The Housing Film

Examines how domestic dwellings and buildings, and the wider socio-political context of housing provision and occupation, is represented in film

• The book defines a new genre of film: The Housing Film
• It gives a survey of almost a hundred years of housing films, and their engagement with the housing situation, housing problems and housing crises
• It examines the diversity of types of housing film - documentary, drama-doc, docu-soap, propaganda and promotion films, activist films, feature films, TV films and plays and artists’ films – and the diversity of housing film-makers
• It sets the housing film in its political, economic, social and cultural context and looks at how it engages with, and affects that context

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 Sng’s 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.’