Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film

Description

Spectacle of Property details the ambivalent but powerful pleasure we take in viewing private property onscreen, analyzing the security and ease the house promises along with the horrible anxieties it produces. It marks a new milestone in examining cinema's relationship to realism while leaving us vastly more informed about, if less at home inside, the houses we occupy at the movies.

John David Rhodes teaches at the University of Cambridge, where he is director of the Centre for Film and Screen. He is author of Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini's Rome and coeditor of Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image, both from Minnesota.

"Opening up a whole new and exciting field of study, Spectacle of Property is far more intelligent, interesting, and revelatory than most cinema studies books. John David Rhodes's combination of sensitive and nuanced close-readings of films and the rich theoretical contexts in which he elaborates them is brilliantly original. Among the book's great pleasures is Rhodes's own writing; it is elegant, judicious, and finely modulated."-David E. James, University of Southern California "Spectacle of Property is a far-reaching and original account of the relationship between private houses and cinematic spaces and the conflicted ways they are viewed and inhabited. Deftly analyzing a variety of different types of abodes and their gendered and race-inflected underpinnings, John David Rhodes demonstrates the way a house may determine the shape of a cinematic narrative. He provides new and fascinating interpretations of such iconic films as Mildred Pierce, To Kill a Mockingbird, Meet Me in St. Louis, and Psycho."-Merrill Schleier, author of Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in American Film "Spectacle of Property is a brilliant, provocative, politically astute, and witty exploration of a fascinating topic. In looking at the ways in which houses and domestic architecture are figured in a wide range of American films, it gives us entirely new understandings of cinematic and architectural spaces and of our relationships to 'property.'"-Laura Marcus, University of Oxford "Spectacle of Property points cinema studies in new directions that should inspire scholarship, teaching, and debate about space, modernity, and Hollywood history."-Critical Inquiry "By bringing together the world of cinema and the world of private houses, Rhodes succeeds in producing new ways of looking both at cinema and at houses-all of this in the larger context of the constructing and experience of new spaces as well as the attempts to maintain no longer viable forms of living and to anticipate the housing and looking forms of tomorrow. Spectacle of Property is a game-changing publication, which ceaselessly emphasizes the ethical and political dimension of cultural criticism."-Leonardo Reviews