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TO STAY AT HOME, TO LIVE, TO REPRESENT

We don't know how long it has been since all the media started to fill our screens with the sentence: stay at home. Something that at first frightened and alarmed us has today mutated and become part of everyday life, in human relationships and their artistic representations.

What does it mean to stay at home? What do we understand by the word home? A possible place of shelter, of isolation, of terror... there are so many variants. Behind closed doors, the dimensions can vary. Between bad and good days, we oscillate. The constant work of configuring that which we call home is both comforting and overwhelming. We decided to think about how dwelling is represented in cinematography.

What happens when walls transform the perception of our space, turning it into a place of oppression, bringing to light our miseries? Walls become mirrors. How long have I been in this house! I don't remember ever being in the same space for so long, and I lived my childhood, puberty, and part of my adolescence here. At that time, the walls seemed bigger, the sound was different, the distance between one space and another was greater. Today I am awakened by sounds that come from more than 20 meters away. What is certain is that my perception has changed.

Maybe Trevanian was right! In his book Shibumi, the main character, Nicholai Hel, after being imprisoned in a maximum-security prison for six months away from any known form of social life, begins to develop a sixth sense: that of proximity. He claims that it is a sense typical of the first appearances of humans on earth, who, in solitude, felt everything close to them as their own, as part of their being... this was extinguished with large human agglomerations. None of this happens in The Exterminating Angel. Luis Buñuel's brilliant film takes place in a room where about 15 people are trapped, unable to develop the sense of proximity as Nicholai did. It brings to light the most miserable traits of human society, that is to say, community living, typical of modern man and not of the first Neanderthals on earth.

Buñuel uses the four walls as a dream factory. At first, small glimpses of the bourgeois unconscious appear until they are squeezed out in the delirium of barbarism. He brings to light the fragility of bourgeois life and the weakness of the home. The containment of the four walls becomes the enemy, as unconscious delirium, as much as the theory of Schrödinger's cat; together with a flask of poison and a device with a radioactive particle, inside a sealed box. If the device detects radiation, it breaks the flask, releasing the poison that kills the cat. After a while, the cat is both alive and dead. During an episode of confinement, one is both alive and dead. The dream or the imagination becomes an engine that allows us to transcend. We find there a harmony between the inside and the outside. The film goes through different stages of crisis, fighting with an unknown enemy, but as well known as the very gadgets of cinema.

There is a psychoanalytic reading that has to do with the outbreak of the most primal instincts of each of the characters; from aggressiveness, neurosis, sexuality, obsessions, and their manias, they reach the point where they find the presence of another human being unbearable. It leads to the sad certainty that in survival situations, humans become the enemy of their equals.

Days of confinement go by, where social conventions give way to hypocrisy, self-centeredness, victimhood, insecurities, etc. A parable about the decomposition of a social class locked up in itsel.

How long have we been here? A month?

The space takes place almost entirely in the living room of Edimundo Nóbile's house. However, it seems as if it is continually changing. The camera movements go from one character to another without cuts; they in turn move through the space, and the camera appears as a mere spectator that remains motionless while the characters parade before its eyes. At times it follows one character until another one crosses its path and changes. In this way, it alternates between one character and another, capturing everything that happens there while simultaneously expanding the space.

The impurity that resides inside the mansion is assimilated to the appearance of the plague. It is not at all gratuitous to place a yellow flag at the door of the Nóbile mansion. It indicates a contaminated interior, a forced and untouchable quarantine, captives poisoned in the loss of differences.

"But imagine the changes of place of each of us during this horrible eternity. Think of the thousand combinations of chess pieces we have been. Even the furniture, we have shifted it a hundred times and... Well, at this moment we all find ourselves, people and furniture, in the exact position and place where we were that night."

A film that interrogates the evolution of the confinement, not the cause that provoked it. Chess, positions, and places. The world is a big gear. Today it seems that some pieces are out of place or have moved in search of another desire. With the force of nature and the collective unconscious, we have inhabited different times and spaces during the course of history. It seems that the tool we have to be able to put the pieces back on track and look to the future is memory.

In this line of thought, Buñuel leads us directly to melodrama, a modeling genre par excellence.

