The Housing Film examines how a century of realities and possibilities in domestic living have been profiled and foregrounded through studies and representations of Housing in the medium of Film. The filmic investigations, analysis and exposés of homes and our way of occupying them, and their possible effect on behaviour, in documentaries like Housing Problems (1935) and Paul Sngs Dispossession: The Great Council Housing Swindle (2017), propaganda films like Cumbernauld: Town for Tomorrow (1970), dramas like Cathy Come Home (1966) and features like High Rise (2017), to understand how closely the tow film and housing - have grown and developed together, each conditioning the understanding and the range of possibilities of the other. This study will examine how these histories are in fact intertwined, will analyse and assess the mutual effects of Housing and Film and propose and define a specific category of The Housing Film.
Arvustused
"The Housing Film gives a vivid new perspective on the monumental story of modern mass housing, through the dramatic lens of film - a medium tailor-made to project the rhetorical passions of the housing problem - and skilfully exploits the idiosyncrasies of British debate as a springboard to explore global discourses of housing crisis." -- Miles Glendinning, Professor of Architectural Conservation, University of Edinburgh Rodger writes engagingly about the development of the promotional use of film with a consideration of the often-overlooked role of sponsorship in housing (and other non-fiction) films of the 1930s and later. The vividness of the horrific living conditions shown in Housing Problems means that many viewers forget that the film was a promotional work for the use of gas. Intriguingly, Rodger mentions that the sponsorship of the film meant that Housing Problems could not be shown on the BBC in its earlier days. -- Ros Cranston * Journal of British Cinema and Television *
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART I - DEFINITION, SOURCES, BEGINNING AND PERIODISATION
1. The Housing Film: exposing processes, struggles, tensions and
interactions
2. The Housing Film: sources and beginnings
3. Chronology and development of the housing film
PART II CASE STUDIES
4. Women making the housing film
5. Television and the housing film
6. Housing Film and high rise
PART III - THE DIGITAL: PERIOD AND CASE STUDY
7. Housing Film in the digital age
Afterword
Bibliography
Filmography
Index
Johnny Rodger is Professor of Urban Literature at Glasgow School of Art. His most recent publications include Glasgow Cool of Art: 13 books of fire at the Mackintosh Library, Key Essays: Mapping the Contemporary in Literature and Culture and The Hero Building: An Architecture of Scottish National Identity.
