Epicurus who, counter to the
earlier theories of Democritus on the regular behaviour of atoms, sug-
gested that occasionally and for no apparent reason, atoms serve off
course. These aleatory deviations, Epicurus suggests, are necessary for life
to occur. If they did not occur, nothing would happen. The system would
roll on indefinitely and without interruption.11 The atomic serve thus acts
as a trigger and generator. In a similar vein, deviations in artistic structure
need also to be aleatory and arbitrarily applied. If they were programmed
in to occur they would be part of the system and trackable back to its
mechanistic mode of functioning. It is a question of devising rules and
ways out of the edifice they provide. ‘Constraint and freedom define the
two axes of any aesthetic system’ Perec writes, they are ‘two inseparable
functions of the work’. Constraint ‘does not bar freedom, and freedom is
not a lack of constraint. On the contrary, constraint makes freedom
possible, and freedom arises from constraint’ (Perec 1967 in 1993: 58, my
translation). There is a particular ‘gap’ in Life, A User’s Manual which
sheds light on the way such gaps work in Jeanne Dielman. In Perec’s
hand-drawn diagram of the apartment block shown below (Fig. 3.3), we
can see a dark square situated at the bottom left-hand corner. There is no
Fig. 3.3 Georges Perec’s plan of the building in Life, A User’s Manual (printed
here with kind permission from Sylvia Robertson and provided by Fonds Georges
Perec, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris, cote: FGP 110)
room here, simply a void. Perec deliberately left out the 66th move of the
Knight, and therefore no room exists in that square. There is no room 100
and no chapter 100. The book ends on Chapter 99. This dark void func-
tions in much the same manner as the gaps in Jeanne’s system; the dark
corridor, the unopened rooms in her apartment, and her nightly walks
into obscurity. These spatial gaps function as hypostasised absences or
‘blind spots’ and create space in the work for that which is left out, forgot-
ten, unsaid or indeed unsayable. Their presence works to destabilise yet
ultimately to enliven the system within which they are subversively
concealed.12
To return to Jeanne Dielman, it is clear that Jeanne’s self-imposed dis-
positif is a formula for repression, and we witness the terrible consequences
of its breakdown at the end of the film. It is precisely the rigour with which
the system is upheld that leads us to appreciate the magnitude of the error
when Jeanne overcooks the potatoes. Akerman describes a particular
moment in the film: ‘When Delphine Seyrig sits in her armchair for such a
long time in Jeanne Dielman… we suddenly realise that if she had so dili-
gently organised her life so as not to leave any gap in her day, it was really
in order not to provide any space for the anguish that exists in that void’
(2004: 38, my translation). Audiences apperceive this situation because
Akerman asks them to look—and look again—at the screen, and she does
this most notably through her prominent use of the long take.
The sheer length and stamina of the long takes in Akerman’s film invite
us to become the hyper-attentive, interrogative spatial observers that Perec
also entreats us to become. Thus we notice when Jeanne does not put the
lid back on the soup tureen, that her hair looks different, that she misses a
button or does not turn the light on in the hall. But what happens when
one looks at something ‘ordinary’ for long periods of time? How do we
‘read’ a mise-en-scène that appears to be devoid of symbolic meaning? ‘I
will put the camera in front of something for as long as it is necessary, and
the truth will come’ said Akerman, or a ‘little bit of truth’ (2004: 30, my
translation). Yet a mise-en-scène that remains obdurate, or as Boris
Lehman (the photographer on the film) idiomatically puts it, ‘as silent as
a carp’ elicits a different kind of attention and response from an audi-
ence.13 We are drawn to notice the composition of elements within the
frame and the way in which Jeanne is embraided into their communal
environment.
There are several moments when Jeanne comes to a physical halt and
remains still for a prolonged period of time. We have no option but to
look more carefully at what we see, and it becomes clear that her body and
its environment are given equal weight within the frame. Akerman eschews
the close-up shot with the result that nothing unduly imbalances what we
see. This compositional approach induces a flattened visual density in
which both ‘live’ and ‘non-live’ elements coexist, held together with a
tensile strength. Jeanne shares her home space (and the ‘home’ of her
screen space) with its walls, doors, windows, household objects and wall-
paper patterns. She is as ‘put-in-place’ (a literal translation of mise-en-
scène) and as ‘held-in-place’ as that which surrounds her.
Figure 3.4 shows a frame taken from the scene described above by
Akerman. Jeanne has made a mistake with her timing and as a conse-
quence she must, rather in the manner of a stalling bus, stop and wait
before she can recommence her activities. She sits ensconced in spatialised
alliance with the flowers in front of her, curtains behind her, gas fire,
tables, chairs—the entire mise-en-scène. The flocked pattern on the wall-
paper seems to have flooded down onto the shiny surface of the table
beneath her, visually embedding her further into the room.14 Our overall
impression in this scene is of someone trying to be as inert and non-
reactive as the objects which surround her, in effect trying not to be alive.
Fig. 3.4 Jeanne comes to a halt in Jeanne Dielman

Fig. 3.5 Jeanne stands still in her corridor in Jeanne Dielman
As those familiar with the film’s story know, she fails dismally in her
attempt.
Figure 3.5 shows Jeanne held in check between wooden doorframes on
the left and the blue curtain on the right, while the wallpaper behind gen-
tly reiterates the repetitive rules in the apartment. Here too Jeanne
restrains all physical movement, keeping her hands obediently folded as
she waits for the client to pass her his hat and coat. She does the same once
they have come out of the room when she waits for him to hand over her
payment.
Jeanne always cleans herself thoroughly once each client has left and
Akerman shows us this private scene in a long and interrupted shot. We
are given time to take in the mise-en-scène and notice her flesh is the same
colour as the wall above, while the blue-green tiles above and bath panels
below hold her vulnerable and naked body safely between them. Once
again, the environment works to absorb Jeanne into itself and its own
organisation (Fig. 3.6).
Akerman and her team carefully and lovingly forge a mise-en-scène so
that elements coalesce into a united spatio-audio-visual lattice of commit-
ment in which Jeanne, and the viewer, become enmeshed. The household
objects hold Jeanne in place, and she performs the same service for them.
Fig. 3.6 Jeanne taking her regular bath in Jeanne Dielman
Each object has a set location; a special hook on the wall, place in a cup-
board, position on a shelf or room in a drawer. Everything in the apart-
ment has been recruited into Jeanne’s singular, binding project of coercive
self-control. Through the application of a strict dispositif and using noth-
ing more than everyday objects, Jeanne has created her own personal
mise-en-scène. But it is a deathly one, which supports nothing less than
psychic and sensual self-immolation (Fig. 3.7).
Why does she do this? Or to frame the question another way, is it
important that we know why she does this? After all, as we witness Akerman
reiterating to an insistent and enquiring Seyrig in Sami Frey’s documen-
tary shot on set, it is not important to know why Jeanne does things, only
that she must do them in such a way and for a particular amount of time.15
In Frey’s film we witness Akerman at the kitchen table doggedly timing
how long Seyrig needs to sit still before getting up to open the balcony
door. It is an unusual way to direct actors, or at least it is within the nor-
mative paradigm of psychologically inflected Western realist drama. So
does the mise-en-scène provide clues or even answers as to what is going
on beneath the surface? Or are we perhaps to approach a study of Jeanne
and her objects in an alternative way?
Fig. 3.7 Jeanne in commune with objects in her kitchen in Jeanne Dielman
The expressivity of mise-en-scène in Hollywood melodrama has been

well theorised. Elsaesser and others describe how mise-en-scène speaks
through an ‘expressive code’ (Elsaesser 1994: 51). Mulvey reiterates the
point in an article addressing the mise-en-scène in Jeanne Dielman:
The investment of meaning in mise-en-scène and certain privileged objects

has generally been considered to be a defining characteristic of the melo-
drama’s aesthetic. It produces a deciphering spectator, who follows clues
and reads decor, light, color, framing, and so on. Crucially, this making of
meaning is mute, usually unnoticed and uncommented on in the narrative
itself. (Mulvey 2016: 28)
Mulvey’s perceptive analysis of the flashing neon light outside Jeanne’s

apartment and the soup tureen in the dining room reveals how these
objects indicate silently towards Jeanne’s secret double life as a prostitute
which she pursues every afternoon while her son is at school. Mulvey sug-
gests that the curious blue light continually flickering across the room
from an unseen source outside the window, destabilises the domestic inte-
rior scene. It is, she explains, ‘an exterior, complicating presence… [that]
brings something unsettling into the precarious respectability of Jeanne’s
interior’ (2016: 27). It is notable that Mulvey picks these two objects,
because they are the only two in the apartment to which one can safely
assign a measure of symbolic significance. (Although, as I suggest above,
one can possibly recruit the beer bottle into this cluster of significant
objects.) But even this has to be done with caution. While it is certainly a
‘complicating presence’ in the film, the flashing light also means nothing
in particular. It could just as well be something Jeanne and Sylvain have
grown used to living with on a daily basis, an annoying neon sign that
someone has installed above a shop across the street. The soup tureen is
also ‘just’ a soup tureen. Meaning expands outwards from objects yet it
also collapses back into them, and the implacability of their everyday-ness
reasserts itself. This might lead us to question whether we can effectively
discuss mise-en-scène as a meaning-making mechanism in Akerman’s
films. Jonathan Rosenbaum is dubious, claiming that it is ‘misleading to
talk merely about Akerman’s mise en scène in spite of her close attention to
framing, because from that vantage point, many of her movies look rather
anemic [sic]’. He goes on to suggest that ‘It’s her découpage that mat-
ters—that is, not only what happens in her shots but what happens between
them, among them, and through them’ (Rosenbaum 2012). And yet we
cannot forget the colours of Jeanne’s world and the specificity of its things;
the quilted bedcovers, plumped-up pillows, the pinks, greens, and faded
yellows. Jeanne’s apartment was constructed with infinite care, its colours,
décor, furnishing, and objects chosen very deliberately. Akerman is recre-
ating the mise-en-scène of her childhood, something art director Philippe
Graff understood at the time and makes clear in his interview with
Isa Stragliati in her radio piece Jeanne D (2022). ‘It was what I saw when
I was a kid’ Akerman says about her film.
My aunts and the aunts of my mother. The gestures of the women around
when you are a child. What else are you looking at? What they do, the
women. Usually, the man isn’t there. The man is working. And you have the
woman, if it was a mother, or maid, or aunt, someone taking care of you as
a child, 99 percent of the time it’s a woman. And you do things all the time.
As a child, it is something you look at. So it’s really a film that was inscribed
in me from my childhood. (Adams 2010)
But the film is not a period piece, nor is it a simple and uninflected recre-
ation of Akerman’s past. We sense something hidden in the film, an invis-
ible matrix that leaves an imprint on what we see. Yet how do we read the
meticulous everydayness we see onscreen? There is an alternative way of

regarding the mise-en-scène in this film, one that shifts away from sym-
bolically weighted analysis. Jeanne Dielman can be described as a melo-
drama ‘manqué’, but the way objects function signals towards another
field of representation. The atmospheric field which charges and structures
Akerman’s work is one I find well described by the late French writer and
publisher Jean Cayrol.
Film scholars may be aware of Cayrol’s screenplays for Alain Resnais’
Night and Fog (1956) and Muriel (1963), but the main body of his work
has not been translated into English. However two seminal essays forming
the basis of his ideas, Les Rêves Lazaréens and Pour un Romanesque
Lazaréen (first published in 1948 and 1949 respectively)16 can be found
translated in full in Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman’s recent volume,
Concentrationary Art: Jean Cayrol, the Lazarean and the Everyday in Post-
war Film, Literature, Music and the Visual Arts (2019). Cayrol survived
internment in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Nazi-
occupied Austria, one of the most brutal camps. But after his liberation he
saw the world as one forever altered. Survivors of the camps return
Lazarus-like from another realm to ‘live again’ in the newly restored, ‘nor-
mal’ postwar world around them. But it is impossible for them to do so
because the presence of this other reality persists into the present and
exists on the same plane as a kind of distorting double. This other reality
haunts the everyday world and imbues it with strangeness. Cayrol calls this
co-existent realm ‘Concentrationary Reality’, and Concentrationary Art,
or what Cayrol describes as the Lazarean Text, alerts us to this doubled
world by drawing together the two realms. Cayrol is not referring exclu-
sively to art created by first-generation survivors of the Holocaust.
Concentrationary art testifies to the co-existence of concentrationary real-
ity created in all societal systems which engender barbarity. Jeanne Dielman
can be understood as a Lazarean text. Indeed Salgas describes Akerman as
‘la cineaste lazaréene par excellence’ (2006: 1). Cayrol’s description of
how the Lazarean figure inhabits the world bears a marked resemblance to
the manner in which Jeanne lives in hers. ‘A Lazarean text will first and
foremost be one that meticulously describes the strangest kind of solitude
man will ever be capable of bearing’ he writes, and continues:
This is not a solitude for which there is a way out or exit. Each one of its
‘followers’ envelops himself in this solitude, like a well-fitting coat, shielding
himself from the cruel assaults of the outside world… He removes all that
might hinder him and is on his guard against anything that might cause him
to surrender. He is swiftly overwhelmed and seeks to play the role of the
stone guest at gatherings. (Cayrol 2019: 54 & 56)
This pictures Jeanne well; her joylessness, her strange solitude wrapped
around her ‘like a well-fitting coat’, the feeling that she never really talks
to anyone even when they talk to her, her evenings with Sylvain when she
sits like a ‘stone guest’ at the dinner table. It also of course recalls Jeanne’s
unwitting physical surrender and its overwhelming effect upon her.
If we look at Cayrol’s observations on the role objects play in concen-
trationary reality, we find further resonances with the way objects work in
Jeanne Dielman. ‘The Lazarean character’ Cayrol writes, ‘is perpetually at
odds with his fellow humans, although he is able to involve himself inti-
mately with things...’ (Cayrol 2019: 57). This accurately describes the way
Jeanne behaves in her flat. We cannot forget the cold way in which she
plonks her neighbour’s baby down onto the dining table in its carrycot as
if it were an alien object and swiftly returns to her familiar community of
objects in the kitchen. In a later scene she tries unsuccessfully to comfort
the crying baby by jigging it up and down. It is painful to watch. Intimacy
with objects is easier for her. They are certainly more reliable. ‘Reality is
not simple for the Lazarean character’ writes Cayrol:
Indeed, the things that form part of his fragile heritage to him possess a
presence and exceptional intensity and rarity that sometimes even the living
do not. A knife, for example, can have a childhood, a personality and an old
age. He reveres it, gives it bread to cut, and in this he almost entrusts it with
life itself. A knife cuts just the right piece, brings it to the mouth, and is not
oblivious to the drama of losing a single crumb of bread. (Cayrol 2019: 61)
Jeanne lives among significant, helpful objects and spends more time relat-
ing to them than she does to people. The gas fire she lights every morning,
knitting bag she opens every evening, radio she turns on, shoes she pol-
ishes with their faithful polishing kit, dinner plates, tablecloth, sofa bed—
the list goes on. These things take up a significant share of the film’s
narrative economy. Traditional mise-en-scène analysis invites us to decode
them, to scan the screen environment for meaning. But objects in Jeanne
Dielman resist interpretation. They stand firm for Jeanne, as ‘ordinary’ as
they are. They present a certain quiddity, an ‘is-ness’, a quality we find
described by Marie-Laure Basuyaux as an ‘extreme density of presence’

(Silverman 2019a: 135). Not many of the objects around Jeanne, if any,
have an affective or nostalgic pull for her. The nick-nacks in the cabinet
receive a cursory flick of the duster only because she has time to fill. We do
not feel she loves or has any sentimental attachment to these decorative
objects, merely that she has inherited or accrued them over time. The
intimacy Jeanne has with her home and its objects is of an entirely differ-
ent nature and it is one Cayrol understands well. The long scene in which
Jeanne stands beside the coffee pot waiting for the water to drain through
is oddly affecting. Jeanne gives the pot time to perform its task and fully
accepts that it cannot be rushed. She does not break off to do something
else while the water trickles through the filter, or fidget with impatience.
She stands quiet and still while the pot does what is required of it. Object
and person work together, sharing between them what Cayrol refers to as
a ‘bizarre intimacy’. Roland Barthes perceives this too, writing that
‘Cayrolian objects… produce a particular sort of affectivity; a warmth
emanates from them…’ (Silverman 2019b: 7). The objects in Jeanne’s life
form a community around her. Like those objects lovingly arranged in
boxes by Joseph Cornell, each one ‘keeps a certain solitude and secrecy’
and ‘we are invited to think of these gathered things as long-lost compan-
ions who speak in silence, discovering new matter for conversation, a frag-
ile but necessary community’ (Gross 2011: 46). Viewing the mise-en-scène
in Jeanne Dielman through this concentrationary lens and understanding
Akerman’s film as a Lazarean text opens out a different field of interpreta-
tion and level of comprehension. The notion of objects put in place to
exude ‘plenitude of meaning’ no longer applies. Akerman’s mise-en-scène
is not driven by such notions. But that does not mean her objects are
entirely mute.
Akerman, like Perec, is an artist whose work speaks about the Holocaust
without describing it directly. Silverman describes how, just as concentra-
tionary reality ‘has grown up clandestinely’ in everyday life, ‘so the art
required to expose it must also be a secret testimony to a transformed
landscape’ (Silverman 2019b: 11). As a second-generation survivor of the
Shoah, Akerman grew up observing her mother and her aunts perform
daily household tasks in an atmosphere soaked with unspoken psychic
trauma and family loss, and this intensely layered childhood experience
feeds directly into Jeanne Dielman. ‘There is nothing to say, said my
mother’ Akerman tells us. ‘And it is on this nothing that I work’ (Akerman
2004: 13, my translation). ‘My story seems to me to be full of holes, full
of blank spaces…’ (27). Akerman could not have brought us closer to her
life-long encounter with her family history—a reality as ever-present to her
mother and herself as the accompanying, banal coffee-pot reality—other
than through circumstances of extreme artistic control. Her approach is
askance and indirect. ‘What cannot be described directly’ writes Silverman,
‘has to be evoked allusively in other terms and, hence, draws together the
experiential and aesthetic in a distinctive way’ (Silverman 2019b: 11).
Bellos describes how Perec adopted a similar tactic, and in so doing was
able to take a ‘sideways approach to his own pain’ (1999: 279). Jeanne
Dielman is set in a world in which one world speaks allusively through the
other. Normality has been reinstated into the world. Shops are open, meat
is sold, replacement buttons are available, dinner gets cooked, pullovers
get knitted and coats get put on. Jeanne’s apartment neither wholly con-
tains nor obliterates her. It provides solace. Silverman makes a similar
point. ‘Jeanne’s routinized everyday life in Brussels is revealed as the set-
ting for an inhuman experience’ he writes. ‘Yet’ he continues, ‘by making
the everyday speak in complex ways, Akerman offers us not only a reading
of the overlaps between post-war city space (especially domestic space)
and the camp but also the possibility of a rehumanization of that space in
terms of memory, desire and the affective life’ (Silverman 2019a: 129).
Jeanne, and Akerman, are as redeemed by the everyday world as they are
devastated by it. Let us now turn to a film made almost forty years later,
set in a house built with the optimistic thrust of architectural modernism
and which exemplifies a total rejection of the stolid, traditional, bourgeois,
early twentieth century architecture in which Jeanne has no option but
to dwell.
Joanna Hogg’s update of the ‘woman in the house’ trope attempts to
broaden its contours. Exhibition brings both sexes into a house, and both
the woman and the man live and work in the space. Hogg confounds
tropic expectations further by beginning her narrative just as this couple
are planning to sell up and move out. Their life in the house, as H (Liam
Gillick) makes clear to D (Viv Albertine), is over. “We have time, we can
do something, we can build something” he says. “We’ve been here so
long, there’s no children, there’s nothing to stop us doing it, we can do
what we want”. This is an entirely different proposition to Akerman’s film
in which Jeanne is as settled in her home as a snail in its shell. Indeed it is
an exception to all the cinematic homes discussed in this book. In each of
them a woman has either lived in her home for some time or has just
arrived and seeks to settle down and explore. But despite this series of
paradigmatic refreshments, the sense that the house ‘belongs’ in a more

conventional sense of the word to D persists, and it is primarily around her
relationship with the space that the film revolves. The opening shot of
Exhibition places D into a long and culturally insistent line of women. She
is lying on a window ledge gazing out of a window. In all of the films in
this book—with the notable exception of Jeanne Dielman—we find a
woman looking out of a window. ‘The iconography is quite insistent’
writes Doane about the 1940s woman’s film, ‘women and waiting are
intimately linked, and the scenario of the woman gazing out of a window
usually streaked by a persistent rain has become a well-worn figure of the
classical cinematic text’ (Doane 1988: 2). Andrew Britton traces the ico-
nography back to the nineteenth century Gothic Romance novel, citing
Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre, he writes, ‘goes to the window, opens it, and
looks out—as women in nineteenth century novels and Hollywood melo-
dramas so often find themselves doing’ (Britton 2009: 35). Elsaesser
describes how ‘women waiting at home’ in Hollywood melodramas, are
often found ‘standing by the window, caught in a world of objects into
which they are expected to invest their feelings’ (Elsaesser 1994: 62).17
There is no innate, qualitative, metonymic connection between women
and windows. Yet the culturally reiterated image of a woman looking out
of one is so freighted with negative association that its implications are
hard to shift. The binaristic opposition between ‘male mobility in the exte-
rior to female stasis in the interior’ is suggested and reinforced (Wigley
1992: 334). Hogg’s film is not a classical Hollywood melodrama evidently,
but it is shot through with anxiety about male power (mobility) and female
passivity (stasis). It is no surprise that we never see H looking out of a
window, and significant that when he does look through one it is from the
outside looking in, as he voyeuristically gazes at D performing half-naked
in her study. The house décor and the way it is organised in the film’s
mise-en-scène invites comparison between the creative agency of its two
artist inhabitants and hints at inequality. D has the pink study downstairs
and H the blue one upstairs. These characters may belong to London’s
artistic intelligentsia, but sexist notions of girls’ and boys’ colour prefer-
ences are not entirely dispelled by middle-class ironic detachment. D’s
study has large windows that extend from floor to ceiling. She is con-
stantly looking out of them, disturbed, or distracted by what is going on
outside. Her workspace is therefore permeable and prone to voyeurism.
H’s study has one small window above eye level when sitting at the desk,
thus permitting uninterrupted concentration. His workspace is
impermeable and private. D’s study has conspicuously pink floor-to-ceil-

ing pocket doors running the length of a wall, which open by sliding
gradually on rolling tracks. Her threshold is not firm, nor can it be quickly
instated. H’s room has a simple door, so borders can be instantly closed
and kept firm. D’s room is full of books, papers, and ‘stuff’ while H’s is
stark and empty apart from neat piles on his desk. This mise-en-scène sub-
tly contributes to our overall impression that D’s creative agency is less
secure than H’s. Early in the film when she is reluctant to discuss her
project with H, D admits “I don’t want to be put down, criticised, I think
that’s what you’ll do. Stop it before it’s begun”—an accusation H denies.
H has a more productive career than D. He is certainly the only one who
appears to be earning any money. He speaks on the phone to clients, works
steadily at his desk and goes away on a business trip. D struggles to con-
centrate, writes feverishly or stares into space, masturbates, does yoga and
often listens out for what H is doing (the sound of his chair rolling across
the floor above, his footsteps on the stairs, front door slamming etc). We
cannot help but view her efforts as a struggle for self-actualisation that
veers towards narcissistic gratification. Yet, while this dismal and perturb-
ing narrative runs through the texture of the film like a constant thread,
Hogg has a broader thematic cloth to weave. Discerning ways in which
the mise-en-scène of this understated art film works presents a critical
challenge, however. As in the previous film, there are no obvious symbols,
and few signposts or symptoms point the way. D and H use their home to
structure themselves and their relationship, but they also use it to hide
themselves from each other and from us.
The house featured in the film was designed by the British architect
James Melvin and built in 1969. The narrative that Melvin built the house
as a home for himself and his wife after their children had left home is one
we find oft repeated in architectural critiques of the house and reiterated
by Hogg (who knew the family) in film interviews. This small biographical
detail serves to reinforce the impression that it is not a ‘family house’.
Indeed this is a line in the film itself, uttered somewhat judgmentally by a
neighbour who, unlike D and H, has children. “It’s not really a family
home is it?” she says, “It’s an artists’ home”. This is a grown-up house, an
evolved house for those who have, well, evolved. A prominent architec-
tonic feature of the building is its use of glass. There are large horizontal
windows and several floor to ceiling glass walls (picture windows). These
play a prominent role in the mise-en-scène of the film. While it is clear that
in a modernist house such as this one can scarcely avoid them, it is equally
evident that the emphasis Hogg places on windows in her film invites us
to view them as a meaning-making feature of the mise-en-scène. The
director’s fascination with the glassy architectonics of the building and
how this corresponds with the art of cinema is explicit. ‘It is a house of
projections’ she says, ‘or even a house of cinema itself. It forces you to
look inside. You can be looking out towards the garden, but then your
gaze is forced inwards with a reflection of yourself’ (Sumpter 2014). This
point is reiterated in another interview: ‘I often filmed looking outside
into the garden, but projected back is the interior of the house. I saw this
inside-out quality as literally cinematic’ (Fuller 2014). The majority of
shots in the film (approximately sixty-five percent) are structured around
these windows. The shots can be divided into five predominant configura-
tions. I outline them here in order of frequency, beginning with the most
common (Fig. 3.8).
The ‘viewing window’ shots are taken close to one of the windows or
glass walls and show us the view outside. They imply a point of view,
although we do not always see D or H within the frame. They show us
what the characters would see were they to be looking out. The viewing
window often establishes a scene change, the start of a new day or simply
clarifies a temporal shift, all of which is useful in a film portraying non-
dramatic actions taking place over time in the same set of rooms. There is
Fig. 3.8 The ‘viewing window’ in Exhibition

no suggestion of any subjective or repressed viewpoint. They are uncom-

plicated and straightforward, and function cinematically in much the same
manner as might a descriptive passage at the start of a new chapter in a
novel. One simply waits to see what will happen next.
The ‘dreaming window’ however is a formal complication of the previ-
ous shot. We see the view outside, but we also see what is inside reflected
back on the glass. They present a layered or doubled image in which two
three-dimensional ‘realities’ extending in opposite directions (in front of
and behind the camera lens) join on a single, two-dimensional plane.
Sometimes the window frame is excluded from the cinematic frame, and
consequently it is unclear what we are looking at and where we are placed
in relation towards it, i.e. whether we are outside looking in or inside look-
ing out. Both ‘realities’ carry equal weight, and neither has ontological
superiority over the other. These shots signal the audience towards uncon-
scious processes and repressed narratives at work in the film text. Late into
the film we watch H lead D up the spiral staircase that runs through the
centre of the house. She is wearing a wedding dress and its long train
lightly curls itself around the central stem. Co-existent with this image is
the abundant almost jungle-like foliage in the garden outside. We have
presumed the couple are already married, so what exactly are we watching?
Is it a flashback, memory, future event, desire or even a fantasy? Or any
and all of the above? Slavoj Žižek describes combined shots such as these
as a kind of ‘interface’. As Branigan explains:
“Interface” arises when shot and reverse-shot are condensed within a single
image (e.g., through a reflective surface in the mise-en-scène, superimposi-
tion, or split screen), evoking an uncanny “spectral dimension”. Ordinary
reality is seen to have another side in that “a part of drab reality all of a sud-
den starts to function as the ‘door of perception,’ the screen through which
another, purely fantasmatic dimension becomes perceptible.” (Branigan,
2006: 140)
At its most suggestive and ‘spectral’, the ‘dreaming window’ calls up a dif-
ferent reality altogether.
Figure 3.9 shows a frame from the last ‘dreaming window’ to appear in
the film. It is a collage of layered images and sounds. Echoey fragments of
conversations and the liquid sound of water sonically infuse an ambiguous
and slowed down image of the couple who appear to be gazing down at a
small model of their house. The foliage around them draws them into a
Fig. 3.9 The ‘dreaming window’ in Exhibition
kind of Edenic visionary environment.18 At one point we hear D excitedly

talking about having children there. This ultimate ‘dreaming window’
provides access into the inner consciousness of the characters, an attitude
or ‘posture’ which, for the most part, the film resolutely avoids. The shot
has no epistemological root, in the sense that we do not know who is
‘doing’ the dreaming. Hogg does not show us D or H lying on the sofa
for example as convention might dictate, staring into space or into a mir-
ror and ‘having a daydream’. The shot is, as Daniel Frampton might argue,
a new ‘film-being’, an example of the film dreaming itself.19 This is notional
of course, as we know quite well this section of the film has been organised
and layered by its makers in the editing suite. But the architectonics of the
house has led the filmmaker towards making visions such as these and
Hogg organises her mise-en-scène in such a manner that she can enjoy and
encourage the possibilities the space invites. The house provides Hogg
with a way to cinematically represent the complex imbrication of our per-
ceptive and imaginative processes. It evinces the ‘inside-out’ capacity of
film to project images outwards onto a screen while at the same time
encouraging an internal, psychic response to those images within the
minds of the audience. Hogg withholds much information from us during
the film. Indeed the film behaves in much the same way as the house—it
shows and conceals. In this shot Hogg luxuriates in defying expectation.
It is as if the film has suddenly decided to reveal something. But it takes

the form of a spectral vision. Branigan points us towards Žižek’s reflections
on this kind of layered, superimposed shot (an ‘interface’ between reali-
ties). ‘What has been “repressed”’ writes Branigan, ‘(e.g., alternative nar-
rativizations, genre conventions, psychic trauma, ideology, historical
circumstances) returns like an “apparition”’. The reason, Branigan explains
(quoting Žižek), is that:
we cannot ever comprehend the “whole” of reality that we encounter: if we

are to be able to endure our encounter with reality, some part of it has to be
“derealised,” experienced as a spectral apparition. (Branigan 2006: 141)
The ‘spectacular window’ switches perspective once again. We are

invited to admire the objective splendour of the house and garden—and
the ability of Hogg’s film to frame it to its full advantage. The architectural
bravura is put on full cinematographic display. It is important to remem-
ber that this is a film about a commodity. This house is for sale. Two
smart, smooth-talking estate agents with scant connection to the emo-
tional value of the house wend their way through house and narrative. (“I
have always wanted to see the inside of this house” says one gleefully while
the other quietly agrees.) These shots resemble photos of property dis-
played in estate agent windows, the difference being of course that our
two main characters find themselves placed in situ. Somewhat dwarfed by
the grandeur inside and out, they appear vulnerable and precarious, fig-
ures on the brink of being irrelevant or of being erased out of the picture
altogether.
In the scene shown in Fig. 3.10, D and H awkwardly discuss her work
while they pack up books for the move. Though they are placed centrally
they appear huddled within the frame, dwarfed by the assurance of form
which surrounds them. As explored earlier in this chapter, the way in
which similarly framed shots in Jeanne Dielman are composed has the
obverse effect. Jeanne may be small in the mise-en-scène, but she is not
diminished by what surrounds her. On the contrary, she is part of and at
one with that environment. Here the opposite impression is created. No
matter how much they profess to love the house, our couple seem not able
to occupy it very well. They do not entirely belong. An impression of the
house as a bigger, more splendid and more successful entity than its inhab-
itants, bearing a promise of happiness they can never fully possess nor live
up to, is inbuilt into Exhibition from the start of the film. It is at the heart
Fig. 3.10 The ‘spectacular window’ in Exhibition
of the narrative and notionally upheld by repeated shots of this kind. “I