"The heart has reasons that reason does not understand." B. Pascal.

Thus begins Arturo Ripstein's Mexican film, The Reasons of the Heart.

Emilia wakes up in the twilight, runs to a barricade from which hang years and heaviness, to breathe out what is happening outside: a group of people unloading a moving truck. Then, the mirror. She observes herself. Not only do we see the subjectivity or unfolding of the character, but also the reflection of the heavy walls. Mirror: fundamental element of melodrama, core of the archetypal construction of melodramatic homes. A large number of wooden objects and armchairs of thick fabrics are perceived. All the elements for a possible fire. The materials of melodrama are flammable.

The living room is spacious, relatively comfortable, with American furniture and a plant that seems to be the only thing alive there. The camera movement frames the adjoining kitchen. The kitchen is cold and illuminated by a tube light. Around it there are some stools that do not go with the style of the rest of the house. The woman's space par excellence is here invaded, cold and conflictive. The scene of Emilia cleaning her vagina in the kitchen resignifies this space. It puts into crisis the institutional model that melodrama has founded, where the woman is in charge of this kitchen-space, so assimilated by our society.

Ripstein makes use of the sequence shot to expand spaces and shrink others in moments of overwhelm. The glass doors of the building serve to divide the inside and the outside, where we can perceive the dichotomy between good and evil.

The stairs are the representation of the ascent to heaven or descent to hell. Within the moralistic binomials of the genre, the staircase element is key to build this clerical vertical movement.

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Maternity is another founding element of gender. We can well understand the womb as the first space of containment and shelter from which several meanings originate. Emilia does not want to be a mother, or at least she does not want to be one in this way. She feels alone and unprotected. Silvia Oroz writes: "the traditional melodrama touches different spheres of strategic significance: the psychological, because it strongly deepens the mother-child relationship, symbolizing the former as the maternal womb, protector, integrator, harmonizer, being more effective the more the children are incorporated in it. Ethics, inasmuch as paradigmatic axes of binary type are constituted, whose pairs correspond vertically to each other: good / evil, poor / rich, subordinate / powerful, home / modernity, justice / injustice, matter / spirit". All these binomials we find in Ripstein. Through the use of the mirror we glimpse Emilia's crushed desires, her projections crushed by her mood, and mainly, what comes to the point, the conflict home / modernity.

When the card is seized, the scene is on the long, empty table with Emilia clutching the bottle. A reference to The Last Supper, but this time without diners. The table, a place where important issues are discussed, where the family meets and hierarchies are established (the family man is always at the head), is empty here. I clearly remember in my maternal grandmother's house how the long Sunday table was organized by the social place occupied by each subject. My grandfather, big and fat, was at the head of the table; he did not move from there until he went to take a nap after four hours of eating. His position was ideal for watching television, although particularly in my house, at mealtime, the television was always turned off. My grandmother and aunt, on the right side, near the kitchen. My mother in the center, in front of them to serve. My father, or my uncle when he appeared, at the other end. We, children, near the women.

The dining room table has been conducive to the meeting, and therefore debate, of many issues. We can think of various cinematic tables: the bourgeois table of Festen, Lo sono l'amore; the neorealist table where it is complex for everyone to remain seated, Roma città aperta, Bellissima or the first episode of Boccaccio 70 directed by Mario Monicelli. The more playful French tables like Truffaut's Antoine and Colette also play an important role in this mix of tenement and post-war contemporary apartment. The individual sphere vs. the public and social sphere, is under construction. Through the windows of the houses we see the Other, but the modern act of intimacy delimits these relationships. Hitchcock's Rear Window is once again the ideal example. Beyond everything we can say about the film, if we analyze only the construction of the neighborhood we see the breaking point between community living and individualism. We observe that other, to the point of knowing all his secrets, but we do not interact. The post-war tano shouting, beyond cultural differences, is kept indoors.

The end is the complete resignification of everything thought around the table object. The dining table becomes a ritual wake with Emilia's body on it. The space, apparently calm, is in order. The men remain talking and as they flee from the shot, the camera approaches the cloak that covered her. A last resource of anguish and anxiety, where they recall the pain of the body it covered. Between the table and the cloak, the religious reference becomes evident.

