Film and Domestic Space: Architectures, Representations, Dispositif, edited by Stefano Baschiera and Miriam De Rosa

Abstract

Stefano Baschiera and Miriam De Rosa’s Film and Domestic Space arrived on my desk during the first wave of Covid-19 lockdowns, at a moment when attention had naturally turned inwards to the domestic interior. The book has therefore gained an unexpected sense of topicality. As the new constraints of physically distanced living have transformed houses and apartments into digitally networked hubs for home working and online social interaction, public and private space have blurred in unforeseen ways. More than ever, the home has become visible via media technologies. Through video calls and the ubiquitous array of the Zoom screen—now a staple of family hangouts, classrooms, and business meetings alike—images of other people’s homes have rarely been so present in our everyday lives. On television, broadcasting from home has offered glimpses into the domestic interiors of politicians, celebrities, presenters, and pundits—with the staging and semiotics of bookshelves even briefly becoming a topic of online debate (Guest). In short, the pandemic has not only produced a wide range of domestic imagery. It has also revealed domestic space as a site of media productionas well as media consumption, bringing into focus how the home can operate as a type of moving image apparatus—or as Baschiera and De Rosa put it, as a dispositif. As their timely book shows, this exchange between screen media and domestic space has a varied and complex history.

Keywords

• domestic space
• architecture