Moving Images of HOME: Tracing an Architectural Phenomenography through the Films of Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky

The research started by asking the question: "How is the meaning and memory of home communicated through the films of Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky?" The meaning this question was seeking entailed elements such as architectural experience, perception, memories and dreams, and the research thus enquired film's mechanisms for rendering legible such ineffable concepts, with a foucs on the two particular case studies of Tarkovsky and Bergman.
Building upon claims that film has the ability to communicate direct experiences of lived space, the thesis peruses theoretical intersecting findings that encircle the research quest: architecture and film, phenomenology, as well as other adjacent fields. The aim is to draw creative splices that outline an original view on the architectural experience of home, as read throughout the work and life of these two artists. Therefore, among the main outputs of the thesis was to rewrite the biographies of Bergman and Tarkovsky based on their spatial element, a recreated life-writing in which place gains a central role of life journeys and choices. From these reconsidered biographies, new understandings about home, dwelling and place attachment are drawn.
The methodological aim of the study is to propose an architectural phenomenography (literally a writing of phenomena), a redefined view on architectural phenomenology that uses autobiographical film as a research tool to allow explorations on the concept of home. The established routes of phenomenological inquiry make use of linguistic material in order to read and write descriptions and in such a manner to reach the essence of phenomena. By replacing the majority of the linguistic research data with audiovisual material provided by the films, the novelty of the present approach lies in considering moving images as portent of inscribed phenomenological descriptions, legible through film viewing. The essential factors for selecting Bergman and Tarkovsky as the case-study filmmakers was the strength of their works to communicate the space of home in its lived form. Due to this peculiar quality, the present study looked at these works attempting to trace a method of writing spatial experience on the imponderable surface of film. Throughout the thesis, this method was termed as architectural phenomenography, and it was defined as a communicative medium through which, once spatial experiences have been written on film, they silently await a proper deciphering.
This study therefore strives to answer the silent call of these experiential moving images and to disclose them as categories of architectural experiences.