[ecrea] Spectacle of Property - The House in American Film

University of Minnesota Press:


http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/spectacle-of-property **

**

*Spectacle of Property***

*The House in American Film***

/John David Rhodes///

    "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

Much of our time at the movies is spent in other people’s homes. Cinema 
is, after all, often about everyday life. Spectacle of Property is the 
first book to address the question of the ubiquitous conjuncture of the 
moving image and its domestic architecture. Arguing that in cinema we 
pay to occupy spaces we cannot occupy, John David Rhodes explores how 
the house in cinema both structures and criticizes fantasies of property 
and ownership.

Rhodes tells the story of the ambivalent but powerful pleasure we take 
in looking at private property onscreen, analyzing the security and ease 
the house promises along with the horrible anxieties it produces. He 
begins by laying out a theory of film spectatorship that proposes the 
concept of the “spectator-tenant,” with reference to films such as /Gone 
with the Wind/ and /The Magnificent Ambersons./ The book continues with 
three chapters that are each occupied with a different architectural 
style and the films that make use of it: the bungalow, the modernist 
house, and the shingle style house. Rhodes considers a variety of 
canonical films rarely analyzed side by side, such as /Psycho/ in 
relation to /Grey Gardens/ and /Meet Me in St. Louis./ Among the other 
films discussed are /Meshes of the Afternoon, Mildred Pierce, A Star Is 
Born, Killer of Sheep,/ and /A Single Man./

Bringing together film history, film theory, and architectural history 
as no book has to date, /Spectacle of Property/ 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.

University Of Minnesota Press |  December 2017| 288pp |  | 9781517903701 
| Paperback | £21.99*

20% discount with this code: CSL118SPEC**

*Price subject to change.

  **Offer excludes the North & South America , ANZ & Japan


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