
It's the places you live that shape you. Not just the suburb and the street you come from, but the rooms and the people you live with. I grew up in tiny terraces in inner city Sydney and Melbourne, where winter was always freezing, the floorboards creaked and the plaster cracked after the rain. Those houses, and the spaces inside, have as much an effect on who I am, I think, as the people I met, the books I read and the music I listened to.
My favourite room in the world is in my father’s house. There are French doors looking out onto a courtyard and an over-burdened Jacaranda tree. Next to the doors is a huge antique leather wing-backed chair, which my father bought when he turned fifty and declared that he had worked hard all his life and from now on will only buy music on vinyl, write in French violet ink and buy expensive things he likes. It’s my favourite chair in the world. I can curl up in it like it’s a cocoon, balance a cup of coffee on my knee and a stack of books on the other. It’s not uncommon for me to fall asleep and wake up hours later with the cat at my feet. Next to the chair is an art deco fireplace, with tiled pictures of weeping women surrounding it. On the wall is a Communist-era Vietnamese poster of a smiling woman holding her baby with an AK-47 draped across her shoulder. And on the wall directly opposite is my favourite thing of all – a wooden bookcase which extends across the room, as high as the ceiling, with a ladder attached to a rail so you can reach the books at the top. I’ve discovered some of my favourite books in that bookcase. I study in that room, I sit and read, I listen to my father’s old records. In the summer I sit sewing on the floor, in winter I get drunk on hot chocolate with shots of whisky. There are crumbled attempts at origami on the shelves and coffee rings on top of the speakers. Every single thing in that room, every scratch and trip and every hour spent in it, contributes to how much I love it. Maybe if I hadn't lived part of my life in that room I wouldn't be precisely who I am right now. Just maybe...
Space only means something once it’s inhabited. You need to be able to use it, to touch it, to live in it, to love it. Otherwise what’s the point? That’s what I got out of the Eames films, and looking at the scrawled elliptical notes I made that week, that’s the most coherent thing I wrote down. The Eames house is beautiful, but part of it’s beauty is that it’s lived in – there’s half eaten toast in the kitchen and papers on the table. People run up and down it’s staircase and around it’s garden. Without all of that I don’t think it would signify anything, it would just be empty, but very well designed, space.
What you say here really resonated with me - I've always had incredibly emotional relationships to particular places and that's how I remember them - I don't so much remember the place, but I remember the emotion. And that memory can never fully recreate the place as a totality. The most intense recollection I have of the house I grew up in was the banister. I can't even remember what my room looked like, but I can remember the banister so distinctly - its texture and shape, and how the paint peeled off in sections.
ReplyDeleteFor me, the Eames film seemed to work in a similar way, presenting only fragments - an archive of emotionally loaded memories.
It is interesting what both you and Isobel reflect upon about the idea of "space" and "emotion". I have tried to explain a similar thing with my discussion of Ozu's Tokyo Story, where I suggested that the interior spaces in its visual representation, contained psychological associations and acted as a type of "heterotopia" in this way. I think Eames' films work in a similar way, to the extent which life is given to inanimate objects, or the "ordinary" is transformed into the "ornate", through our own associations and the transformations which occur within us when watching the film. I think your statement that "space only means something once it's inhabited" is perfectly true, as we transform “space” through applying “meaning” and “emotion” to it.
ReplyDeleteI really liked this post. Your dad's house sounds amazing! It's interesting to see how a person's surroundings can affect one's own self. Almost as if the exterior somehow becomes part of a person's interior.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny how the little things in life really get to you.
And like a good bottle of bourbon, it only gets better with age!
Madeleine, you evidently suffer from an advanced case of Cool Parent Syndrome...
ReplyDeleteYour description of your father's (enviable) study does what good cinema (and literature) does - choosing evocative details. The objects you isolate give the room history and texture. And I think there's no way to rush that process, to dress a space authentically. The history has to exist, to inform the objects. As humans we are meaning-seeking beings I think and to decorate and invest a space reflects some deep need to record one's own story.
I'm not sure I was as convinced by the Eames' photographic account of their charmingly lived-in space; there was something self-conscious about the artful arrangement of dishes and knick-knacks. Five years didn't seem quite long enough to buy authenticity... am I just being cynical? Probably.
When I first started reading the description of your father's study, my immediate impulse was wanting to see a picture; but the world you come to evoke so clearly through your writing was rendered so clearly that I was fine without one and instead was content with the image you conjured and my own projection of it. It sounds like a great room.
ReplyDeleteI also like Patrick's idea that to decorate a space is to record one's story. I never understand people who hire decorators to do that for them, to furnish their homes with kitsch, faux-historic items without any meaning behind them. Each to their own I guess. Otherwise, great post.
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ReplyDeleteThis is a great post Madeline! I think the "residue" of place, especially that of your parents, is such a strong determining factor of who you are. It made me wonder if this may be because, on some level, "your" affect on that place (or in this case your father's affect on it), made it what it is. Does the place become a projection of your dad like your bedroom may be a projection of yourself? I think a dialogue opens up when you enter a place. It brings its creaky, floor boards, french windows and bookshelves. You bring the books.
ReplyDeletei had to re-comment. its essentially the same post. just fixed some typos i couldn't live with...
ReplyDeleteAn enjoyable read! :)
ReplyDeleteThe detailed description of your own space really reflects how closely connected with it you are. I like how many of the films we've studied have resonated with so many people, shaping a variety of interpretations which have been influenced by personal experiences.
I think you just described something I couldn't quite pin point in my mind. I have debated with myself as to weather the absence of actual life means lifelessness but I'm sure it doesn't. The Eames' depiction of their living space really does parallel the connection you've established with yours. Their film is more of a fragmentary memory of residual space that alludes to a sense of life within and outside it.
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