The transition between ancient and modern customs is also reflected in oriental cinematography. The works of filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu have constructed a series of everyday images interpellated by these conflicts. Just as Oroz names the dichotomy home/modernity, and we extend ourselves to think about these boundaries, Ozu reflects them through other behaviors.

In the first instance, we recognize how the Japanese filmmaker's work is mostly composed of scenes of everyday life in the domestic sphere. Good Morning (Ohayo) portrays the mischief of two brothers when they fight with their parents over the purchase of a television set. What they are confronted with is the advance of Western culture over Eastern culture. The film is halfway between tradition and change, an issue that is clearly symbolized by the figure of the English teacher and the "I love you!" that Isamu constantly repeats.

It is interesting to see the different ways of composing these melodramas (Ripstein and Ozu). When Ripstein needs to load the house with heavy elements and emphasize the shadows that these bodies generate on the character to tell the drama, Ozu does it through absence. In the book "Absence", chapter "Light and Shadow", Byung Chul Han describes: "the light suspended in shoji paper (Japanese sliding paper door), immerses things in an absence. The shoji paper functions as a layer of white clouds delicately surrounding the light. It is as if it stops the light. The shoji light is as contained, as absent as the last breath of a dying light that, paradoxically, inscribes an unnatural vitality to the light. Because of its delicacy, shoji light cannot illuminate or radiate things in space. Things then retreat into an absence: "as if the sunbeams that barely penetrate from the garden, after having slipped under the eaves and passed through the gallery, had lost the power to illuminate, as if they had become anemic, to the point of having no other power than to highlight the whiteness of the shoji paper" (fragment from Tanizaki Junichiro, The Praise of the Shadow). This generates an indistinction between light and dark, and Junichiro's trajectory of light reaffirms the somewhat labyrinthine construction of the Japanese house.

In Ohayo and in El sabor del sake (Sanma no aji) for example, it becomes quite complex to understand the total plan of the houses. There are two reasons for this: the first has to do with the impossibility of understanding the specific functionality of each space. Marta Peris explains in her book "La casa de Ozu": "there is no Japanese word that corresponds to the word "room". The concept of Western space does not exist for the Japanese. Although the word ma is similar, the Japanese meaning is much more open. Perhaps the translation would be closer to the idea of "place". The ma is a space that is not necessarily visualizable. The boundaries of ma are suggested but not defined. Even if a person experiences ma, explaining it in words is difficult.

The literal translation of the word ma is "gap", "pause", "intermediate interstice" an interval of time and space. This ideogram is formed by the association of two characters, "door" and "sun", and is interpreted as the vision of the sun filtering through the interstice of a door. It suggests an action at a given moment in time and implies a certain space-time relationship; not only as a quantitative connotation, but as a mode of sensory perception of space. Space can be said to be recognized through the mediation of time." The rooms have more than one entrance and exit, which is why at the end of Ohayo it is so confusing to understand where the children escape. One senses a ring circulation reducing in number of crossings increasing the air and permeability of the floor plan.

And secondly, it is confusing to understand the circulation because of the type of planes he uses. Ozu works a lot with depth of field, but not so much with sequence shots, something that would help to understand spatiality, for example. The camera is usually fixed with a normal 50mm lens that would represent what our eyes see.

Ozu works with space (particularly with the house) to evoke the feeling of the characters. He constructs the dimensions, the planes and the possible labyrinth of these dwellings to demonstrate melancholy, guilt, drama. In Peris' words, "it is the experience of the house that leads the viewer into the interior of the characters". In contrast, Latin American melodrama exaggerates gestures to emphasize the sentimentality evoked.

"It's easy to show drama in a film; actors laugh or cry, but that's just a simple explanation. A director can really show what interests him without appealing to emotions. I want to produce a feeling in the spectator without resorting to drama. I've been trying for a long time, but it's very difficult. Yasujiro Ozu.

