“Realism, anyway, is never exactly the same as reality, and in the cinema it is of necessity faked” 
                                                       - Jean-Luc Godard

Film in the Film (Home is affected by these films]

One Week (1920) 
by Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton

  The shorts Keaton made in the early twenties are warm-ups for his features, but they have exotic delights of their own. Filled with topical jokes about prohibition and the success of women’s suffrage, they exhibit a consistent self-reflexivity, making them perhaps the first serious films about films themselves. In One Week (1920), there is a delicious scene: his newlywed wife is taking a bath. She drops the soap and reaches to get it, but then looks at the audience and makes a “tsk-tsk!” face, whereupon a hand covers the camera lens to hide her nudity. This scene demonstrates his sophisticated awareness of the nature of the film medium, which would climax in Sherlock, Jr (1924). Keaton understood, instinctively, the dream-like nature of films — many of the shorts end with him waking up from a dream-filled slumber.

Peeping Tom (1960) 
by Michael Powell

  The self-reflexivity permeates the film’s opening of Peeping Tom’s narrative and stylistic structure.By making the viewer aware of what is normally “a hermetically sealed” construction of misogynistic gazes in a narrative that is thematically bound up with the dangers of voyeurism, Peeping Tom embodies Mulvey’s definition of an “alternative cinema.”  Furthermore, Mulvey posits her own admiration for the film in the way in which, “the story is showing us an extreme, a perversion of the cinematic look, but it also reflects outwards, onto the cinema’s intrinsic fascination with looking, and the ease with which it can make peeping toms of us all”

Tokyo Story (1953) 
by Yasujiro Ozu

  Ozu's representing reality of the 50's Japanese society. The story consists of a social commentary on Japanese middle-class family life and more acutely, an examination of human mortality, alienation, and modernity.

Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) 
by Alain Resnais

  The Japanese man begins to ask the French woman about herself. “What are you doing in Hiroshima?” he asks. “I am acting in a film” the woman replies. It is not only part of the fictional world of the film, it’s also a self-reflexive comment on the production of the movie. the French woman is indeed acting in a film, and that film is HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR.

Contempt - Le Mépris (1963) 
by Jean-Luc Godard

  The film was backed by three big producers: American Joseph Levine; the Italian Carlo Ponti; and the French Georges de Beauregard. Levine insisted upon a nude scene with Bardot as a way of making the film commercially attractive. Godard obliged but made the scene self-reflexive. Bardot’s character, Camille, asks her husband what parts of her body he likes and the scene was filmed using a variety of colour filters, as well as ordinary light, which draws attention to the artifice of what we’re seeing. The audience is not going to be allowed to enjoy the sight of Bardot’s body in a straightforward manner. Le Mepris’s self reflexivity is evident from the title sequence, in which a camera tracks across the screen before turning to face the audience. The narrative continues the theme. It concerns the conflict between art and commerce, a schism that Godard himself was struggling with.

The Double Life of Véronique (1991) 
by Krzysztof Kieślowski

  Two main characters: Weronika lives in Poland & Véronique lives in Paris. They don't know each other. Weronika gets a place in a music school, works hard, but collapses and dies on her first performance. At this point, Véronique's life seems to take a turn and she decides not to be a singer. The film tells a complex narrative of two young women who are existential copies of each other. The film hinges entirely on ineffable qualities: the interconnectedness of humanity, dual personalities, alternative realities, mysticism, sensation, attraction.

Measures of Distance (1988) 
by Mona Hatoum

  The filmmaker never appears in the film, however, the voice she reads her mother's letter on the sound track. In the video Hatoum attempts to narrate and represent the distances between safety and unsafety, mobility and confinement as the images of the mother’s flesh and her words do not provide us with a world outside of the mother. The film has very personal\political video pieces which began as a performance installation with the artist herself before it was put in a form, a videotape, whereby it could travel without its author and creator, granting Hatoum another distance from her internal landscape of war and loss. 

Reassemblage (1982) 
by Trinh T. Minh-ha

  The filmmaker explores how she can avoid a top-down perspective on the Senegalese women who are the main subject of the film. The voice-over of Trinh says: I do not intend to speak about. Just speak nearby. Trinh does not want to be an objective outsider explaining to the viewer how the Senegalese women spend their daily lives. She wants to get closer, but at the same time she realises that she is different and cannot be one of them. Trinh reflects on these concerns in the film, thus turning it into a source for alternative ideas for ethnographically inspired documentary filmmaking.

