Visiting the Past – A Look at ‚The House inside of Her‘ by Pernille Rose Grønkjær and Astrid Kruse Jensen

Do you hear a whisper, does it come from the leaves of the trees? And what about the soft feeling on your skin, was it a touch or just a light breeze?

In the short story ‚A Haunted House‘ the inhabitants of a house become visitors: a ghostly couple. The story by Virginia Woolf describes the couple’s visit to their former home:

‚From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there‘.

What Virginia Wolf describes with words, becomes visible in the short film ‚The House inside of Her‘ by Pernille Rose Grønkjær and Astrid Kruse Jensen. We see a woman whose hair is blown over her face. The wind and light come from an unknown source. However, judging by her face, they take her to another place, to a former home maybe.

 

In the next still, we see this woman walking through a grey forest. A fog is coming up, does she know where she is?

Then she enters a house, the fog has vanished and warm sunlight is coloring the rooms. She walks directly to the window as if searching for something. This reminds us of the ghostly couple by Virginia Wolf, them going around the house and attaching memories to various spots:

 

“Here we slept,” she says. And he adds, “Kisses without number.” “Waking in the morning—” “Silver between the trees—” “Upstairs—” “In the garden—” “When summer came—” “In winter snowtime—”

Then we enter with the woman another room. It is covered with papers, they are on the floor and swirl around in the air. These papers cover partly a man who is standing at a table. He does not notice us. The flying papers separate us from him.

Like the papers, the woman is flying too in the next still. She is not lying on a bed but she hovers above it. Maybe this is a familiar place but now she does not dare to touch it anymore.

The film closes and so does our insight into the house. Was it a real house? Or did we accompany the woman into a house from her past, now existing in her imagination? Thus, she is visiting something in herself. Being a visitor to the past, being a visitor to ones memories and coming home again and again. And where is home then? Always inside of you, with you.