The Ohayo neighborhood is described by small barriers but at the same time as a large nucleus that shares the habitation. We could call it a form of oriental tenement. "The houses are not only similar on the outside. Their interiors consist of the same materials, the same elements, the same pieces; only the relationship between them is altered. So much so, that if we eliminate the brief exterior scenes, we could read these interiors as a continuum capable of adding up to a single house." This is a major difference with the house in The Reasons of the Heart. In it, the neighbor is spied on through heavy curtains, with chopped shots (marking hierarchies), where the light briefly escapes and passes through those curtains. Here the opposite is true: the transparency of glass or paper suggests another kind of intimacy, at the same time as the non-hierarchy of spaces (kitchen, bedroom, living room). The depth of the homes, all on the same floor, connects the neighbor on the same level. There is no up and down, good or bad, hell or paradise to ascend to. The drama is indoors with the sadness of the expiration of things. We see this in Sanma no aji, a widowed father who finds it hard to accept that his daughter is leaving home.

Plants by Marta Peris de Ohayo.

It is interesting to think how the Japanese living spaces are constituted from the dimension of the tatamis; the size of a room is given by the number of tatamis it could contain. This allows a quite precise, horizontal and equal planning between several dwellings. The genkan is an intermediate space where footwear too aggressive for the tatami is left. Feet on the ground are another characteristic of lightness and connection to the earth, the natural and calm as opposed to Western brutality. Rarely does a member of the family cross this threshold, except by express invitation. Only those closest to the family are allowed to enter the heart of the house. These customs are well represented in Sanma no aji when men wait to enter the house. This is another characteristic that differs from the Latin melodramatic chaos, where one enters, leaves, and bursts in without permission. This proposes another link between the characters.

We understand that the fundamental difference between the Latin American melodramatic space, which includes the two Mexican films mentioned above, and the Eastern melodramatic space, is given from the charge of the characters. On the one hand we have the abuse of heavy objects, flammable materials and the circulation of several characters breaking into other people's space, a priori in an invasive way. On the other hand, we have a work based on absence, lack and emptiness.

"Already the absent gaze has an emptying effect. Fluid transitions generate places of absence and emptiness. The essence is conclusive and excluding. Absence, on the other hand, makes space more permeable. And so it enlarges it. A space makes room for another space. A space opens for more spaces. It does not reach a definitive closure. The space of emptiness, the space of emptiness, is a disinteriorized space composed of transitions and intermediate spaces. Thus, in the midst of the crowding of big cities there is a pleasant emptiness, a crowding of emptiness" Byung Chul Han.

The idea of absence and empty cities leads us to think about the paradigm that is opposed to living in big cities.

Why is it that in some cases when something afflicts us we tend to escape from home, to find refuge in nature? Ich war zuhause, aber, the latest film by German director Angela Schanelec explores the symbology between the city-forest dichotomy in a very subtle way, rather than showing it as such, it suggests it to us. The film focuses on Astrid's life, but not so much, she is the main thread of the narrative and from her other paths emerge. Astrid's son has been lost for a long time in the forest, a space that sometimes symbolizes the opposite of society. After the death of his father, Peter goes into the forest for weeks, escaping from something he does not know. What he does know is that the four concrete walls decorated with all the objects he once appropriated do not comfort him. There is a need to escape into the unknown, in this case the forest.

The film travels through the city of Berlin, with its high-ceilinged architecture and wide-open outdoor spaces. We see Astrid's emotions change with each space she passes through. Her house is a space of coexistence, where she endures the daily life and contains the family in her role as mother; sometimes she explodes when she is going through the loss of her husband. Her emotions are carried as she wanders through the streets, impregnating her emotional states wherever she goes.

"In the same way that one does not inhabit, that one does not turn an apartment into a home by the mere fact of using it -to sleep, eat, work-, but because one stays, one inhabits a city when one decides to wander through it ["flanear", in the sense given to the term by Balzac and Baudelaire] , that is to say ; without goal or direction", Building, inhabiting, thinking by Martin Heidegger.

The colors, the light, the movement of bodies, the bed as the place where we sleep, and which we will leave in the morning, all of us, throughout our lives, unless you live in the forest where there are no beds and only the earth to which we will return one day.

