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Our house
Our House, an excerpt

Our House opens with a gray, natural light that both illuminates and flattens the gritty texture of the building’s roof. It is the kind of light that gives you a headache, is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and whose source is so diffuse in the clouds that it disappears. Many of the indoor segments that follow are almost celestial, with natural and bulb light bouncing off the white walls and raw wood, glowing in the window frames. But we continue to return to the flatness, seeing J.P. dressed in black as he talks about beauty and loss. The segment moves between the different palettes, yanking the viewer from the dower to the luminescent, from defeat to hope. This is one of many structural elements of the film that echo the theme of transience and impermanence in the lives of “squatters.”

This idea of transience also appears in the use of steady imagery, not the panning of photographs we are accustomed to in documentary film, but a video or film camera framing and holding a powerfully composed image. Photographs are permanent—captured, as it were—whereas the moving image is just that: moving, nomadic, transient. These steady frames highlight the tension between permanence and impermanence in the film, and are particularly effective in this segment where J.P. and his friends are losing their house, but the sense of home they have gained remains fixed and steady.

~ editorial intern Sarah Sherman

For more about Our House, visit ourhousethefilm.com.

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Thanks Sarah for posting this and giving us a great review. I actually never saw this clip; so it brought back many real memories. Thanks again.

Posted on Jun 8, 2010 by JP Ross