can feel it in its walls” says D about the past happiness of the previous
occupant’s life in the house, “the house has recorded, you know, this long
happy marriage from the building of the house till their 80s”. But we see
no such happiness. A qualitative imbalance between this couple and their
beautiful home builds in pressure as the film unfolds and it propels them
steadily and relentlessly towards their unceremonious ejection at the end
of the film. Before I discuss how this occurs, I should complete my tax-
onomy of windows.
In shots like the one in Fig. 3.11, camera and audience are set firmly
outside. The ‘voyeur window’ recalibrates the status of our relationship
with the characters and with the film itself. Placed into the text at seem-
ingly random moments, these shots have an oddly corrective effect, as if
reminding the audience who they really are. We are thrust into our nature
as outsiders in the cinema in a phenomenological sense. While we may visit
the house of cinema for the pleasure of looking into the lives and houses
of others and become drawn into their fictions, we can never fully inhabit
these houses and will always remain on the outside looking in.
The ‘concealing window’ is the fifth and least common form of window
shot in the film’s ‘glass-centric’ mise-en-scène, and its occurrence insti-
gates yet another perspectival shift. Here we are also outside, but we
Fig. 3.11 The ‘voyeur window’ in Exhibition
cannot see inside at all. The house becomes an impenetrable box and the
way in, as the second Mrs de Winter would say, “is barred to us”. While
these shots emphasise the material obduracy of architectural forms (glass
can after all be opaque as well as transparent and reflective), Hogg inflects
these shots with metaphor. The gathering storm clouds seen on the outer
face of the glass echo the repressed fury we have just witnessed in the pre-
vious scene, in which a frustrated H has tried to persuade a reluctant D of
the benefits of leaving the house and starting afresh. But this suggestive
effect would be more accurately ascribed to a decision taken in the editing
process, in which shots such as these, used sparingly, become useful when
placed in context. More importantly this kind of shot metaphorically
places a hand over our prying binoculars—or the lens of our camera
(Fig. 3.12).
We need to probe more deeply into how Hogg uses this glassy architec-
ture to transform her house into ‘a conceptual rather than a referential
space’ (Turim 1991: 29). Hogg’s emphasis on the transparency of the
house appears to foreground visibility and honesty. But unlike Akerman’s
film, we would have difficulty producing an accurate floorplan of the
Melvin house. Hogg does not provide us with a consistent cinemato-
graphic dispositif with which to spatially orientate ourselves. We are not
aware, for example, that there is a swimming pool until we find ourselves
Fig. 3.12 The ‘concealing window’ in Exhibition
looking down on D’s naked body floating in its chlorinated water, and it
is never made clear exactly where it is or how you get to it. There also
appear to be two kitchens and we are not sure where the second one is
situated. There are gaps in our spatial knowledge, and it is just so with the
characters. We glean certain hard facts: they have lived in the house for
nearly 20 years, H wishes to sell while D does not, they are well off, they
work in separate rooms, they have no children, they have friends who live
opposite. Yet detailed personal information and past events of magnitude
are withheld. We never find out their full names. They are artists but we
do not know what they do. They are wealthy but we see no evidence of
why or how. Something bad happened to H outside but we never find out
what it is. They have no children, but we never find out why. There is an
oscillation between poles of knowability and unknowability. This is played
out in the binary opposition between the open transparency and closed
reflectivity of their glass home. Indeed, it is not only played out but actively
invoked. Sometimes we can see through the windows clearly, sometimes
we cannot. The characters are on full display (on exhibition) one moment,
entirely hidden from view the next. Visibility does not guarantee know-
ability, proximity does not provide intimacy. If we accept this complex
perspective, which we have no choice but to do given the nature of the
way the film pulls us in and pushes us out, we realise the desire to ‘get to
know’ the characters is not the project of the film even though the mod-
ernist glass transparency of the house suggests that it might be. It is pre-
cisely the unknowability of D and H which marks the film. In addition,
our desire to know the characters at all is called into question. Why might
we want to know more? For whose benefit? Do the characters wish to be
seen, to be better known? Did they ask to be? If Hogg feels the need to
explain D’s motives or to psychologically narrativise her in ways which
make her seem more understandable to us, it is surely in response to the
psychological turn of the questions she is commonly (and reductively)
asked in interviews. The film withholds elements of the truth from us
because it wishes to do so. This is a strange mise-en-scène, one which
promises and withholds meaning in equal measure, which shows us the
couple having sex or places us at the foot of the bed in the middle of the
night to watch D secretly masturbate while H is asleep, but which is just
as likely to hold us at a distance by depositing us on the pavement outside
and suddenly, as it were, ‘shutting up shop’. This is made quite clear in the
way Hogg’s film ends.
In the closing shot we find ourselves outside looking up into the house
from the garden outside. Inside this suspended, glassy theatre box we see
an unknown family with three young children playing joyfully. We cannot
hear them, which increases our sense of isolation. The pithy observation
made earlier by D’s neighbour ‘It’s not really a family home is it’ is
dethroned. The scene comes as a total surprise because aside from seeing
them packing books, we have not seen D and H move out. They are sim-
ply no longer there. They have been ‘disappeared’ in the suture between
shots, unceremoniously ‘unhung’ like pictures in an out-of-date exhibi-
tion. But it is not only the couple who have been removed from the film.
We too have been cast out, from narrative and house. Both have moved on
without us. What is odd is that we remain curiously unmoved.
Why does their stark disappearance evoke no sentiment or sense of loss?
Because we have never been close to them in the first place. That we are
no closer to knowing the characters at the end of the film than we are at
the beginning is, one needs to accept, the point. On one level, Hogg’s film
could be experienced as an elaborate tease. On another, it can be under-
stood as a formal representation of personal and social estrangement.
People live in houses and then move out never to be seen again, only to be
replaced by another set of strangers. People come and go without explana-
tion. What takes one family years to gather together and create is dis-
mantled in an instant, torn down like an old set and thrown into a skip.
Property, as Rhodes reminds us, ‘is fungible and alienable’ and ‘whatever
is promised by the house is radically susceptible to violation, displacement,
and loss’ (Rhodes 2017: viii). This echoes our spectatorial experience in
the cinema. Here too we gaze into the furnishing of other people’s lives.
‘In purchasing a movie ticket’ observes Rhodes, ‘we pay for the right to
occupy a space in order to gaze up at a space we can never occupy’ (2017:
ix). In his book House Made of Light George Toles evokes the conflicted
promise at the heart of cinema, which is to intensely but briefly occupy a
‘privileged enclosure’ from which we will always be cast out (Toles 2001:
23). The ‘interior of the dwelling is everything that film can reveal to us
by way of presence’ he writes, ‘and the successive vanishings that are always
the cost of film’s forward movement’ (23). We dwell in the world of a film
and the homes we find enframed on the screen, and commonly experience
a sense of loss when it comes to an end and we are ejected into the world
outside, wherever that may be. ‘The house of film is a frame we long to
enter in the spirit of homecoming’ writes Toles, ‘but that we cannot pos-
sess any more securely than the lost home of our beginnings’ (2001: 23).
If we look at Exhibition from this angle, we come closer to understanding
Hogg’s peculiar mise-en-scène and its muted choreography between inti-
macy and estrangement. Her characters do not belong in their home.
Their bodies often appear pale and anaemic to the point of being corpse-
like in contrast to the bright and vivid colours on the walls around them.
They seem to haunt the house, rather than live inside it. It is a contrast
when we see the new family having fun, kicking a ball about, enjoying
their space. Unlike D and H, the Melvin house lives life to the full. It is a
colourful and dramatic space, emboldened by passionate impulse and
architectural bravura with its dark pinks and steely blues, aeronautical-style
spiral staircase, tropical plants in the garden, giant leaf sculptures on the
walls. Our couple fail to catch any happiness or promise the house may
exude from the splendour of its walls, no matter how inlaid they might be
with happy memories of its past owners. Hogg’s film is a quiet, devastat-
ing, spatialised mapping of what the poet W S Graham describes as the
‘deeper problem which everybody is concerned with… the essential isola-
tion of man and the difficulty of communication’.20 The couple often pre-
fer to communicate using a dated intercom system, one of the period
details of the building. Once again, the physical attributes of the house are
recruited into the mise-en-scène to signal the couple’s alienation from one
another and their space. Unable to speak openly and directly, it is easier to
message each other between rooms, elliptically and in code, as if on an
ocean-going vessel or submarine. This creeping sense of alienation and

attendant repressed anxiety becomes especially clear when H goes away for
a few days leaving D alone in the house.
H is more acquainted with the house on a practical level than D. We see
him checking the boiler, dealing with pool maintenance, ushering estate
agents into the lift, and sweeping copious amounts of rainwater off the flat
roof in his flip-flops. But we never see D perform any such tasks. She pro-
claims her love for the house and wraps herself around its walls, but she
has no basic idea how it works. This moves her into the generic ranks of
impractical women, a stereotype somewhat analogous to the modernistic
thrust of house and film. After having waved H off, D carefully closes the
front door with its complicated system of locks and alarms. There follows
an extended sequence in which she creeps around in the dark disturbed by
strange noises. Unable to trace the source of the odd sounds, she hovers
outside closed doors, tiptoes along corridors, and tentatively opens cup-
boards. This anxious figure is not unfamiliar, and the substrate of melo-
drama rises a little closer to the surface. She appears in most of the films I
discuss and is at the heart of the Gothic narrative. D’s night-time wander-
ing and obsessive door-opening recall Celia’s actions in Secret Beyond the
Door and Kit Preston’s anxious pacing in Midnight Lace. There is no
ghost, first wife or murderous husband hiding in the fitted cupboards or
crouching behind the boiler in Hornton Street. What haunts this no-
expense-spared space is something far less concrete and more difficult to
identify. It is a repressed self that nags at D, an estrangement from herself
and her purpose—or her purposeless-ness. The house, once she is alone
and night has fallen, becomes a territory haunted by all that is feared and
unspoken. ‘All houses are haunted’ asserts Barry Curtis, ‘by memories, by
the history of their sites, by their owner’s fantasies and projections or by
the significance they acquire for agents or strangers’. He continues,
‘Houses inscribe themselves within their dwellers, they socialize and struc-
ture the relations within families, and provide spaces for expression and
self-realisation in a complex and interactive relationship’ (Curtis 2008: 34).
The inhabitants of this house are always on show, except when they are
not—which is not as tautologous a statement as it might seem. When this
exhibitionist situation meets the ‘bold and active gaze’ of the cinematic
process and finds itself re-framed and re-structured by that process, we
find ourselves involved in a complex relay of looks. That the audience
looks through the glass walls at the characters inside the house is clear. It
also looks at them through the glass lens of the camera, and through what
it commonly perceives to be the transparent window of the screen. Film

and house can be understood as viewing devices, which holds good to
Hogg’s earlier analogy. Her claim that this house is ‘literally cinematic’ can
be further unpacked by drawing on key observations from spatial theory
on the use of windows and glass in modern architecture. The windows in
Hornton Street prompt, even propel, its inhabitants to look outwards. As
we have seen, the majority of window shots in the film are ‘inside looking
out’. Venetian blinds cover the windows, but they are most often lifted or
revolved so that one can see out and in. The fabric drawn performatively
across the horizontal bedroom window is conspicuously patterned with
holes. Generally the windows are left uncovered, like eyes forever open.
The house of D and H is a viewing device for seeing out and for its more
inflected correlative, looking out. The impulse behind Melvin’s design was,
as Penz points out, ‘directly inspired by Le Corbusier’s vision’ (2018: 90).
Le Corbusier windows ‘are never covered with curtains’ explains spatial
theorist Beatriz Colomina in her discussion of windows in modern archi-
tecture, ‘neither is access to them hampered by objects. On the contrary,
everything in these houses seems to be disposed in a way that continuously
throws the subject towards the periphery of the house’ (Colomina 1992:
98). Le Corbusier was excited by the speed and technological advance-
ment of his age, and with evolving communication systems in particular.
‘The window is, for Le Corbusier, first of all communication’ writes
Colomina, and his architecture is ‘produced by an engagement with the
mass media’ (1992: 126). The architect ‘repeatedly superimposes the idea
of the “modern” window, a lookout window, a horizontal window, with
the reality of the new media: “telephone, cable, radios,… machines for
abolishing time and space.”’ (126) If the window is a lens, she explains,
‘the house itself is a camera pointed at nature’ (113). But unlike the opti-
mistic view envisaged by Le Corbusier, what D sees out of her window is
far from utopian. There is a constant, daily stream of disruption and dis-
turbance which, if one nudges at the analogy between window and lens,
one might call a never-ending ‘hair in the gate’. Scaffolders appear on the
buildings opposite at close and invasive eye-level, people park directly out-
side and row noisily on mobile phones, roadworks set up randomly in the
middle of the night, delivery vans park illegally in their driveway, gangs on
bikes career dangerously past, and at one point D watches an old man
anxiously clutching a baby on the pavement opposite. The couple are
equally as assailed on an aural level. Their daily ‘soundtrack’ is full of police
sirens, ambulances, car alarms, dogs barking and people shouting violently
and inexplicably late at night. Even the peaceful opening shot with D lying
on the windowsill is subtly threaded through with anxiety, as the whine of
a siren insinuates itself into the calm sunny day, the susurration of wind
and the consoling chime of church bells. Their house is a recorder as well
as a camera and it soaks up the outside world like a sponge. This recalls
another observation from Hogg: ‘I saw the house as a sponge that could
absorb my ideas about creativity and relationships—a container for all the
complexity and contradiction I wanted to express’ (Sumpter 2014). The
house far from impermeable and while D and H may proclaim their strong
attachment to it, it is clear they do not feel wholly safe inside it. This privi-
leged couple cannot fully ‘dwell’ in their valuable home. The only room to
offer total privacy is the small ensuite bathroom, which has no windows.
H retreats here several times during the film and at one point we watch the
couple share a bath together—a moment of rare intimacy in a secret room,
access (for the moment) allowed.
In his essay examining changing attitudes towards the ‘fetish’ of trans-
parency in modern architecture, Nigel Whiteley describes how ‘something
initially associated with honesty rapidly became problematic once the
power of the gaze was noticed’. That ambivalence, he continues, ‘charac-
terises our contemporary response to a transparency associated with both
scrutiny and voyeurism’ (Whiteley 2003: 8). He quotes Mies van der Rohe
who, defending the transparency of the Farnsworth House (a ‘glass house’
he designed and built for Edith Farnsworth in the years 1945–51), wrote:
I feel that [it] … has never been properly understood. I was in this house
myself from morning till evening. I had never known till then what splendid
colours nature can display… These colours are continually changing
throughout, and I should like to say that it is simply marvellous.
(Whiteley 2003: 10)
But as Whiteley crucially points out, ‘Powerful occupants can control or at

least modify the gaze through transparency’ (2003: 10). The Farnsworth
house is in a remote, private location surrounded by beautiful trees and
countryside, the client wealthy enough to afford such a place. Rich people
could afford to look out because they could control what they see. But D
and H (who may also be rich) have no power over what they see. They
can’t even control who parks in their driveway. Transparency in architec-
ture was initially viewed as a stripping away of toxic and concealing struc-
tures. But modernity ‘has been haunted—by a myth of transparency’ states
Anthony Vidler (1992: 217). He quotes Walter Benjamin on the collaps-

ing distinction between the interior and exterior in modern life. ‘In the
imprint of this turning point of the epoch’ wrote Benjamin, ‘it is written
that the knell has sounded for the dwelling in its old sense, dwelling in
which security prevailed’ (Vidler 1992: 217). Unlike Jeanne’s stolid apart-
ment with its deep-set, net-curtained windows snuggled into solid walls,
D’s glass house has no protective membranes, and D feels vulnerable.
Despite what Mies van der Rohe had to say about the beauty of nature
outside, Edith Farnsworth felt the same way in her glass house. ‘The truth
is’ she said in an interview for House Magazine in 1953, ‘that in this house
with its four walls of glass I feel like a prowling animal, always on the alert.
I am always restless. Even in the evening. I feel like a sentinel on guard day
and night. I can rarely stretch out and relax’ (Friedman 1998: 141). In her
book Women and the Making of the Modern House, Alice T Friedman dis-
cusses the Farnsworth House (1998). ‘Mies’s architecture’ she writes,
‘calls attention not only to itself but also to the physical and aesthetic
experience of the occupant’. She continues, ‘It is important to note that
the experience is not always positive.’ She quotes Mies’s grandson Dirk
Lohan, also an architect, who observed that, ‘So unconventional is the
house that every move and every activity in it assume an aesthetic quality
which challenges behaviour patterns formed in different surroundings’
(Friedman 1998: 128). We can see that the form of the house in Exhibition
has a direct impact on the behaviour of its inhabitants. Architecture ‘can
dictate behaviour’ says Hogg, ‘It actually shapes the relationship’ (Dallas
2014). But it is not only the inhabitants who are influenced by the form
around them. The house shapes the film. The camera moves around this
elusive object like a probe, searching inside and out, changing angles
unpredictably, as if trying to work something out. The building is a puz-
zling, rotating cube with walls that slide open and closed and windows
that show and conceal. It is a perfect vehicle for exploring the tendency of
human nature to both hide and reveal itself to others.
Akerman and Hogg frame their two architectures in ways which visually
iterate something about the interiority of those who live inside them. They
also frame them in order to conceal or to look askance at that interiority
thereby revealing it in non-direct and allusive ways. These modernist film
texts resist critical attempts to summon up the metaphorical or psycho-
logical dimensions that traditional mise-en-scène criticism works to dis-
cern and decipher. Exploring ways in which architecture is remoulded in
avant-garde films, Turim makes the important point that the unconscious
‘is not a symbolic system easily deciphered’ (Turim 1991: 32). The dan-
gers inherent in interpretative decoding are borne out by psychoanalytical
dream analysis, which does not seek to regard one dream object as a sim-
ple stand-in for another. Freud sees single images as nodal points emanat-
ing multiple meanings once they are touched, while single meanings can
propagate new and associative chains of images. He pictures the mind as a
‘thought-factory’ or weaving machine, in which ‘One throw links up a
thousand threads’.21 Mise-en-scène works to serve a discursive universe
which tells us something, but not everything, about itself. But despite the
challenges that Exhibition and Jeanne Dielman present to a mise-en-scène
analysis that responds more readily to film texts which are openly and
symbolically expressive, we can still arrive at a deeper understanding of
such modernist films through this critical route. In the next chapter I dis-
cuss something equally as intangible as filmic architecture, the invisible
space of sound in cinema.
Notes
1. As noted in the previous chapter, contemporary architects in the United
States were inspired by vernacular Japanese architecture and its use of natu-
ral materials.
2. That this shot helps elevate the scene (and indeed the entire film) from
what might have remained a predictable, middle-of-the-road romance
movie into something more complex, moving and expressive, is due in no
small part to the contribution of cinematographer Charles Lang, who was
nominated for 18 Academy Awards during his career. Lang is thus placed
equal first among the most nominated cinematographers by the Academy
along with Leon Shamroy.
3. A short documentary made on set which follows the entire process of con-
struction makes fascinating viewing. This engaging yet curious short film
was made by the Weyerhaeuser Company who supplied the wood and built
the building. It can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=YBGD5GaxT_4&t=987s. [accessed 11/01/23].
4. This is conjecture, given that we only see Jeanne in the bedroom with a
client on the third day, but the director confirms the event in various inter-
views, including Camera Obscura with Janet Bergstrom (1977: 120).
5. The angle of this shot is repeated once more in the film, when Jeanne gets
a pair of scissors from the drawer of the kitchen table in order to open her
sister’s present, an unusual occurrence. These are the scissors with which
she will stab her third client later that day. One could postulate therefore
that with this new angle the film is also noting the possibility of a future
malfunction in the system, alerting us to its possible danger, to something
that could occur, and which will in fact destroy everything.
6. A quote from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1994: 176).
7. A fascinating interview with Babette Mangolte in Isa Stragliate’s radio
documentary about Jeanne Dielman (2022) reveals that it would have
been too expensive to hire lights for this outside scene. However, Akerman
retains this dark shot and recruits its enveloping, obscuring darkness into
her overall mise-en-scène.
8. I presented a paper on the subject at the International Screen Studies
Conference in Glasgow in June 2019, ‘Extraordinary Things in Ordinary
Places’. Architectural theorist François Penz draws their work into dia-
logue in his book Cinematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to
Architecture (2018). Focusing on their attraction to everyday events and
rhythms, Penz contextualises their work with that of spatial philosopher
and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, in particular his critique of everyday life.
Art theorist Jean-Pierre Salgas discusses the modalities in which each artist
creatively negotiates with their respective traumatic family histories and
describes how the psychic inheritance of the Shoah can be clearly discerned
in their work (Salgas 2006: 1). Sandy Flitterman-Lewis also recognises
affinities, describing in her Camera Obscura article ‘Souvenirs de Chantal’,
how they ‘share an aesthetic and a practice that probe the depths of iden-
tity, exile, memory and displacement’ (Flitterman-Lewis 2019: 75).
Silverman explicitly connects the two artists in his essay ‘Concentrationary
Art and the Reading of Everyday Life’ in Concentrationary Art (2019).
9. They were certainly aware of each other’s work, but also moved in similar
artistic and social circles for a time. Perec was a close friend of Mangolte,
and through this connection he met Akerman on at least two occasions in
1976, both noted in his diary. I am grateful for this information, so kindly
provided by Jean-Luc Joly (President of the Association Georges Perec).
10. An acronym for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential
Literature).
11. No explanation of ‘clinamen atomorum’ exists in Epicurus’s own words.
Lucretius, Roman poet and philosopher, provides a later account:
Though atoms fall straight downward through the void
by their own weight, yet at uncertain times
and at uncertain points, they swerve a bit—
enough that one may say they changed direction.
And if they did not swerve, they all would fall
downward like raindrops through the boundless void;
no clashes would occur, no blows befall
the atoms; nature would never have made a thing.
(From De rerum natura translated by Frank O Copley in Motte

1986: 264).
12. I explore these linking ideas and processes in a videographic essay, Akerman
& Perec: the creative potential of formal constraints’ (7 mins, 2022). Online
at https://louiseradinger.com/making.
13. Extract from an interview with Boris Lehman heard in sound artist Isa
Stragliati’s radiophonic documentary Jeanne D. Stragliati’s poetic
research piece in 3 parts premiered at the Cinematek, Brussels on
09/10/22 as part of a season of events in tribute to Akerman organised
by the Fondation Chantal Akerman. More information can be found on
https://noearnosound.net.
14. It is a painterly shot, and its flattening of three-dimensional space could be
compared to the work of Henri Matisse in paintings such as ‘Harmony in
Red’ (1908) and ‘The Red Studio’ (1911).
15. Autour de “Jeanne Dielman” (Sami Frey 1975). Included as a special fea-
ture on Criterion Collection DVD of Jeanne Dielman.
16. These two articles were republished together in 1950 under the title
Lazare parmi nous, with a preface by Cayrol. Lazare parmi nous (‘Lazarus
among us’) is fully translated in Pollock and Silverman’s book.
17. One could argue it is because women are so often set inside houses in art
(and in life) that cultural representations of them looking out of the win-
dow are so ubiquitous. If men were more closely affiliated to the home and
portrayed more frequently inside, the same might be true for them. One
might also consider what the equivalent iconic ‘gazing position’ is for men
outside the house. The image can be traced back further in time, as a
recent exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery ‘Reframed: The Woman
in the Window’ shows. ‘The earliest evidence for windows with a view and
window gazing are not textual but visual, and date centuries earlier to
ancient Minoan-Mycenaean works representing a woman in a window. The
so-called ‘Ramp House’ fresco fragments of c. 1450 BCE at Mycenae,
depict an architectural façade with female viewers shown in profile peering
through window embrasures at the spectacle—bull-leaping—taking place
beyond. The earliest evidence for a window with a view, therefore, is also
the first instance of the ‘woman in the window’ motif’ (Exhibition cata-
logue, Jennifer Sliwka, 2022: 10).
18. We discover in the next shot that it is indeed a miniature version of their
house in the form of a cake made for their leaving party. They smash it up
and guests are invited to eat whichever part they desire.
19. Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (2006).
20. Give Me Your Painting Hand: W S Graham and Cornwall by David
Whittaker (Wavestone Press 2015: 17).
21. The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud, Wordsworth Editions Ltd
(1997: 174).
References
Adams, Sam. 2010. Interview with Akerman in The Onion, Excerpted for a
Screening of Jeanne Dielman at Northwest Film Centre, Yale Union. Accessed
March 6, 2023. https://yaleunion.org/chantal-akerman/.
Akerman, Chantal. 2004. Chantal Akerman: Autoportrait en Cinéaste. Paris:
Cahiers du Cinéma & Centre Pompidou.
Antonioni, Michelangelo. 2007. The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews
on Cinema, eds. C Di Carlo & Giorgio Tinazzi. New York: Marsilio.
Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Bayman, Louis. 2018. The Sorrow and The Piety: Melodrama Rethought in
Postwar Italian Cinema. In Melodrama Unbound, ed. Christine Gledhill and
Linda Williams, 273–287. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bergstrom, Janet. 1977. Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
by Chantal Akerman. Camera Obscura 1 (2): 115–123.
Béghin, Cyril. 2011. La Folie Almayer: Entretien avec Chantal Akerman. Accessed
February 28, 2023. https://medias.unifrance.org/medias/88/8/67672/
presse/la-folie-almayer-dossier-de-presse-francais.pdf.
Bellos, David. 1999. George Perec: A Life in Words. London: The Harvill Press.
Branigan, Edward. 2006. Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory.
Britton, Andrew. 2009. A New Servitude. In Britton on Film: The Complete Film
Criticism of Andrew Britton, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 24–63. Detroit: Wayne
State University Press.
New York: Verso.
Cayrol, Jean. 2019. Lazarean Literature, trans. Katie Tidmarsh. In Concentrationary
Art: Jean Cayrol, the Lazarean and the Everyday in Post-war Film, Literature,
Music and the Visual Arts, ed. Griselda Pollock & Max Silverman, 49–62.
Berghahn: New York & Oxford.
Colomina, Beatriz. 1992. The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism. In Sexuality and
Space, 73–128. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Cronk, Jordan. 2017. A Woman’s Work: A Conversation with Babette Mangolte.
Published on Mubi. Accessed January 10, 2023. https://mubi.com/note-
book/posts/a-woman-s-work-a-conversation-with-babette-mangolte.
Curtis, Barry. 2008. Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film. London:
Reaktion Books.
Dallas, Paul. 2014. Architecture of Desire: Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition’ in Cinema
Scope 57. Accessed January 2, 2023. https://cinema-scope.com/cinema-
scope-magazine/architecture-desire-joanna-hoggs-exhibition/.
Doane, Mary Ann. 1980. The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and
Space. Yale French Studies—Cinema and Sound, 60: 33–50. Accessed January
10, 2023. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2930003. Also in Movies and Methods
Vol II. 1985. Edited by Bill Nichols, pp. 565–575. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
———. 1988. The Desire to Desire: Woman’s Films of the 1940s. Basingstoke &
London: Macmillan Press.
Elsaesser, Thomas. 1994 (first published 1972). Tales of Sound and Fury:
Observations on the Family Melodrama. In Home Is Where the Heart Is, ed.
Christine Gledhill, pp. 43–69. London: British Film Institute.
Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. 2019. Souvenirs de Chantal. Camera Obscura 34(1):
75–89. Accessed January 11, 2023. https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-
obscura/article/34/1%20(100)/75/137775/Souvenirs-de-Chantal.
Frampton, Daniel. 2006. Filmosophy. London & New York: Wallflower Press.
Friedman, Alice T. 1998. Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social
and Architectural History. New York: Abrams.
Fuller, Graham. 2014. Interview: Joanna Hogg. Film Comment, July. Accessed
January 2, 2023. https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-joanna-
hogg/
Gibbs, John. 2002. Mise-en-scène: Film Style and Interpretation. New York &
Chichester: Columbia University Press.
———. 2013. The Life of Mise-en-Scène Visual Style and British Film Criticism
1946–1978. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press.
Gledhill, Christine (ed.). 1994 (first published 1987). Home is Where the Heart Is:
Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. London: British Film Institute.
Gledhill, Christine, and Linda Williams, eds. 2018. Melodrama Unbound: Across
History, Media and National Cultures. New York: Columbia University Press.
Goliot, Anne. 1991. Introduction à une narratologie de l’espace: Gaslight ou le
récit-architecte. Iris: Revue de Theorie de l’Image et du Son 12: 71–83. Iowa &
Paris: University of Iowa.
Gross, Kenneth. 2011. Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life. Chicago & London:
The University of Chicago Press.
Architecture and the Feminine: Mop-Up Work 4: 22–27. Accessed January 10,
2023. www.jstor.org/stable/41846076
Heidegger, Martin. 2010 (First published 1951). Notes on Building, Dwelling,
Thinking, Poetically Man Dwells. In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in
Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach, pp. 100–109, 109–119. New York & London:
Routledge.
Kessler, Frank. 2014. Mise en Scène. Montreal: caboose.
Margulies, Ivone. 1996. Nothing Happens: Chantal Ackerman’s Hyperrealist
Everyday. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Martin, Adrian. 2011. Turn the Page: From Mise en Scène to Dispositif. Screening
the Past 31: 1–15. Accessed January 10, 2023. https://www.screeningthepast.
com/issue-31-first-release/turn-the-page-from-mise-en-scene-to-dispositif/
———. 2014. Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical. Hollywood to New
Media Art. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Michelson, Annette. 1969. Bodies in Space: Film as Carnal Knowledge. Art Forum
7(6). Accessed January 10, 2023. https://www.artforum.com/print/196902/
annette-michelson-on-stanley-kubrick-s-2001-a-space-odyssey-36517.
Motte, Warren F. 1986. Clinamen Redux. Comparative Literature Studies 23(4):
263–281. Accessed January 10, 2023. www.jstor.org/stable/40246714.
Mulvey, Laura. 1989. Melodrama Inside and Outside the Home. In Visual and
Other Pleasures, 63–77. Palgrave: Basingstoke & New York.
———. 2016. A Neon Sign, A Soup Tureen: The Jeanne Dielman Universe. Film
Quarterly 70 (1): 25–31.
Pawlikowska, Ewa. 1983. Entretien Georges Perec/Ewa Pawlikowska. Littératures
7. Accessed February 28, 2023. https://www.persee.fr/doc/litts_0563-9751_
1983_num_7_1_1234.
Penz, François. 2018. Cinematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to
Architecture. London and New York: Routledge.
Perec, Georges. 1993. La Chose. Magazine Littéraire, December 316: 57–64.
(Originally unpublished but with 1967 as assumed writing date). Accessed
January 10, 2023. https://www.desordre.net/textes/bibliotheque/auteurs/
perec/la_chose.htm
———. 2008a. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. and ed. John Sturrock.
London: Penguin Classics.
———. 2008b (Originally published in 1978). Life, A User’s Manual. Translated
by David Bellos. London: Vintage.
Pollock, Griselda, and Max Silverman, eds. 2019. Concentrationary Art: Jean
Cayrol, the Lazarean and the Everyday in Post-war Film, Literature, Music and
the Visual Arts. Berghahn: New York & Oxford.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. 2012. Chantal Akerman: The Integrity of Exile and the
Everyday. LOLA 2. Retrieved January 10, 2023. http://www.lolajournal.
com/2/integrity_exile.html. and Retrieved January 10, 2023. https://jona-
thanrosenbaum.net/202205/chantal-akerman-the-integrity-of-exile-and-the-
everyday-tk/.
Salgas, Jeanne-Pierre. 2006. Chantal Akerman: ‘Regarde de tous tes yeux regarde’.
In Le Cabinet d’amateur. Revue d’études perecquiennes. Accessed March 6,
2023. https://www.associationgeorgesperec.fr/IMG/pdf/jpsalgas_2.pdf.
Silverman, Max. 2019a. Concentrationary Art and the Reading of Everyday Life:
(In)human Spaces in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du
Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). In Concentrationary Art: Jean Cayrol, the
Lazarean and the Everyday in Post-war Film, Literature, Music and the Visual
Arts, ed. Griselda Pollock & Max Silverman, 123–144. Berghahn: New
York & Oxford.
———. 2019b. Introduction. In Concentrationary Art: Jean Cayrol, the Lazarean
and the Everyday in Post-war Film, Literature, Music and the Visual Arts, ed.
Griselda Pollock & Max Silverman, 1–28. Berghahn: New York & Oxford.
Sliwka, Jennifer. 2022. Reframed: The Woman in the Window. London: Dulwich
Picture Gallery.
Stragliati, Isa. 2022. Jeanne D. Radio Program, Stereo. https://noear-
nosound.net/
Sumpter, Helen. 2014. Q&A Joanna Hogg: Exhibition. Art Review, 21 July.
Accessed January 2, 2023. https://artreview.com/feature-qa-joanna-hogg-
exhibition-2014/
Toles, George. 2001. A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film. Detroit:
Wayne State University Press.
Turim, Maureen. 1991. The Displacement of Architecture in Avant-Garde Films.
Iris: Revue de Theorie de l’Image et du Son 12: 25–38. Iowa & Paris:
University of Iowa.
Vidler, Anthony. 1992. The Architectural Uncanny. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Whiteley, Nigel. 2003. Intensity of Scrutiny and a Good Eyeful: Architecture and
Transparency. Journal of Architectural Education 56 (4): 8–16.
Whittaker, David. 2015. Give Me Your Painting Hand: W S Graham and Cornwall.
UK: Wavestone Press.
Wigley, Mark. 1992. Untitled: The Housing of Gender. In Sexuality & Space, ed.
Beatriz Colomina, 327–389. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
CHAPTER 4
Sound: Building the Invisible
I’m where the sounds are.

—Elisa in The House
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” says a voice as the credits
fade and the opening scene of Rebecca begins. What we see as these words
envelop us aurally is a full moon floating in a night sky, dark clouds sailing
across its face. There is no Manderley, no house, no dreamer, no bed, only
a moon. The image evokes dreamwork, the face of the moon a glorious
stand-in for Manderley or even for the moon-face of our dreaming hero-
ine, a woman we have not yet seen. We do not know what Manderley is
(unless we have read the original Daphne du Maurier book), who is talk-
ing or where she is speaking from. But this is of no consequence because
we are already spellbound, ‘enmeshed’ as Thomas Elsaesser and Malte
Hagener put it, inside the ‘filmic texture’ (2010: 132). The tone of the
voice is important. Actress Joan Fontaine pitches it between two poles,
conscious and alert while at the same time dreamy and poetic. The person
to whom this voice belongs is young, vibrant and articulate, her diction
clear and precise. Yet each word is permeated by a softness of vocal texture
and the timbre is melodic. Fontaine moves up and down the register draw-
ing out the length of certain vowel sounds, yet also racing along at a pace
with no wish to over-indulge the drama of her words. The voice holds us
in an aural spell and draws us into the film world. But once the ‘present-
day’ narrative of the film takes over, this guiding voice disappears never to
be heard again. Despite its banishment, this primary voice remains

Switzerland AG 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40033-9_4
foundational to our relationship with the rest of the film. It opens up an

imaginal space which continues to affect what we see. Film sound has the
power to evoke the existence of spaces beyond the frame. It also, as I shall
explore here, shapes and influences what we see within the frame, and
structures our response towards it. In this chapter I look at two films in
which women inhabit sonic space in as significant and constructed a way
as they do the architectural spaces in which they live. I discuss how these
two spatial regions, the visible and invisible, come together to enrich our
experience.
One might assume sound ‘does not count’ as a space or place because
one cannot see it. But sound, as Rick Altman (1980, 1992) and Tom
Levin (1984) assiduously point out, is material and does occupy space.
‘The production of sound is… a material event’ writes Altman, ‘taking
place in space and time, and involving the disruption of surrounding mat-
ter’ (1992: 18). Sound, he reminds us, ‘cannot exist in a two-dimensional
context’ (1992: 5). Sound ‘does have a different relation to time and space
than the image, it has a spatial dimension’ (Levin 1984: 61–62). The
dimension of sound in cinema is commonly figured in spatial terms, both
in its material occupation of the three-dimensional space of the cinema,
and in its capacity to evoke alternative, invisible dimensions beyond what
we see on the two-dimensional screen (Doane 1980; Levin 1984; Altman
1992; Chion 1999; Sjogren 2006; Elsaesser and Hagener 2010; Martin
2014). A key way to better understanding the ‘heterogeneity of the cin-
ema’ suggests Doane, is by means of ‘the concept of space’. Sound, she
continues, ‘is not “framed” in the same way as the image. In a sense, it
envelops the spectator’ (1980: 39). One could (as many theorists have and
continue to do) regard the creation of the soundtrack as part of overall
mise-en-scène activity. However, providing sound with its own designated
chapter as I do here, and thus regarding it as a process apart from mise-en-
scène, provides space for close reading from an aural perspective while
opening up a deeper investigation into the relationship between sound
and image in cinema. It also contributes towards critical efforts to redress
the perceived visual emphasis of cinema studies. Central to my position is
an appreciation of the aural dimension and its vital contribution to the
complexity of the cinematic experience. What binds film sound theorists
together is their conviction that sound is no mere supplement to what we
see onscreen. Sound works in concert with image to extend expressive
possibility, depth and meaning—and indeed always has done, even in so-
called ‘Silent’ movies. Film theory is increasingly recognising the
4 SOUND: BUILDING THE INVISIBLE 113
multi-sensory aspect of cinema and recalibrating its approach accordingly.

