“Unhomely Cinema” explores how the unhomely nature of contemporary film narrative provides an insight into what it means to dwell in today’s global societies. Drawing from Freud’s concept of the uncanny – that frightful and inexplicable experience of the home as foreign and strange – the unhomely speaks to the spatial dislocation, transience, homelessness and disempowerment symptomatic of contemporary global societies.
While uncanny homes are traditionally associated with the science fiction and horror genres, “Unhomely Cinema” shows how an array of film genres – from Michel Gondry’s comedy “Be Kind Rewind” to Laurent Cantet’s eerie suspense thriller “Time Out” – use the figure of the precarious home to engage with some of the most pertinent social and cultural issues involved in the question of “making home.”
Encounters with the unhomely often result in the painful loss of home, but the unhomely can also offer an ethics of dwelling, whereby the impossibility of narrative closure represents new and more hopeful ways of dwelling in the world.
