![]() ![]() In Australian cinema, Richard Lowenstein’s Dogs In Space (1986) is a notable example of a film grounded more by its share house location than its fragmentary narrative and barely developed characters. Yet in the imagination, even the misery of quotidian existence can somehow take on a perverse glamour (or ‘anti-glamour’), especially when linked to apocalyptic extremes of madness and death.Īudio-visual media like film and TV seem especially well equipped to explore these competing notions of share housing, and relate them to concrete experiences of life in a particular place. Of course, it’s arguable that actual share houses are nothing like either ideal, and are more likely to be swamps of poverty, bickering, and squalor. ![]() But then there’s the flip side of the countercultural dream: the individualistic fantasy of escaping from all permanent ties, drifting footloose and fancy-free from one address to another. On the one hand, modern share housing descends partly from the collective, communal ideals of the ’70s. As a narrative site, it’s also interesting because it can be understood in several ways. Of course, living with your friends hardly makes you a bohemian rebel – but with its potential to generate open-ended encounters between very different social types, the share house can be an extremely powerful engine for drama (just ask the producers of “Big Brother”). One way of investigating contemporary Australian cinema’s interest in ‘alternative’ lifestyles might be through a kind of phenomenology of the share house. ![]()
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