‘The spectator is no longer a passive recipient of images at the pointed end
of the optical pyramid’ write Elsaesser and Hagener, ‘but rather a bodily
being enmeshed acoustically, spatially and affectively in the filmic texture’
(2010: 131–2).
Sonic space in film has also been theorised in feminist terms. Doane
(1980, 1986, 1988) and Silverman (1988) apply notions of female con-
tainment within the visual field in classical Hollywood cinema to an equiv-
alent positioning of the female voice in the acoustic domain. They find
that here too, female subjectivity comes under pressure. Like the ‘visual
vraisemblable’ writes Silverman, ‘the sonic vraisemblable is sexually differ-
entiated, working to identify even the embodied male voice with the attri-
butes of the cinematic apparatus, but always situating the female voice
within a hyperbolically diegetic context’ (Silverman 1988: 45). Both theo-
rists discuss ways in which the female voice is curtailed and limited in
scope and influence. The voice-over ‘undergoes a number of vicissitudes’
writes Doane, ‘and the female character is ultimately dispossessed of this
signifier of subjectivity as well’ (1988: 150). ‘The voice-off’ Silverman
writes, ‘exceeds the limits of the frame, but not the limits of the diegesis;
its ‘owner’ occupies a potentially recoverable space—one, indeed, which is
almost always brought within the field of vision at some point or other’
(Silverman 1988: 48). The work of sound theorist Michel Chion demon-
strates that the voice is not so easily captured and moored to the diegetic
space of the image. ‘The voice is elusive’ he states at the start of The Voice
in Cinema ‘neither entirely inside nor clearly outside’ (Chion 1999: 1, 4,
his italics). Moreover, as Levin, Altman and others are keen to remind us,
sound does not behave in the same way as image and is not received by the
audience via the same sensorial route. Sound therefore cannot safely be
discussed in the same terms as the image and theorised with equivalent
critical language and assumptions. This chapter explores the way two
voices behave in two films and aims to re-look at—or re-listen to—the
manner in which they inhabit both the body of the woman and the body
of the film which houses them.
I focus on two films: Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door (1947)
and David Miller’s Midnight Lace (1960). Both are what Doane refers to
as ‘paranoid woman’s films’ and conform to the ‘Somebody’s Trying to
Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband’ genre, also defined as ‘The Modern
Gothic’ (Doane 1988: 12; Russ 1973). Secret Beyond the Door is a classical
film of this kind, while in Midnight Lace the trope has been reframed and
brought up to date. Miller’s later film was made on the verge of the ‘swing-
ing sixties’ and, as I shall explore, exemplifies the resistance of the old
order to the coming of the new. Conversely though, Lang’s earlier film is
the more formally experimental of the two. The voice of Celia Lamphere
(Joan Bennett) is independent of its body for much of the film and occu-
pies the film text in a variety of curious ways. Miller’s later film abides to
Hollywood rules of synchronisation, and cinematic unity between image
and sound is strictly upheld. But in spite of this, the voice of its star, actress
Doris Day, threatens to break free from its moorings. The intensity of her
vocal performance (much derided at the time) is problematic and raises
issues with regards to the efficient ‘housing’ of female subjectivity and the
stability of the relationship between sound and image in a broader sense.
Both films are texturally and textually uneven, which is what draws me to
them as objects for close reading (that and watching Midnight Lace on
daytime television when I was very young—an unforgettable and hilari-
ously scary experience). I concur with Perez, who observes that it is useful
to focus on what he calls ‘works in deviance from the norm’ not only
because ‘these are often the most interesting films’ but because they are
often ‘the ones that reveal the most about the workings of film, the prop-
erties and possibilities of the medium’ (Perez 1998: 21).
Although they have been obviously manipulated into the film texts in a
variety of technical and creative ways, and these ways can be (and have
been) theorised as attempts by the cinematic apparatus to contain the
threat posed by an errant feminine subjectivity, the two female voices in
these films act on these same texts to structure them in dynamic and con-
tradictory ways. They therefore provide a rich and discursive critical arena
in which to re-evaluate what Doane pithily describes as ‘the economics of
female subjectivity’ in the cinema (1988: 293). Both films evince the
inability of the image to wholly ‘pin down’ sound and vice versa and show
how the innate ‘un-placeability’ of sonic space challenges spatial and
diegetic thresholds, signalling towards alterity and, in this Gothic con-
text, threat.
Diane Waldman describes the ‘Gothic Romance’ cycle produced in
Hollywood between 1940 and 1948, as films built upon the following
formula:
a young woman meets a handsome older man to whom she is alternately

attracted and repelled. After a whirlwind courtship—she marries him. After
returning to the ancestral mansion—the heroine experiences a series of
bizarre and uncanny incidents, open to ambiguous interpretation, revolving

around the question of whether or not the Gothic male really loves her. She
begins to suspect that he may be a murderer. (Waldman 1984: 29–30)
Rebecca (Hitchcock 1940) is commonly identified as the first in the cycle

and Sleep, my Love (Sirk 1948) and Caught (Ophüls 1949) as the last.
Michael Walker includes the original British version of Gaslight (Dickinson
1940) at the start of the cycle and helpfully lists the films chronologically
in his close analysis of Secret Beyond the Door in Movie 34/35 (1990). He
extends the cycle to include—somewhat appropriately here—Midnight
Lace, citing Miller’s later film as a ‘thinned out’ version of the generic
material and arguably the last in the cycle (Walker 1990: 16–17). Walker
takes issue with previous critical definitions of the series which in his view
fail to account for the complexity of the films. Elsaesser’s reference to the
cycle as ‘Freudian feminist melodrama’ in ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’ is
‘misleading’, while Doane’s use of the term ‘paranoid woman’s films’ in
The Desire to Desire: the Woman’s Film of the 1940’s (1988) is in his view,
‘an extraordinary error’. ‘The wife’ Walker explains, ‘most certainly does
not invariably fear that her husband is planning to kill her’ although, as he
points out, ‘the institution of marriage may indeed by haunted by mur-
der’. ‘Much more fundamental to the films’ he continues, ‘is the heroine’s
failure to understand what is going on: the paranoia is located not in the
heroine’s responses but in the film’s structure’ (Walker 1990: 17). He
prefers to adopt the term ‘the wife-in-distress cycle’ put forward by Britton
in Movie 31/32. With regards to Lang’s film, Walker points out that it is
actually a combination of two generic strands, ‘the persecuted wife melo-
drama and the ‘psychological investigation’ movie’ (17). One crucial
aspect of the film which connects it to others in the cycle is the presence
of a secret, locked room. This is obviously of interest here, as this room
functions as a spatial reification of a traumatic truth repressed somewhere
inside her husband’s psyche, her marriage and herself.
Celia Lamphere, Lang’s heroine, is a strong, likeable character and a
woman with some experience in life. The typical Gothic heroine is shy and
naïve and in the Hollywood cycle she is often (frustratingly) a bit of a
‘push-over’. But Celia is open, unafraid and loving—a force to be reck-
oned with. While holidaying in Mexico with a friend (and considering
marriage to the nice but dull family layer), she meets and impetuously
marries Mark Lamphere (played by Michael Redgrave) and comes to live
with him in his New England family home, Blaze Creek. As suggested by
Waldman, this film is part of a group in which the topological environ-

ment of a house (or any home structure) comes to spatially signify the
topology of the psyche of its owner, invariably a damaged and dysfunc-
tional zone, and the woman’s task is to get to the heart of the matter both
figuratively in the space of the house and psychically in discovering the
truth about the dubious nature of her marriage. Celia’s first entrance into
her new home heralds in this process. Having just arrived from the train
station, Celia stands outside Blaze Creek looking up at its many windows.
As Mark’s sister Caroline (Anne Revere) goes inside, she blithely mentions
that Mark has a son. This is the first Celia has heard of his existence. The
following shot shows Celia’s view of the open front door. Instead of a
bright and welcoming space, what she sees is a black hole into dark obscu-
rity—a perfectly rendered vision of her voyage into the unknown. Celia
soon discovers that Mark keeps a series of rooms in the basement in which
historical murders have taken place. These rooms are not simulacra, but
the actual rooms reconstructed, complete with original objects, furnish-
ings and murder weapons that Mark has collected and arranged over time.
Unlike the murder room in Bluebeard’s castle however (a European fairy
tale with which this film and others in the cycle are deeply imbricated),
these rooms are not locked and indeed we are given a guided tour of them
along with some party guests. While odd and somewhat macabre, the
intent behind his collection might appear innocent enough. We have
learnt earlier in the film that Mark is an architect who believes architectural
forms directly affect the mood of those who live inside them, a psychologi-
cal yoking which seems logically accounted for by his professional interests
and practice. But one room is kept locked, and Celia must use her natural
guile to fashion a key. Finally gaining access to the forbidden place, she
finds herself presented with the ‘image of the worst’1—her conjugal bed-
room. Initially she comforts herself with two observations. Firstly, that this
bedroom was originally the room of Mark’s first wife Eleanor and was
therefore built while she was alive (even though Celia now occupies that
same room) and secondly that it is only a copy of the room upstairs and
therefore (unlike the other rooms in the basement), not the real thing (i.e.
not built with truly murderous intent). But she is then alerted by a small
detail that must have been recently added. One candle on the mantelpiece
is shorter than the other, something she had to do upstairs when using
wax to mould a copy of the key. It is a tiny detail, but one which Mark at
the time surprisingly noticed and commented on. She now realises that
Mark is in the process of assembling this ‘doubled’ room in the basement,

preparing it for the deed, and that he intends to kill her inside its four walls.
These films commonly turn ‘on a woman’s desire for forbidden knowl-
edge’ writes Maria Tatar (2004: 3) and on the ‘anxiety and excitement
attending marriage to a stranger’ (89). Tatar outlines the historical con-
text behind Hollywood’s investment in dramas of this kind. ‘This was,
after all, a time of crisis’ she writes, ‘when women in great numbers were
marrying men who were real strangers—soldiers going off to war who
were taking vows out of a frantic need to establish intimacy and affection’
(89). It is briefly mentioned in Secret Beyond the Door that Mark returned
from the war a changed man, and that he no longer shared a bedroom
with his wife. The implications of this, never again referred to explicitly,
are deeply significant. In her analysis of Lang’s film, Elisabeth Bronfen
observes that ‘mainstream Hollywood would allow only oblique represen-
tations’ of the ‘affective pressure left by the traumatic experience of war’.
In films such as these, such experiences were often ‘cinematically refigured
in the guise of a lethal battle of fatal love, played out in the most intimate
part of the home, the bedroom’ (2004: 161). Describing the return of
changed men into a changed world as ‘the Enigma of Homecoming’
Bronfen observes that ‘Uncertainty about whether soldiers trained to kill
could successfully be reintegrated into the everyday reality of post-war
America led to a paranoid refiguration of the valiant soldier as a dangerous
psychopath’ (2004: 159). Secret Beyond the Door is seeped through and
structured by this deep sense of post-war unease.
Lang’s film is further structured by notions of the unconscious mind
and the Oedipal narrative germane to Freudian psychoanalysis. At the
time, audiences for Hollywood films were well aware of such ideas and,
although by no means expert in their understanding, knew a fair amount
about Freud, Jung and the interpretation of dreams. Freudian analysis had
become ‘absolutely worked into the weft of the culture’ by the 1940s.2
Many creatives in Hollywood had arrived from Europe fleeing Nazi perse-
cution, bringing continental ideas and aesthetics with them. ‘If Vienna is
symptomatic of the first layers in the culture of psychoanalysis’, writes
Sylvia Lavin, ‘Los Angeles is symptomatic of its later accretions’ (2007:
31). There was also a nascent awareness, prevalent in Hollywood, of links
between the design of one’s domestic environment and the mental health
of those who live inside it. In her book Form Follows Libido (2007) Lavin
explores how European notions of the ‘architecture of an affective envi-
ronment’ and the ‘merging of the architectural and psychic object’
percolated into American culture. ‘In this environment’ she explains, ‘the
house was no longer a house but a locus of psychological currents that
flowed beyond the domestic sphere to invisibly shape the climate of social
and spatial interaction’ (2007: 31). Lavin focuses on the work of
Hollywood-based architect Richard Neutra, an Austrian refugee who had
grown up in Vienna, known the Freud family well, and developed a strong
professional interest in psychoanalysis. When asked ‘How can our houses
affect our mental health?’ Lavin tells us, Neutra replied ‘“How can they
not? I mean, where do we go crazy?”’ (2007: 24). This broadens our his-
torical context for Secret Beyond the Door. Mark Lamphere is a firm believer
in ‘affective architecture’ and in an early scene with Celia he explains his
views. His magazine ‘Apt’ is dedicated to communicating this theme to
the public. When he takes his guests on the ‘party tour’ of the basement,
he describes how the architectural form of the murder rooms precipitated
the crimes that occurred within them, that the murderers were somehow
propelled to commit their awful acts by the way the rooms were organised.
Blaze Creek, the mansion in which Celia now finds herself, is a strange
building which gets progressively stranger as the film unfolds. Celia roams
restlessly along its corridors and through its rooms trying to uncover the
doubly concealed truth about the nature of this space and her marriage.
Walker suggests what is fundamental to most of the films of this cycle is
‘the heroine’s failure to understand what is going on’, thus countering
Doane’s nomination of the group as ‘paranoid woman’s films’. But while
Celia may not consciously suspect her husband intends to kill her, it is
undeniable that their initial attraction towards one another was generated
by excitement, sexual passion and violence. Bronfen deepens our psycho-
logical understanding of the situation by drawing our attention to Celia’s
own complicity:
[…] all she can do is pace restlessly up and down the diverse bedrooms she
finds herself in, accompanied by the ceaseless readjustments she makes to
her critical judgment of her situation, or wander along the dark corridors
and up the somber staircases in her new home, driven by her desire to enjoy
her own peril. (Bronfen 2004: 177)
But as well as Celia’s restless body roaming a psychologically charged

space, this film is also structured by her roaming voice.
The spatial invocation of the film’s thematic territory is complicated
because the space called up by the voice is an invisible one. Two tracks of
signification (aural/voice and visual/body) are plaited together in the cin-

ematic text, meeting and separating, conjoined and split apart. Secret
Beyond the Door famously opens with a voice-over which, like the voice-
over in Rebecca, guides us into the film like an aural Ariadne’s thread. The
film opens with an animated sequence, a ‘pre-film’ commissioned by Lang
and produced by Disney Studios. Once the introductory credits have
ended, an invisible harp flourishes an upward chord and ushers in a vision
of still water with clouds reflected on its glittering surface. A single note
strikes high on the register of a xylophone; a tinkling, bell-like sound sug-
gestive of magic or fairy tales. A drop of water falls into the water just as
this note strikes and its ripples radiate outwards. Two more drops follow,
each accompanied by a struck, musical note. This precisely timed storytell-
ing establishes from the outset a primal connectivity between sound and
vision and attunes us in a particular way. We are being initiated into the
way the film ‘thinks’. An ‘audiovisual contract’ (Chion 1994) is being
struck up and there appears to be total synchronicity between sound and
vision. The camera begins to move along the water’s surface (an illusion,
given the sequence is animated), following the ripples. Into this hushed
and expectant space, a woman’s voice introduces itself: “I remember, long
ago I read a book, that told the meaning of dreams”. Bennett’s voice is
well modulated and dreamlike, with a hushed and intimate tone that draws
us into its sphere of confidence. Unlike the youthful voice which opens
Rebecca, this voice is mature and deep. A toy paper boat floats into view,
while the voice says “It said, that if a girl dreams of a boat or a ship, she
will reach a safe harbour”. Daffodils then appear, along with their shadowy
distorted doubles underwater. “But if she dreams of daffodils… she is in
great danger”. We are held in the sonic thrall of this voice. A harmonious
unison between what it describes and what appears onscreen leads us to
interpret what we see onscreen as an emanation from that voice and a
direct figuration of the psyche from which it issues. The voice appears to
be enunciating the film, to be bringing it into being. Chion describes such
bodiless voice-overs as acousmêtres and attributes substantial and archaic
power to them. ‘When the acousmatic presence is a voice’ he writes, ‘and
especially when this voice has not yet been visualised we get a special
being…’ (Chion 1999: 21). The powers of the acousmêtre are fourfold:
‘the ability to be everywhere, to see all, to know all, and to have complete
power’ (24). The voice at this point is an acousmêtre and carries this four-
fold authority. In fact, as we have not yet seen who the voice belongs to
and do not know when or indeed if we ever will, we experience it as what
Chion describes as a ‘complete acousmêtre’ (21). We find ourselves in a

privileged position, placed at the right hand of an acousmatic creator as
she pictures her inner thoughts.
But if we ask ourselves exactly where this floating voice is speaking from
there is no clear answer. It simply comes from an ‘elsewhere’. Unlike the
lively voice-over ushering in Rebecca, this voice occasionally verges on the
sepulchral, bolstering our impression of a spectral, phantasmic voice float-
ing ‘freely in a mysterious intermediate domain’ (Žižek 1996: 92). The
spatially positioned term ‘voice-over’ is a useful, ubiquitous, and estab-
lished way to describe such voices, but it is not wholly accurate. Can we
critically and sensorially situate the voice as being ‘over’ the image? Sjogren
questions our axiomatic use of term in her book Into the Vortex: Female
Voice and Paradox in Film. ‘Vocabulary in describing this kind of “space”
is tricky’ she observes, ‘it is beyond, but also behind, within, alongside,
intersecting the diegetic space’ (Sjogren 2006: 38). A similar epistemo-
logical problem can be attributed to the term ‘voice-off’. As Doane
reminds us, Christian Metz identifies a broad cultural tendency towards a
‘hierarchical placement of the visible above the audible’, and the term
‘voice-off’ serves as a ‘reconfirmation of that hierarchy’. Metz, she adds,
‘argues that sound is never “off”. While a visual element specified as “off”
actually lacks visibility, a “sound-off” is always audible’ (Doane 1980:
38).3 Žižek interrogates the idea of ‘levels’ of signification altogether, sug-
gesting that the voice ‘does not simply persist at a different level with
regard to what we see, it rather points toward a gap in the visible, toward
the dimension of what eludes our gaze… ultimately, we hear things
because we cannot see everything’ (Žižek 1996: 93). Secret Beyond the
Door begins with a voice issuing from this ‘gap in the visible’, wherever
that might be situated or open onto. But what happens when Celia’s body
enters the picture? How do we then position this voice? Let us look at how
Lang negotiates this transition.
Initially he does this by way of rupture, enacting creation with a cut.
The tone of the voice changes, becoming bright and urgent as if waking
up from a dream: “But this is no time for me to think of danger—this is
my wedding day!”. The film wrenches us out of the animated dream
world, and we see a real church bell swinging back and forth on the screen.
All vestige of the pre-film dreamworld has disappeared, its mysterious
music subsumed by the bell ringing and a church organ playing. Naturally
we assume we have emerged into the light of ‘real life’, and ‘caught up’
with real time, as the sprightly insistence of “This is my wedding day”
breaks the spell of “I remember, long ago…”. But at this pivotal juncture
the harmonious relationship between the woman’s voice and what we see
becomes disturbed. In the beginning our gaze followed watery ripples,
wandering along in clueless, languid discovery. Here we are presented
with the huge close-up of a bell swinging relentlessly within the frame.
There is no wide shot of a church, smiling crowds, confetti, or anything
else commonly associated with weddings. A swinging bell is a piece of
heavy machinery set into powerful, repetitive motion. It heralds our arrival
into the refreshment of the present, but it could also indicate a wakeup
call, a sounding alarm as well as a harbinger of joy. This is the start of our
education into the opposing forces at play within the film. The voice
(which, despite its inaccuracy but for reasons of consistency and clarity, I
shall continue to refer to as the ‘voice-over’) does not disappear when the
film wakes up from its dream. Unlike the voice-over in Rebecca, this voice
carries over into the ‘real world’ and has no problem traversing time and
space. It has initiated us into its ability to cross spatial and ontological
borders by virtue of the fact that it began by speaking from a gap in the
image, a space we can neither see nor identify. It continues to emanate
from that pervasive, ‘in-between’ space and now works in conjunction
with onscreen diegetic reality. In ‘The Voice in the Cinema: The
Articulation of Body and Space’, Doane (referring to a voice-over as a
‘voice-off’) describes how the voice-off ‘deepens the diegesis’, and ‘gives
it an extent which exceeds that of the image’ (1980: 40). It supports the
claim, she continues:
that there is a space in the fictional world which the camera does not regis-
ter. In its own way, it accounts for lost space. The voice-off is a sound which
is first and foremost in the service of the film’s construction of space and
only indirectly in the service of the image. It validates both what the screen
reveals of the diegesis and what it conceals. (Doane 1980: 40)
The film cuts to the inside of the church. We find ourselves placed high
on a balcony looking at the church below. The camera is positioned behind
a statue of a large crucifix and its stark silhouette cleaves the image com-
pletely in two. Either side of its black, vertical divide we see figures in dark
robes kneeling in front of the altar far below. Weddings signify union and
happiness, but this image shows nothing of the sort. We see only division,
splitting and death. But the voice-over seems not to register any ironic
split. “Something old is this church. Four centuries old. Mark says it’s a
felicitous structure”. On the word ‘felicitous’ the films cuts to a barred

window set high up in the thick stone wall, another visual contradiction.
The camera slowly tracks along the sober interior while the voice-over tells
us that Mark believes this church is built in perfect harmony “so that here
only events of joy can happen, 400 years of joy”. But we see no joy, and
we do not know who Mark is. On the final ‘joy’ a man in a dark suit stand-
ing with his back to us comes into view. The camera accelerates towards
him but then comes to a sudden and disconcerting halt, which turns into
a momentarily held freeze-frame on the words: “And something new is
Mark himself”. It is a deliberately dissonant moment. No joyful face turns
to greet us. Instead we are brought up against the resolute back of a
stranger. In the opening ‘dream’ sequence we were immersed in a smooth
world uninflected by irony or contradiction. What the voice spoke, it visu-
alised and we saw. Now this unison is broken. The audience finds itself
involved in an active process of reading the image and wondering if who-
ever is speaking is not as omniscient or perceptive as previously imagined.
What the words of the all-seeing, all-knowing acousmêtre tell us do not
always concur with what we see with our own eyes. There may be, we
suspect, an element of delusion. This complexity develops further.
The film cuts to the darkened doorway of the church as the voice-over
says, “And love is new for me”. On the word ‘love’, a bride appears as if
blown through by the breathy power of the word itself. The film now
performs another crucial structural transition. It is a pleasurable moment
because not only does it invite the audience to take part in a gradual reveal,
but it requires them to once again recalibrate their ‘audiovisual contract’
with the film, recalling Perez’s idea of the renegotiation of our agreement
with what the work is doing (Perez 1998: 21–22). As the now physically
revealed Joan Bennett stands in front of us (we do not yet know her char-
acter’s name), the voice-over whispers, “My heart is pounding so… the
sound of it drowns out everything”. On these words, the figure reaches up
to touch her heart with her hand. With this simple gesture everything gets
‘joined up’ and we know to whom the voice belongs. The voice-over has
smoothly transitioned from a disembodied acousmêtre into an embodied
voice-over. It no longer speaks from an unspecified place and time but has
become materially ‘present’ inside the film—‘housed’ if you like into the
diegesis. Doane makes a further distinction. The voice-over which is rep-
resented at the same time as the body and lives in the same temporal
dimension, becomes an ‘interior monologue’ which, ‘far from being an
extension of that body, manifests its inner lining’. It is a voice which
‘displays what is inaccessible to the image, what exceeds the visible: the
“inner life” of the character’ (Doane 1980: 41). The voice-over is a sonic
representation of an inner voice. Both ‘spaces’ (the internal mind and the
space from which the voice-over emanates) are invisible and therefore fun-
damentally non-retrievable by the image.
Celia now has a body inscribed into the frame, although as yet no voice
has come directly out of its lips. Chion calls this process, in which the voice
is given a body, one of ‘de-acousmatization’ [sic] (1999: 27). It is a pro-
cess which, he suggests, involves a loss of auratic power. ‘Embodying the
voice is a sort of symbolic act’ he writes, ‘dooming the acousmêtre to the
fate of ordinary mortals’ (1999: 27–28). However, the acousmêtre in
Lang’s film does not suffer that reductive fate. Celia’s inner voice may now
have a body to which it ostensibly belongs, but as the film unfolds we
discover it loses none of its ambiguity and semantic fluidity. Tom Gunning
writes that Celia’s inner voice ‘primarily reflects her uncertainties, doubts
and fears, and even repressed feelings’ (2009: 350). That is certainly true,
but it would be reductive to suggest that the role of the voice-over in this
film is solely to highlight Celia’s psychological blind spots. What happens
in this film is that the voice-over continues to make itself heard in tandem
with the synchronised voice of Celia. If Lang’s original intent had been
fully realised, the relationship of this voice-over to its sensate, onscreen
body would have been even more layered and complicated.
Lang had initially planned for Celia’s inner voice to be vocalised by a
different actress altogether. Indeed, the original cut of the film contained
a voice-over performed by an actress called Colleen Collins. The synchro-
nised voice which issues from Joan Bennett’s mouth onscreen (although
of course it comes from the speaker(s), but we attribute it to her mouth)
would not have been the same as the voice expressing her internal feelings
and thoughts on the soundtrack. The two voices would have co-existed,
each related to the same body but without being the same entity. ‘This
would have staged Lang’s conviction that the unconscious is another’,
Gunning explains, one who is (and Gunning quotes Lang here) ‘someone
in us we perhaps don’t know’ (Gunning 2009: 350). In a letter to Lotte
Eisner in February 1947 at the start of shooting Secret Beyond the Door,
Lang describes his intention to experiment with the voice-overs as ‘thought
voices’. ‘As Eisner notes’ writes Bronfen, ‘for Lang “the worlds of the
subconscious are not like asides in a play but are somehow placed on a
different plane, belong to a different dimension.”’ (Bronfen 2004: 175).
However, following a disastrous audience response in early screenings,
Universal Studios ordered the film to be substantially recut. Bennett

agreed to record a new voice-over which for Lang, as Gunning relates, was
a great betrayal (2009: 350).
However, the attempt to impose stable semantic borders and audiovi-
sual coherence on the film through this somewhat brutal re-edit does not
wholly succeed in taming the film’s experimental impulses, and we have
been left with an ‘impure’ and fascinating film. This becomes particularly
clear in the final act, in which Celia’s voice-over apparently disappears. The
fate of Celia’s inner voice as articulated by the voice-over is a point of
contention amongst feminist theorists. It is commonly assumed that her
voice is silenced once Celia has been ostensibly murdered by Mark and
that, true to the patriarchal order, her voice-over is replaced by his. Doane
for example, cites its disappearance as one which ‘gives witness to the
death of female subjectivity’ (1988: 151). She concurs with Stephen
Jenkins’s analysis in which he writes, ‘Any notion of the possibility of
female discourse within the text is always undercut, (dis)placed, qualified’
(151). But Celia’s voice-over actually disappears earlier, at the moment at
which she realises the truth about her husband when she is in the base-
ment. From a psychoanalytical point of view, one could interpret this sud-
den silencing as analogous to the way in which a shocking insight in a
therapy session often renders the analysand stunned and ‘lost for words’.
But the situation is not as straightforward as these interpretations suggest,
because Celia’s voice-over does not entirely disappear. There are two
sequences following her physical return to the film in which her voice is
placed in a deliberately liminal zone—a new space we have not seen or
heard before in the film—before finally settling back into her body.
Once she realises the awful truth about Mark, Celia rushes out into the
night where she runs back and forth getting lost in a thick fog—a wonder-
ful visual figuration of her powerlessness against a murderous psychic
force. She runs towards the camera but comes to a sudden stop as thick
bushes bar her way. The music stops too, like a sonic holding of the breath,
and into this suspenseful moment a shadowy figure emerges from the mist
behind her. It slowly approaches her and the film fades to black. Out of
this blackness we hear Celia utter a long, piercing scream. This moment is
an example of what Chion calls a ‘screaming point’; a moment in the cin-
ema in which ‘speech is suddenly extinct, a black hole, the exit of being’
(1999: 79). But despite the length and intensity of the scream, we do not
believe Celia is killed. This is not only because the audience trusts the film
will not defy convention and kill its feisty heroine (it is several years before
Hitchcock performs this seismic feat with Psycho in 1960). The discrep-
ancy between what Celia’s inner voice perceives to be the truth and what
we see with our own eyes onscreen has trained us to well understand that
appearances can be deceptive. Moreover, while her gaze may be ‘often
deficient’ (Gunning 2009: 352), her character most certainly is not, and
we know that she is good, brave and clever enough to survive. We also
know that were she to leave, the film would effectively be over. She is the
generative force at its narrative core.
It is what follows this screaming point that causes controversy and criti-
cal debate. After the blackness has been held onscreen, the film cuts
directly to Mark’s room in Blaze Creek. Mark enters and surprisingly it is
his voice-over which now speaks. “It will be a curious trial” his voice says,
“The people of New York versus Mark Lamphere… charged with the mur-
der of his wife, Celia”. There follows a hallucinogenic scene set in a court
room, populated by doubles of Mark who enact his own trial. The prompt
departure and replacement of Celia’s voice would seem to support Doane’s
assertion that once again, the potential threat of an errant female subjec-
tivity has been avoided, brought back under control, safely subsumed
within the diegesis and the female character ‘ultimately dispossessed of this
signifier of subjectivity as well’ (1988: 150). She describes the common
fate of the female voice-over in 1940s films thus:
When the voice-over is introduced in the beginning of a film as the posses-

sion of the female protagonist who purportedly controls the narration of her
own past, it is rarely sustained […] Instead, voices-over are more frequently
detached from the female protagonist and mobilized as moments of aggres-
sion or attack exercised against her. (Doane 1988: 150)
The screaming blackness incites a rupture that is physical and, according

to Doane, discursive. The vocal discourse moves from Celia to Mark, as
‘the narrative also displaces its hermeneutic question from her relation to
a locked door—to his (the locked door of his childhood, when his mother
left him alone to go out with “another man”)’ (Doane 1988: 151). Various
theorists offer alternative explanations and perspectives. David Bordwell
details how frequent the use of the voice-over was in films of this period
and how protean the form they took. He describes 1940s Hollywood as a
‘vast storytelling ecosystem, bursting with compulsive energy’ (2017: 1).
Filmmakers were opportunistic, experimental and not always consistent
and it was not uncommon for voice-overs both male and female to disap-
pear at some point during a film. He writes:
If Hollywood narration were a tidy sender/receiver communication, we

would expect to find boxes within boxes. An external voice might frame the
film, opening and closing it with all-knowing efficiency. Character narrators
would take their turns, launching and rounding off embedded episodes. As
in literature, those first-person narrators would confine themselves wholly to
what they witnessed or could plausibly know… But such boxed and book-
ended voice-over narration is rare. (Bordwell 2017: 246)
Gunning tackles Doane and Jenkins’ assertion of the silencing of female

subjectivity on its own terms. ‘Doane and Jenkins are right that the film
undercuts an authoritative female discourse’ he writes about Secret Beyond
the Door. ‘But’ he continues, ‘their objection to this would seem to argue
for a sort of unified consciousness that their use of Lacanian psychoanalysis
renders rather contradictory’ (2009: 350). Gunning points out that the
film does not proclaim a coherent version of subjectivity, and I would
agree. Secret Beyond the Door, Gunning suggests, ‘stages a kind of incoher-
ence of subjectivity that bleeds across gender roles—in ways that make the
tidy patriarchal reading of the film by Jenkins and Doane rather problem-
atic’ (349). Moreover, he correctly observes that in this scene Mark is
talking about what he wants to do, not what he has already done. One
cannot tidily interpret this scene as a male persona moving into a space
previously occupied by a female one, because she hasn’t actually been
done away with. Sarah Kozloff offers another interpretation. She writes
that ‘voice-over is like a strong perfume—a little goes a long way’ (1988:
45) and goes on to suggest that we never actually lose the impression Celia
is speaking. She draws on the theories of Eric Smoodin, who writes, ‘Once
the presence of the voice-over narrator has been established, the entire
film serves as a sort of linguistic event, as the narrator’s speech even when
there is none’ (Kozloff: 47). This leads Kozloff to consider the observa-
tions of Metz:
The impression that someone is speaking is bound not to the empirical pres-
ence of a definite, known, or knowable speaker but to the listener’s sponta-
neous perception of the linguistic nature of the object to which he is
listening; because it is speech, someone must be speaking. (Kozloff 1988: 44)
Metz suggests that it is the overall ‘speech’ of the film to which the audi-
ence is attentive, which leads Kozloff and Smoodin to theorise that our
initial fusing of Celia’s voice-over with the overall enunciation of the film
is sustained, even when that voice-over ceases to speak out loud. Looked
at from this perspective, Celia’s voice-over could be said to have merely
retreated or refrained from speaking out loud rather than submitted to
being cut off entirely. That might imply that the agency behind the voice-
over is simply too busy articulating the rest of the film to speak to us
directly. Such notions attribute a great deal of intentionality to the voice-
over, which is a position difficult to support. Nonetheless, it is an idea
taken up by Bronfen and Sjogren who reach similar conclusions about this
peculiarly deceptive sequence after Celia’s scream. They suggest it is not
Mark’s actual voice at work here, but a phantasmatic recreation of it by the
still pervasive consciousness of Celia. Bronfen writes:
Having reached the acme of her voyage through the phantasmatic space of
her marriage, Celia has appropriated Mark’s fantasy, making the jury scene a
part of her inner theatre. Thus she is able to enjoy knowledge of her death
by virtue of the traces it has left behind in the form of her husband’s confes-
sion before the law. (Bronfen 2004: 191)
Sjogren makes a similar point:
Celia’s point of view and her voice-off are still very much “present” in the
scene, despite her seeming elision. If we understand the project of this part
of the film as an attempt—and specifically Celia’s attempt—to interpret
Mark, then this voice-off responds directly to this effort, finally getting
“inside” Mark’s head and showing us what he’s thinking. (Sjogren
2006: 113)
These are fairly convincing interpretations, but they do not take into con-
sideration Lang’s attempt to deceive us—or at least to taunt us—about
Celia’s demise. Lang’s elision is deliberate, and we are not meant to know
what has happened. Were this really to be read as Celia’s imagining of
events, we might be more likely to be alerted to that fact by Lang.
Moreover, Mark’s voice-over returns to the film in a later scene in which
he stands waiting for a train to take him back to New York. Is this Celia’s
imagination once again? It seems to rather stretch the point, particularly
as she has re-entered the film physically by that point. Attributing Mark’s
voice-over and the dream-like episode it narrates to the phantasmic emis-