Why does detaching from the cement-city seem so comforting to us? In the final shot of the film we can glimpse the encounter between the human and his nature. Green colors, sounds of water, calm and a family immersed in this world, accompanying each other. The pure state of each space was impregnated with the feelings that the characters left as they passed by, thus the solitary bodies, almost immobile in their wandering, paralyzed, are represented as if they did not find their place in space and in the urban architecture.

In the home, the equilibrium has been disturbed and the family leaves its axis and finds itself again in nature.

We think about the idea of inhabiting that cannot be understood without the use of space itself. To inhabit is not to possess, to inhabit is to construct what surrounds us as our own. One of the ways of appropriating a space is through wandering, and we think of the film News from home by director Chantal Akerman. A film that not only wanders in New York City, but also appropriates a feeling of uprootedness. It has a double gaze in terms of inhabiting space, both from physical presence and emotional nostalgia. The letters sent by the director's mother with a feeling of melancholy, make every frame of the film soaked with these two elements in convergence.

"Rootedness is not the place where we are born or the one we inherit, but the one where we decide to look at the world with transcendence" Fu Tuan Yi - Topophilia

The long, static shots of the streets, with occasional passers-by, testify to Chantal's presence in that space, which is in relation to this other space that is constantly present in the film: the place from which her mother writes the letters. From the coalition of these narratives, the film is represented in images that are impregnated with the city; the long and static shots give us the sensation of a distant inhabitant of the city who observes the events but does not get involved in them. The film evidences the author's relationship with the city, her identity, her mother's identity and the relationship between the two.

This outdoor dwelling, New York streets at different times of the day, become for the director the shelter from which she observes the world. Home is our corner of the world.

Using cinema as a way to establish a horizontal relationship with invisible spaces and populations, Akerman turns the static into knowledge. In fixed shots charged with a mysterious movement thanks to the walking of the different characters who appear and disappear, the movements of cars and buses in infinite circulation through the streets and avenues are connected. A combination of absence and presence. A film that portrays the exterior of New York streets, and that emanates the interior of a person who emigrates to an unknown place that becomes their own through cinematic representation.

Akerman’s documentary mode of representation can also be seen in the New York streets of Jonas Mekas, an experimental filmmaker who enjoys using every possible device to create what are called home scenes.

The Lithuanian filmmaker's experience is long; it traverses theater and modern happening. But here we concentrate on the scenes encapsulated in his film As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. A five-hour film, divided into chapters, where Mekas shows us small snippets of his own life. A cinematographic poetry that goes through everyday images where his wife, his children, Central Park, autumn and winter appear. Mekas' eclectic way of recording and editing these images, condenses instants of life, where, from time to time, brief moments of beauty are glimpsed. They are micro-narratives as powerful as those proposed in the long fictional scenes.

With his Bolex under his arm, Mekas records these ephemeral scenes of daily life every day, every other day at most. The home comes to occupy a central place in these captures. He considers himself a romantic and under those eyes he captures his home. The romanticization of the home gives rise to a new portrait, a new way of telling the domestic and personal. Although Mekas defines his cinema as a portrait of nothingness, where nothing happens, only records of the everyday, "it's just me and my Bolex, I must film what I see there, what is there now, nothing more. It is no more than that" "I am a filmmaker"; we perceive that there is much more there. The thickness of the film emanates a deep love for these images. We find ourselves before a collage of pleasure, a New York avant-garde cinema that constantly repeats to you: everything is going to be all right.

The space is traversed purely and exclusively by the artist's feeling at the moment of recording. Here, unlike other forms of constituting homes, we witness Mekas' deepest intimacy. We live in his home, with his family. And the great thing about his film is the possibility of recognizing ourselves in it despite all cultural boundaries.

Jonas is an experimental filmmaker, and as such, he insists on form. In his book "Notebook of the Sixties" he takes us through the artistic underground of New York and invites us to reflect on the gaze: "This is a new cinematographic language that is being born, a new way of perceiving the world [...] a new cinema needs us to have new eyes to understand it. Our gaze is going through physical changes.

It requires the temperament and intelligence of an artist for the organization of materials in time and space to produce forces capable of containing life".

