One’s home and other’s home: Visions of houses from the inside in films

Abstract

This article explores the dimensions of the artistic cliché of the inside of houses in contemporary film –as of the fundamental referent of Rear Window (1954) by Alfred Hitchcock– in: Kika (1993) by Pedro Almodóvar, Animals ferits (2006) by Venutra Pons, El hombre de al lado (2009) by Mariano Cohn & Gastón Duprat and Dans la maison (2012) by François Ozon. The visions of the home offered by the protagonists themselves are based on two basic variants: one’s own home and the homes of one’s neighbors. This paper sets out to present an interdisciplinary and critic review of interior architecture as of the dynamics of vision in a sample of contemporary films, through focusing on the visual act of the characters surrounding the house. The approach to the house is suggested in two basic dimensions: as intimate territory and as alien territory that is looked at –in an act that necessarily imposes a distance, an objectivation– because it usually mediates a desire. Thus, this paper articulates and confronts interacting operative concepts such as intimacy, voyeurism, error and thalamós, among others. The result produces variations of the perception of the domestic surroundings of the characters in this representative sample which begins from the house as a place beyond a mere physical space.