sion from the consciousness of a ‘behind the scenes’ Celia is inventive, but
it is also a response to what is suggested by the film itself. Celia’s inner
voice occasionally demonstrates a complete power over the image. For
example, when Celia is looking out of the window at Mark attending to an
injured dog, the voice-over remarks how she wishes he wasn’t so emotion-
ally locked away, as locked as the door to room number 7. The film makes
an uncharacteristic cut to a brief shot of the locked door to Room 7,
before returning to the dog scene. In doing so, the voice is given a sub-
stantial measure of enunciative agency, and we follow its visualised thought
process. I would suggest that Bronfen and Sjogren are able to theorise
Mark’s voice as Celia’s creation because the experimental quality of the
film encourages them to do so. But if we look more closely at what hap-
pens when Celia returns to the film after her imagined death, we find that
Lang has not entirely removed her voice-over from the narrative and that,
in fact, he manages to create a space for it on the screen itself.
The scene with Mark’s voice-over follows Celia’s scream into the void.
Tatar’s thoughts on Celia’s ‘screaming point’ are useful here, as they theo-
rise how this scream correlates structurally to one heard earlier in the film:
The scream is symptomatic of the passionate mix of death and desire haunt-
ing her. It echoes the scream heard at the very beginning of the film, when
a Mexican woman’s shriek is heard off-screen in a tableau that brings Mark
and Celia together for the first time. (Tatar 2004: 104)
The second scream rents the film violently in two. Celia’s erotic fascina-
tion with the fight over a woman in Mexico is clear, and Mark recognises
her repressed desires which chime with his own. Tatar rightly draws a con-
nection between these two screams and reads Celia’s scream as a terrified
recognition of her own drives as well as those of her husband. She writes,
‘It is only after enacting her own version of the love triangle in Mexico
that Celia seems able to free herself from a state of terrorised hysteria and
to move in the mode of calm determination’ (2004: 104). This interpreta-
tion holds good, because when Celia does reappear her voice has under-
gone a noticeable transformation (Fig. 4.1).
Celia is thankfully not dead and re-enters the picture by drawing aside
a curtain to reveal herself. She stands in a theatrically swathed doorway, in
a portal framed by light. “I thought you left last night,” says Mark. “I did”
she replies. Strangely however, we do not see her lips move when she says
Fig. 4.1 Celia stands between worlds in Secret Beyond the Door
this. This is not only because she stands in an unlit space and is not shot in
close-up. As she moves through the darkened passage towards us, effec-
tively crossing over from death into life to where Mark stands surprised,
her lips barely move as she continues to speak: “I ran into Bob on the
lawn. He’d come for David and lost his way in the fog. I went with him to
Levender Falls”. She is speaking but her voice is not in-synch with her
body, in fact her mouth hardly moves at all. Instead, her voice seems to
uncannily hover around her lips. Lang has endowed this scene with a
mythic quality. The passage between the two rooms is a transitional space
through which Celia must process in order to re-enter the narrative, like
Eurydice returning from the land of the dead. As she crosses back into the
film we witness a literal re-inhabitation of her body by her voice. Once she
has fully entered the room her voice settles where it should be, within her
body and issuing directly out of her mouth. “Why did you come back?”
asks Mark. With a clear and definitive unison of body and voice she utters
the crucial words, “Because I love you. Because I married you for better
or for worse”. Celia is now in full command of the situation. She knows
the dark secret at the heart of her marriage, that Mark intends to kill her
and that she has been fatally attracted to that, and she knows Mark knows
she knows. Celia’s voice, far from being subsumed, disempowered or dis-
appeared, now fully articulates psychic truth. Her voice has not been
reductively contained within her body and within the diegesis. On the
contrary, it has found its agency. It has finally entered the picture.
There follows another pivotal scene in which voices are once more curi-
ously positioned. Mark’s sister leaves the house forever, although he begs
her to stay. Celia will now be alone and unprotected in the house and
Mark is terrified of what he might do. So, he comes to tell Celia that he
must leave. The scene takes place in a darkened room full of shadows.
Celia stands by the window, framed by moonlight and Mark stands in the
doorway on the opposite side of the room. The two talk in short, pithy
utterances. Mark announces he is going to New York and urges her not to
spend the night alone but to go to Levender Falls. “I’m not afraid” she
replies. He tells her he loves her very much. “I know,” she replies. We can-
not see Mark’s lips move at all, while Celia’s barely move. Their dialogue
is, as Sjogren puts it, ‘Gently disembodied’ (2006: 117). It is poised in the
air around them, hovering in a kind of sonic bardo. It floats near to their
lips, but ‘slightly askew, slightly off”’ (2006: 117). In this room Celia and
Mark communicate with one another without actually having to speak.
Indeed, one could suggest it is their voice-overs who now speak to one
another. This mysterious, shadowy room has not been seen in the film
before—at least not from this angle and lit in this way. It is a space delib-
erately rendered strange and unfamiliar, as if it is a magic room. Given the
nature of the sound in this room in which words can be spoken without
moving one’s lips, it seems to be a visual realisation of the offscreen-space
from which voice-overs usually emanate. Mark and Celia are ‘literally “in”
this gap—in this “between” that the voiceover articulates so plainly…’
(Sjogren 2006: 117). The house in Levender Falls has always been a magic
house, warped by psychic forces. Lang brings a non-diegetic space into the
diegesis, providing a room in which the voice-overs, those carriers of deep
interiority, can be present with each other. It is a room of honesty, deep
communication, and pause (Fig. 4.2).
This sonic analysis of Secret Beyond the Door offers a different reading of
the fate of female subjectivity in the Gothic melodrama to that put for-
ward by Doane and Silverman. Celia’s inner voice does not disappear, nor
is it sequestered back into the claustral confines of the diegesis. The sonic
Fig. 4.2 Celia and Mark in the room of acousmêtres in Secret Beyond the Door
domain is recruited by Lang to convey the voice of the unconscious as well

as the conscious Celia, and we have learnt that the relationship between
the two is neither straightforward nor linear. The voice-over carries with it
what Sjogren calls a ‘creative flex of contradiction’ (2006: 3) and is not
jettisoned by Lang when Celia’s scream ruptures his film in two—the
event which supposedly causes her silence, or ‘de-acousmatization’.
Instead, he continues to explore ways in which her inner voice can remain
present and heard, hovering around her body and not quite inhabiting it.
The unconscious mind of Celia keeps on working to alert her conscious
mind to the psychic truth of her husband’s sado-masochistic desires and
her attraction towards them. Her new-found voice we hear towards the
end of the film does not represent a subjectivity successfully corralled and
brought back under control. Quite the opposite has taken place. As I have
suggested here, it voices an ineluctable subjectivity that has at last found a
place from which to speak.
This analysis has focused on the non-synchronised voice of its main

character. Lang’s conceptual yoking of the voice-over to the uncon-
scious—deploying one as the sonic manifestation of the other—leads him
into experimental and sometimes problematic territory. It allows him to
play one constructed dimension (image) against the other (sound), fusing
them to create what Adrian Martin describes as ‘often unreal or hallucina-
tory spaces, belonging fully to the realm neither of image nor of sound,
but of both in concert’, invisible regions which can never be wholly recu-
perated by the image but remain elsewhere and beyond (Martin 2014:
111). One could go further and claim that Celia’s voice at the end of the
film has been liberated from the soundtrack rather than confined within it.
Mark’s voice-over, his personal ‘soundtrack’, is full of clichés and lies, old-
fashioned values and unexamined yearnings constructed to bolster his self-
delusion and fantasy. Celia changes all of that. She is not haunted or held
back by psychic wounds of the past. She wants to take their marriage to
somewhere new which, as Blaze Creek burns to the ground, she literally
does. However, as Bronfen reminds us, the happy ending is aporic.
‘Homeless in a cultural-geographic sense’ she writes, ‘they know that the
safe haven of marital happiness, like the paper boat representing it in
Celia’s dream, floats on the surface of a pond that is inhabited by dark
figures’ (2004: 195). There is no real possibility of recuperating home
entirely, but the couple embark on a process. “That night, you killed the
root of the evil in me” says Mark to Celia as they rest in their Mexican
garden, “but I still have a long way to go”. “We have a long way to go”,
she gamefully replies.
I now turn to the voice in the later Gothic romance, Midnight Lace.
Like Celia, Kit Preston (played by Doris Day) has married a man she barely
knows and come to live in his domain. Unlike Celia, Kit does not speak to
us privately or directly in voice-over. Instead her voice is synchronised
throughout. But there are behavioural problems with this voice which I
shall explore further here. There is a curious unevenness to the film (not
entirely attributable to its problematic plot), which at the time was very
much attributed to Day’s performance and in particular, to her voice. Yet
it is precisely its textural awkwardness which draws me towards the film as
to a puzzle which needs working out. Firstly, I look closely at Day’s syn-
chronised voice and the odd way it behaves and therefore affects the audi-
ence. Secondly, I take a comment her character Kit makes early in the film
and explore how it unknowingly opens up a much broader enquiry into
the complex, unstable and even antagonistic relationship between sound

and vision in cinema.
Kit is an American heiress who has married suave English banker Tony
Preston (Rex Harrison) and come to live in his posh flat in London. It is
clear from the start that she is new to her surroundings and does not fit in.
We are keenly aware of the contrast between her cream-coated, glossy
glamour and the stoicism of the huddled, raincoated Londoners that sur-
round her. Midnight Lace reveals Hollywood perceptions of a drab and
dreary England emerging from the war, not yet in the swinging sixties but
on the brink of them. Day is luminescent onscreen, clothed throughout in
numerous, exquisitely fashioned outfits, with perpetually shiny hair. This
‘shininess’ contributes significantly towards the film’s overall mise-en-
scène. Kit and Tony’s flat is full of reflective and expensive surfaces; mir-
rors, patterned glass screens, champagne glasses, jewellery—even the
sheets are shiny. All is reflection, which begs the question as to what is
really inside. The core creative team were experienced Hollywood profes-
sionals who had worked extensively with Douglas Sirk in the previous
decade and were well used to creating a distinctive and honed mise-en-
scène.4 Day was at the height of her career and her box office popularity
was soaring. Yet despite these solid production credentials, Midnight Lace
was almost universally derided by critics and audiences alike.
The film opens in a “real London fog”. Kit comes out of the American
Embassy (not insignificantly) and, spurning the offer of a cab, happily opts
to walk home through the park instead as she lives just on the other side.
The suspense gets off to a prompt start, unlike most films of this kind in
which the ‘I wish she wouldn’t do that’ moment usually occurs a little
later in the narrative. She walks through the park gate and is immediately
enveloped in a foggy gloom and can barely see ahead. She carefully, even
childishly, treads her way along the gravelly path. Suddenly out of the grey
mist, a voice calls her name. It is an odd, high-pitched voice which stops
Kit in her tracks. “Mrs Pres-ton! Over here! So close I could reach out and
put my hands on your throat!” “Who are you? What do you want?” she
cries. “You’ll know when the time comes Mrs Pres-ton! Just before I kill
you!” it ominously replies. Understandably, a terrified Kit breaks into a
run and, after a few collisions with various park benches and near misses
with trees, finds her way out of the park. She runs straight across the road,
plunges through the front door of a mansion block and into the lift, franti-
cally searching for her key. When she eventually gets in to her flat she finds
her husband unexpectedly at home, calmly mixing a drink. She throws
herself into his arms telling all. When Tony presses her for details, she says
the voice sounded high, ‘like a puppet’. (I shall return to this off-hand
comment later on.) As we watch and listen to Kit, we cannot help but
notice how audible she is. We hear every word and breath, even when
Tony holds her close. What becomes clear in this scene is just how clearly
and closely Day’s voice has been recorded.
Day’s voice has a very particular quality, something Roland Barthes
calls a ‘grain’ (1977). But it is not only the recognisable grain of ‘Day-
ness’ which sets her voice apart in the film. Every word her character
speaks is distinct even when she is buried in an embrace or speaks with her
back to us. We hear each inhalation and exhalation as clearly as we do her
words. At times her voice may have been overdubbed because it could not
have been rendered so clearly audible due to her physical position in the
scene, when her mouth is completely buried in her husband’s lapel for
example. But over and above this, it is clear Day was conscientiously ‘close
miked’ i.e. recorded with a microphone kept as close as possible to her
body wherever she was physically in the scene, or perhaps even one that
was attached to her body. A microphone which can be attached to an
actor’s body is generally called a radio or wireless microphone. While these
certainly existed in the 1950s, the technology was still evolving, and their
use had not yet been taken up by film Studios. The first time a wireless
microphone was employed to record sound in a motion picture is pur-
ported to be a few years later, when the actor Rex Harrison wore one in
Cukor’s 1964 film My Fair Lady.5 While there remains what Martin use-
fully identifies as a ‘zone of indeterminacy’6 around the exact sound
recording methods and interventions used in Midnight Lace, it is safe to
assume that the actress was close miked—and rigorously so.7 This would
have involved a microphone held in close proximity to the actress at all
times and capable of being moved around the set as she moved.8 But what
this method gains in vocal fidelity and consistency it loses in spatial rever-
beration. As a result the voice sounds unrealistically dry and non-
atmospheric. There is no ‘room space’ carried over in the tonal quality of
the voice, there is no ‘faithful spatial signature’ (Altman 1992: 25) with
which the audience can effectively situate the speaker in the world of the
screen space. Issues of clarity and intelligibility have taken precedence over
accurate representations of space and the positions of the bodies inside it.
Day’s voice sounds uncommonly close to the audience wherever she is and
whatever she is doing, as if speaking from an intimate position close to our
ear at all times. The consequence of this is that her voice veers away from
naturalism towards what Chion refers to as the ‘I-Voice’ (1999: 51). An

audience will generally interpret this kind of voice as an inner one because
it appears to be not wholly connected with, or even to be totally disassoci-
ated from, its spatial and diegetic environment. To achieve this effect the
voice must be recorded in a particular way. Gunning (who attributes this
same quality to Celia’s voice-over in Secret Beyond the Door) summarises
this as a ‘close miking which eliminates any sense of distance between us
and the voice, so that it seems to speak to us directly, and a lack of rever-
beration which abstracts it from any specific space’ (Gunning 2009: 350).
Two technical criteria are essential to convey the presence of an I-voice,
explains Chion:
First, close miking, as close as possible, creates a feeling of intimacy with the
voice, such that we sense no distance between it and our ear. We experience
this closeness via the surefire audio qualities of vocal presence and definition,
which manage to remain perceivable even in the worst conditions of recep-
tion and reproduction… The second criterion derives from the first: “dry-
ness” or absence of reverb in the voice… It’s as if, in order for the I-voice to
resonate in us as our own, it can’t be inscribed in a concrete identifiable
space, it must be its own space unto itself. (Chion 1999: 51)
However, it is equally clear despite this I-Voice quality that Day’s voice
does belong to the onscreen space and to the body who moves around
inside it. The voice we hear so intimately is not an I-voice but is located
firmly in the diegesis, anchored to the body we see onscreen. We therefore
have a paradox, and the resulting sense of dissonance has implications for
the way in which her performance is received and understood by the audi-
ence. The obvious assiduousness with which Day’s voice has been recorded
attests to the experience of the two credited sound engineers and their
investment in the task at hand. Both were highly experienced and had,
along with other key members of the creative team, worked on numerous
major productions including films directed by Hitchcock and Sirk. Joe
Lapis began his career in the early days of sound at Universal Studios,
working on Reginald Barker’s 1929 film The Mississippi Gambler. He would
therefore have negotiated his professional and technical way through the
many shifts in the material business of Studio sound recording. Waldon O
Watson was equally as experienced. Nominated for six consecutive
Academy Awards for his sound work from 1962 through to 1967, he went
on to earn a special award from the Academy for his contribution towards
the invention of the Sensurround System in 1975. But the prominence of

Day’s voice, which at times supersedes the vocal consistency and level of
other characters in the film, points towards an exertion with regards to the
star performer and an over-attachment to the voice with which she was
very much associated. ‘Recording choices’ writes Altman, ‘govern our
perception of particular sound events. Far from simply recording a specific
story of a specific sound event, the sound engineer actually has the power
to create, deform, or reformulate that event’ (Altman 1992: 25).9 The
attention paid to the status of Day’s voice attests to the level of importance
placed on maintaining audiovisual synchronicity and intelligibility in
Hollywood at that time and, according to Doane and Silverman, to the
way in which this holds especially true for the female voice.
In The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema
(1988) Silverman theorises that the female voice in classical cinema is
more strictly held to the rules of audiovisual synchronicity than its male
counterpart. ‘Dominant cinema’ she writes, ‘holds the female subject
much more fully than the male subject to the unity of sound and image,
and consequently to the representation of lack’ (1988: 51). She equates
synchronisation with an attempt to embed the female subject into the
diegesis and therefore to distance her from her any discursive control.
While it is obvious that male voices were also subject to the same rules of
synchronisation, Silverman examines ways in which the classical Hollywood
text finds ways to place men closer to the ‘point of textual origin’.
Hollywood cinema, she explains, ‘equates diegetic interiority with discur-
sive impotence and lack of control, thereby rendering that situation cul-
turally unacceptable for the ‘normal’ male subject’ (1988: 54). She
continues:
“Inside” comes to designate a recessed space within the story, while “out-
side” refers to those elements of the story which seem in one way or another
to frame that recessed space. Woman is confined to the former, and man to
the latter. (Silverman 1988: 54)
There is a beautiful example of this strategy in action in Midnight Lace.

The sinister puppet voice continues to threaten Kit in a series of surprise
phone calls to their flat. Kit persuades Tony they must report it to the
police. On her first visit to Scotland Yard, Kit is asked to listen to an audio-
tape of various ‘telephone talkers’ or ‘heavy breathers’ the Yard has com-
piled. Some of the comments would, as Inspector Byrnes (John Williams)
says, “make Freud sit up and blink.” Once she puts on the headphones
and plugs herself into the tape machine she is cut out of the conversation.
The men stand round studying her while she sits in the chair, attached to
the tape machine by various wires. They discuss her over her head; any
enemies she may have, her physical health, and finally (inevitably) her
mental health. The overly large headphones Kit is wearing emphasise their
infantilisation of her. She neatly and obediently sits in her chair, reduced
to a child-like and powerless auditor robbed of any ability to participate in
a ‘grown-up’ conversation. Instead, she sits incapacitated in her own
sequestered aural bubble listening to a stream of verbal ‘filth’, none of
which we hear. The men have total discursive power and are framing the
recessed space. They are literally placed in what Silverman calls a ‘transcen-
dental auditory position, and so aligned with the apparatus’ (1988: 57).
The inspector suggests to Tony that Kit may be making all this up to gain
attention. The apparatus stops and Kit is released. She has not recognised
any of the voices. As they get up to leave the inspector makes a shocking
comment. Asked by Kit if her stalker might call again, he replies that per-
haps there will be a next time, “if he enjoyed your gasp enough”. She may
no longer be deaf and dumb, but her voice is problematised and sexual-
ised, suggesting that in some way it may be responsible for the damage
being done. “You’d be surprised how far a wife will go to make her
neglectful husband tow the mark” the inspector remarks to Tony (Fig. 4.3).
Kit is forced into a series of increasingly smaller onscreen spaces and
thus repeatedly removed from any position of discursive power. But
despite being held in check by such diegetic framing devices, Day’s voice
overflows its containment. As I have suggested, the I-voice quality of her
recorded voice is partly responsible for this. But there is also an issue with
the totalising strategy of audiovisual synchronisation itself and with its
assumed efficacy. While sound technology had made huge advances in the
1940s and 50s, fidelity to the human voice remained a top priority and
vocal synchronisation was strictly adhered to in Hollywood. ‘Film is a
medium that presents complex perceptual experiences for its audiences by
aligning the spectator’s eyes with the camera operator’s, and his/her ears
with the recordist’s’ notes James Lastra, and classical Hollywood cinema
attempts to provide ‘a simulated perceptual experience of a real event’ by
using normative perceptual unity as a standard (Lastra 2000: 193). Doane
alerts us to the broader issues at stake in image/sound synchronisation:
Fig. 4.3 Kit cut out of the conversation at Scotland Yard in Midnight Lace
Sound carries with it the potential risk of exposing the material heterogene-
ity of the medium; attempts to contain that risk surface in the language of
the ideology of organic unity. In the discourse of technicians, sound is “mar-
ried” to the image and, as one sound engineer puts it in an article on post-
synchronization, “one of the basic goals of the motion picture industry is to
make the screen look alive in the eyes of the audience…” (Doane 1980: 35)
Audiovisual synchronisation ‘puts the pieces back together’ and in so

doing hides from the audience the machinations of the medium thereby
allowing them to become willingly and undistractedly absorbed in its fic-
tion. Silverman also recognises this. The emphasis on ‘diegetic speech acts’
she explains, ‘helps to suture the viewer/listener into what Heath calls the
“safe place of the story”, and so to conceal the site of cinematic produc-
tion’ (Silverman 1988: 45). But Chion reminds us that this attachment or
‘nailing down’ of the voice to the body can never be wholly effective. ‘So
this nailing-down via rigorous post-synching’ he asks, ‘is it not there to
mask the fact that whatever lengths we go to, restoring voices to bodies is
always jerry-rigging to one extent or another?’ (Chion 1999: 130 his ital-
ics). If we return to Day’s voice, we find that its overdetermined, overly
close quality actually works to dissuade us of its stable attachment to her
body onscreen rather than to reassure us of it. We may know that her voice
belongs to her, but we find ourselves perpetually reminded of its
‘grafted-on-ness’. This places Day’s attempt at a realistic performance

under considerable pressure, particularly as so much of her performance in
this film is based around how she is expressing herself vocally. It also ren-
ders her observation about the voice in the park as being ‘like a puppet’
less innocuous than it might at first appear. The threatening ‘puppet-like’
voice is recorded as we find out. But so is Day’s voice, detached and then
reattached to her body by the filmic process. What Kit’s comment unin-
tentionally calls to our attention is that the voice does not ever wholly
belong to the body and that film, like puppetry, evokes ventriloquism.
In his article ‘Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism’ (1980), Altman
explores this notion in some depth. Impatient with sound theory that
generally regarded sound in cinema as redundant in comparison to the
image, his response is intentionally radical:
I will postulate a new model for the conceptualization of sound-image rela-

tionships in the cinema: the sound track is a ventriloquist who, by moving
his dummy (the image) in time with the words he secretly speaks, creates the
illusion that the words are produced by the dummy/image whereas in fact
the dummy/image is actually created in order to disguise the source of the
sound. Far from being subservient to the image, the sound track uses the
illusion of subservience to serve its own ends. (Altman 1980: 67)
Altman deliberately recalibrates the sound-image balance, putting sound

in charge of image and even endowing it with power to subvert the image
or say what the image cannot. He ends his article with the claim that cin-
ema’s ventriloquism ‘is the product of an effort to overcome the sound-
image gap, to mask the sound’s technological origin, and to permit the
film’s production personnel to speak their sub-conscious mind—their
belly—without fear of discovery’ (1980: 79). This reference to the ‘belly’
(venter in Latin—the etymological root of ‘ventriloquism’) refers to the
‘belly-prophets’ of Ancient Greece, who were said to ‘emit their prophetic
voice’ from their stomach rather than from their mouths (1980: 78).
Locating the exit point of the inner voice into the part of the body com-
monly identified with ‘eating, excretion, and sexuality’ Altman claims,
‘squares surprisingly well with the role traditionally allotted to the ven-
triloquist’s disguised voice’, which is to speak ‘a more sincere, personal,
and unguarded language, a language no longer watched over by the cen-
sorship of the conscious mind’ (1980: 78). These ideas are of interest with
regards to the trope of the hysterical screaming woman onscreen and to

the way in which Day tackles this aspect of her role in Midnight Lace.
In the film there are two notable scenes in which Kit is driven into a
hysterical frenzy. The first is set in the lift in the mansion block in which
the Preston’s live. The sequence begins with a wide exterior shot showing
the outside of Kit’s building and the busy building site next door. (We
have already met these builders when a metal girder they were trying to
hoist up almost fell on Kit in an earlier scene. The site manager Mr
Younger, played by John Gavin, rescued her on that occasion.) Once the
audience has registered the scene outside with its world of active and
industrious men, the film cuts to the interior of Kit’s building. She leaves
their flat (impeccably dressed as usual) and enters the lift. In contrast to
the expansive world outside, Kit’s drama will happen inside a lift inside a
building—a doubled enclosure, another ‘box within a box’.10 This claus-
tral space acts as an emotional compression chamber.11 As she closes the
door to the lift (it is one of those old-fashioned ones frequently found in
Edwardian mansion blocks), slides over the metal gate and presses the
buttons, a machinery of descent—physical and emotional—is set in
motion. The lift unexpectedly stops mid-floor, the lights go out and Kit
finds herself trapped. Panic-stricken, she stabs repeatedly and ineffectively
at the lift buttons but to no avail. She hears footsteps and through the
opaque glass she watches as a dark figure slowly climbs the stairs which
encircle the lift. Kit is quick to assume that this is her predator who is now
about to attack. She stifles a scream by clasping her hand over her mouth.
Reaching the floor above, the figure rattles at the door into the lift shaft.
Kit can see this through the grilled ceiling in the lift. The figure succeeds
and climbs down onto the top of the lift. Once the penetration of her
space begins, Kit’s voice breaks out of its bodily confinement. She starts to
gasp and moan, getting progressively more hysterical until the moment
when the figure opens the hatch above her head and shines a torch into
her eyes. Its piercing beam intensifies her screams, and she loses control
entirely. A pair of legs descends vertically into the space. With this full
spatial invasion, the filmic apparatus switches to an extreme close-up of
Day and her face becomes abstracted and nonsensical. We see only a pair
of terrified eyes. Her body loses all coherence, and with it, her voice. The
lights come back on, and we see it is Mr Younger from the building site
next door who has come to the rescue. But by this point Kit is a gasping
wreck on the floor.
In her book Doris Day Confidential, Hollywood, Sex and Stardom

(2013) Tamar Jeffers McDonald traces the critical reception of Day’s per-
formance in this film. It was widely reported that Day had a breakdown
while filming this particular scene, was escorted off set by her husband
Martin Melcher (a co-producer on the film) and had to take a few days
break from filming to recover. Neil Rau from the Los Angeles Examiner
visited the set and explains to his readers that the lift was an impressively
solid construction that really did move up and down. The director and
cinematographer were poised on beams attached to the shaft and were
able to move with the lift while filming a sequestered and hysterical Day
inside. Rau witnessed the scene being filmed and reports with evident glee
how it ended: ‘When the elevator again reaches the stage floor, Doris’ own
husband, Marty Melcher, is there to help her off. It is obvious her play-
acting has gotten the best of her, because she falls into his arms and starts
sobbing’ (McDonald 2013: 226). McDonald calls our attention to the
way in which the tone of Rau’s reporting ‘undermines Day’s labour and
talent’ reducing her work to ‘an emotional outburst’ (226). She highlights
how this scene, reported in other papers as well, was generally framed in
this way. ‘Kit’s hysteria’ writes McDonald, ‘created through Day’s skills, is
read as not performed but lived’ (230). McDonald goes on to analyse
Day’s performance in the scene. Kit and Tony Preston sleep in separate
beds and have not yet been on their honeymoon due to Tony’s work com-
mitments. Kit continually tries to sexually arouse her husband. Indeed, she
buys the black negligee which gives the film its title. But Tony always
postpones intimacy, offering her fetishistic, shiny objects and a trip to
Venice instead. McDonald concludes, I think rightly, that their marriage is
not yet consummated, and goes on to suggest that ‘Day’s performance of
Kit’s hysteria works skilfully to indicate that the outburst is both a result of
and an outlet for her pent-up sexual tensions, with her audible panting
echoing the deep breathing of arousal’ (2013: 225). Day’s heavy breath-
ing and exaggerated moans, as well as her climactic cries when the torch is
shone into her eyes, can certainly be interpreted in this way, and the sexual
undertow of this scene with its enforced spatial penetration is clear. But
one cannot reliably attribute this intent to Day as a conscious acting
choice. What is certain is that there is something prodigiously incontinent
about her vocal performance in this scene which audience and critics
found (and continue to find) difficult to accept. Day’s voice turns against
her, effecting vocally what Doane refers to as ‘the look turned violently
against itself’ (Doane 1988: 19). But is our resistant response to her
seemingly excessive cries and moans wholly attributable to the intimacy of

the I-Voice with which they have been imbued? Are we simply brought
into too close a proximity with the unrestrained and even embarrassingly
over-the-top register of her emotions? I would suggest that this does not
adequately account for why her voice seems so out of place in the film, so
‘not at home’.12 Let us look closely at another scene in which Day’s voice
moves into uncomfortable territory.
The second time the actress pushes her voice to extreme limits occurs
in a later scene. It takes place on a staircase, which as many have theorised,
is a potent melodramatic location.13 Kit has now been exposed to many
threatening phone calls from the ‘puppet voice’ and is beginning to
unravel. She has also been severely frightened by an event earlier in the day
when someone pushed her in front of a London bus as it approached the
stop. She survived this incident but feeling vulnerable she asks her friend
Peggy who lives upstairs (Natasha Parry) to help convince Tony of the
veracity of the stalker by pretending she too has heard the voice on the
phone. Tony returns from work and exposes the lie when he reveals the
telephone line has been down all day. Utterly defeated, Kit retreats upstairs
and Peggy leaves. Kit’s Aunt Bea arrives (Myrna Loy) and the phone rings
again. Tony asks Aunt Bea to answer and pretend to be Kit in order to trap
the stalker into speaking to someone else. Kit watches this scene from the
top of the stairs, only to hear the plan fail because the caller recognises it
is not Kit on the phone. Day now begins a performance of descent into
abjection. Like Tony and Aunt Bea the audience can only watch passive
and appalled as she dissolves into moaning, inchoate hysteria at the bot-
tom of the stairs. Like the previous scene in the lift, her descent is both
psychological and spatial. The scene is almost unbearable to watch, but
strangely so. It is not simply that Day could be overacting, or reliving
memories of trauma from her own personal life—although one might be
tempted to arrive at such conclusions and indeed many adopted this criti-
cal position at the time, as McDonald’s work reveals. Is it simple irritation,
as yet again an audience (and particularly the women to whom this film is
ostensibly being addressed) is subjected to the humiliating spectacle of a
woman in the throes of a breakdown, her body reduced from enviable
glamour to a ‘vehicle for hysterical speech’ (Doane 1986: 171)? I suggest
that Day’s hysteria gives voice to an interiority the perturbing intensity of
which is not entirely ‘held’ or accepted by the cinematic architecture with
which she is surrounded.
The formal shape and style of the film acts as a repressive system which,
although the filmic narrative might superficially purport to encourage Kit
(and the actress who plays her) to find her way to truth and freedom, actu-
ally serves deeply divided ends. Day’s ‘body-voice’ reveals hidden truths
and desires. But it is not only Tony who finds Kit’s emotional and sexual
drives unacceptable and, not to put too fine a point on it, monstrous. It is
the film itself. Repressed and disturbing energies are summoned up by the
narrative, but at the same time these energies are disallowed by that same
narrative and are unacceptable to its overarching system of creative enun-
ciation, as evidenced in processes such as découpage, mise-en-scène and
editing. What becomes fascinating however, is that these deeper drives and
unspoken energies are insistently voiced through the sonic domain
(Fig. 4.4).
Midnight Lace holds the sonic dimension up for examination. Kit is
after all stalked by a voice, which she refers to as high-pitched, “like a
puppet”—a throwaway comment on her part as I have already pointed
out, but one with significant connotations. The soundtrack is the bearer of
meaning and the vocal stream is where the real story plays out. Appearances
are deceptive but sounds tell the truth. The phone is central to the film
and Kit is terrorised by its ring. Kit’s phones are pink or white, a nod to
1960s modern luxury which contrasts with the menace or ‘filth’ which Kit
Fig. 4.4 Kit alerted by the pink phone in Midnight Lace

says flows down the receiver. Notably, when we finally see the stalker’s
phone in one shot (a smoking cigarette artfully arranged on an ashtray
nearby), it is of the old-fashioned and black variety. It is the modern, white
phone which finally reveals to Kit who her husband really is, as he places
his finger over it to stop her ringing the police and remarks “I wouldn’t do
that if I were you Kit”. We are not scared by Kit’s pink phone. Nor are we
scared by the tape recorder, revealed towards the end of the film to be the
source of the voice. But we are scared by the puppet voice. It has no body
and no breath. One thing we can say about Day’s closely recorded breath
and voice is that they are signs of her vitality, a warrant of her hapto-
sonorous corporeality. Tracing the development of audio technology after
World War II, Steven Connor tells us that, ‘the most important aspect of
the new talking machines was the substitution of electricity for breath as
the motive power for producing and transmitting voice’ (Connor 2000:
377). But a voice without breath is a voice issued from beyond. This
updated Gothic romance recruits the invisible, electrically transmitted
sonic domain as a conduit of threat. Non-human modes of communica-
tion and operation, i.e. telephonic communication, electrically operated
machines and audio-technology are, this film suggests, not to be wholly
trusted. The film constructs a spatial metaphor to support this premise. It
is the building work next door that accidentally cuts off the electricity to
the mansion block in which the Prestons live, causing the suspension of
the lift and the break in the telephone lines. Mr Younger (the site man-
ager) is therefore responsible for interrupting this invisible flow. Not only
is he ‘younger’ than Tony, but he is a builder—a good, honest, manual
profession unlike Tony’s dubious (and crooked as it transpires) work at the
bank. He is also American, something once again we can tell by his voice.
His wholesome, home-town American accent is to be interpreted as more
trustworthy than Tony’s overly refined English one. It is revealed, in a
climactic scene in which Tony fights with an unexpected intruder, that the
source of the puppet voice is a tape recorder. Tony picks it up and shows
it to Kit, playing the tape. The murderous entity who has stalked and per-
secuted Kit throughout the film is suddenly compressed into an innocuous
little rectangle, and we are somewhat disappointed. Tony holds it up to Kit
while it is playing as if to say ‘see, it was this all along’. But if the object is
small, its implications are sizeable. The voice has been recorded, but how
and by whom? Initially we think it may be the man Tony fights with who
now lies unconscious on the floor. But we then find out the inevitable,
that Tony is the source of the fake, puppet-like voice and that he recorded
it onto the tape. But how did he do this? Did he sit down at a desk some-
time late into the night, in the office perhaps, and ‘speak funny’ into the
microphone? Did he use some kind of fancy distortion effect to disguise
his voice and make it sound, as Kit says, ‘like a puppet’? And what of the
‘filth’ Kit says he spills out on the phone? Did Tony Preston really say all
that? And in this peculiar puppet-like tone? And if so, what on earth did
he say? What exactly, the audience wonders, is ‘filth’ and of what per-
verted, repressed sexuality does it speak? To hear a stream of distorted
obscenities issuing directly from the lips of a smooth and debonair Rex
Harrison would be disturbing indeed. But none of this is shown or made
audible to the audience. It is withheld, with only hints of it squeezed into
a tiny and bathetic tape machine. This is, I would suggest, where the film
fails to support Doris Day’s performance and why her voice is exiled into
a space ‘outside’ the rest of the film. Midnight Lace withholds its true ter-
ror from us. It never manifests for us the hidden, hideous truth that Kit
has been dreaming all along. Tony is in fact a puppet—a psychopathic
puppet man with a murderous heart. This is what Kit intuits about her
husband and what her unconscious self has known from the start. But we
never see Tony speak with the puppet voice, and therefore never experi-
ence the full horror of his real incarnation. At the end of the film Tony
calmly leaves the flat escorted by a polite detective while making a fond
quip about how one should never underestimate an English policeman.
His true psychic disfigurement is not revealed to us because it is not admis-
sible into the sphere created by the film’s stubbornly shiny and glamorous
mise-en-scène. But it is what haunts Kit Preston and is what Day is trying,
unsuccessfully and on her own, to get us to hear. Day struggles against the
systematic confinement of her work on many fronts and her boundary-
crossing performance is sadly cast adrift.
Day’s performance gives voice to an abjection entirely at odds with her
glamorous onscreen persona. This brings her into an unlikely alliance with
the one other abject figure in the film, the Preston’s snivelling, downtrod-
den, Cockney cleaner Nora (Doris Lloyd). Nora’s son Malcom (Roddy
McDowall) is a sneaky character with a potentially troublesome sexuality,
once again conveyed through the sonic domain. McDowall imbues his
voice with faked innocence, sexual ambivalence and barely concealed
threat. She may be beautiful, rich and impeccably dressed, but Kit is drawn
into uncomfortably close contact with their closeted underworld of pov-
erty and innuendo. But at the same time, Kit’s hysteria voices a powerful
libidinous energy that overflows any attempts at curtailment through close
recording and synchronisation. Her voice opens a door into an invisible