This idea of containing life is in each of the plans he records. His link with the neighborhood, the neighbors, the park, the family, are small pieces of this great film. Each of these elements helps to build Mekas' dream space, his living space, his reality.

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty is a spatial audiovisual symphony.

On the New York counterpart are documentary filmmakers like Frederick Wiseman. A sort of audiovisual chronicler who represents social conflicts. His film Welfare is an example of this. Through observation and the chaining of sequences, we see how different people go to a government institution to ask for help. Most of the problems have to do with street situations, unemployment, sexual abuse, child abandonment, medical treatment.

The story is given from the encounter of all these social subjects in front of the corrupt capitalist system. With scenes of up to ten minutes in the same shot, Wiseman gives voice to those who have none. He shows the city in its margins, where splendor has no place. The film begins with a series of photographs taken by the agency of all the people who are claiming service or assistance. With no music, no credits, the first thing we are confronted with is the camera flashing on the faces. The link to crime photography is quite clear. From there it goes to the waiting room full of people where they are calling by name. The perpetual interior. Each case is attended to, but the bureaucracy evidences the complexity of the solution.

It is interesting to think how these cinematographies are installed in a moment, in a specific time, and how they show the impossibility of being something else. Let's say... it is impossible for a film not to be its era. In the 1970s, the United States is in the midst of a cold war against the Soviet Union, a confrontation that coincidentally has the peculiarity of not being located in a specific territory. Unlike the Second World War, none of the countries involved takes direct action against the other (bombings, invasions, military offensives, etc.), but the aftershocks and echoes of the dispute for the constitution of this world system will take place in the margins.

Welfare becomes the representation of the marginalized and excluded of yesterday and today. The apparent invisible plane in which the blocks confront each other gives rise to these social institutions that conglomerate the conflicts related to habitation. Private property is installed as a norm, and therefore as a problem. The major conflict is the impossibility of being part of the system, a system that is at war and in dispute, but in the meantime forces you to follow a series of rules to belong to it. This includes having a decent social and economic capital that allows you to inhabit your space, to have your home. When that becomes impossible, the bureaucratic power of the institutions appears where the fortress built is given to the echoes of the voices that come to claim a better life. The hard walls and wide spaces devoid of warmth, materialize the lack. It is the moment of the loss of utopias, curiously in the most utopian country of all. In the land of lights and the American dream, the loss of utopias will bring much uncertainty and sadness.

Society is severe and Wiseman seeks to make a film of identity, a kind of statement to society, a claim. It is the portrait of a people confronting the dark forces of the invisible, of strategic and media warfare.

The link that we establish between this cinematography and those previously mentioned resides in the fact of visualizing that living in no concrete place is part of this construction. Here the characters live in transition between the street and the shelters. The walls are unstable or non-existent. The cold and humidity pierces the skin in a different way.

We present the different architectures that make up the stories and how inhabiting is articulated in relation to it, but we also consider it essential to think that a large percentage of the population does not have a warm and comfortable home. Hence, the slogan "stay at home" can become quite complex.

We made this journey through different forms of cinematographic representations, cultures and historical contexts. It seemed pertinent to us to choose these films because of the richness of their unity and the possibility of analyzing them as a whole. We can glimpse diverse ways of inhabiting space, this word that has echoed so much in recent months. By understanding this concept we can decompose ideals, question forms and find a kind of harmony to look to the future. With regard to what we have previously addressed, we want to understand our inhabiting today, how to configure cinematographic representations, thinking about the limited physical space in which we find ourselves? What will be our ways of representing? For Heidegger, to inhabit consists in realizing that one does not inhabit an inert space, but makes it one's own and gives it personality by using it, in a relationship between observer and object that creates a symbiosis: neither observer nor object are totally distinct and precisely separated entities, but the person is projected onto reality when acting in it. Maybe the sentence stay at home can begin to plant the idea of recognizing a place and fight with the postmodernity of possessing the intangible: reflecting on the old relationship between building, inhabiting and thinking is underlying the human condition and an essential condition to achieve a society capable of exploring a physical and conceptual rootedness in an increasingly technological and dematerialized world.

Juanjo Pereira and Sofía Lena Monardo

juanjo pereira