House by the River, A: The Wrong Shape1980

the film is about the history of the family as a social institution. Various cinematic forms are appropriated by the film as a means of displacing and questioning the viewer/listener's knowledge and experience of subjectivity. The sound tack develops a materialist history of the family unit beginning in feudal Europe and delivered in th ewords of a young student giving a book report to his classmates.
The voice of this student, however, wavers between the authorial voice of the educational film and the hesitant voice of the student; between the pregnant pauses of a nervous young man and the stunbling of a 'bad' actor.
The image track alternates between subjective and descriptive camera positions, focusing on contemporary domestic and scholastic 'scenes'. The audience is divided between these contradictory practices and positions in a film which refuses to close in on itself or to offer a closed position outside of itself" D.W.