psychological chaos—not a territory with which the film ultimately wishes
to be identified. Day may be packaged in glamour and surrounded by all
things shiny, but her ‘belly-voice’ emits unseemly, sexualised messages.
This observation leads me to a curious link between Midnight Lace and
Secret Beyond the Door. It is an intertextual connection of which I was per-
haps unconsciously aware when I chose to place these two films into dia-
logue with one another and may well be core to my fascination with both.
If one wants to find a puppet’s voice coming out of a human body one
need look no further than the 1945 British film Dead of Night. In the film
a group of people come together in a house, and each tell a story of a
supernatural experience in their lives. One story (directed by Alberto
Cavalcanti), generally regarded as the most creepy and vivid, concerns a
ventriloquist called Maxwell Frere who is taken over by his evil dummy
Hugo and finally driven insane. It is never clear whether Hugo is really
alive, or if it is all in Frere’s mind. The film ends on the definitive moment
in which Frere, lying prone and speechless in a padded cell, turns his head
and opens his mouth to speak. It is not his voice we hear, but the dum-
my’s. It is an unforgettable moment for anyone who has had the thrill of
seeing the film. Frere is played by none other than Michael Redgrave, and
it was on the basis of this performance that Lang insisted Redgrave come
to Hollywood to play Mark Lamphere.
Silverman describes the process of ‘submersion of the female voice in
the female body’ as one which ‘results in linguistic incapacity and a general
vulnerability’ (1988: 61). But she also describes the ‘identification of the
female voice with an intractable materiality, and its consequent alienation
from meaning’ (61). The sheer corporeality of Day’s voice, including its
moist-sounding breathiness, issues from crevices in the body and this is
problematic. We may refer to female ‘subjectivity’ in our critical language,
but actually what this film is struggling to contain is female sexuality, that
which Freud described as a ‘dark continent’. Kit holds up her ‘midnight
lace’ for male approval. But Tony is evidently not aroused. What is not
shown is nevertheless suggested—that sex between them is not only non-
functional but that Tony finds her sexuality voracious. It is possibly even,
to use Kit’s word, ‘filth’.
There are important parallels between Midnight Lace and Secret Beyond
the Door even though the two films differ hugely in style. Each film fea-
tures a lively American woman who marries a sinister, repressed European.
Tony Preston, never seen without a carnation in his lapel,14 refuses sex
with his wife. Mark Lamphere does not avoid sex (at least not at first), but
his portrayal as a sexually compelling figure does not convince. Swinging
into an uptight boardroom full of besuited men to surprise her husband,
complete with shopping bags full of engaging feminine ‘kit’, Kit carries a
vitality which the dour, stiff-upper-lipped English characters do not pos-
sess. Celia is similarly full of vim and vigour and is undeterred by Mark, his
sombre sister, his resentful son or Miss Robey (Mark’s jealous assistant,
played by Barbara O’Neil). Kit and Celia have healthy psychic reserves.
They also have their own money, another challenge to the old-world
order. The foggy London in Midnight Lace and the Gothic mansion in
Secret Beyond the Door represent something of the dying ‘old world’, and
the bright, sparky and well-dressed American women represent a new,
post-war optimism. Lang’s film reaches towards a happy ending (or at
least a reasonable one), in which Celia and Mark begin their marriage
anew in an entirely new space. Miller’s film also ends on a spatial meta-
phor, as Kit climbs out of the window onto the scaffolding of a new life.
A close reading of the sonic space in these two films reveals the extent
to which the voice can be both organic and foreign to the body it inhabits
onscreen. Body and voice can never wholly be joined up, in the cinema or
in life. The voice ‘never quite belongs’ writes Žižek, ‘to the body we see,
so that even when we see a living person talking, there is always some
degree of ventriloquism at work’ (Žižek 1996: 92). This ventriloquism is
something the cinematic process cannot wholly conceal. It is a split which
cinema can evoke and perform deliberately or otherwise, as I have explored
here. The two voices partake in their films’ metaphorical spatialisation of
the mental realm. The voice-over or non-synchronised voice emanates
from and points towards an ‘outside space’. But the embodied, synchro-
nised voice also emanates from an elsewhere in Midnight Lace, even while
it appears to belong to Kit’s body and to issue from her immaculately
made-up lips. Celia and Kit’s voices mark what Sjogren calls a ‘creative flex
of contradiction’ that runs through each film (Sjogren 2006: 3). They are
never successfully brought under diegetic control, sequestered, or disap-
peared. On the contrary they remain insistent, unruly, and pervasive. Celia
and Kit are well-adjusted to the social performance of femininity. But their
voices resist stereotype and tropic containment. Their bodies are not phys-
ically contained within the Gothic enclosure of their homes. Each woman
breaks out of the construct which seeks to restrain and destroy them, even
when the odds are stacked against them. We can view these constructs as
an interrelated series of enclosures: body, marriage, house, and film. Their
screams threaten to rupture coherent discourse. As indeed they should,

given the gravity of the situation in which they find themselves. As soon as
the voice ‘departs from its textual anchorage’ observes Renata Salecl, ‘the
voice becomes senseless and threatening, all the more so because of its
seductive and intoxicating powers’ (Salecl 1996: 17). And yet it is their
partners who pose the real threat.
Day’s performance is not well supported by the filmic apparatus as I
have explored here. Her desperate escape from the park is plastered over
with the opening credits. Even as she pants with fear in the lift we learn
that her gowns are made by ‘Irene’. But the failure of this apparatus to
adequately moor her voice to her body through synch-sound creates a
kind of misbehaving ‘hybrid’ voice—an I-Voice masquerading as a syn-
chronised one—and this unintentionally provides space for Kit and Day’s
unconscious to express itself more directly. ‘Her’ (viewing ‘her’ as a per-
formative hybrid of Kit and Day) abject cries and sexual moans do not ‘fit’
the immaculately groomed, well-behaved body they issue from, nor the
shimmering sheets it lies in. But they are in tune with the film’s unspoken
and unspeakable ‘under the surface’ narrative and Kit’s deep and intuitive
entanglement within it. Her screams are her ‘insides’ speaking, her corpo-
real, messy and out of control ‘belly voice’ having its say.
Spatial metaphors abound in both films. “Sometimes I think the Blitz
left us with more derelict minds than derelict buildings” remarks Inspector
Byrnes in Midnight Lace. Lang provides his male protagonist with a set of
rooms which structure his unconscious into a taxonomy of murderous
spaces. Mark’s work room upstairs is an obsessively neat space but down-
stairs the ‘murder’ rooms are cluttered, architectural reifications of his
baroque drives. Between these domains runs a labyrinth of seemingly end-
less corridors, doors, gates and stairways—topological figurations of psy-
chic defence barriers and systems of repression. Apart from the feminine
space provided for Celia upstairs by Mark and his sister (a bedroom suite
full of curves, soft furnishings, and hot baths), Celia has no onscreen space
of her own.15 But she has the sonic space in which to roam, and power to
move between multiple suggested spatialities, seen and unseen.
The sonic domain in both films is a place beyond, unreachable and
untouchable by the male characters. Even when Secret Beyond the Door
attempts to place Mark’s voice inside that very same sonic space, we expe-
rience this as a temporary aberration and a falsity—just as we know the
event which precedes it (Celia’s murder) is a lie. Sjogren writes that the
female voice-over (which she refers to as the voice-off) is ‘strikingly
unstable’, an object that is ‘constantly mutating, shifting, slipping, and

transgressing both “bodily” and textual boundaries’ (Sjogren 2006: 83).
But as I have explored here, the synchronized voice also strains at the leash
of the image, and has potential to transgress bodily, spatial and textual
boundaries. The voices of Celia and Kit are not wholly moored to their
bodies, in much the same way as their bodies are not wholly contained
within the spaces in which they find themselves. Kit’s freedom from male
control will require a little more work. She manages to step out, literally,
into thin air and to balance on the metal girders high above ground. But
Mr Younger comes to her rescue in a makeshift builder’s lift. Thus she
moves from one claustral space into another—although it is only a tempo-
rary construction. Either way, both women break free from the Gothic
structures—architectural and cinematic—they are deceived into call-
ing home.
Notes
1. Pascal Bonitzer in Doane ‘The Woman’s Film’: Possession and Address’
(1994: 287).
2. Matthew Sweet in a documentary about the English film, Dead of Night
(1945). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wZyhZ3eF_A [accessed
18/01/23]
3. Language describing sound is notoriously hard to retrieve. For example,
there is no aural equivalent for the verb ‘to appear’. If an image ‘appears’
onscreen, what does a sound do? One can describe it as ‘heard’ but this is
a passive verb. What is its action?
4. The producer Ross Hunter, cinematographer Russell Metty and art direc-
tor Arthur Golitzer had all worked on Douglas Sirk’s major melodramas of
the 1950s.
5. This notable event was created ‘through the efforts of Academy Award-
winning Hollywood sound engineer George Groves’ (Wikipedia: ‘Wireless
Microphone’).
6. Martin employs this phrase in his discussion of the soundtrack in Orson
Welles’ film The Lady from Shanghai (1947).
7. At the time of writing, the film archives at NBCUniversal Archives &
Collections serves as a resource for the internal business units of
NBCUniversal only and is not open to external researchers. The question
remains open as to how exactly the sound was technically recorded on
Midnight Lace.
8. It seems apt, given my focus in the previous chapter, that Dorothy Arzner
is generally credited with the invention of the boom microphone. She
instructed a sound engineer to tape a microphone to a fishing rod on the
set of Clara Bow’s first talkie The Wild Party (1929). More details can be
found in silent women: pioneers of cinema eds. Melody Bridges & Cheryl
Robson, Supernova Books (2016).
9. Altman (1992) and Lastra (2000) both provide essential and detailed anal-
ysis of the historical developments in sound recording in Hollywood, the
technical problems technicians faced, the related conceptual issues and the
often power-led culture of decision making.
10. A reference to Jeanine Basinger’s phrase: ‘The woman’s world on film is a
box within a box’ (1994: 216).
11. Lifts on film are often sites of charged or tense encounters. Originally oper-
ated manually and called ‘rising rooms’, lifts were signs of opulence and
were first installed in large, urban hotels. The invention of push-button
technology in the early twentieth century enabled lifts to become auto-
matic, which introduced anxiety into the experience as one could no lon-
ger see how the lift worked. This anxiety has never entirely dissipated. Lifts
transport us from public to intimate space, but along the way one is in
neither one nor the other. On film these liminal, claustral aspects become
exaggerated, and emotions amplified. There is a fascinating book on the
subject by Andreas Bernard called Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator
(2014, NYU Press).
12. Whether male and female members of the audience react differently to
Day’s cries are not essentialist questions I can debate here, but they are of
interest. Doane outlines two basic options or ‘modes of entry’ open to a
female audience when watching classical Hollywood films ‘with a male
address’: either ‘narcissistic identification with the female figure as specta-
cle’ or ‘a “transvestite” identification with the male hero’ (1988: 19). But
in the case of the ‘woman’s film’ the textual address undergoes a series of
attempts to ‘reverse the relation between the female body and sexuality’
(19). It is a creative effort fraught with difficulty and internal resistance. ‘In
a patriarchal society’ Doane points out, ‘to desexualise the female body is
ultimately to deny its very existence. The ‘woman’s film’ thus functions in
a rather complex way to deny the woman the space of a reading’
(1997: 296).
13. The staircase ‘possesses a certain semantic privilege in relation to the
woman as object of the gaze’ writes Doane, ‘which articulates the connec-
tion between the familiar and the unfamiliar, or between neurosis and psy-
chosis’ (Doane 1988: 135).
14. It is interesting to note that the green carnation was one of the earliest
symbols of the LGBT community. Oscar Wilde wore one in his lapel and
asked those close to him to do the same as a sign of their secret affiliation.
Although in Midnight Lace any such allusion is diminished by Tony’s long-
standing affair with Peggy who colludes with him to kill Kit.
15. Thankfully however, Celia manages to ‘mess up’ the bedroom inherited
from Mark’s first wife, flinging her clothes onto the dead wife’s furniture
with carefree abandon—another reason we believe her to be
indestructible.
References
Altman, Rick. 1980. Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism. Yale French Studies
60: 67–79. London: Yale University Press.
———. 1992. Sound Theory, Sound Practice. New York & London: Routledge.
Basinger, Jeanine. 1994. A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women,
1930–1960. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd.
Bordwell, David. 2017. Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed
Movie Storytelling. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. 2004. Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of
Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press.
Chion, Michel. 1994. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and translated by
Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 1999. The Voice in Cinema. Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Connor, Steven. 2000. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford
& New York: Oxford University Press.
Space. Yale French Studies—Cinema and Sound 60: 33–50. Accessed January
California Press.
———. 1986. The Clinical Eye: Medical Discourses in the “Woman’s Film” of the
1940s. The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed.
Susan Rubin Suleiman, 152–174. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press.
———. 1988. The Desire to Desire: Woman’s Films of the 1940s. Basingstoke &
London: Macmillan Press.
Gunning, Tom. 2009. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity.
London: British Film Institute.
Jeffers McDonald, Tamar. 2013. Doris Day Confidential: Hollywood, Sex and
Stardom. New York & London: I B Tauris & Co.
Kozloff, Sarah. 1988. Invisible Storytellers: Voice-over Narration in American

Fiction Film. Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press.
Lastra, James. 2000. Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception,
Representation, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lavin, Sylvia. 2007. Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a
Psychoanalytic Culture. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press.
Levin, Tom. 1984. The Acoustic Dimension: Notes on Cinema Sound. Screen 25
(3): 55–68.
Martin, Adrian. 2014. Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical. Hollywood to
New Media Art. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Perez, Gilberto. 1998. The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium. Baltimore
and London: John Hopkins University Press.
Russ, Joanna. 1973. Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s my Husband:
The Modern Gothic. Journal of Popular Culture 6 (4): 666–691.
Salecl, Renata. 1996. Gaze and Voice as Love Objects. In Gaze and Voice as Love
Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek. Durham & London: Duke
University Press.
Sjogren, Britta. 2006. Into the Vortex: Female Voice and Paradox in Film. Urbana
& Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Tatar, Maria. 2004. Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and his Wives.
Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Waldman, Diane. 1984. ‘At Last I Can Tell It to Someone!’: Feminine Point of
View and Subjectivity in the Gothic Romance Film of the 1940s. Cinema
Journal 23 (2): 29–40.
Walker, Michael. 1990. Secret Beyond the Door. Movie 34/35: 16–30.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1996. ‘I Hear You With My Eyes’ or, The Invisible Master. In Gaze
and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek, 90–126. Durham
& London: Duke University Press.
CHAPTER 5
Editing: Radical Reconstructions
The walls of this room are solid except right there. That leads to
something.
I’ve got to get it open because through there I can go through to
someplace
instead of leaving here by the same way that I came in.
—Maya Deren
Maya Deren wrote the words above in 1955 in a letter to film archivist
James Card, to whom she was sending prints of her films. She was refer-
ring to a scene in her first film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) in which one
version of herself advances upon another, brandishing a large knife. As
Deren moves from the table towards her sleeping double in the armchair
we see her sandalled feet take five separate strides. Each stride has its own
shot: the first is on sand, second on earth, third on grass, fourth on pave-
ment and fifth on the carpet back in the room. She moves the short dis-
tance between table and armchair yet travels through different realities to
get there. Deren explains this pivotal sequence thus, ‘that you have to
come a long way—from the very beginning of time—to kill yourself…’
(2019a: 192). She describes how, when rewatching the film with others,
this short montage always ‘buzzed a buzzer’ in her head. ‘It was like a
crack letting the light of another world gleam through’ (192). She frames
her fixation in spatial terms; as a room with walls that are solid ‘except
right there’. This ‘room’ is not only the room we see on the screen. It
functions as a synecdoche for a series of nested enclosures: the room of the

Switzerland AG 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40033-9_5
film frame, the film as a whole, and the filmmaking process. The ‘crack’
through which Deren suspects she can travel, taking us along with her, is
opened up in the invisible hinge between shots—a hinge which is both a
cut and a join (Figs. 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3).
The analogous connection Deren intuitively draws between physical
and mental space (‘You have to come a long way—to kill yourself’) is ger-
mane to my enquiry into the spatial depiction of subjectivity in the cin-
ema. Deren perceives how film syntax can alter the contours of film space,
and—in a broader sense—how she can use this to build her own kind of
cinematic house and inhabit it in her own way. I begin this chapter with a
reading of the editing in this film. I then go on to discuss two more recent
films in which the trope of ‘the woman in the house’ is subjected to fur-
ther interventions and interrogations through the editing process: Peter
Tscherkassky’s Outer Space (1999) and Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s The House
(2002). All three films invoke the reciprocal relationship between what
Alison Butler summarises as ‘cinematic syntax, architectural space and sub-
jective experience’ (Butler 2012).
These three avant-garde art films are experimental works screened in
galleries and museums rather than mainstream cinemas. This distinguishes
them from the films discussed in previous chapters, in which the editing
style and viewing context are more conventional. We have seen huge
Fig. 5.1 Deren steps out of her room onto the beach
5 EDITING: RADICAL RECONSTRUCTIONS 155
Fig. 5.2 ...and onto the pavement
Fig. 5.3 ...and back into her room
variations in rhythm and narrative organisation and some experimentation

with form, but on the whole the films explored so far do not aim to un-
build their cinematic homes, nor to disassemble in any radical way the
cinematic apparatus which ‘houses’ or frames those homes. There are sev-
eral points to make about this development. Firstly, at this stage in an
exploration rooted in materialist enquiry I am drawn to discuss films
working at the threshold of what is possible in the editing process.
Secondly, Meshes of the Afternoon, Outer Space and The House are not as
differentiated from their classical and more mainstream counterparts as
one may think. They are all generated by, invested in, and inspired by the
same figure and wish to tell a story about her no matter how fragmented
that story may at first appear. A woman approaches a house, opens the
front door, goes inside and what happens then is unpredictable. The core
figure of a house with a woman inside acts a generative kernel for each
filmmaker. Maya Deren’s film was conceived and made outside the
Hollywood Studio industry and its cinematic products. Yet it cannot be
viewed as wholly separate from that form of cinema. As Annette Kuhn
writes, ‘The film’s impulse, its desire, its very distinctiveness, is rooted in
preoccupations which also find expression—albeit in very different ways—
in other cinemas of the period’ (Kuhn 1988: 187). Catherine Fowler
makes a distinction between ‘gallery films’ and ‘cinema films’ in her article
‘Room for Experiment: Gallery Films and Vertical Times from Maya
Deren to Eija-Liisa Ahtila’ (2004). Yet she also points out what mutually
informs and enriches these two creative pathways. ‘A knowledge of cin-
ema’ she writes, ‘the expectations it sets up, its mode of spectatorship and
ways of making meaning is then a prerequisite to gallery films, which play
with, reflect upon and challenge that knowledge’ (Fowler 2004: 329).
Where can one draw an effective and definitive line between these three
experimental works and the films discussed so far? Generative connections,
intertextual resonances, formal echoes, and gestural crossovers flow freely
and across time between them all.
It is worth clarifying what I mean by ‘editing’ before I proceed. This is
pertinent when we consider the fundamental distinction between editing
and découpage, the latter being a concept and process I took time to eluci-
date in the first chapter. In Barnard’s monograph Découpage, we find this
simple statement from the late French writer and filmmaker Roger
Leenhardt: ‘I have recently defined editing as being carried out after the
fact on the exposed film and découpage as being carried out before the fact,
in the filmmaker’s mind, on the subject to be filmed’ (Barnard 2014: 37).
This is a basic yet accurate description, and if things were so straightfor-
ward no one would bother to write much more on the subject. But the
theoretical literature on editing, and on its sister term ‘montage’, is vast
and full of nuance. We know that joining two shots together creates a
meaning that is greater than the sum of its parts. ‘By the combination of
two “depictables”’, ventured Eisenstein in 1930, ‘is achieved the repre-
sentation of something that is graphically undepictable’ (1977: 30). We
also know, and Jacques Aumont reminds us in his book Montage (pub-
lished by caboose in the same series as Découpage and Mise en scène), that
the instantaneous switch from one shot to another corresponds to a ‘look
that jumps through space in the wink of an eye’ and that the decision to
either accentuate this shift or to cover it up is one of the fundamental
issues at the heart of the editing process (Aumont 2014: 4). ‘In the end’
Aumont asserts, ‘the entire history of film has consisted in choosing
between two paths: emphasising and making use of editing’s shock and
sensational value, or trying to bridle or attenuate it’ (10). In this chapter I
take the conscious decision to concentrate on three films in which the
editing is not trying to cover its tracks. On the contrary it is prominent,
engaged and—in the final analysis—important. What Aumont suggests as
his monograph on the subject draws to a close is that in a world now
flooded with a ceaseless flow of unrelated images, the discriminative power
of editing has begun to lose its hold, taking ethical concerns along with it
in the deluge. ‘If ‘montage’ can be said to be reaching the end of its reign’
he writes, ‘it is not as a tool to concatenate or even to structure, but as an
intellectual, aesthetic and even ethical principle’ (2014: 52). The cine-
matic works of Ahtila and Tscherkassky refute such despondent claims and
are entirely ethical in their stance, while Deren’s film remains compelling
and innovative to this day even if it is now easy to view via the indiscrimi-
nate flow of imagery on YouTube. Annette Michelson makes it clear that
Deren’s project, evident in both her theoretical writings about film as well
as her films themselves, demonstrates a conviction ‘that it was the artist’s
role, even morally incumbent on the artist, to confront and address the
forces threatening a generalised anomie’. Deren’s artistic practice,
Michelson writes, is ‘the most powerful antidote to what she sees as an
atrophy of consciousness’ (Michelson 2017: 89).
Meshes of the Afternoon is set inside the modest bungalow Deren was
renting at the time (a short period of three months) with her first husband
Alexander Hammid. Their home was a ‘California Bungalow’, a style
common to early twentieth century suburban development and to Los
Angeles in particular. These bungalows were, as Maureen Turim outlines
in her examination of the film, ‘one or one-and-a-half-storey stand-alone
houses with a low profile and a clustered floor plan’ (2007: 158). Simple
in design, well-built and affordable, the California Bungalow offered a

new way of living for an upwardly mobile, booming population with lim-
ited financial means and the desire to do better. This modern form of
suburban domestic space soon made its way into cultural representation.
Both Turim and Rhodes draw our attention to their frequent appearances
in Hollywood films of this period. ‘If we but list the number of films that
feature the word bungalow in their titles’ writes Rhodes, ‘we get a sense
of the degree to which the bungalow figured as something of a represen-
tational object across the first three decades of Hollywood filmmaking’
(2017: 65). Yet this new way of living did not usher in new ways of being.
With particular reference to the way the bungalow ‘performs’ (how it is
configured and made meaningful through découpage and mise-en-scène)
in the 1946 film Mildred Pierce (Curtiz) Turim and Rhodes both show
how, despite the idealist attempt to inculcate a more open spatial and
familial dynamics in the home, deep-rooted marital tensions and gender
relations still found a way of spatially playing themselves out in these new
spaces. ‘The seemingly progressive design’ Turim explains, ‘still garnered
associations at odds with its plastic harmony’ and its ‘ideal interior space’
was not necessarily ‘interiorized by women of the forties’ (2007: 159).
Speaking about Mildred Pierce, Turim observes that the connotations of
‘the working-class California bungalow as a confining compromise of
larger ambitions for women emerges as a subtext in one of Hollywood’s
darkest views of family life in the forties’ (2007: 158). Deren’s film may
have been regarded as an avant-garde piece in 1943, but it is set in a home
and generates feelings around that home that many in its audience would
recognise—not only from the more conventional films they were watch-
ing, but from their own lives.
One notable characteristic of the California Bungalow is that it has no
hallway. This deliberate architectural omission was intended to encourage
a more open-plan, less ritualised and more democratic way of living. But
the loss of the hallway is not without consequence. Hallways are useful
places in real life, and on film. Time follows different rules in a hallway as
if paused for a moment. In her article ‘The Ins and Outs of the Hall’
Céline Rosselin identifies their function as crucial spaces of transition. The
space of the hall, she explains, provides a ‘marginal or liminal’ zone that is
‘protective and neutralizing’ and helps to ease the ‘transition from the
public to the private world’ (Rosselin 1999: 54). She describes how even
the tiniest of spaces is inventively remodelled by residents to provide this
crucial area for transition and neutralisation. One couple attach coat hooks
onto the back of a wardrobe for example, while another creates an ‘imagi-
nary hall’ by placing a square meter of carpet on the floor by the door
where guests can leave their shoes (54). In the cinematic home hallways
do more than provide a space for shoes. They open out space for charac-
ters to be private for a moment and even reveal something about them-
selves. Key transitional ‘hallway moments’ occur in all of the films discussed
in this book except Meshes of the Afternoon: Craig’s Wife ends with Harriet
standing in its yawning space caught in a psychic revelation; Celia’s hall-
way is the neutral junction between the conscious life upstairs and the
unconscious life in the basement; Mabel’s hallway in A Woman Under the
Influence provides a spatial truce between cramped and over-charged
rooms; Jeanne Dielman’s hallway institutes an impersonal space in which
her clients can pay her for sex; even Elisa’s unstable home in The House
(discussed later in this chapter) has somewhere coats get hung up and
boots taken off before the walls start to melt down. But in Maya Deren’s
Hollywood home there is no such space. She simply opens the door and
crosses straight over the threshold into the front room. On film such direct
entrances can become ‘crucial and more powerfully cathected’ (Rhodes
2017: 73). Usefully to my work here, Rhodes draws an explicit connection
between this abrupt spatial transition and the process of cutting from one
shot to another. ‘To think along the lines of a cinematic metaphor’ he
writes, ‘the bungalow makes every entrance or exit from the house a jump
cut, a brusque edit, more jarring than the stately lap dissolve performed by
the entrance hall’s mediation of inside and out, public and private’ (2017:
73). Cuts can therefore perform as thresholds, thresholds as cuts. As we
have seen in the five-stride sequence described at the opening of this chap-
ter, Deren realises this. She can open a door straight into another room,
but she can also travel between worlds in a cut. Let us look more closely
at her ‘creative cutting’ (Deren’s term for the process of editing) and at
how she takes apart and reassembles the very substance and shape of her
home so that it becomes a space no longer structured by architectural
logic but activated instead to the shape of her unconscious.
Meshes of the Afternoon circles around a repeated series of events and
images like a mind trying to work something out. The film is constructed
around five separate entrances into the bungalow, each one a return to and
yet a complication of the first. The overall shape of the film is often
described as a spiral structure, or a vertical exploration of (or a drilling
down into) a single moment. But before any of this begins, the simple act
of going into the bungalow proves difficult. It takes time and effort to get
in. The stable, figural status of ‘home’ and the notionally simple action of
‘home-coming’ is not to be automatically assumed; there is process, com-
plication, estrangement and struggle. A mysterious, robed figure appears
on the road who our protagonist cannot follow, she must turn instead to
go up the steps, her shadow is cast on the door before her figure enters the
frame, she must try the door to see if it is locked, the key drops out of her
hand seemingly of its own accord and bounces down endless steps as if
running away, she retrieves it but is held back by the difficulty of slow
motion. In the ‘woman’s film’ of the 1940s the façade of a house or build-
ing is often shown first before we are taken inside that building and into
the narrative. Films such as Rebecca (Hitchcock 1940), Since You Went
Away (Cromwell 1944) and No Man of Her Own (Leisen 1950) begin
with the image of a house seen from a distance which is then pondered
over by a female voice-over. It might be slowly approached by the camera
or tracked alongside. There is a strong sense that the family home is being
newly considered, held up for inspection like an object in a snow-globe
but without the nostalgia. The home is, for this brief time, consciously cast
as a ‘set’ (which of course it is, recalling Neutra’s observation that archi-
tecture is a ‘stage for living’).1 Women find themselves placed inside these
sets, but are given a portion of space and time to reflect on them before-
hand. These suspended moments, situated somewhere outside, above or
around the narrative (and we recall from the previous chapter how tricky
it is to describe aural space in any accurate spatial sense), are imbued with
ambivalence. “This is a home” intones Barbara Stanwyck at the start of No
Man of her Own, “warm and friendly as a home should be. But not for
us… Not for us…” By the end of Leisen’s film the home has not been
abandoned or burnt to the ground, it is most definitely ‘for them’ and
family security is restored. But this is not the case in all films of this kind
and the intersecting genres of the Hollywood ‘woman’s film’, gothic
melodrama and film noir are cultural markers of deep fissures in a societal
fabric rent through by social change and the upheaval of World War II. Yet
all of the films in this book up to and including the most recent (Exhibition)
question the status of home, its gendered affiliation and its broader con-
notations. They each probe into what it means to make a home, keep
home, be at home and feel at home. The stakes are high, as many feminists
drawn to the imbrication of feminist with spatial concerns remind us. ‘The
containment of women within a dwelling that they did not build, that was
not built for them’ writes Elizabeth Grosz, ‘amounts to homelessness
within the home itself’. She continues:
[Home] becomes the space of duty, of endless and infinitely repeatable

chores with no social value or recognition, the space to affirm and replenish
others at the expense and erasure of the self, the space of domestic violence
and abuse, the space that both harms and isolates women. (Grosz 1994: 27)
Yet home also provides a site of resistance, a sense of community and dedi-
cation to that community, and a precious space in which to recompose
oneself. Home can become, as Laura Rascaroli points out in her discussion
of Akerman’s last film No Home Movie (2015), ‘a place of radical creativ-
ity’ (2020: 164). Deren turns her Laurel Canyon home into just such a
place. While she may not feel at home in it, she certainly feels at home in
the activity of filming her bungalow and creatively mobilising it to the
shape of her desires. ‘[W]hen I undertook cinema’ she continues in the
letter to Card, ‘it was not like discovering a new medium so much as com-
ing home into a world whose vocabulary, syntax, grammar, was my mother
tongue; which I understood, and thought in but, like a mute, had never
spoken’ (2019a: 191). If Deren comes home to the filmmaking process,
what happens when she comes home to her house? Let us look more
closely at how the film story is told, and more specifically at how shots are
edited together.
The authorship of the film has been periodically contested. It is clear
from interviews with both artists (and those who knew them who have
given their opinion on the matter) that, while Deren was an apprentice in
the filmmaking process and learnt a huge amount from Hammid (who was
a talented cinematographer and filmmaker of some experience), the film’s
distinctive vision came from Deren. The film was famously shot in two
weeks and edited by Hammid with Deren’s close attention and reviews.
Hammid had been offered work in New York, so time was short. “We
were rushed to finish it,” records Hammid in an interview in 1976, “before
we left for New York. I finished it just in time so we could pick up and
go…”.2 In an interview earlier that same year, Hammid paints a picture of
the basic editing set-up at the house: “[We] had rewinds and a projector.
I forget whether we had a viewer or not. We didn’t really have one…”.3 It
is clear that the editing was performed in the main by Hammid. But the
film was cut according to a unique shape and structure that Deren had
previously envisaged and written down in advance. The edit was a mutual
endeavour generated by Deren’s personal vision.
Unlike Celia’s dramatic entrance in Secret Beyond the Door, and indeed
unlike the entrance of any woman protagonist in a classical Hollywood
film constructed around her ‘to be looked-at-ness’, Deren’s filmic body

