Postscript: Moving House

Boris Lehman describes the experience of working on Jeanne Dielman as seeming unreal to him now, like a dream. Everything in the film is a fiction, he remarks, but there is something beyond the artifice that is real and 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. It 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 and rhizomatic connections between films pop up and proliferate. A simple trope is shown to function as a lure, provocation and source of inspiration to the filmmakers. These homes 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 property is fungible, and space is fragile. Issues of belonging, safety, borders, and permeability have come to the fore in recent years, and it remains to be seen how these change the way we represent home in the cinema.