Because they bring together trace elements of daily life, because they focus on moments without qualities, because they claim an attraction to marginal places, because they unearth the vulnerabilities that are hidden there, the films I have discussed go beyond the ordinariness of spaces to create a true ‘aesthetics of place’. Events both repetitive and inventive, both familiar and strange, can occur there: places are a parchment on which is inscribed our ever-moving contemporaneity. Many books allude to the ‘spirit of place’, or to the ‘genius loci’, to which are attributed mysterious qualities, allegorical values, but that amounts to taking away from places this fundamental trait: people live there. This is where concrete, quotidian gestures are structured and repeated. This is not the case for the places discussed in this book; they are ordinary homes, isolated areas, sometimes titanic, sometimes minor locales: they are dynamically connected with the inside and the outside, their echoes are heard near and far, here and everywhere.

In some of the films of Chantal Akerman, Avi Mograbi or Jean-Daniel Pollet, the houses the audience sees on screen belong to the filmmakers themselves: they give the viewers access to the centre of their subjective thought while paradoxically allowing themselves to step away from that centre. These houses are worlds unto themselves; they are wells to be dug, places where silent confessions and noisy disavowals fill the space, where thoughts about oneself and thoughts about others are shared and linked. What is considered private comes out of its shell, so to speak, and takes part in the experience of the world’s tumult. These houses are not residences any more, they have become spaces where interior powers and exterior forces clash and collide. In them, speech becomes free, mobile, fragmentary, poetic and political, inventive and questioning. They may be turned into workshops, transformed into a temple, made simultaneously ‘nomadic’ and ‘cloistered’. These houses form an archipelago of disparate poetic and political dwellings. To dwell, for these filmmakers, means to build fortresses, so that they may reveal (themselves) through whispers, angry revolts or provocations. But they still imply rather than explain, they prefer to include rather than exclude.

In Pedro Costa, Tariq Teguia or Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘real fictions’, to live on the outskirts of the city does not just mean to occupy another space.