enters the film, body part by body part. First her shadow appears, then her
hand, her arm, and sandalled feet—all are shown before her whole body
and that signature of subjective presence, her face. Through this frag-
mented self-introduction Deren ritualises her cinematic entry. She rhyth-
mically arranges her bodily appearance as a means to induce mystery and
suspense, but also as an act of creative resistance and agency. She is aware
that she can control how she is to be perceived. Once Deren’s hand has
retrieved the endlessly falling key, her feet go back up the stone steps. Her
shadow approaches the front door, passing over textures of wall and wood.
Now her arm extends into the frame to unlock the door and push it open
with her hand. The film cuts to a low-level shot taken from the inside
looking out. We see Deren’s sandalled feet cross over into the room, the
sunlight casting shadows of her legs onto the carpet. This moment is held
for a few moments as Deren stands still in the doorway. The film then cuts
to an eye-level shot taken from her point of view, showing us what she sees
in the room. The cut marks the switch between objective and subjective
viewpoints, a shot pattern which orchestrates the entire film. The gaze of
the camera—aligned with Deren’s gaze—pans left to right taking in the
space. We see an open newspaper lying on the floor as if someone has just
left the room. On the left a sofa, chair, portrait on the wall, chintz curtains
on a window, sconce wall lights—a simple and conventional interior. The
gaze moves past a staircase framed by an archway in the wall before quick-
ening a little to rest on a table and chairs in a recessed dining area on the
right.4 We are taken closer towards the table where we see a cup (possibly
of coffee) and a loaf of bread with a large knife sticking out of it. Suddenly
the film makes an unexpected move, cutting to a close-up of the bread and
knife. As this happens, (or just afterwards because nothing seen can happen
in the cut itself) the knife appears to jump out of the bread and onto the
table, as if precipitated by the attentive force of the camera’s close look.
Dirk de Bruyn writes about this moment, ‘Through a jump cut in close-up
the knife jumps out of the loaf’ (2014: 88), implying that it is the cut itself
which causes the knife to jump—and he is right. This interpretation con-
curs with Ute Holl’s suggestion in her essay ‘Moving the Dancer’s Souls’
that ‘every subjective sensation of the protagonist corresponds to an
objective film trick’ (Holl 2001: 160). It is becoming clear as we watch
that Deren is playing with the potential of editing to act on what is seen,
performing what Rhodes calls a ‘kind of modern ‘magic” (Rhodes 2020:
10). The film famously opens with such a ‘film trick’. A mannequin’s arm
reaches into the frame from above holding a flower and extends down to
a sunlit driveway, appearing to lay the flower on its surface. The arm
instantaneously disappears leaving the flower. This vanishing act is not
strictly an editing ‘trick’ but is achieved by stopping the camera, removing
the arm but leaving the flower and starting the camera quickly up again
before anything much has changed. But the moment hails in magical dis-
placements to come. It is how Deren instates her intention at the outset to
play with the nuts and bolts of her medium.
The changes that occur inside are activated on the editing table invisi-
bly and behind the scenes, in tandem with certain visual effects achieved
with the camerawork and the movement of Deren. Deren is able to be
both onscreen and off, inside and outside her film at the same time, per-
forming interventions on her own figure as it moves through her domestic
space. It is a powerful place to be. Onscreen Deren finds her body pro-
pelled into spatially impossible positions by these unseen forces, floating
through a window upstairs when she should be coming through a door-
way, flying down from the ceiling to the front room instead of walking
down the stairs, sitting at the table facing three versions of herself while
another sleeps in a chair nearby, dealing with objects re-placing themselves
into odd places, discovering her front door key on her tongue. As Butler
writes, ‘the animation of the home and the objects within it evokes the
mischief of the sorcerer’s apprentice: in a world in which the woman con-
trols the look, any object might be instilled with agency’ (2002: 66). She
returns to the threshold of her bungalow four times while a man (played
by Hammid) enters on the fifth, and each time she re-opens her front door
she finds things a little more elaborately disrupted inside. Objects move
about in a kind of ‘spot the difference’ game, but the game is far
from random.
Things move ‘up one’ in each visitation thereby becoming more insis-
tent. Much of this is organised through cuts and splices, switches between
shots effecting switches between objects and locations like a magician’s
sleight of hand. The bread knife which jumps out of the bread on her first
entrance is at the bottom of the stairs on her second, replacing the tele-
phone receiver which was there on her first and has now moved up to the
bedroom. Deren steps past the knife to go upstairs, but it reappears under
the bedclothes. On her third visit the knife has moved upstairs into the
bed, but this time the bed itself has moved downstairs near to the armchair
in which the first Deren still lies asleep. This physically arduous task has
been more easily achieved through cutting from one room to another, one
shot to another. The third Deren goes to the window to watch her fourth
iteration enter the house. She takes the front door key out of her mouth
as she watches which—via a cut—turns into the knife. The fourth Deren
enters the house holding the knife instead of the key, as if passed on to her
by the psychic intentions of the third. This same knife is fully taken up by
the fourth Deren with intent to attack the first ignorant Deren sleeping in
the armchair. In a final ‘show-down’, or what Turim calls a ‘trial by fire’
(2007: 157), three awake Derens are gathered around the table looking at
each other and down at the tablecloth, taking turns to open the palm of
their hand to see what might appear there. The cutting of this scene is
composed musically, instating a rhythmic pattern of eyes looking, hands
opening, key circulating, knife appearing. The Deren with the black palm
is the one who must take up the knife to attack the sleeping version of
herself. The relay of objects at work in this house is not entirely linear but
it has a progression and an aim. It is more of a zigzag ‘snakes and ladders’
affair, in which a cluster of objects make their way up and down a ladder
of significance or in this case, a staircase. The key has a more intimate
journey, making its way into and out of Deren’s actual body. The Girl (as
Deren refers to her in various program notes on the film) is engaged in a
search for something or someone just beyond her reach and the objects
lead her towards it in an oblique way. They act as signposts rather than
symbols. Their jumping journey is one which represents, as Turim well
describes, a ‘montage of displaced being, a multiple quest riddled with
chutes and ladders, falling away from forward progress, then, paradoxi-
cally, an unexpected sliding forward’ (2007: 160). But it is not only objects
that move. Deren learns she can disassemble and reassemble the space of
the house itself on the editing table.
Her onscreen world becomes more illogical and elastic the further into
the filmic dream Deren travels. When the Girl first looks round to the
bedroom from the top of the stairs during her first visit to the house, she
sees a gauzy curtain blowing in the breeze at the window. On her second
entrance she makes the same journey up the stairs, but this time it takes an
inordinately long time to ascend. Through an effective combination of
slow-motion filming and dividing the stairway into three separate shots
taken from different angles, the journey is elongated. In a spatially desta-
bilising shot taken from above, which frames the small mezzanine between
stairs into a visual abstraction of lines and planes, Deren’s face floats into
the frame. But then the film makes a surprising cut. Instead of entering the
bedroom from the top of the stairs as we know she should, the following
shot shows the Girl gliding into the frame from the left and passing
through the same gauzy curtain with only empty, white space behind her.
She appears to be in a kind of cinematic bardo. Once she has passed
through the frame and left on screen right, the following shot is even
more surprising. She springs through the bedroom window on the left,
pausing briefly on the windowsill before stepping into the room, her eyes
wide with surprise. She has flown into the first floor bedroom from out-
side—a physical impossibility of course, but not in this magic house.
Onscreen Deren is at the mercy of her offscreen counterpart’s editorial
manipulations and offscreen Deren, like a puppet-master, controls her
onscreen self. In seven shots the Girl twists and turns her way through a
Piranesi-style nightmare on the staircase as she tries repeatedly to go up to
the bedroom, not knowing whether she is going up or down or sideways,
as neither do we. At one point she emerges through the arch into the liv-
ing room at ceiling height clinging on to the walls for dear life, her hair
blown about not only by the warm Hollywood winds, but by the invisible
and (let us not forget) silent forces at work inside her home.5 This blowing
breeze may have been helpfully provided by the 7 foot high electric restau-
rant fan the couple hired, but onscreen it becomes something else entirely.
We can read its stirring energy as the libidinous energy of Deren herself, as
she excitedly discovers how film process allows the ‘inner realties’ of her
thoughts to become reified onscreen.
The film’s form is often compared to a dream. The fact that the first
Deren falls asleep in an armchair and we see a ‘fuzzy’ effect over the lens
as she closes her eyes is not in itself definitive. This is the least ‘dream-like’
element in the film and the most derivative. It was (and continues to be) a
well-established, conventional way to visually represent the act of losing
consciousness, signalling to the audience that an inserted dreamlike narra-
tive is about to take place. The film’s oneiric quality is felt more keenly
through its uncanny resemblance to the way the mind weaves dream nar-
ratives inside our own heads. Deren is both subject and object of her cre-
ation, actor in and author of her vision. Onscreen she glides between these
two experiential frameworks with the effortlessness of a passe-muraille.6
The actor Deren walks, floats or reaches into a framed space that the audi-
ence has already interpreted as one seen through her eyes—a physically
impossible feat. For example, on her first entrance into the house we watch
Deren’s feet as she goes up the stairs. We then switch to a subjective view
as she reaches the top and peers round to the bedroom. Once that room
is seen, she is then transported directly into it via a cut. Once again, like
the shot of the bread knife at the beginning, her intent has power to carry
her places and the film is shaped by the agency of this intent. The point-
of-view shot roves around the room, taking in the record player on the
floor with a record playing on the turntable. But to our surprise, Deren’s
arm reaches into this point-of-view shot to turn the player off and lift the
needle from the record. This oscillation between, or to put it more accu-
rately, infusion of subjective and objective viewpoints structures the film’s
form. Far from confusing an audience, these intermingling perspectives
cause delight and recognition. The resulting atmosphere replicates cine-
matically a psychological experience common to us all: that odd feeling of
having a dream and being in a dream at the same time. And as in dreams,
no matter how weird things become, normal things still occur. She may fly
between floors, but the door always opens like a front door should.
The spiral-like structure of the narrative initially conceived by Deren
and laid out in her script (her découpage), filmed by herself and Hammid,
and finally organised on the editing table gives formal shape to what Deren
described as: ‘A film concerned with the inner realities of an individual’
(Deren 2019b: 248). Deren was a dancer, and one can view her film as a
visualised choreography between levels of conscious and unconscious
experience in which she casts layers of awareness into a ritualised and ludic
encounter. But Deren’s repeated entrances into the house and attempts to
follow the figure trailing an animated cabal of objects in its wake is read
more specifically by the audience as a quest. Someone lives in this house
and this person is apparently herself. But Deren is unable to make contact
with this mysterious figure. Her interior space is warped by psychic forces,
so ‘laden with the weight of the unconscious, of desire and of fantasy’ that
it is difficult to move through them in any logical or practical way (Turim
2007: 157). Meshes can be understood as a poetic rendition of the self’s
search for that most elusive and unattainable of objects—The Self. Turim
reaches the same conclusion, and attributes Deren’s repeated homecom-
ings to our endless desire ‘to enter, to find this other, to know the self, to
inhabit the home’ (2007: 155). But as we see in the film there is no coher-
ent, unified self to grasp nor is there a securely boundaried space in which
that entity can be safely housed or located. The search is endless and the
key, as Turim observes, is ‘falling still…’ (1986: 88).
There is nothing sure nor tangible about ‘the self’, and none of us has
any real idea about where that invisible entity might be or of what it is
constituted. Internal experience is hard to describe and even harder to
show. The film theorist needs to be careful not to lean too hard on abstract
terms like the ‘self’ and ‘interiority’ as interpretative endpoints, as they

have a way of dissolving critical energy and subsiding into psychological
vagueness. Deren rejected wholeheartedly any attempt at any psychoana-
lytical interpretations of her work. ‘The energies of the artist’ she stipu-
lated, ‘are devoted to so mating his psychic images with the art instrument
that the resultant product is imbued with vitality independent of its source’
(2019c: 25). In other words, she asks us not to forget the vital fact that
films are made and constructed. The lasting fascination and success of
Meshes of the Afternoon lies not in deciphering the exact meaning of the
‘message in a bottle’ communiqué from Deren’s secret self, but in the
film’s material aspects and our enjoyment of them: its ability to move a
woman around in time and space; its grainy, chiaroscuro images of a past
Hollywood endlessly receding in time; the syncopated cutting patterns;
spatial inversions; silences and later musical soundtrack; the simple fact
that Deren’s body flying in space appears as real, believable and concrete
onscreen as the nail polish on her sandalled feet. After she had made Meshes
Deren became passionately involved in communicating to others—espe-
cially those who wish to make their own films—the nature and propensi-
ties of this new medium. Cinema, she writes simply, ‘is uniquely capable of
presenting the unbelievable with a show-it-to-me convincingness’ (2019c:
22). It is, she continues, ‘a time-space art with a unique capacity for creat-
ing new temporal-spatial relationships and projecting them with an incon-
trovertible impact of reality—the reality of show-it-to-me’ (2019c:
29–30). One begins with an idea, she admits, but it is by allowing oneself
to be guided by the technical aspects of the medium that inner visions can
be realised in a way that is specific to that medium. It is only through mak-
ing ‘fine use’ of the practical affordances of the instrument that one’s
imaginative realities can be made manifest (2019d: 160). In a lecture
given in 1951 at the Cincinnati Museum of Art Deren made the following
statement:
If one applies the principle of penetration, ignoring aspect, then one has
simply gone through the door that leads nowhere and the work of art is left
behind. One understands other things, but in the work of art the problem is
to create a material object with sensory existence, which is a manifestation
of emotions, ideas, which are themselves non-material. So art is the manifes-
tation in material terms of non-material things. That is real meaning, not to
be penetrated and left behind. (Deren 2019e: 209)
Returning to the specific editing achievements of Meshes of the Afternoon,

we see how through her work with creative cutting Deren sculpts a new
kind of space for a new kind of body, neither of which is containing or
limiting. Both bodies (house and woman) are porous, pliable and unpre-
dictable. The relationship between Deren’s body and the architectural
space which surrounds it does not conform to normal rules of the ‘inside-
outside’ relationship. We are encouraged away from the view that her
house functions solely as a shell for her interiority, and that her body func-
tions in much the same way, as a ‘surface or shell that houses a depth or
interiority’ (Grosz 2001: 55). Deren’s world is interpenetrative, fluid and
malleable. Body and house flow in and out of each other and thresholds
become porous, no matter how many times the hard line between inside
and out is reinstated at the front door. ‘The limits of possible spaces’
observes Grosz in her later work Architecture from the Outside: Essays on
Virtual and Real Space, ‘are the limits of possible modes of corporeality:
the body’s infinite pliability is a measure of the infinite plasticity of the
spatiotemporal universe in which it is housed and through which bodies
become real, are lived, and have effects’ (2001: 56). Grosz makes these
observations as part of what she calls a ‘risky wager’, by which she seeks to
explore how ‘all the effects of depth, of interiority, of the inside, all the
effects of consciousness (and the unconscious), can be thought in terms of
corporeal surfaces, in terms of the rotations, convolutions, inflections, and
torsions of the body itself’. Her wager is ‘to think the subject in terms of
the rotation of impossible shapes in illegible spaces’ (2001: 55). These
propositions of ‘infinite pliability’ and the dissolution of corporeal-spatial
certainties (certainties which for Grosz are very much related to hege-
monic perceptions of space and subjectivity upheld by a patriarchy pre-
dominantly representing ‘white, middle class, male bodies’), chime with
comments Deren made fifty-five years earlier in ‘Cinema as an Art Form’
(1946). Three years after making Meshes of the Afternoon, Deren is formal-
ising ideas about the ability of the ‘instrument’ of cinema to take on what
she perceives to be the newly revealed ‘unstable equilibrium’ at the heart
of reality (Deren’s italics not mine). She speaks of the contemporary ‘indi-
vidual’ who, she theorises:
deprived of the absolutism which moulded the moral patterns of his life, is
faced with a critical desperate need to discover in himself an integrity at once
constant enough to constitute an identity, and adjustable enough to relate
to an apparently anarchic universe whose gravities, revolutions and constel-
lations operate according to a logic which he has yet to discover… Cinema,

with its capacity to manipulate time and space seems eminently appropriate
as an art form in which such problems can find expression. (Deren 2019c: 31)
Deren’s work in film continued as we know, as did her commitment to

communicating the nature of film art. Her aim was to inculcate ‘cinematic
thinking’. She emphasises that this can only develop when one fully
engages with and appreciates the practical affordances of the medium,
including any practical limitations one may encounter while shooting. ‘My
concern with cutting, or editing’ she writes, providing a specific example
from her work on Meshes of the Afternoon, ‘was born out of the fact that,
like all other amateurs, I had a hand-wind camera with a run of 20 to 25
feet, rather than a motor-drive that could go on and on’. Deren had there-
fore to ‘figure out how to achieve continuity in spite of discontinuous
shooting’ (2019d: 152–3). We find a similar commitment to ‘cinematic
thinking’ and film craft in the exploratory work of Finnish filmmaker Eija-
Liisa Ahtila, and I want now to draw her 2002 film The House into dia-
logue with Meshes of the Afternoon.
Here too we have a film in which a woman repeatedly enters a home
that is unbuilt and rebuilt through the editing process. Like Deren, Ahtila
draws a correspondence between the workings of the cinematic medium
and those of the human mind and senses, echoing Deren’s fundamental
claim that: ‘If the function of the camera can be spoken of as the seeing,
registering eye, then the function of cutting can be said to be that of the
thinking, understanding mind’ (2019f: 139–140). But en route to Ahtila’s
work I want first to pause at the work of another filmmaker inspired by
Deren who reflects as deeply and responds as materially towards the
medium, the Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky and his film Outer
Space (1999). The house in this film is not restructured so much as utterly
destroyed, and from this ruination I shall move on to Ahtila’s new creation.
Outer Space is a ‘camera-less’ film created entirely on the editing table
from found footage. In one sense the film is not ‘edited’ at all, or at least
not in the way we understand montage in any classical sense. The film
revolves around a woman struggling against an interior space which warps
and fragments around her. But while Deren excitedly rearranges her home
for her own purposes through the possibilities she finds offered by her
medium, Tscherkassky questions the underlying, darker tendencies of that
medium to participate in the subjugation of women. His film works to
expose the ‘house of film’ as a place in which women are not safely housed
at all. His editing method is worth describing in detail, but to understand

its effects I shall first describe the opening of his film.
Outer Space begins in primordial darkness (the darkness of outer space),
out of which images and sounds stutteringly appear. Agitated, partial
images of a house at night flicker into view at different moments and in
different positions on the screen. Sometimes these images briefly coalesce,
as if trying to cohere but not quite succeeding. The spectator, confused at
first, gradually develops the impression that the film is trying to take shape
before their eyes. A woman flickers into view, standing with her back to us
facing the house. A door number painted on a small stone sits on the lawn
beside her, number 523. This detail stands out amid the restless fits and
starts, like a singular detail in an otherwise unstable dream. The sound-
scape is as restless as the image. We hear electronic buzzes, the odd strain
of music, fizzing crackles—like a radio trying to tune itself. The woman
walks towards the house and opens the door, reaching for the doorknob
in the same way that Deren reaches for hers. Then, as Matthew Levine
pithily observes, ‘As soon as she enters the home—a metaphor for the
cinematic realm—everything breaks down’ (2018: 20).
All of these images and sounds have been forged from the footage of
another film entirely. Tscherkassky acquired a 35 mm copy of The Entity,
a supernatural thriller made in Hollywood in 1982, directed by Sidney J
Furie, and used this as his source material. Furie’s original film generated
two other works from Tscherkassky: a one-minute trailer for the Viennale
called Get Ready in 1999 and Dreamwork in 2001. All three form his
‘camera-less trilogy’. Outer Space does not retell the original story of The
Entity but seeks to redraw the drives and intensities that structure it to
create what Adrian Martin calls a ‘sympathetic critical intensification’ of
the original film (2018: 72). In other words, Tscherkassky moves beyond
the ‘narrative armature’ of The Entity to engage with what lies beneath,
the ‘film behind the film’, as transmitted by the energies and associative
connections that flow into and out of that film between maker and audi-
ence.7 Tscherkassky posits this substratum layer of signification as a kind of
cinematic id or unconscious. In order to get through to this unconscious
layer, all surface impressions must be dissolved. The artist does this by
watching his source material multiple times until ‘the original story starts
to crumble’ and the plot ceases to hold sway over him. (He claims to have
viewed The Entity 100 times.) Once the ‘homogenising forces’ of narra-
tive, character and representation are stripped away, all that remains is the
‘bare, beating heart of the moving image’ (Levine 2018: 9). It is at this
point that the original film’s underlying drives, sensations and intensities
can rise to the surface. Certain images and visual patterns persist, as we
shall see when we look more closely at Outer Space. Tscherkassky’s ulti-
mate aim is to ‘penetrate the skin of the medium and explore cinema’s
unconscious”8 and, once he has arrived in that strange region, to make a
film out of what he finds there. In the case of Outer Space he does this by
way of a clever conceptual leap.
Tscherkassky works manually on strips of photochemical film in a dark-
room. It is the material nature of analogue film stock itself that guides him
into invention (a response to the ‘aspect’ of his medium of which Deren
would no doubt have highly approved). The Entity was shot on 35 mm
CinemaScope film. 9 The filmmaker discovered that the entire CinemaScope
film strip can be made visible via photochemical processing, i.e. not only
the images on the filmstrip but also the projector perforation holes and the
optical soundtrack running along the edge of the image track can be made
visible. Tscherkassky describes this secret, concealed region as the ‘outer
space of the film strip’, which no doubt informs the title of his film. It is a
region of technical information kept hidden from the audience, for obvi-
ous reasons. This discovery led him towards constructing a film in which
the filmstrip, instead of being kept hidden, becomes ‘the main actor, rep-
resented mainly by the sound strip of the optical soundtrack, the perfora-
tion holes, and the celluloid itself’ (Tscherkassky 2017).
The original film tells the story of Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey) who
is terrorised by an invisible entity which assaults her repeatedly in her own
home. Typically, nobody believes her because the ‘thing’ cannot be seen.
Others are eventually persuaded of its reality and the entity is forced into
a laboratory in an attempt to destroy it. Carla is liberated and leaves for-
ever with her children. But as she walks around her shattered home one
last time to say goodbye, the front door slams behind her and we hear the
entity’s one and only verbal utterance in the film (shocking even now),
‘Welcome home—cunt’. Tscherkassky dives headlong into the depths of
this misogynist ferocity, the virulence of which undergirds Furie’s film. In
The Entity a fictional character is attacked by an invisible entity. In Outer
Space the woman ‘behind’ Carla—the actress Barbara Hershey—is attacked
by the film strip. This invisible ‘entity’ embodies the sadistic drives
Tscherkassky firmly locates in the cinematic apparatus itself. ‘All fans of
Outer Space agree’ writes Martin, ‘that it says, underlines, or reveals some-
thing that The Entity cannot: that violence is gendered, and that cinema is
complicit in this assault’ (2018: 68). This is where Tscherkassky’s film
fundamentally departs from Meshes of the Afternoon, which is a film made

by a woman who feels at home in cinema.
The artist begins with a metre length of unexposed 35 mm film stock
and lays it along a measured piece of cardboard. He continues:
The unexposed film is held in place by small nails with which the cardboard
is outfitted. I place one meter of found footage on top of my unexposed film
stock. The nails of the cardboard protrude through every fourth perforation
hole, so I can keep track of the frame lines: 35 mm film has four perforation
holes per film frame, each pair of nails holds one frame in place. Subsequently
I copy the found footage onto the raw material by exposing it to light.
(Tscherkassky 2012)
Tscherkassky does not cut up and rearrange his source material, so there is
no montage. Instead, he delves through its footage photochemically with
light. Focusing the red beam of a laser pointer pen onto single frames of
footage (in this case individual frames from The Entity), Tscherkassky
imprints visual fragments from each frame down onto the strip of unex-
posed film lying beneath it, thereby creating what James Leo Cahill art-
fully describes as ‘shimmering pools of exposed images against completely
unexposed, pure black fields’ (2008: 95). He repeats this process, expos-
ing multiple images from the same frame as well as images from other
frames down onto single frames below, creating a packed fusion of expo-
sures. ‘In this way’ describes Tscherkassky, ‘I can mix details from entirely
disparate sequences and each individual frame becomes an intricate optical
collage. Parts of Outer Space include up to five multiple exposures’
(Tscherkassky 2012).
Significantly to my concerns here, Tscherkassky frames this whole pro-
cess in psychological terms. He draws an explicit parallel between his
efforts in the darkroom (what he refers to evocatively as his ‘darkroom
interventions’) and the processes Sigmund Freud identified as key to our
creation of dreams, our ‘dreamwork’ or ‘Traumarbeit’.10 In order to cre-
ate meaning in a dream, explains the filmmaker, ‘the main elements’ are
‘the use of displacement and condensation’. These are the two mental
processes Freud identifies as key to dreamwork. ‘You take something from
somewhere and remove it and put it somewhere else and there you con-
dense it’ Tscherkassky continues. ‘That’s how dream works—and I do
basically the same’.11 He works directly with found footage as dreamers
work with their internalised personal lives. ‘I take something like found
footage’ he explains:
… scenes from a totally different film and take it out from that film, replace
it by moving it onto my worktable in the dark room and then the condensa-
tion takes place by double, triple, quadruple, quintuple exposure at the same
time, in the dark room, so I get the layers and the condensed, displaced situ-
ation… (Tscherkassky 2015)
The Entity is formally structured around a series of recursive images and

visual mise-en-abymes, one reason Tscherkassky found the film so genera-
tive a source. At the climax of Furie’s film, the scientists build a double of
Carla’s house and place her inside it as bait in order to entrap the entity.
This house is enclosed inside a larger, glass house which in turn is enclosed
inside the larger laboratory. Like a Russian doll, one house is encased
inside another, and another. Carla is placed at the epicentre of a series of
nested enclosures, each one containing the other, and paces around deep
inside them like a nervous doll in a doll’s house. She is watched from
above by the scientists, who have gathered in a suspended viewing box
waiting for the entity to arrive. Like a strange hybrid of audience, projec-
tionist and director, this white-coated group waits for the demon to begin
its assault in much the same way as they might wait for a horror film to
start. They even have a video screen installed inside their glass box on
which to watch the attack unfold. Tscherkassky extends this ‘box within a
box’ structure to include the overarching structure of the cinematic appa-
ratus, whose secretive components can happily, due to the nature of the
CinemaScope film strip, be laid bare onscreen.
The filmic attack on Hershey does not begin straight away but begins
in earnest once she lies down on her bed.12 This gives the audience time to
attune to the way the film is communicating to them. Perhaps more
importantly it shows the influence of classical Hollywood narrative on
Tscherkassky’s work. An avid cinephile, he states plainly that he wants his
efforts in the darkroom ‘to attract and affect my audience as deeply as my
fellow Austrian compatriot Billy Wilder does with a comedy produced by
the Hollywood studio system’ (Bachmann 2018: 31). Outer Space may be
set in a wild and unfamiliar filmic world, but it still has timing. This returns
us to Fowler’s observation on the links between ‘cinema films’ and ‘gallery
films’ noted earlier in this chapter, in which she states that a ‘knowledge of
cinema, the expectations it sets up, its mode of spectatorship and ways of
making meaning’ is still a ‘prerequisite to gallery films, which play with,

reflect upon and challenge that knowledge’ (Fowler 2004: 329). Once
Hershey lies down, a restless mottling on the surface of the image starts up
and intensifies. Hershey’s seems aware that something disturbing is going
on, sensing a force she cannot see but which can see her. Her watchful eyes
resemble those of Deren in Meshes and, as we shall see, Elisa in The House;
three wide-eyed, wary women in woefully unstable spaces. Sitting up sud-
denly as if propelled, she finds herself trapped in a maddening, repetitive
gesture. Her head jerks from side to side with unnatural speed without her
will and she is powerless to stop it. Her head then splits into two heads,
and this mirrored self-suffers the same fate (Fig. 5.4).
The soundtrack vocalises this physical attack by emitting a mechanical
screeching shot through with a scream that is repeatedly stifled as it tries
to escape from Hershey’s mouth. Suddenly the whole room triumphantly
splits into two, three and four in gestures of aggressive, cinematic bravura.
Things accelerate quickly and Hershey’s body is smashed into smithereens
along with everything around her. Windows shatter and matter explodes
as more chaotic energy is unleashed. Amy Taubin summarises Tscherkassky’s
motivations here, describing these frenzied spatial fragmentations as ‘pow-
erful correlatives for the psychical processes Tscherkassky wants to evoke’
(Taubin 1993). After several minutes of intense and violent chaos
Tscherkassky reveals the identity of the attacker. As Hershey cowers against
Fig. 5.4 Hershey‘s head is forcefully doubled (image from Outer Space courtesy
of the artist and sixpackfilm)
a wall, jagged lines begin to dissect her, which we can see clearly are shreds
of film stock. Gigantic 35 mm sprocket holes punctuate and pierce the
image in vibrating vertical lines, and the skeletal signature of the optical
soundtrack joins in, zigzagging maniacally across the screen. Finally
Hershey is obliterated and the film strip reigns supreme, dancing ecstati-
cally to and fro across the screen (Figs. 5.5, 5.6).
Fig. 5.5 Hershey under attack (image from Outer Space courtesy of the artist
and sixpackfilm)
Fig. 5.6 Filmstrip with sprocket holes and optical soundtrack attack Hershey
(image from Outer Space courtesy of the artist and sixpackfilm)
After this assault an unexpected calm descends. The screen fades to

black and the soundtrack goes quiet. But once again Tscherkassky demon-
strates his attachment to cinematic genre by playing with a narrative trope
common to horror films: just when you think it’s all over, something
worse comes along. The house flickers back into view and gets larger as if
being slowly approached. This new ‘entity’ has more gravitas than the last.
Its movement and voice (embodied by the image track and soundtrack)
are steadier and more assured, less frantic than the chaotic frenzy of before.
In the original film Carla tells her therapist that the bruises on her ankles
were caused by two smaller entities who she describes worryingly as being
‘like children’. These held her down while the larger entity (in a grotesque
parody of a parent) raped her. Tscherkassky’s film echoes this ‘small-to-
big’ structure. As this more ‘adult’ force draws closer to the house it
reveals its identity. Two huge pillars of film strip appear on either side of
the screen, fusing together then drawing apart as if flexing their cinematic
muscle. Its ‘voice’ is deep-throated and mechanical, more authoritative
than the crazed insanity that characterised the previous vocalisation. The
windows are inverted and bifurcated, as if the house is being forcefully
prised open and turned inside out. Cahill notes Tscherkassky’s sexualisa-
tion of space in this scene, writing that, ‘Mirrored images of bay windows
look from inside onto the exterior of the house, suggesting an impossible,
invaginated space where interior and exterior fold into each other’ (Cahill
2008: 90). This visualised splitting precedes the rape of Hershey and can
be read as a spatial representation of that event; screen space is forced apart
like the enforced opening of a body that is to come. But when the rape
occurs the image becomes more straightforward. Hershey is violently
slammed against the mirror and rammed into repeatedly, the soundtrack
vocalising this with machine-like relentlessness. We have no choice but to
witness a scene of unadulterated brutality—as indeed we are forced to do
in the original film. This editorial decision might suggest Tscherkassky
judges it too crucial a scene to manipulate.
By positioning the invisible film strip as one driven by sadistic and
misogynist desires, Tscherkassky alerts us to the disturbing tendencies of a
preternaturally male-dominated cinema and the harm imposed on women
by the male gaze. He does not exempt himself from this troubling process.
In his later film Dreamwork he makes his complicity quite clear. He photo-
chemically exposes his editing tools onto the film strip interspersed with
images of himself at work in the darkroom (his face, his pair of
glasses), thereby revealing his controlling presence. In Outer Space Hershey
is profoundly unsafe in her home. Every part of her body and space down
to the tiniest detail is (literally) in Tscherkassky’s hands, frame by frame.
How then, is this any different from the imposition of control and violence
on women which underpins the original film? As Martin recounts:
Tscherkassky did not escape the reprimand—directed at him within a film

conference by no less an avant-garde luminary than Yvonne Rainer—that
Outer Space merely reproduced, in another way and for another crowd, the
violence inflicted upon women by the entity... and by The Entity. It is a
charge Tscherkassky answers in this way: in his film, Barbara Hershey not
only fights back—but also wins. (Martin 2018: 73)
Tscherkassky is fully aware of his power in the editing room, and this
enables him to problematise the act of making and watching films.
‘Looking in cinema’ he states plainly, ‘watching film, should not be so
cheap’.13 Hershey emerges as the winner (according to Tscherkassky) and
while her onscreen home is utterly destroyed, she smashes into smither-
eens that structure which overarches it—the filmic apparatus. Under attack
from the 35 mm image and optical soundtrack, she fights back. At the end
of the film she stares out defiantly from a hole in a black and silent screen,
a hole she has forged and through which she can now gaze directly at the
audience with her subjectivity very much intact. But of course it is
Tscherkassky who has placed her there.
Deren reconfigures her home on the editing table, Tscherkassky demol-
ishes his in the darkroom. Both artists edit manually on material strips of
analogue film, Deren by cutting and joining, Tscherkassky by travelling
through his celluloid with light. Eija-Liisa Ahtila takes her home apart
assiduously brick by cinematic brick in the digital domain. Before I look at
her editing of The House, I want to highlight two foundational proposi-
tions from Deren which stretch over time like a bridge of influence because
they relate to the way in which the two later films are edited.
Deren had a theory about what happens in our minds when watch a
film. ‘As we watch’ she writes, ‘the continuous act of recognition in which
we are involved is like a strip of memory unrolling beneath the images of
the film itself, to form the invisible underlayer of an implicit double expo-
sure’ (2019g: 116). This is very much in tune with the work of Tscherkassky
who, as we have seen in this short analysis of just one of his films, takes the
firm view that films engage their audience on more than one level of con-
sciousness. Deren’s picturing of our mental process of recognition
‘unrolling’ like a strip of memory ‘beneath the images of the film itself’
bears striking resemblance to the situation Tscherkassky materially recre-
ates in his darkroom; one strip of film running underneath another like a
kind of psychic trace paper, on which the hidden world of feelings and
thought running at the same time as the narrative on the surface above is
imprinted. Mulvey talks about the lure of the ‘film behind the film’.14
Tscherkassky positions this hidden realm in a similar manner. ‘Behind the
power of the imaginary reality of classical film’ he writes, ‘one can find the
symbolic discourse of the Other (the author/filmmaker) in which the
power of film as imagined reality is revealed’ (Levine 2018: 15). Whether
behind, beneath or buried within, levels of psychic reflection and experi-
ence are being framed in spatialised terms. This brings me to the second
of Deren’s key observations on film, one which links more directly to the
work of Ahtila. In a seminar on ‘Poetry and the Film’ held in New York in
October 1953, Deren put forward the following proposal about what
constitutes poetry and poetic film:
The distinction of poetry is its construction (what I mean by “a poetic struc-

ture”), and the poetic construct arises from the fact, if you will, that it is a
“vertical” investigation of a situation, in that it probes the ramifications of
the moment, and is concerned with its qualities and its depth, so that you
have poetry concerned in a sense not with what is occurring, but with what
it feels like or what it means… Now it also may include action, but its attack
is what I could call the “vertical” attack, and this may be a little bit clearer if
you will contrast it to what I would call the “horizontal” attack of a drama,
which is concerned with the development, let’s say, within a very small situ-
ation from feeling to feeling. (Maas 1963)
Deren cites Shakespeare’s work as an example of how these two ‘move-

ments’ can be combined into a single work. In a Shakespeare play the
drama generally moves forward ‘on a “horizontal” plane of development’
and one action leads to another. But ‘once in a while’ she explains, the
playwright arrives ‘at a point of action’ where he wants to stop and reflect
more deeply on what the character is feeling and to ‘illuminate the mean-
ing to this moment of drama’. Shakespeare ceases the horizontal move-
ment and ‘investigates it “vertically”’. The result is that ‘you have a
“horizontal” development with periodic “vertical” investigations which
are the poems, which are the monologues…’. Deren goes on to define a
poetic film as a “vertical” film, because it ceases to move forward in action
to travel into the ramifications of the single moment. ‘In a vertical devel-
opment’ Deren continues, ‘it is a logic of a central emotion or idea that
attracts to itself even disparate images, which contain that central core,
which they have in common’ (Maas 1963). Meshes of the Afternoon works
as a “vertical” film. It continually returns to a singular moment to explore
its depth and associations, defying any effort of its protagonist and indeed
of the moving film in the projector, to move forwards ‘horizontally’ in
time. However, Deren must find ways to present this vertical movement
sequentially—one could say horizontally—in the sense that one shot must
follow another as dictated by the film equipment of her day. Fowler asks
what might have happened if Deren had been able to show things happen-
ing not one after the other in a linear fashion but at the same time. This
brings us forward in time to the Ahtila’s work with multi-screen installation.
The House is the fifth and final episode of the longer film Love is a
Treasure (2002), a multi-screen installation film screened in art galleries
and museums.15 The individual episode is also shown as a stand-alone
video installation. For those lucky enough to see the film spread out over
three large screens in a gallery space (which at the time of writing does not
include me), the experience is a memorable one. As Butler describes:
Encountered in darkened rooms, her work transports us to strange worlds

