In Avi Mograbi’s film-essays, which we will be examining here, the house functions as a focus for observations and confessions, where a web of statements and provocations occur and spend themselves out, connect with each other and isolate from one another. It is never a place that is totally, hermetically closed; it allows one to leave, to go away, to come back and, in this movement of passages, the being is relocated, stands up to meet the outside world, and opens up its upheavals. Thus, the house is a place where filmmaker Mograbi both speaks of himself and summons, within his familiar cell, the voices of the voiceless and the dramas of history. He establishes a topological link in which the ‘outside’ constantly shifts into the ‘inside’: the house is transformed and forms windows for speaking.

In contrast, Alexander Sokurov’s house is a daily microcosm where mournful voices, isolated from the world, circulate. It is a place of silent meditation and echoes the Heideggerian thought of dwelling for which ‘poetry builds the being of dwelling’.

Through the analysis of what we will call the ‘household films’ of Avi Mograbi and Alexander Sokurov, through these places where both the self and a vision of the world are broadcast and projected, we will analyse the movement of speech and silence that engages the other’s gaze. To dwell is to organise and to settle down, in the words of Benoît Goetz, ‘spaces that are thought (spaces of thought)’. In these film-essays, to speak, to look, to create and to reflect, with the house as starting point, does not mean to discover the noumenon of beings in order better to reveal the movement of communities (Mograbi), or to grasp the spirit of the Japanese house, where the image of the threshold establishes a point of mediation between the inside and the outside (Sokurov). Is it not in the familiar places that the outside world barges in, and, as the consequence of a disturbance, is the view of the outside not rearranged so that this strangeness becomes more familiar?