All Too Easy

Takes up the modernist house as it appears in films like A Star is Born (George Cukor, 1954), House (Charles and Ray Eames, 1955), and more recent films and moving image media such as The Anniversary Party (Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh, 2001), A Single Man (Tom Ford, 2009), and Stephen Prina’sThe Way He Always Wanted It, II (2008). The chapter also considers a strange site of coincidence between modernist architecture and the movies: the house designed by Richard Neutra for the director Josef von Sternberg that then passed into the hands of Ayn Rand, who was also working in the film industry.

Cinema’s Short-Term Tenancy

In this mostly theoretical discussion I discuss some examples of American feature filmmaking, including Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), in order to establish the implicit problematic that race and the raced body are fundamentally bound up in the “spectacle of property,” even when no non-white bodies appear onscreen. Finally, as a means of testing some of these ideas through close formal and historical analysis, the second part of the chapter focuses in detail on a single film, D.W. Griffith’s The Lonely Villa (1909) and its representation of the house and its violation in the context of cinema’s emergence as a narrative representational medium and as an industry preoccupied by property rights

From Porch to Attic

Concludes by opening up again with a coda that reflecting again on the question of race.

Wrong Life

Investigates the bungalow, the modern house of modest proportions, whose spaces promise an openness and a blurring of private and public and whose threshold is the site of radical possibility. The key films discussed here are Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) and Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, 1943), but the chapter is also in conversation with Theodor Adorno’s fleeting but curious interest in the bungalow and with living spaces more broadly.

Between the Past and the Present

Explores in some detail the history and historiography of what architectural historian Vincent Scully has famously nominated as stick and shingle style architecture. These styles name the large, rambling wooden houses built in the late nineteenth-century whose histories are entangled with that of the colonial revival and Queen Anne styles. Nostalgia is the animating force of these architectural styles, as it is for the films that make significant use of this architecture: Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli,1944), Psycho, and Grey Gardens.