in which the power of the imagination holds as much sway as the laws of
nature, in which words, images, colours and sounds govern the shapes of
time and space. (Butler 2012)
While it takes the form of a three-screen installation, The House can also
be watched as a single-channel piece in which shots follow one another
sequentially. For this version Ahtila and her editor Tuuli Kuittinen cre-
ated an alternative edit. Ahtila regularly edits dual versions of her work,
enabling them to be screened in cinemas and on home screens as well as
in galleries. Butler describes these variant forms as ‘amphibian texts’
which ‘hybridize the logics of narrative cinema and visual art’ (2005: 2).
While the single-screen version of The House is more accessible to view
(it is available on a DVD collection of Ahtila’s works), watching the film
in this way is a less immersive and layered experience. The difference
between the two edits is primarily determined by the overlapping and
discursive complexity offered by one over the other, and I shall touch
on key points of variance when it is useful. But it is also the film’s
immersive nature when presented as a spatial installation in a large space
that cannot be replicated. The three screens are set in a slight arc, the
central screen winged on either side by two others which curve slightly
inwards, offering a subtle form of spatial embrace. Sounds are transmit-
ted from points around the gallery including the space behind the spec-
tator (Fig. 5.7).
But the single-screen version is none the less compelling to watch. The
fundamental directives of each version are the same. One could perhaps
claim the private intensity of watching the single-channel version on one’s
own screen is an experience foreclosed to those viewing it in the more
open space of a public gallery. Ahtila’s work in this field is exploratory, and
critical enquiry into the complex nature of spectatorial engagement with
multi-screen work is in flux as the art form evolves. Butler draws our atten-
tion to the complexity of this issue in her monograph on the subject,
Displacements: Reading Space and Time in Moving Image Installations
Fig. 5.7 The House in three-screen projection (image courtesy of the artist and
Kristallisilmä/Crystal Eye)
(2019). She lays out the problems inherent in drawing binaristic compari-
sons between the ‘supposedly passive cinema spectator with the purport-
edly active viewer in the gallery’ (86). ‘The notion of the mobile viewer as
flâneur’ she explains, ‘has been aptly described by Erika Balsom as a ‘petri-
fied cliché’ which retains its explanatory value only through the resistance
of ‘a simple equation of mobility with either criticality or freedom” (86).
The multi-screen installation in an open gallery space is a new form of
what Jenny Odell defines as ‘attention-holding architecture’. Such archi-
tecture, Odell suggests, ‘holds open a contemplative space against the
pressures of habit, familiarity and distraction that constantly threaten to
close it’ (Odell 2019: 6). But Butler reminds us that multi-screen work
(and the cinematic diptych or triptych in particular) is not a new form of
cinematic art, but one which is re-emerging. In ‘Feminist Film in the
Gallery: If 6 was 9’ she identifies it as a ‘major new form in contemporary
art in works by Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Gillian Wearing, Sam Taylor-Wood,
Shirin Neshat, Isaac Julien, and many others’ (Butler 2005: 3). But she
also charts the history of such work, drawing on critical observations from
others in the field. Peter Weibel traces multi-screen presentation back to
the expanded cinema of the 1960s (2005: 3), although Butler clarifies
notable differences between its practice then and now. Lev Manovich,
who describes the compositional organisation of multi-screen works as
“spatial montage”, claims this new form stems from a repressed artistic
tradition reaching much further back in time. The ‘tradition of spatial nar-
ration in Western culture’ explains Butler, ‘from fresco cycles to narrative
paintings, was suppressed by Fordist modes of production that instead
emphasise sequential organization’ (2005: 7). “Cinema followed this logic
of industrial production” claims Manovich. “It replaced all other modes of
narration with a sequential narrative, an assembly line of shots that appear
on the screen one at a time” (7). This comparative observation is also not
new. Deren proposes something similar in ‘Planning by Eye’ (written in
1947), comparing the ‘assembly-line organization of production’ at the
heart of classical Hollywood filmmaking with the efficiency of a Fordian
assembly line. ‘All this is entirely logical’ she admits, ‘in a situation in
which enormous sums are invested and must be guaranteed returned’.
(Deren 2019d: 155–156). The renewed impulse towards multi-screen
exploration and the provision of an experiential space of this kind for the
spectator has ethical implications of which Ahtila is fully aware. The direc-
tor is constructing an alternative cinematic ‘home’ for audiences to imagi-
natively and sensorially inhabit. This invites them to reconsider normative,
habitual modes of perception and reflection. It is also what the film itself
is inviting them to do.
Ahtila wrote the script for The House after a period of research into
psychosis and interviews with women who live with the condition. Unlike
the sensationalised version of the disorder often presented in onscreen fic-
tions (the ‘mad woman in the attic’, the hysterical woman, the woman
who is “just seeing things darling” etc), Ahtila’s film takes psychosis ‘liter-
ally, or authentically’ (Bal 2013: 50). The House begins with a shot of a car
filmed from above winding its way along a country road in a verdant
Finnish landscape. We cut to a position in front of the car and see a young
woman behind the wheel (played by Marjaana Maijala). The credits tell us
her name is Elisa, but we never hear her name spoken in the film. We see
changing viewpoints of the landscape from the car, which when shown on
three screens create an overlapping, collage effect. The car drives through
a forest and a house soon appears on the right. Elisa parks the car near to
the house, gets out with her shopping and walks towards the front steps.
As she does so, a female voiceover begins to speak: “I have a house. There
are rooms in the house. There is a terrace outside the front door. After the
terrace you walk up three steps to go inside.” The figure on the screen
performs these actions as they are described. Vision and sound are in
accord and cinematic convention leads us to attribute the voiceover to
Elisa. Once inside, her voiceover continues: “After that there is a hallway
where I take off the clothes I wear outdoors. Opposite is another door
that opens directly eastwards”. The film cuts to show us this door, through
which we see an expanse of blue water. In the three-screen version, Ahtila
has space to spread her story horizontally. We see the forest on either side
of the house for example, and the house on the middle screen. Elisa speaks
in Finnish. English subtitles appear on each screen simultaneously, which
establishes a certain unity between screens. Elisa enters the kitchen, and
her voiceover continues its hyper-literal description of her actions. She eats
some cereal, reads the paper and the television plays in the other room, as
described. Her voiceover declares, “All this is routine” and we would
agree. What Elisa says happens, happens. And yet, this overdetermined
verisimilitude invokes a subtle tension in the spectator. If everything is
‘just so’ then at some point we know it will not be. Like Tscherkassky and
Deren before her, Ahtila is aware of cinematic conventions and melodra-
matic tropes. Films set in unstable houses always begin with an emphasis
on normality. Everything is always ‘just fine’ until it isn’t. As Barry Curtis
notes in his study of haunted houses on film, ‘Houses are characteristically
first encountered in the full daylight of rational decision-making’

(2008: 179).
Ahtila cuts to the living room where Elisa now stands looking out of
the window. Unexpectedly, at this point she speaks out loud. While sur-
prised by this shift, the spectator swiftly readjusts their ‘audiovisual con-
tract’ with the film (a notion explored in the previous chapter on sound).
Evidently there is more than one way of speaking in, and listening to, this
film. Nevertheless, someone speaking out loud when they are on their
own in a house is not as usual (or as ‘normative’) an occurrence to a film
audience as is the presence of a voice-over, no matter how untethered and
unlocatable that voice-over may be. This first instance of a switch to direct
speech sets in motion a procedural splitting of image from sound that will
build in intensity as the film unfolds. We now have two levels of sonic
enunciation at work in the film: either ‘heard’ speech or ‘real’ speech (i.e.
a voice from an unknown source as opposed to a voice from a source
which is clearly seen). A basic dialectic is suggested between what is ‘imag-
ined as heard’ and what is ‘seen as heard’. Moreover, it is not clear who
Elisa is talking to. She does not look at the camera, so it is not necessarily
the audience. Continuing to speak out loud, Elisa describes the diurnal
movement of the sun as it moves from the back of the house round to the
front. The film cuts to the outside and we see what she describes. At this
point her voice reverts to a voiceover. Because of course you cannot be in
two places at once. Or—perhaps you can. The three screens have already
demonstrated that Elisa can in fact be in more than one place at a time. We
have watched her enter the house on the left-hand screen while she comes
into the hallway in the middle. She walks away from the hall into the
kitchen on the middle screen, while walking towards us into the kitchen
on the right. There is nothing unsettling in this for the audience. I would
suggest something more to the contrary, that we enjoy this mutability
between screens, it is discursive. We have not lost our bearings. Elisa’s
vocal narrative describes what we see, while the credits on each screen
hold them in steady equilibrium. Elisa’s tone of voice is calm, steady, and
rational and remains so throughout the film. Returning inside, Elisa
addresses us once again in direct speech, describing the trees outside. As
before, when the film cuts to show us these trees, the voiceover returns.
“Seen from here, the trees are right in front”. We return inside. But now,
contrary to our expectation, her voice remains in voiceover.
I have described this early sequence in detail because it demonstrates
how precisely Ahtila is working to disassemble cinematic elements of
sound and image and to what effect. Her film is incrementally ‘undoing’
the stable ontological status of Elisa’s voice. Through this simple detach-
ment of sound from its source Ahtila can articulate something significant
about psychosis in cinematically specific terms. Aural hallucination is a
major feature of psychotic experience. Hearing detached voices and sounds
that are no longer connected to their physical source, or indeed which
have no visible source at all, is a common and frightening symptom of the
condition. Cinema is formally equipped to depict this process. It can also
choose what to make visible, which is Ahtila’s next target.
Back in the living room, Elisa remarks that if she moves her body
slightly to the right she can no longer see the trees outside. “When I take
a step to the right, behind the armchair, the curtain is in the way…”. We
see Elisa move slightly to the right on the central screen, while on the left
a point-of-view shot shows how the curtain blocks the view of the trees.
On the right-hand screen we see a different angle of the room entirely and
Elisa is no longer present. The single screen version shows Elisa’s observa-
tions step by consecutive step. In both versions however, the film is for-
mally participating in Elisa’s thought process. As she moves to change the
view, so does the camera. Elisa is considering the ‘framing’ nature of per-
ception; what is seen is ‘in frame’ and what is unseen is ‘left out’ of the
frame. By choosing what one sees, one chooses what to frame. Bal sug-
gests Elisa is ‘thinking in film’, and that her remark about the blocking
curtain ‘offers insight into the properties of cinematic framing’ (2013:
93). The significance of this, in Bal’s view, is that it enables Ahtila to con-
nect the ‘political impact of madness’ with the ‘cinematic aesthetic’. From
the ‘far side of psychosis’ Bal writes, ‘the woman is the expert who can
demonstrate what cinematic vision is, and what is “unnatural” about cin-
ematic vision itself’ (2013: 93–4). At this stage in the film, Elisa is not yet
at the ‘far side of psychosis’. We are taken further into this domain step by
relentless step. What happens next formally enacts the intensification of
Elisa’s condition.
Elisa’s voice-over tells us about the untrimmed clumps of spruce trees,
and we cut to a shot outside showing us these trees. But suddenly, a shot
of the car appears as if from nowhere. Elisa’s voice is notably absent. Last
seen parked outside the house, it now moves oddly back and forth and
with its headlights on even though it is daytime. It turns sideways and
starts to veer in and out of frame. Its movements have been speeded up
which contributes to the general weirdness of the scene. The film cuts to
a closer view and we see there is no driver. The car is moving by itself.
This is the film’s first venture into fully-fledged, visual hallucinatory

experience. Ahtila’s processive disjuncture of audiovisual elements cine-
matically mimics the perceptual unpicking of reality brought about by psy-
chotic delusion. In classical cinema, the apparatus works to maintain
formal unity between visual and aural elements. This process preserves the
integrity of the filmic object and any danger of revealing the potentially
subversive heterogeneity at the heart of cinematic artifice is kept at bay.
The work also preserves the unity and integrity of the bodies to whom the
film is addressed, as theorised notably by Doane (1980). Audiovisual ele-
ments are conventionally aligned with sensorial processes and their syn-
chronicity works to stabilise and unify them. The camera is linked to the
eye, the soundtrack to the ear. As Doane explains, cinema ‘presents a spec-
tacle composed of disparate elements—images, voices, sound effects,
music, writing—which the mise-en-scène, in its broadest sense, organises
and aims at the body of the spectator, sensory receptacle of the various
stimuli’. To avoid confusion and any subsequent refutation of the filmic
object, classical mise-en-scène:
has a stake in perpetuating the image of unity and identity sustained by this
body and in staving off the fear of fragmentation. The different sensory ele-
ments work in collusion and this work denies the material heterogeneity of
the “body” of the film… what must be guarded is a ‘certain “oneness”’.
(Doane 1980: 47)
Continuity editing—a technical construct that formally supports the

equally as constructed notion of a unified and coherent self—is, in one
sense, a reassuring lie. Ahtila digitally unravels this ‘oneness’ in the edit
suite. By releasing sound and image from the hegemony of ‘oneness’ by
splitting the image between screens and setting her sounds ‘free’ to roam
the gallery space, Ahtila makes her medium function metaphorically on
several fronts. As Bal describes, ‘the solidarity between the medium and
the mental state of the figure converge, enriching our “thinking in film”
about both’ (2013: 93). Ahtila realises that she can, as Bal summarises,
deploy ‘psychosis as a medium, with the triptych installation form and its
discrepant sounds as its literalizing metaphors or embodiment’ (2013:
90). But Ahtila’s project is more extensive than simply to provide an audi-
ence with a cinematically embodied experience of psychosis. Deploying
the dispositif of multi-screen installation, Ahtila’s ultimate aim is to recon-
figure our view of the world through the splitting lens of this condition.
‘The point of this installation’ writes Bal, ‘is not to make us all feel tor-
tured by psychotic delusions’ (2013: 113). Neither, I might add, is it to
make us relieved we do not suffer from the condition. Referencing
Heidegger’s concept of Geworfenheit or (literally translated) of being
‘thrown into the world’, a state in which we might experience ourselves as
being placed into this world without agency or consent, Bal argues that:
[…] if we are to be affected by Elisa’s forceful Geworfenheit (“thrownness

into the world”), we must, like her, grasp the diversity of perspectives that
make up the “being” of others who are there, with or even inside us.
Psychotic behaviour is an effective metaphor for this engagement with the
world. (Bal 2013: 113)
The scope of Ahtila’s project reaches from the psychological domain into
the political, drawing vital connections between the two in the process.
Normal ‘footholds’ on perception are founded on basic assumptions of
the sensorial integrity of the individual. These assumptions serve to uphold
‘liberal humanistic notions of the self’ (Butler 2019: 79) as a coherent and
boundaried being. Once these stable footholds have been loosened, the
filmmaker can move us towards a wider consideration of our relationship
with others. She does this by dissolving the hermetic borders
between worlds.
Elisa’s world calmly becomes unhinged. Nothing stays where it belongs,
her car comes inside and a mini version drives horizontally along the walls,
and borders between the outside and inside melt down. But things are
taken apart in a methodical way, and there are no sensationalist or melo-
dramatic shocks. Ahtila’s edits are economical, paratactic, and assured.
When Elisa returns from her third shopping trip, (one recalls Deren’s
repeated returns to a house which each time is a little more disturbed),
Ahtila makes a significant editorial move in a pivotal trio of shots. I shall
describe these as they occur in the single-screen version, as it is less ver-
bally cumbersome. (Words, like images on a strip of film, find it easier to
describe things happening one at a time). Elisa walks through her living
room and glances to her right. The film cuts to a shot of the television
playing and on its screen we see a black and white cow walking about in a
green field. Ahtila then cuts to a shot in which the cow in the field now
occupies the whole of the film frame. In Aumont’s ‘wink of an eye’ the
cow has crossed over from the framed world on the television screen to the
framed world of the film screen. The transgressive journey does not stop
there. In the following cut, the cow crosses over from the film frame into
Elisa’s house. The third instalment in this trio of shots shows the cow
walking nonchalantly across the living room through one door and out of
another. The single screen edit must show these border crossings as they
occur sequentially, which makes the threshold-crossing of the cow a more
cathected event. The three-screen version (more difficult for me to
describe in words) enables a more gradual, overlapping dissolve between
worlds to occur. If the cow were to continue on its threshold crossing
journey, the next logical step would be for it to cross into the real world
and to walk past the spectators in the art gallery (or through whatever
space in which they watch the film). Improbable of course, but the infer-
ence is deliberate. It signals an interpenetration between worlds and a
dissolution of borders which the installation is keen to encourage. Elisa’s
world cannot be watched passively. It extends into our own, ‘across the
threshold suggested by the installation’s form and the camera’s agency as
narrator’ (Bal: 2013: 95) (Fig. 5.8).
These editorial cuts act as hinges between realities. As Ahtila’s work is a
cinematic triptych, Bernhard Siegert’s analysis of the Mérode Triptych by
the fifteenth century Flemish painter Robert Campin16 is of interest, par-
ticularly in light of Manovich’s historical contextualising of multi-screen
storytelling. In ‘Door Logic, or The Materiality of the Symbolic’, Siegert
analyses how Campin’s triptych operates as a visual mechanism. The paint-
ing is full of foldable objects and things with hinges; doors, books, tools,
candleholders, fabrics, and screens. It is also a foldable object, with real
hinges joining each of its three screens—and scenes—together. ‘In highly
conspicuous and tangible ways’ Siegert observes, ‘the very process of
visual perception is here connected with the opening and closing of vari-
ous media: turning pages and panels, opening doors and books, “unfold-
ing” the triptych itself’ (Siegert 2015: 198). The central panel holds the
‘primal scene’ of revelation, an angel appearing to Mary to announce her
Fig. 5.8 Cow crosses between worlds (image from The House courtesy of the
artist and Kristallisilmä/Crystal Eye)
pregnancy. On the left panel, a pair of donors outside looks through a

door into the visionary scene. The painted door leading into the house
opens on the join between the two panels, its painted hinge thus located
where the real hinge is attached. In the right panel Joseph is seen in his
workshop, the world outside shown through an open window behind
him. Siegert positions the triptych as a revelatory device, designed to fore-
ground the act of ‘Seeing’. He theorises that cinema can use the editorial
cut in a similar manner, as a hinge in a revelatory mechanism capable of
changing the way we see things or encouraging us to see them anew. In
Meshes Deren uses editorial cuts to travel between worlds. But we also see
these border crossings iterated in concrete ways in repeated door open-
ings, journeys upstairs and flights in and out of windows. The objects and
beings around Elisa travel over borders without need of any physical or
architectural device. Thresholds are entirely introjected. It is Elisa’s mind
which is dissolving borders between outside and inside. This is reflected in
Ahtila’s film. Here the cuts between shots are thresholds which can be
virtually—or digitally—crossed. Elisa’s world is dissolving, and she can no
longer discern what is inside or out. Things get progressively worse, if we
hold onto a view of identity as a singular, coherent entity with borders
around itself that must be preserved at all costs. Ahtila’s work challenges
this view.
Elisa now hears sounds with no diegetic source whatsoever. As she sews
blackout curtains on her sewing machine (the significance of which we
learn a little later on), we hear seagulls. One by one the screens turn into
abstract rectangles of colour; red, blue, and green. We hear a boat moving
in the water, its horn blowing. “The ship you see on the horizon is the
same ship as all the other ships” Elisa’s voice-over tells us over the colours,
“and this ship is full of the refugees who come to every shore. The ship is
a red ship, a blue ship and a green ship”. The film returns to Elisa who
looks out at the lake behind the house, where there is neither ship nor
harbour. “This ship emits the sound of all ships. The ship has been here
and is only just arriving here and that is why I know the ship.” Elisa is not
talking about one particular ship, but all ships at all times. Ahtila replicates
this broadening spatio-temporal gesture in her image-free screens of plain
colour and untethered sounds set free to roam in the space around the
spectator. With this cinematic ‘emancipation’, writes Bal, ‘both the unity
of time and space in which stories are usually set… and the unity of vision
and hearing in perception that holds the subject together finally explode’
(2013: 105). “I see it from the shore, on the shore, from the window and
through the forest” continues Elisa, addressing us directly. “The same

people step onto the dock every time I turn away and back again”. The
House moves towards its finale in a series of carefully constructed editorial
moves which allow the filmmaker to activate a process of revelation. As if
slowly opening a set of screens, Ahtila leads the audience towards a new
perspective, one which recognises the ‘unfixed, transferable identity’ of
the self (Philbrick 2003: 34). In ‘Subcutaneous Melodrama: The Work of
Eija-Liisa Ahtila’, Philbrick discusses how Ahtila stages this more mutable
version of identity through her experiments with form.
Working on multiple screens refracting simultaneous, differing points of

view that converge and contrast, encourages multiple narrative interpreta-
tions, formally realizing Ahtila’s thematic investigation of volatile identity.
Her finely-tuned soundscapes, manipulating natural sounds and pop music
intervals, perceptually disavow a fixed narrative reality, the keystone to sub-
ject stability. Subject construction, so urgently called for by film theorists,
becomes yet another flickering illusion of the Hollywood dream machine.
Identity, represented and experienced, is volatile, and only ever provisionally
achieved. (Philbrick 2003: 45)
Elisa carefully hangs the blackout blinds above all the windows. No
longer able to keep sounds at bay, she decides to shut out the visible and
be wholly “where the sounds are”. As she lets the blinds down all three
screens are plunged into darkness. The audience find themselves released
into a world of sound. In this purely sonic space we hear people on the
move; harbours, train stations, airports, loudspeakers announcing depar-
tures and arrivals, footsteps along corridors, boat horns calling, trains
moving, seagulls crying. Elisa’s face appears in the darkness on the right-
hand screen, looking directly at us. Her face registers no emotion, but her
words are far from ordinary. “I meet people” her voice-over tells us. “One
at a time they step inside me and live inside me. Some of them only for a
moment, some stay. They set up wherever they want to and take my facial
expressions or my leg’s resting position and put their own in their place”.
We too ‘inhabit’ Elisa. We wander into the gallery, encounter Elisa, inhabit
her world, decide where to place ourselves, whether to sit or stand (“They
set up wherever they want…”), how long to stay, when to go. ‘What enters
into Elisa’s being’ writes Bal, ‘is the world of others’. She continues:
refugees—people who come, some to stay, some to move on. This temporal
differentiation is metaphorically tied to the temporality of visiting a video
installation where some visitors stay for the duration of the video loop and
beyond it, while others move on after a few minutes. (Bal 2013: 111)
As Elisa continues to describe these strange and sensational inhabitations

inside herself, Ahtila shows a series of empty, white rooms. The spectator,
like the journeying, misplaced people to whom she has been listening, has
arrived at a wholly new place. It is unfurnished, unplaceable and open.
These white rooms can be interpreted as spatial evocations of the empty
spaces inside Elisa’s head. “They fill all the empty space…”. But they also
suggest empty gallery spaces, as yet unoccupied homes, images of open
hospitality, invitations to enter and to live. We are no longer to be wholly
concerned with the specific predicament of an individual called Elisa. This
final sequence is an elegant and spatialised cinematic realisation of the cor-
relation between psychic openness and geo-political permeability
(Fig. 5.9).
In his essay ‘Home as Region’ cultural geographer T S Terkenli explores
the notion of what it means to be rooted in one’s surroundings. Rootedness
is defined as the long habitation of one locality. But rootedness can also be
perceived as ‘a state of being made possible by an incuriosity toward the
world at large and an insensitivity toward the flow of time.’ (Yi-Fu Tuan in
Terkenli 1995: 325). Ahtila’s film encourages us away from such incurios-
ity. The process of inviting people inside, in other words of inviting people
who are not like you into your ‘safe’ sphere, is challenging and uncomfort-
able. (“They lie on my back and press their toes into my Achilles ten-
dons”). But it can also feel, as Elisa’s closing words state plainly, “good,
really good.”
Ahtila challenges our view of subjectivity as an identity preserved in a
‘four-walled’, non-porous container that must be kept intact at all costs.
Fig. 5.9 The empty spaces (image from The House courtesy of the artist and
Through the radicalising, deconstructive lens of psychosis we are invited

to review notions of sovereign subjectivity (along with what Deren would
call our ‘feverish narcissism’ and ‘personal compulsions of individual dis-
tress’)17 and turn instead towards a wider consideration of a connected
and communal humanity. At the end of the three-screen version of the
film, the audience is presented with a new vision. Each screen shows a dif-
ferent view of a Finnish farmhouse or country home set in a peaceful
landscape. There is no talking, no further narrative enunciation, we hear
only the susurration of wind in the trees. These unhurried images are put
on display for us to ponder over and respond to internally. Viewers may
not be familiar with the cultural specificity of houses like these nor of their
cultural significance to a Finnish national identity.18 But they can enjoy
making their own inferences and connections to a ‘heartland’ or ‘country
retreat’ which can be protected, invaded, or shared. Instead of being asked
to arrive at a firm conclusion, our thoughts wander, reshape, and reform.
There is an openness to the end of Ahtila’s film that is as palpably felt as it
is seen and heard. This brings to mind Stuart Hall’s observations on the
fluid nature of cultural identity. Hall situates our sense of national and
cultural identity not as a fixed position, but as ‘a matter of ‘becoming’ as
much as it is of ‘being”, as a fluctuating state which ‘belongs to the future
as much as to the past’.19 In ‘Cinema as an Art Form’ Deren valorises the
impulse to forge new and experimental forms in film art. Her words are
pertinent when we consider Ahtila’s aim to creatively mobilise spectatorial
engagement into new and more receptive shapes:
The audience for art is limited not by ignorance nor by an inability to ana-
lyze, but by a lack of innocent receptivity. The defensiveness which is respon-
sible for this reluctance to surrender to one’s own reality, at least temporarily,
in order to experience another, is symptomatic of a social condition for
which the artist is not responsible. It is based on the fact that if one con-
ceded validity to contemporary realities other than one’s own, the self-
righteous convictions—those “absolute truths”—upon which social
organization is based, are undermined. (Deren 2019c: 23–24)
Two years after making this film Ahtila built a series of house sculptures.20
As the one seen below shows well, one’s home can be both open and
closed (Fig. 5.10).
The House encourages us to envisage ourselves not as isolated individu-
als and to consider the implications of creating borders around ourselves
Fig. 5.10 ‘The Tent House’ (Ahtila 2004) (image courtesy of the artist and
which keep us separate from others. ‘Home as a place is a porous, open,

intersection of social relations and emotions’ write feminist geographers
Blunt and Dowling. ‘As feminists have pointed out, home is neither public
nor private but both’ (2006: 27). Ahtila arrives at this conceptual position
through a methodical and dispassionate editorial control of potentially
melodramatic, sensationalist material. Fantastical and disturbing
experiences are rendered with technical perfection yet shown with the
minimum of cinematographic fuss. At one point, Elisa flies through the
forest towards her home. She quietly floats into view on the middle screen,
gently touching branches as she passes. All we can hear is the breeze and
the birds. She reaches her house and holds on to the gable to carefully land
herself back down. ‘When one works with the moving image’ said Ahtila
in an interview, ‘there are always several options’ as to how to tell the story
and to convey its atmosphere:
With the flying scene and the sounds of the forest, I aimed at telling how she
kind of lost the gravity of things: a certain anchored meaning for things. I
did not want there to be anything frightening or any angst in the scene, only
to show another state of being. (Knudsen 2012)
I am reminded of a similar calm assuredness with which this book began—

the steady cinematic moves of Dorothy Arzner. We have moved house
along the way, from a claustrophobic stage set to a new kind of house at
the edge of the world.
Notes
1. ‘In sharp contrast to Le Corbusier’s famous dictum that a house is a
machine for living, Neutra argued the contrary: a “home is… not a machine
for living. Architecture is a stage for living” and a substitute for the envi-
ronment that first influenced “the plastic purposeless, passively receptive
mind of the infant”’ Neutra’s work in Hollywood is explored
by Sylvia Lavin in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in
a Psychoanalytic Culture. 2007. Cambridge, MA and London: The
MIT Press.
2. Extract from an interview between Hammid and Miriam Arsham on
September 8 1976, in The Legend of Maya Deren, Volume 1 Part 2
(Chambers 1942–47) Anthology Film Archives New York City (1988: 97).
3. Extract from interview on August 3, 1976, same publication (1988: 96).
4. There appears to be a jump cut here to extend the panning shot, cleverly
disguised by cutting on the swish pan over the dark area near the stairs.
5. The film was made without a soundtrack and was initially to be viewed as
a silent film. It was only in 1959 that the musical soundtrack was added,
composed specifically for the film by Japanese musician Teiji Ito.
6. Le Passe-muraille is a short story by Marcel Aymé (1941). It translates as
The Man Who Walked through Walls.
7. Laura Mulvey Death 24 x a Second (2006: 145).

8. Levine (2018: 10).
9. A format which, as discussed in Chap. 2 with Strangers When we Meet,
provides an extra wide image when screened in cinemas with the correct
projectors.
10. A reference to Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (first published 1899).
11. Freud identified two other processes at work while we dream, ‘secondary
revision’ and ‘considerations of representation’, but these are not referred
to explicitly by Tscherkassky.
12. The site of Freud’s ‘primal scene’, the bedroom is a charged space where
one is at one’s most private, vulnerable, and out of control. It features
prominently in the films I discuss. Deren gravitates towards the bedroom
in Meshes. A bedroom lies behind the door in Secret Beyond the Door.
Jeanne’s bedroom is where everything breaks down and D’s most intimate
thoughts and deeds happen in her bed.
13. Both the above quotes from Tscherkassky are taken from a recorded work-
shop held at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in 2014,
viewable on the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
qlW3ZHZSrVQ (accessed on 05/12/2022).
14. In Death 24 x a Second Mulvey writes: Finding the ‘film behind the film’ is
the main aim of textual analysis. There is a temptation, similar to the temp-
tation to isolate the stilled frame from its setting in continuity, to detach a
privileged sequence from its narrative armature. This is a gesture that dis-
misses narrative and context and brings the cinephile’s love of Hollywood
movies into touch with the counter-cinema of the avant-garde (2006: 145).
15. Love is a Treasure was developed from The Present (2001), an earlier work
originally presented as ‘one-to-two minute segments on monitors for gal-
lery/museum exhibitions and as thirty-second spots screened with movie
trailers in cinemas and broadcast during commercial breaks on Finnish
television’ (Philbrick 2003: 34).
16. Although the painting is generally thought to be a hybrid work created by
several painters in his studio over a few years.
17. Deren, Maya (2019g: 55).
18. Ahtila is aware of her native country’s vision of itself and of how it may be
perceived by other nations. Philbrick points us towards the website for her
exhibition “Fantasized Persons and Taped Conversations” (held at Tate
Modern in 2002) on which Ahtila placed a link to “Finnish Info”, or what
Philbrick describes as a ‘museum-goer’s thumbnail Baedeker to one of the
EC’s most affluent nations’. Philbrick continues: ‘Associated in popular
perception (if at all) with melancholic overtones of Strindbergian bleakness
and claustral Munchian despair, and the sublime transcendence of the
landscape tradition, contemporary Finland is a post-war success story, a

seemingly content, if somewhat bland, welfare state, becalmed by govern-
ment-issue middle-class comfort and ethnic homogeneity. A closer look
reveals a darker side, evinced by the country’s high suicide rates and preva-
lent alcoholism. Representing her native land, home to international con-
glomerates such as communications giant Nokia, as a world within yet
without mainstream globalism, is more than a glib, ironic gesture.
“Finnishness is a type of narrative,” Ahtila explains, a “framework” through
which she stakes out her own territory within the contradictory impulses
of Nordic tradition and the homogenizing universality of media-driven,
popular culture.’ (Philbrick 2003: 33).
19. A quote from Stuart Hall’s essay ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ in
Identity: Community, Culture, Difference 1990, ed. Jonathan Rutherford.
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/
masters/modules/asiandiaspora/hallculturalidentityanddiaspora.pdf
(p. 225).
20. https://crystaleye.fi/eija-liisa_ahtila/sculptures.
References
Arsham, Miriam. Original interview in 1976. 1988. VèVè A Clark. In The Legend
of Maya Deren: Volume 1 Part 2 Chambers (1942–47), eds. Millicent Hudson
and Catrina Neiman. New York: Anthology Film Archives.
Aumont, Jacques. 2014. Montage. Montreal: caboose.
Bachmann, Alejandro. 2018. The Trace of a Walk that has Taken Place: A
Conversation with Peter Tscherkassky and Alejandro Bachmann. Found Footage
Magazine 4: 27–33.
Bal, Mieke. 2013. Thinking in Film: The Politics of Video Art Installation according
to Eija-Liisa Ahtila. London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Barnard, Timothy. 2014. Découpage. Montreal: caboose.
Bruyn, De, and Dirk. 2014. The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art.
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Butler, Alison. 2002. Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen. London:
Wallflower Press.
———. 2005. Feminist Film in the Gallery: If 6 Was 9. Camera Obscura 20 (1,
58): 1–31. Accessed January 10, 2023. https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-
obscura/article-pdf/20/1 (58)/1/400619/CO58-01-Butler.pdf.
———. 2012. Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Cinematic Worlds. In Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Parallel
Worlds, pp. 173–189. Gottingen: Steidl/Moderna Museet/Kiasma. Accessed
January 10, 2023. https://crystaleye.fi/eija-liisa_ahtila/articles/cinematic-
worlds.
———. 2019. Displacements: Reading Space and Time in Moving Image