Sullivan’s Travels (1942) 
by Preston Sturges

  Sullivan and others glamorize the life of the poor through his wanting to make a film about that lifestyle. However, when he truly experiences the mundane activities that the poor have to deal with such as sleeping with the multitudes in a shelter, being stolen from, and digging through the trash for food, Sullivan realizes that being poor is not such a charming life. Sullivan fully assimilates into the poor lifestyle when he is at the church and finally begins to laugh at the Mickey Mouse cartoon shown, like the others. This is also Preston Sturges’s way of making the film a satire of Hollywood, for the film seems to say that laughter alleviates everything, even social standing, in the way the film concludes and how it simplifies poverty.

Manhattan (1979) 
by Woody Allen

  Woody Allen's perpetual theme of self- reflexive in his 1979 film Manhattan - 
The seed for Manhattan, which is Allen’s most critically acclaimed film grew out of the director’s desire to work within specific technical parameters: anamorphic shooting to mirror the immensity of his beloved city, and black and white film to echo the vision of New York that had been romanticized through countless classic films.

Being John Malkovich (1999) 
by Spike Jonze

  The mysterious relationship between the mind and body: Being John Malkovich is self-reflexive film for those who question along with Craig(John Cusack) the nature of a world where there are portals through which people can enter others’ brains,John Malkovich’s brain. It’s clear that the creators of this film solve the mind and body problem by separating the two entities. For Craig and Dr. Lester’s(Orson Bean) bandwagon, John Malkovich’s body is a vehicle, one that is to be controlled. However, John Malkovich also has a soul, as he is knocked into his subconsciousness when Craig and Dr. Lester become his body’s new host.

8½ (1963) 
by Federico Fellini

  Federico Fellini's self-reflexive autobiography with what is widely believed to be his finest and most personal work. In Fellini's alter ego Guido Anselmi, a film director overwhelmed by the large-scale production he has undertaken. He finds himself harangued by producers, his wife, and his mistress while he struggles to find the inspiration to finish his film. The stress plunges Guido into an interior world where fantasy and memory impinge on reality. Fellini jumbles narrative logic by freely cutting from flashbacks to dream sequences to the present until it becomes impossible to pry them apart, creating both a psychological portrait of Guido's interior world and the surrealistic, circus-like exterior world that came to be known as "Felliniesque"

Videodrome (1983) 
by David Cronenberg

  A sleazy cable-TV programmer begins to see his life and the future of media spin out of control in a very unusual fashion when he acquires a new kind of programming for his station.
“And therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it.” 
                                          — Brian O’Blivion in Videodrome

Arirang (2011) 
by Ki-Duk Kim

"Through Arirang I understand human beings, thank the nature, and accept my life as it is now" 
                      - Kim, Ki Duk

The film addresses a personal crisis Kim went through, sparked by an incident during the filming of his previous film and by the departure of a couple of close colleague filmmakers.

The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) 
by Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas

  The montage-based self reflexive analytical work by the Grupo Cine Liberacion. The film addresses the politics of the 'Third worldist' films and Latin-American manifesto of the late 1960s. 
Part1: neo-colonial violence as having several manifestations, and after enumerating them, we are told in an intertitle that under neo-colonialism,
Part2: Act for Liberation
Part3: Violence and Liberation.

Sans Soleil: 
Sunless (1983) 
by Chris Marker

  A film about time travel that has elements of science fiction like Marker's earlier La Jetée (1964). The present day of Tokyo is projected in Marker's pov at the start of the 1980s. via his narrator, he delivers an endless stream of grand, airily magisterial pronouncements on the Japanese character. Sun Less is a jumble of images and words – most of the footage is shot in Tokyo, but we also have several detours to Guinea-Bissau, Iceland and, as previously mentioned, San Francisco. There is no direct sound – instead we have an almost non-stop narration from Alexandra Stewart, in which she tells of receiving various letters and images from an unseen, unidentified traveller we presume is Marker himself: the observer.

Tarnation (2003)
by Jonathan Caouette

  The filmmaker's auto biography documentary on growing up with his schizophrenic mother - a mixture of snapshots, Super-8, answering machine messages, video diaries, early short films, and more culled from 19 years of his life.

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“Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined"     
                             - Chris Marker