Editing: Radical Reconstructions

The analogous connection Deren draws between physical and mental space in her comments about Meshes of the Afternoon (‘You have to come a long way—to kill yourself’) is germane to my enquiry into the spatial depiction of subjectivity in the cinema. Deren perceives how film syntax can alter the contours of film space, and uses this aspect of the film ‘instrument’ to build herself a new cinematic house and inhabit it in her own way. After closely reading the editing in this film, two more recent avant-garde films are discussed: Outer Space (Tscherkassky 1999) and The House (Ahtila 2002). The films subject the trope of ‘the woman in the house’ to further interventions and interrogations through the editing process. All three works invoke the reciprocal relationship between ‘cinematic syntax, architectural space and subjective experience’ (Butler, 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 , 2012). Each filmmaker uses a different editing procedure to deconstruct one home and replace it with another activated by desire and the unconscious. The chapter discusses the ethical implications of such work and the common objective to challenge idealised notions of identity as unified, coherent and self-contained, and represent in cinematic terms the shifting and unpredictable nature of our inner life.