Installations. UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cahill, James Leo. 2008. Anacinema: Peter Tscherkassky’s Cinematic Breakdowns,
Towards the Unspeakable Film. Spectator 28(2): 90–101. Accessed January
10, 2023. https://pofpa.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/james-leo-cahill-
anacinema.pdf.
Curtis, Barry. 2008. Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film. London:
Reaktion Books.
Deren, Maya. 2019a. Letter to James Card (1955). In Essential Deren: Collected
Writings on Film by Maya Deren, ed. Bruce R. McPherson, 189–196. Kingston
& New York: McPherson & Company.
———. 2019b. Three Abandoned Films (written in 1946). In Essential Deren:
Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren, ed. Bruce R. McPherson, 247–248.
Kingston & New York: McPherson & Company.
———. 2019c. Cinema as an Art Form (first published in 1946). In Essential
Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren, ed. Bruce R. McPherson,
19–33. Kingston & New York: McPherson & Company.
———. 2019d. Planning by Eye: Notes on ‘Individual’ and ‘Industrial’ Film
(written in 1947). In Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya
Deren, ed. Bruce R. McPherson, 152–162. Kingston & New York: McPherson
& Company.
———. 2019e. New Directions in Film Art (first delivered as a lecture in 1951 at
Cincinnati Museum of Art). In Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by
Maya Deren, ed. Bruce R. McPherson, 207–219. Kingston & New York:
McPherson & Company.
———. 2019f. Creative Cutting (first published in 1947). In Essential Deren:
Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren, ed. Bruce R. McPherson, 139–151.
Kingston & New York: McPherson & Company.
———. 2019g. An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (first published in
1960). In Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren, ed. Bruce
R. McPherson, 110–128. Kingston & New York: McPherson & Company.
Space. Yale French Studies—Cinema and Sound 60: 33–50. Accessed January
California Press.
Eisenstein, Sergei M. 1977 (originally published 1930). The Cinematographic
Principle and the Ideogram. In Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans.
Jay Leyda, pp. 28–44. San Diego; New York; London: Harcourt, Harvest,
Helen & Kurt Wolff.
Fowler, Catherine. 2004. Room for Experiment: Gallery Films and Vertical Times
from Maya Deren to Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Screen 45 (4): 324–343.
Architecture and the Feminine: Mop-Up Work 4: 22–27. Accessed January 10,
2023. www.jstor.org/stable/41846076.
———. 2001. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Holl, Ute. 2001. Moving the Dancers’ Souls. In Maya Deren and the American
Avant Garde, ed. Bill Nichols, 151–177. Berkeley, Los Angeles & London:
University of California Press.
Knudsen, Stephen. 2012. Breaking the Rules of Storytelling. An Interview with
Eija-Lissa Ahtila. In ArtPulse Magazine. Accessed January 2, 2023. http://
artpulsemagazine.com/breaking-t he-r ules-o f-storytelling-a -c onversation-
with-eija-liisa-ahtila.
Kuhn, Annette. 1988. Meshes of the Afternoon. Monthly Film Bulletin 55
(653): 186–187.
Levine, Matthew. 2018. Controlled Chaos: The Cinematic Unconscious of Peter
Tscherkassky. Found Footage Magazine 4: 8–23.
Maas, William. 1963. Poetry and the Film: A Symposium. Film Culture 29: 55–63.
Accessed March 8, 2023. https://www.ubu.com/papers/poetry_film_sym-
posium.html.
Martin, Adrian. 2018. Entities and Energies. In Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on
Film Theory, History and Culture 1982–2016, 63–78. Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press.
Michelson, Annette. 2017. Poetics and Savage Thought: About Anagram. In On
the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film, 79–108. Cambridge, MA &
London: The MIT Press.
Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London:
Reaktion Books Ltd.
Odell, Jenny. 2019. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Brooklyn:
Melville House.
Philbrick, Jane. 2003. Subcutaneous Melodrama: The Work of Eija-Liisa Ahtila.
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 25 (2): 32–47. (Massachusetts: MIT
Press on behalf of Performing Arts Journal, Inc). Accessed January 10, 2023.
www.jstor.com/stable/3246399.
———. 2020. Meshes of the Afternoon. London: Bloomsbury on behalf of British
Film Institute.
Rosselin, Céline. 1999. The Ins and Outs of the Hall. In At Home: An Anthropology
of Domestic Space, ed. Irene Cieraad, 53–59. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Siegert, Bernhard. 2015. Door Logic, or, the Materiality of the Symbolic. In
Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real,
trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. pp. 192–205. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Taubin, Amy. 1993. Flash Floods: On Peter Tscherkassky’s film ‘PARALLEL
SPACE: INTER-VIEW’. Eikon. Internationale Zeitschrift für Photographie &
Medienkunst 7/8. Accessed January 10, 2023. http://www.tscherkassky.at/
content/txt_ue/04e_taubin.html.
Terkenli, T.S. 1995. Home as Region. Geographical Review 85 (3): 324–334.
Tscherkassky, Peter. 2012. Statement on Reset the Apparatus. Accessed January
10, 2023. http://www.resettheapparatus.net/corpus-work/outer-space.html.
———. 2015. Interview at the LUFF Film Festival. Accessed January 2, 2023.
Available to watch on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkkEqH1hAWQ.
———. 2017. A Conversation with Peter Tscherkassky and Eve Heller. In desist-
film. Accessed January 2, 2023. https://desistfilm.com/a-conversation-with-
peter-tscherkassky-and-eve-heller/.
Turim, Maureen. 1986. Childhood Memories and Household Events in the
Feminist Avant-garde. Journal of Film and Video—Home Movies and Amateur
Filmmaking 38 (3/4): 86–92. (University of Illinois Press on behalf of the
University Film & Video Association). Accessed January 10, 2023. https://
www.jstor.org/stable/20687739.
———. 2007. The Interiority of Space: Desire and Maya Deren. In Avant Garde
Film, ed. Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann. Netherlands: Brill.
CHAPTER 6
Postscript: Moving House
It all looks very familiar, but we’re sure we’ve never been there.
—George Toles
Standing outside the apartment building where Jeanne Dielman was filmed,
somewhere near the Bois de la Cambre, Philippe Graff cannot quite recall
whether they shot the film on the first or the second floor. It was a long
time ago. Boris Lehman describes the experience of working on Jeanne
Dielman as seeming unreal to him now, like a dream. Both understand
their interviewer’s fascination with the work and her search for its traces
into the present. Everything in the film is a fiction, Lehman remarks, but
there is something beyond the artifice that is real, an ‘interior truth’ that
endures. Such things are hard to pin down, and this book seeks exactitude.
Discussing films through the lens of materialist film processes generates
insight into how those films work on us and elucidates the practical and
creative ways their makers imbue architecture with meaning and why they
are driven to do so. But there are hidden processes at work too, and rhi-
zomatic connections between films more sensed than consciously antici-
pated, pop up and proliferate. A simple trope, a house on film with a woman
inside, opens out onto multiple avenues of critical reflection. A single image
acts as a nodal point emanating multiple and often contradictory meanings
from its core, while single meanings radiate out to suggest new and associa-
tive images. ‘One throw’ writes Freud, ‘links up a thousand threads’.1
These films chose me as much as I chose them, and as I delved more deeply
into them through close analysis, they resonated and interconnected with

Switzerland AG 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40033-9_6
one another in unexpected ways the more closely I looked. I open this
book with découpage and end it with editing, the beginning and end of the
journey. I notice too that the book begins with the earliest film and ends
with the latest, not something I had originally planned. When Harriet
Craig turns to look at her home at the end of Craig’s Wife it all looks very
familiar, but she’s sure she’s never been there. Her gaze is interrogative.
She has, as Georges Perec advises us to do, looked—and looked again. ‘We
open doors’ writes Perec, ‘we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order
to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why?’
(1999: 210). Harriet’s questioning gaze initiates the investigation into the
cinematic home which follows. Once again, there is something about the
films themselves and our unconscious as well as conscious connections with
them that guides those drawn to reflect on their worlds.
The women in this book inhabit homes of different shapes and sizes.
They also dwell in the filmic structures which house these homes and
occupy these overarching structures with their body and voice. Close anal-
ysis uncovers a series of nested analogues, a chain of spatialised correspon-
dences that the cinematic house engenders and energetically draws towards
itself. Silverman identifies this as a ‘nesting-box effect’, a ‘mise-en-abîme
interiority’ that figures an ‘endlessly receding locus which is simultane-
ously a psychic terrain and a domestic area, with the one implying and
indeed leading to the other’ (1988: 60). But this framework, or what
Edward Branigan calls the ‘container schema’, has its limitations. The
‘nesting-box effect’ upholds the notion of an ‘essence’ to be discovered at
the core of the self and a correlated and essential understanding to be
reached about the filmic object—neither of which are there to be thus
accommodated. The container schema, writes Branigan:
underlies, for example, the way in which we imagine that objects are inside
space, parts and qualities are inside objects, beliefs and memories are inside
the mind, examples are inside categories, meanings are inside films, and ideas
are conveyed in words even when innuendo is in a conversation. Moreover,
we imagine a chair to be in the corner and in view, a glass to be in our hand,
and orange juice to be both inside a glass and inside our bodies as we are in
our clothes and in a mood inside a room, a car, a marriage, Denmark, and the
Society for Cinema and Media Studies. (Branigan 2006: 121)
But the schema fails to account for the fact that rooms, to put it simply, have
openings in them and that states of flow, process, openness, pliability,
6 POSTSCRIPT: MOVING HOUSE 201
interconnectivity, and encounter connect them in a variety of spatially unpre-

dictable and non-hierarchical ways. Cinema performs this radial patterning
well. One room, body or ‘space’ is not always totally enframing nor can be
wholly enframed by another. The interior in cinema is not always aligned
with a ‘safe reserve of memory’ or a ‘stable locus of the self’ (Lajer-Burcharth
and Söntgen 2015: 12). A hierarchy of spaces that starts from the visible
outside and moves into the invisible inside does not accurately describe the
way the characters dwell in these films nor the way in which they are psycho-
analytically configured, and neither does it wholly account for the heteroge-
neous and rhizomatic ways in which audiences relate to those films as they
watch them. As Branigan adroitly puts it, ‘The effort to expunge all ambigu-
ity is the desire to build a room for all occasions’ (2006: 148).
In ‘Dwelling the Open: Amos Gitai and the Home of Cinema’ Miriam
De Rosa suggests that the ‘design of the home’ revolves ‘around open-
ness’ and has always done so, despite commonly held notions of home as
a ‘closed, protected environment’. She draws our attention to the Ancient
Egyptian hieroglyph for home which, we learn, is ‘one of the first forms of
description and inscription of the term’ (2020: 204). The pictogram
resembles a rectangle drawn as if from above. One can see that there is a
distinct opening or aperture in one side. Home has always needed to have
an open door, a place through which one can go in and out, energies can
flow, and exchanges be made. Deren’s film Meshes of the Afternoon shows
perhaps more literally than any of the other films discussed here that the
home and the thinking body inside it are entwined, mutually informing
entities that shape and are shaped by each other. And like the camera in
Exhibition which probes a house as intent on hiding as it is in revealing
those who live inside, our attention as spectators is equally as mobile and
curious. We do not watch films in straightforward and linear ways, as
Deren knew when she described the strip of memory which runs along
inside our heads while we watch a film. ‘Comprehending and reacting to
a film’ Branigan writes:
is not a continuous act in the way that film runs through a projector or shots
succeed each other. Comprehension moves in fits and starts on a tide of
enigmas, hypotheses, feelings, partial answers, surprises, ambiguities, fork-
ing paths, mistakes, and—still lingering at the end—unrealized (but real)
possibilities: what might have happened. (Branigan 2006: 144)
Watching a film that is set in a house involves watching many doors

open and close, as we have seen. But it also involves a series of internal
doors opening inside the mind of the spectator through which currents
pass between the film, its makers and themselves. Elsaesser and Hagener
describe such openings as ‘so many passages or portals through which
energies circulate that implicate the spectator and respond to his/her par-
ticular input’ (2010: 46). Their spatially inscribed description of what is
ultimately an intangible connection between film and audience resonates
with my concerns here. It also shows how common it is to discuss cinema
and the way we relate to it using architectural metaphors. This returns us
to the deep respondance between architecture and film that underpins this
book. Both arts frame space and our experience and perception of that
space. But films can also be understood as assemblages; as constructions of
images and sounds assembled together in a manner analogous to the way
in which architects assemble buildings—a correlation often noted by film-
makers and architects alike. As part of my academic research which began
with a PhD and led towards this book, I undertook an alternative method
of film study by working with videographic material—in other words,
by discussing film with film. The resulting video essay A Woman’s Place:
Home in Cinema, completed in 2019, is an audiovisual assemblage of
footage from the films discussed in this book and one other, Akerman’s
early short film Saute Ma Ville (1968). Placing films into comparative rela-
tionships with one another can of course be achieved in writing. But work-
ing directly with sounds and images in an editing suite changes the accent
of the relationship the researcher has with their chosen filmic material.
Fascination with particular films or moments in films becomes more
entwined into the process of exploration. Mulvey describes the tension
this process can invoke in the film researcher:
A tension begins to emerge, however, between a cinephilia that is more on

the side of a fetishistic investment in the extraction of a fragment of cinema
from its context and a cinephilia that extracts and then replaces a fragment
with extra understanding back into its context. At each extreme, the
pleasures of the possessive spectator are seemingly in opposition to the more
meditative, pensive spectator. But, of course, these oppositions are inevita-
bly undermined by the imbrication of the two, there is always a personal
edge to the mix of intellectual curiosity and fetishistic fascination. (Mulvey
2006: 144–145)
A Woman’s Place can be viewed as a companion piece to this book and

works to complement some of the discoveries made here. I originally
staged it as a three-screen installation in the Bulmershe Theatre in the

Department of Film, Theatre & Television at Reading University in
December 2019, and it was subsequently shown on a single monitor at the
Tate Modern as part of Tate Exchange. It was published by [in]Transition
magazine, which is where, if the reader of this book is so inclined, they
can go to watch the film. (The link to the video is provided in the refer-
ence section below.) The women in these films express themselves in idio-
syncratic and eloquent ways. They do not display what Doane describes as
the ‘image repertoire’ of ‘classical feminine poses’ we find in the woman’s
film, gestures which fail to ‘provide us with an access to a pure and authen-
tic female subjectivity’ (Doane 1988: 4). By elevating their gestures into a
new form of cinematic architecture and creating a new cinematic ‘home’
for them to inhabit, my aim was to dissolve or dismantle what Doane calls
‘the process of troping’. I wanted to elaborate ‘a new process of seeing and
remembering’ these characters and the films in which they live, one more
in tune with the ‘actual division, instability, and precarious nature of sub-
jectivity’ (Doane 1990: 61–62, 51).
In these films women voyage between rooms, down corridors, up stair-
cases, through windows and over thresholds with as much consequence as
if they were travelling through landscapes and between temporal dimen-
sions. As Mabel ventures across the beige carpet of her 1970s living room
back into the arms of her family, she is not just crossing a room. As we
know from Cassavetes’ film, she is crossing back from a supposed ‘insan-
ity’ into a family life that is far from sane, and the film’s ending is bitter-
sweet. When Celia comes back into the film through a corridor between
rooms she is in fact returning Eurydice-like from the land of the dead. For
the characters in these films, the house is not the point that marks the start
and end of an adventure in the world outside. This mytho-narrative, as
many feminist researchers have laid bare, places the woman at the begin-
ning and the end of a journey and keeps her there, fixed in the oikos. I have
taken issue with this, because it fails to recognise the mutability, strange-
ness and heterogeneity of home and the way it is experienced, and the
many different shapes it takes in the cinema. My aim here has been to
reposition these films as ones which portray home as a territory or a land-
scape, or as Bruno might say, a ‘homescape’ (2007: 36). Far from being
confined or reduced, these characters move around in worlds infused with
metaphor and poetic depth. They travel between rooms, worlds, and
times, and can go anywhere in a cut. The cinematic home transcends the
spatial limitations of its concrete counterpart to become an expressive,

mutable space re-shaped through filmic process.
Was Jeanne Dielman filmed on the first floor of the apartment block?
Or the second? Graff cannot quite remember. But Babette Mangolte can
because they had to erect a platform outside on which to place exterior
lights. It was the third—or maybe the fourth. Does it matter? Well, yes it
does. Filmmaking is a material process that involves multiple decisions
large and small, all of which have consequences. It is this ‘patterned, sys-
tematised decision making that achieves significance’ write Gibbs and Pye,
and that has ‘material effects on our experience of the film’ (2005: 11,
10). This book has taken time to look closely at a select few of these
decision-making processes, and to demonstrate how a greater critical
awareness of these processes and their stylistic implications can enrich our
understanding of the way films work on us. Gavin Lambert’s comment is
simple but apposite: ‘Until we know how a film is speaking to us, we can-
not be sure what it is saying’ (Gibbs and Pye 2005: 7).
The homes in these films exist in a particular corner of the world.
Whether they like their home or not, or feel at home inside it, these
women all expect to have one. But a home of one’s own is no longer to be
assumed. ‘The house is past’ wrote Theodor Adorno in Refuge for the
homeless (published in 1951 but as relevant today as it was then), and if
one wants to live responsibly and ethically, one needs to learn ‘how not to
be at home in one’s home’ (1978: 39). In Exhibition, D is worried about
what will happen to their house once they move out. “Can it be in the
contract even, to say, you know, they won’t pull the building down?” she
anxiously asks the estate agents. “I don’t ever want it to be pulled down…”.
This intimation of her own impermanence and dispensability was not
unfounded. The house was pulled down in 2019. While it may possess
‘local interest’ states the matter-of-fact report from Historic England, ‘as
a house designed by a prominent architect for himself, the building does
not have the high levels of significance required for listing’. Issues of
belonging, safety, borders and permeability have come increasingly to the
fore in recent years, and it remains to be seen how these change the way
we think about home and ponder over such matters in the cinema.
Note
1. Quote from The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (Wordsworth
Editions Ltd 1997: 174).
References
A Woman’s Place: Home in Cinema. Radinger Field 2019. http://mediacom-
mons.org/intransition/womans-place-home-cinema.
Adorno, Theodor. 1978. Refuge for the Homeless. In Minima Moralia: Reflections
from a Damaged Life, 38–39. London: Verso.
Branigan, Edward. 2006. Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory.
New York: Verso.
De Rosa, Miriam. 2020. Dwelling the Open: Amos Gitai and the Home of
Cinema. In Film and Domestic Space: Architectures, Representations, Dispositif,
ed. Stefano Baschiera and Miriam De Rosa, 188–209. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Doane, Mary Ann. 1988. The Desire to Desire: Woman’s Films of the 1940s.
Basingstoke & London: Macmillan Press.
———. 1990. Remembering Women: Psychical and Historical Constructions in
Film Theory. In Psychoanalysis & Cinema, ed. E Ann Kaplan, 46–63. New York
& London: Routledge.
Gibbs, John, and Douglas Pye, eds. 2005. Style and Meaning: Studies in the
Detailed Analysis of Film. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press.
Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, and Beate Söntgen, eds. 2015. Interiors and Interiority.
Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, Inc.
Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24x a Second. London: Reaktion Books Ltd.
Index1
A B
Acousmêtre, 119, 122, 123 Bachelard, Gaston, 105n6
Adorno, Theodor, 204 Bachmann, Alejandro, 173
Ahtila, Eija-Liisa, 9, 13, 154, 156, Bal, Mieke, 182, 184–190
157, 169, 177–193 Balázs, Béla, 22, 45, 46, 57
Akerman, Chantal, 9, 11, 12, 15n5, Balsom, Erika, 181
38, 59n1, 64, 66, 68–71, 73–77, Barker, Reginald, 135
79–82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 96, 103, Barnard, Timothy, 11, 20–23, 29,
105n7, 105n9, 106n13, 161 32, 57, 156
Alberti, Leon Battista, 4 Barthes, Roland, 87, 134
Albertine, Viv, 65, 88 Baschiera, Stefano, 14, 15n5
Altman, Rick, 112, 113, 134, 136, Basinger, Jeanine, 27, 37, 150n10
139, 150n9 Bassett, R.H., 59n3
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 67, 69 Basuyaux, Marie-Laure, 87
Arsham, Miriam, 193n2 Bayman, Louis, 67, 68
Arzner, Dorothy, 9, 11, 19, 24, Bazin, André, 20, 29
26–36, 38–40, 42, 45, 49, 56–58, Béghin, Cyril, 76
150n8, 193 Bellos, David, 77, 88
Aumont, Jacques, 13, 157, 186 Bellour, Raymond, 72
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

Switzerland AG 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40033-9
208 INDEX
Benjamin, Walter, 103 Concentrationary Reality, 85

Bennett, Joan, 114, 119, 122–124 Connor, Steven, 144
Bergren, Ann, 3 Cornell, Joseph, 87
Bergstrom, Janet, 104n4 Craig’s Wife, 9, 11, 19, 20, 23,
Bhabha, Homi K., 37 27, 35, 36, 39, 40, 42,
Blunt, Alison, 5, 67, 192 46, 56, 159
Boles, John, 19 Cronk, Jordan, 69
Bonjour Tristesse, 20 Cuarón, Alfonso, 73
Bordwell, David, 125, 126 Cukor, George, 134
Bow, Clara, 150n8 Curtis, Barry, 100, 182
Branigan, Edward, 92, 94, 200, 201
Britton, Andrew, 89, 115
Bronfen, Elisabeth, 117, 118, 123, D
127, 128, 132 Dallas, Paul, 103
Bruno, Giuliana, 3, 6, 14, 35, Darwell, Jane, 23
36, 69, 203 Dasein, 38, 58
Buñuel, Luis, 21, 29, 32 de Bruyn, Dirk, 162
Burke, Billie, 28, 59n2 de Lauretis, Teresa, 4
Butler, Alison, 13, 154, 163, De Rosa, Miriam, 14, 15n5, 201
179–181, 186 Dead of Night, 146, 149n2
Decorte, Jan, 74
Découpage, 10, 11, 20–24, 26, 29, 31,
C 33, 35, 36, 40, 42, 46–49, 53,
Cahill, James Leo, 172, 176 54, 56–58, 84, 143, 156, 158,
Campin, Robert, 187 166, 200
Card, James, 153, 161 Deleuze, Gilles, 67
Carney, Ray, 44, 45, 48–51, Democritus, 77
56, 60n10 Deren, Maya, 8, 9, 13, 59n7, 153,
Cassavetes, John, 9, 11, 20, 21, 154, 156–159, 161–171, 174,
42–50, 52–58, 60n11, 60n12 177–179, 181, 182, 186, 188,
Cassavetes, Katherine, 53 191, 193n2, 194n12,
Caught, 115 194n17, 201
Cavalcanti, Alberto, 146 Deschanel, Caleb, 45, 46
Cayrol, Jean, 85–87 Dickinson, Thorold, 115
Chion, Michel, 112, 113, 119, 120, Dispositif, 12, 70–77, 79, 82,
123, 124, 135, 138 96, 185
CinemaScope, 64, 171, 173 Doane, Mary Ann, 13, 14, 35,
Clinamen, 77, 105n11 89, 112–115, 118, 120–126,
Cohn, Harry, 39, 40 130, 136–138, 141, 142,
Collins, Colleen, 123 149n1, 150n12, 150n13,
Colomina, Beatriz, 3, 101 185, 203
Columbia Studios, 15n8, 39, 40 Douglas, Kirk, 63
INDEX 209
Dowling, Robyn, 5, 67, 192 Fuller, Graham, 91

Dreamwork, 170, 176 Furie, Sidney J., 170, 171, 173
Duncan, Nancy, 3
G
E Garber, Marjorie, 3, 4
Editing, 10, 11, 13, 20, 21, 29, 32, Gaslight, 64
73, 93, 96, 143, 154, 156, 157, Gavin, John, 140
159, 161–164, 166, 168–170, Gerstenberger, Emil, 59n3
176, 177, 185, 200, 202 Get Ready, 170
Einstellung, 22, 45 Gibbs, John, 9, 10, 12, 66, 204
Eisenstein, Sergei M., 157 Gillick, Liam, 88
Eisner, Lotte, 123 Gledhill, Christine, 67, 68
Elsaesser, Thomas, 12, 83, 89, Goliot, Anne, 13, 15n10, 64
111–113, 115, 202 Graff, Philippe, 69, 84
The Entity, 170–173, 177 Graham, W S, 99
Epicurus, 77 Gray, Hugh, 20
Espèces d'espaces, 76 Griffith, D W, 9
Exhibition, 9, 12, 64, 66–68, 88, 94, Gross, Kenneth, 87
99, 103, 104, 106n17, 160, Grosz, Elizabeth, 3, 65, 160, 161, 168
201, 204 Groves, George, 149n5
Eyre, Jane, 89 Gunning, Tom, 123–126, 135
F H
Falk, Peter, 41 Hagener, Malte, 6, 12, 111–113, 202
Farnsworth, Edith, 102, 103 Haines, William, 35, 40, 45
Ferris, Mike, 46 Hall, Stuart, 191
Fletcher, Angus, 26 Hammid, Alexander, 157, 161, 163,
Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy, 76, 105n8 166, 193n2
Fontaine, Joan, 111 Harrison, Rex, 133, 134, 145
Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey, 39 Heath, Stephen, 138
Fowler, Catherine, 156, 173, Heidegger, Martin, 38, 59n4, 65, 186
174, 179 Hershey, Barbara, 171, 173–177
Frampton, Daniel, 93 Hill, Gary, 181
Franju, Georges, 22, 57 Hitchcock, Alfred, 115, 125, 135, 160
Freud, Sigmund, 8, 43, 59n8, 104, Hogg, Joanna, 9, 10, 12, 64, 68,
106n21, 117, 118, 137, 146, 88–91, 93, 94, 96, 98,
172, 194n10, 194n11, 194n12, 99, 101–103
199, 205n1 Holl, Ute, 162
Frey, Sami, 82 Holland, Norman H., 2
Friedman, Alice T., 103 Hollander, Martha, 24–27, 31
210 INDEX
hooks, bell, 5, 6 Lastra, James, 137, 150n9

The House, 9, 13, 154, 156, 159, 169, Lavin, Sylvia, 117, 118, 193n1
174, 177, 179, 180, 182, Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard
189, 191 Jeanneret), 101, 193n1
Houston, Beverle, 34, 35, 39 Leenhardt, Roger, 156
Lefebvre, Henri, 105n8
Lehman, Boris, 79, 106n13, 204
J Levin, Tom, 112, 113
Jacobson, Brian R., 15n8 Levine, Matthew, 170, 178, 194n8
James, Henry, 37 L’Homme qui Dort (The Man Who
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Sleeps), 76
Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 9, 11, Life, A User’s Manual, 76
59n1, 64, 66–69, 73, 75, 76, 78, Lloyd, Doris, 145
79, 83, 85–89, 94, 104, 105n7, Loeb, Anthony, 52
106n15, 159, 199, 204 The Lonely Villa, 9
Jeffers McDonald, Tamar, 141 Lotman, Jüry, 4
Jenkins, Stephen, 124, 126 Love is a Treasure, 179
Joly, Jean-Luc, 105n9 Loy, Myrna, 142
Julien, Isaac, 181 Lukacs, John, 7
K M
Kagan, Elaine, 60n11 Maas, William, 178
Kaufman, Sam, 8 Maijala, Marjaana, 182
Keathley, Christian, 11, 20, 21 Mangolte, Babette, 69, 105n7,
Kessler, Frank, 12, 66 105n9, 204
Kiarostami, Abbas, 72 Manovich, Lev, 181, 187
Knudsen, Stephen, 193 Margulies, Ivone, 66
Kozloff, Sarah, 126, 127 Martin, Adrian, 12, 66, 70–73, 112,
Kruger, Alma, 27 132, 134, 149n6, 170, 171, 177
Kuhn, Annette, 156 Martin, Richard, 59n8
Kuittinen, Tuuli, 179 Massey, Doreen, 3
McDowall, Roddy, 145
McHugh, Kathleen, 36, 37, 39, 40
L Meagher, Sharon M., 5
Lajer-Burchart, Ewa, 7, 8, 201 Melcher, Martin, 141
Lambert, Gavin, 9, 204 Melvin, James, 90, 96, 99, 101
Lang, Charles, 104n2 Mérode Triptych, 187
Lang, Fritz, 9, 12, 114, 115, 117, Meshes of the Afternoon, 9, 13,
119, 120, 123, 124, 59n7, 153, 156, 157, 159,
127–132, 146–148 166–169, 172, 174, 179,
Lapis, Joe, 135 188, 194n12, 201
INDEX 211
Metz, Christian, 120, 126, 127 Parry, Natasha, 142

Michelson, Annette, 15n9, Pawlikowska, Ewa, 77
57, 65, 157 Penz, François, 76, 101, 105n8
Midnight Lace, 9, 12, 100, 113, 115, Perec, Georges, 76–79, 87, 88,
132–134, 136, 140, 143, 105n9, 200
146–148, 151n14 Perez, Gilberto, 15n6, 47, 114, 122
Mildred Pierce, 158 Perkins, V.F., 10, 11, 58
Miller, David, 9, 12, 114, 115, 147 Philbrick, Jane, 194n15
Mise-en-scène, 10–12, 20, 24, 27, 29, Pollock, Griselda, 76, 85–88
35, 43, 64–66, 68, 71–73, 75, The Portrait of a Lady, 37
79–87, 89–95, 98, 99, 103, 104, Preminger, Otto, 20
105n7, 112, 133, 143, 145, The Present, 194n15
158, 185 Psycho, 125
Motte, Warren F., 77, 106n11 Pye, Douglas, 9–11, 20, 22, 204
Mulvey, Laura, 66, 67, 83, 84, 178,
194n7, 194n14
Muriel, 85 Q
My Fair Lady, 134 Quine, Richard, 63
N R
Neshat, Shirin, 181 Rainer, Yvonne, 177
Neutra, Richard, 118, 160, 193n1 Rascaroli, Laura, 6, 15n5, 38,
Night and Fog, 85 39, 161
No (2011), 72 Rau, Neil, 141
No Home Movie, 161 Rebecca, 111, 115, 119–121, 160
No Man of Her Own, 160 Redgrave, Michael, 115, 146
Novak, Kim, 63, 65 Resnais, Alain, 85
Revere, Anne, 116
Rhodes, John David, 9, 14, 59n5, 99,
O 158, 159, 162
Odell, Jenny, 181 Roder, Milan, 59n3
O’Neil, Barbara, 147 Roma, 73
OuLiPo, 77 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 84
Outer Space, 9, 13, 154, 156, Rosselin, Céline, 158
169–173, 176, 177 Rowlands, Gena, 42, 44, 46, 48,
Ozu, Yasujirō, 43 51, 53, 55
Ruban, Al, 46
Russ, Joanna, 113
P Russell, Rosalind, 19, 31, 39
Parker, Francine, 40 Rybczynski, Witold, 7
212 INDEX
S Teiji, Ito, 193n5

Salecl, Renata, 148 Terkenli, T.S., 190
Salgas, Jean-Pierre, 76, 85, 105n8 Toles, George, 14, 99
Saute Ma Ville, 76 Tscherkassky, Peter, 13, 154, 157,
Schaal, Hans Dieter, 49 169–174, 176–178, 182,
Secret Beyond the Door, 9, 12, 100, 194n11, 194n13
113, 115, 117–120, 123, 126, Tuan, Yi-Fu, 190
129, 130, 135, 146, 148, Turim, Maureen, 1, 2, 58, 68, 71,
161, 194n12 96, 103, 104, 157, 158,
Seyrig, Delphine, 65, 79, 82 164, 166
Shamroy, Leon, 104n2
Shaw, Eddie, 53
Sherman, Leona F., 2, 15n1 U
Shonfield, Katherine, 51 Unheimlich, 43
Siegert, Bernhard, 187, 188
Silverman, Kaja, 13, 113, 130,
136–138, 146, 200 V
Silverman, Max, 76, 85–88 Vagabonde, 73
Since You Went Away, 160 van der Rohe, Mies, 102, 103
Sirk, Douglas, 115, 133, 135, 149n4 Varda, Agnès, 73
Sjogren, Britta, 112, 120, 127, 128, Ventura, Michael, 48
130, 131, 147–149 Vertov, Dziga, 15n9
Smoodin, Eric, 126 Vidler, Anthony, 103
Söntgen, Beate, 201 Viola, Bill, 181
Sound & Soundtrack, 10, 12, 13, Vitruvius, 4
106n13, 112–114, 119–122,
130, 132–139, 145, 148,
149n5, 150n9, 171, 182–185, W
188, 189 Waggoner, Matt, 38
Stanwyck, Barbara, 160 Waldman, Diane, 114–116
Stragliate, Isa, 84, 105n7 Walker, Michael, 115, 118
Strangers When we Meet, 63, 194n9 Wallace, Lee, 35, 36, 40
Sumpter, Helen, 91, 102 Watson, Waldon O., 135
Suspense, 8 Wearing, Gillian, 181
Weber, Lois, 8
Weibel, Peter, 181
T Wenders, Wim, 69
Tatar, Maria, 117, 128 Westman, Nydia, 23
Taubin, Amy, 174 Whiteley, Nigel, 102
Taylor-Wood, Sam, 181 Wigley, Mark, 3, 89
INDEX 213
Wilde, Oscar, 150n14 X

Williams, John, 136 Xenophon, 4
Williams, Linda, 57, 67
Wilson, Dorothy, 28
A Woman Under the Influence, Y
9, 11, 20, 23, 40–42, Yates, Frances A., 15n7
60n11, 159 Young, Iris Marion, 3, 5, 15n3
A Woman’s Place: Home in
Cinema, 202
W or the Memory of Z
Childhood, 76 Žižek, Slavoj, 92, 94, 120, 147

Women and Home in Cinema Form, Feeling, Practice

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Women and Home in Cinema Form, Feeling, Practice

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

PALGRAVE CLOSE READINGS

IN FILM AND TELEVISION

Women and Home

Women and Home in

ISSN 2634-6133 ISSN 2634-6141 (electronic)

Paper in this product is recyclable.

This book looks at representations of home in cinema through the lens of

1 Introduction: A Woman Walks into a House… 1

2 Découpage: Planning the House 19

3 Mise-en-scène: Creating Rooms 63

4 Sound: Building the Invisible111

5 Editing: Radical Reconstructions153

6 Postscript: Moving House199

Fig. 2.1 The room pre-dissolve in Craig’s Wife25

Introduction: A Woman Walks into

Interiority in films is a spatial construct dependent on visual illusion.

This book explores the metamorphosis of home in cinema into a place

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Turim’s concise theorisation of the way architecture and filmmaking inter-

habitation’ to sum up the figuration.1 This coupling is entrenched in the

Leon Battista Alberti is equally as definitive. Women were to be seques-

Opposite pairs such as inside/outside, the raw/the cooked, or life/death

environments we see on screen are all, to a greater or lesser extent, struc-

At times one knows only extreme estrangement and alienation. Then

Translocating these more elastic understandings of home into cinematic

woman inside a home acts as a catalyst. It is a launch pad, a lure and a

the emergence of the suggestive depictions of interiors in seventeenth cen-

But focusing separately upon each process is useful, nonetheless. It clari-

1975) and Exhibition (Joanna Hogg 2013). As in the previous chapter, I

configured in spatial terms as a series of interlinked ‘bodies’: their onscreen

Découpage: Planning the House

Découpage may simply be the term for how cinema works.

Craig’s Wife (Dorothy Arzner 1936) ends on a moment of revelation.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

resulting organisation of filmic space is a process that can be described as

filmed so that it is filmed by the camera in a particular way in order to say

shooting script or storyboard prepared in advance of filming, ‘the final

I like to think of Balázs’ clever expression Einstellung zur Einstellung as the

effectively acting as a proscenium arch. The housekeeper and maid, stand-

Fig. 2.1 The room pre-dissolve in Craig’s Wife

in particular, ‘based on the placement of figures and architectural elements

Fig. 2.2 The stately dissolve in Craig’s Wife

relationships and multitudinous events within a single overall frame could

that it is because she is incapable of human intimacy that she organises

Thus, what emerges on close examination of hundreds of women’s movies

Within the film’s carefully composed frames there is primarily similarity,

The authentic moment in a film, creating through segmentation. A land-

Fig. 2.3 The final scene of Craig’s Wife

sees as she herself pursues an aggressive act of looking’ (25). Houston

In Craig’s Wife—this tendency of inanimate objects to come to symbolic life

Giuliana Bruno reads this final scene in a similar way:

Every neighbourhood has its Mrs Craig whose husband is a sympathetic

McHugh recognises how this critical perception of Harriet as an ‘inap-

elegance of spaces, of the reassuring familiar objects, furniture and orna-

made in 1936, A Woman Under the Influence in 1974) and a catastrophic

But he continues, ‘What’s important is that Gena [Rowlands] goes out

relevance is to be attributed to it. The emotional texture of the scene and

back as before. Cassavetes then returns us to the previous camera position,

For a convention in art is not just an established rule—that red at a traffic

Cassavetes’ film may aim to show us everything about Mabel, as evidenced

everything? If we do arrive at this understanding, which I believe the para-

These statements exemplify a crucial tension at the core of Cassavetes’ film

His filmmaking environment was free-wheeling and controlled, his cam-

1 Introduction: A Woman Walks into a House… 1

2 Découpage: Planning the House 19

3 Mise-en-scène: Creating Rooms 63

4 Sound: Building the Invisible111

5 Editing: Radical Reconstructions153

6 Postscript: Moving House199

Fig. 2.1 The room pre-dissolve in Craig’s Wife25

multi-sensory aspect of cinema and recalibrating its approach accordingly.