Page 28 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

22 CULTURAL STUDIES

mankind would never have invented architecture… I prefer houses to the open
air’ (1968:117). Thus one task that the home, or better, the idea of the home,
performs is a transformative one: as an intersticial space, it delimits an area in
which specific practices create the distinctions between two territories—the
natural and the cultural or the physical and the social—that appear to border it.
Articulating elements of both, the home is neither. Rather it figures as a place of
paradox, connoting at once a refuge or area outside of the so-called frantic
‘public’ world and a shelter inside, protected from the natural elements. These
conflicting significations are managed in part by housework. As housekeeper, as
homemaker, as the agent of this semiotic operation, ‘women’ become identified
with its contradictions and effects, contradictions The Central Character
literalizes and thereby makes manifest.
In the film, an amorphous protagonist—initially a housewife—is transformed as
her voice/persona moves from the emphatically organized environment of the
kitchen to the organic profusion of the woods. The film sets up an ambiguous
relation between its central character, her activities and the locations in which
she moves. While highlighting the ways in which housekeeping practices
construct and maintain a domestic environment, Gruben also illustrates the
effects this environment has on the highly unstable identity of its protagonist. In
the film, ‘she’ moves from the kitchen to the garden to the woods in the
performance of her tasks, her character changing dramatically in each milieu.
In an early sequence of the film, text superimposed over a schematic kitchen
floorplan reads, ‘Entropy is the main problem in the modern kitchen, regulating
traffic flow, keeping fingerprints, food particles and other unhygienic particles
out. A nucleus of order must be maintained. A kitchen is white steel and chrome
for early detection. Why is it that disorder is more contagious.’
In the following sequence, stills of a broom sweeping the patio dissolve one on
top of the other, as the woman’s voice informs us ‘the patio must be swept every
day to reclaim it from the out of doors’. Margins are problematic; the patio—
outdoors yet part of the home—borders on the woods and requires vigilant, daily
attention. As the stills of a sweeping broom continue, the housewife notes the
superimposition of the patio, of the cultural surface, on to the natural one—The
clay bricks are set directly into the earth in the extensive backyard’. This
attention to the cultural function of surfaces dominates the first half of the film,
the half that concerns the indoors, the domestic; furthermore, most of the early
images are flat and two-dimensional (a white floor, a floorplan on graph paper, a
drawing of cabinets). These surfaces must be kept clean, free from the material
that characterizes the outdoors (‘dirt’), from all residue that indicate the work
done in the kitchen (‘food particles’), and from the signs of human presence
itself (‘finger’ or ‘footprints’). Significantly, the presence of the housewife is
conveyed strictly by implication, by sound and primarily by the effects of her
housework. When she explains the logic of her cleaning, we see only a broom or
her hand scrubbing a floor.