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Screening House: film and material representations of the Cold War’s anxieties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2023

Sebastián Aedo*
Affiliation:
sebastian.aedo@port.ac.uk
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In 1955 Charles and Ray Eames gathered more than three hundred photographs of their Case Study House #8 in the Pacific Palisades to produce the experimental film House: After Five Years of Living. The film is a visual exploration in which craft and found objects contrast with the mass-produced industrial structure of their house, but also a constant tension between the frantic acceleration of its images and moments of slow pace.

Proceeding from a close reading of House: After Five Years of Living, this article analyses its film and editing technique to proposes how domesticity becomes a screen. This means, an ideological surface promoting the cultural, social, and economic changes of the Cold War period, while simultaneously screening out (obscuring) its anxieties, preoccupations, and fears in its mode of visual representation. In the film, the Case study House #8 exposes and covers, promotes and disguises, veiling some preoccupations and motivations while exhibiting an alternative reality.

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Full Paper
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that no alterations are made and the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained prior to any commercial use and/or adaptation of the article.
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© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press