Preamble

The essay that follows is a hybrid of academic research and poetic or creative research. In fact, it is less a bounded essay than a fragment of a thread of work that I have been tracing for over thirty years. Poetic research begins not from a thesis or intuition to be argued and proven, but from a figure or trope – necessarily shadowy, multiple in its social meanings and uses, perhaps somewhat ‘mythic’ (see Schwartz 2014 for one model of this type of research and writing). This figure is then (as it were) placed at the centre of an empty field, a mental screen. Gradually, over time, examples arrive to associate or constellate themselves around the central figure; it is a work of accumulation, and also serendipity. Different ‘families’, subgroups, variations and metamorphoses of the figure form across the board. A rhizomatic logic may appear, connecting some of the zones or layers bunched on the field/screen. One discovers what the diagram is about by following its paths, meditating upon it. In a very real sense, the subsequent narration of these research endings can begin or end anywhere, since the entire process is in media res, always happening in the midst of things; no linear chronology, no rhetoric of ‘overview’ is possible.

Nonetheless, for the sake of an initial orientation to this sliced fragment, I shall point to the schema that formed here around the initially chosen figure of ‘home’ and its spaces. A history of sorts is inaugurated in the post-Second World War period with John Ford's iconic images of a home in his classic Western The Searchers (1956). It is here, I have come to believe, that a first true ‘haunting’ or evacuation of home space – outside of the generic confines of horror and fantasy cinema – begins. But a slightly earlier work little seen in its time, Josef von Sternberg's The Saga of Anatahan (1953), has revealed itself, across a cultural ‘delay’, as an even more radical instigation of what I call the boomerang effect of reversible space: once domestic space is flattened and emptied out so thoroughly, it sends us, the spectators, back to our own resources and origins.