Introduction: A Woman Walks into a House…

This book explores the metamorphosis of home in cinema into a place shaped by emotion and suffused with metaphorical power. The aim is to understand how filmmakers achieve these spatial transformations 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 structures (be they sets or real locations) and requisition them for their own creative purposes using the cinematic tools available to them. Through the lens of film practice, the book closely reads nine films made between 1936 and 2013. It focuses on four decision-making processes in particular: découpage, mise-en-scène, sound creation and editing. Paying attention to the creative decisions taken by filmmakers proves generative and enriches our understanding of what it is the films wish to communicate. As each decision-making process is clarified and analysed in context, its related critical theory is challenged and reassessed.