double bill #33

Cinema sometimes has a ghostly quality, from the apparitions on decaying celluloid to the eeriness of watching long-dead actors reanimated on screen. In the home movies My Uncle Tudor (2020) by Olga Lucovnicova and Empty House (1999) by Gina Kim, the woman behind the camera manifests as a spectral presence, observing domestic life from a distance, not quite a full participant in its rhythms.

The insidious feeling of being uncomfortable in your own home permeates both films, whether through the silent complicity of family members in My Uncle Tudor or the personal hell of an eating disorder in Empty House. In the latter, Kim pinches and prods her stomach in a shot isolating her torso, rotating to examine it from every side. Angling the camera towards a full-length mirror, she poses nude, save for a bowler hat, less an accessory than a cover to hide her swollen face. Her paranoid investigation morphs into a whole-body scan, a shameful ritual performed for a house that’s empty even when she’s there.

During their most vulnerable moments, both films home in on the interstitial spaces of the house. The soundtrack with Kim binge-eating and Lucovnicova talking to the uncle who abused her as a child overlays images of dusty corners and gaps between furniture and walls, neglected nooks ripe for ghostly inhabitation. Yet the two seek to escape their haunted life. Peering through closed blinds, they search for openings, however small, to the outside world.