Anyone who has watched American cinema has spent a fair amount of time looking at and into houses. Cinema’s privileged relationship to realism — to the representation of the contours of everyday life — has much to do with this fact. The house is where much of everyday life transpires. The house shelters, structures, temporalizes, differentiates, makes private, and also publicizes this life. It is the ground of realist representation, and it is everywhere in cinema.

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