'Good Girls go to Heaven, Bad Girls go to London. But there is No Place like Home'

Abstract

This catalogue essay was commissioned by Steven Bode at Film and Video Umbrella to accompany Sarah Miles' installation of her film No Place, 2005. The film, comprising two different components shown in two separate but related locations - King's Lynn, Norfolk and King's Cross, London - loosely weaves narrative themes from Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo to tell the story of a young girl's move from the country to the city. My text, in addressing the film, was structured around the narrative trope of the journey, using Tvetlan Todorov's model where the stasis of the beginning is put into action by a rupture, in this case, the cyclone from The Wizard of Oz, and finally reaches another point of stasis or resolution. In narratology, as in No Place, death often resolves narrative conflict. However, the feminist ethos of my text used the fragmentary nature of the film's editing, as well as the fact that No Place featured seven Dorothy characters, to critique the relation between stasis and death. I argued instead for the continuous transformation of the multiple female protagonists. My text, taking its impetus from the film's references to Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times 1936, Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre Sa Vie, 1962, and Christa Wolf's novel 'No Place on Earth,' explored redemptive themes such as love and friendship as no-places which provide transitory homes in modernity