This thesis explores the potential of domestic space to act as the ground for new forms of community and sociability in Argentine and Chilean films from the early twenty-first century. It thus tracks a shift in the political treatment of the home in Southern Cone cinema, away from allegorical affirmations of the family, and towards a reflection on film’s ability to both delineate and disrupt lived spaces. In the works examined, the displacement of attention from human subjects to the material environment defamiliarises the domestic sphere and complicates its relation to the nation. The house thus does not act as ‘a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability’ (Bachelard), but rather as a medium through which identities are challenged and reformed. This anxiety about domestic space demands, I argue, a renewal of the deconstructive frameworks often deployed in studies of Latin American culture (Moreiras, Williams). The thesis turns to new materialist theories, among others, as a supplement to deconstructive thinking, and argues that theorisations of cinema’s political agency must be informed by social, economic and urban histories. The prominence of suburban settings moreover encourages a nuancing of the ontological links often invoked between cinema, the house, and the city. The first section of the thesis rethinks two concepts closely linked to the home: memory and modernity. Analysing documentary and essay films, Chapter 1 suggests some political limitations to the figure of the fragment which dominates scholarly discussion of memory in Latin America. Chapter 2 studies films which explore the inclusions and exclusions created by modernist domestic architecture. The second section focuses on two human figures found on the threshold of the home: the domestic worker and the guest. Chapter 3 analyses unorthodox representations of domestic work, and explores how new materialist approaches can enhance readings of the political potential of ‘art cinema’. Finally, in Chapter 4 I examine films depicting household visitors that upset urban class divisions, and question the possibility of ‘domestic cosmopolitanism’ (Nava 2006) in contemporary Latin America. My comparative analysis of these films explores a rupture between physical dwelling and imagined home that points towards new political practices in a neoliberal, post-dictatorship context.

In modern supercomputer architectures, the I/O capabilities do not keep up with the computational speed. Image-based techniques are one very promising approach to a scalable output format for visual analysis, in which a reduced output that corresponds to the visible state of the simulation is rendered in-situ and stored to disk. These techniques can support interactive exploration of the data through image compositing and other methods, but automatic methods of highlighting data and reducing clutter can make these methods more effective. In this paper, we suggest a method of assisted exploration through the combination of feature-centric analysis with image space techniques and show how the reduction of the data to features of interest reduces occlusion in the output for a set of example applications.