Estate of the Nation: Social Housing as Cultural Verisimilitude in British Social Realism

Abstract

Social realism, or what might in other circumstances be called documentary realism, has long been the aesthetic choice of politicized film-makers concerned with the depiction of the British working class. From early documentaries such as those made by John Grierson and the GPO Film Unit in the 1930s (such as Housing Problems, 1935) through Free Cinema and Kitchen Sink dramas and later Cathy Come Home and Kes (Ken Loach 1969) realism has been closely associated with the visual representation of ‘the other’ predominantly located on post-war housing estates and in contemporary times, inner-city and suburban tower blocks. Such territories are sites of intense social interaction where distinctive cultures are generated and social identities conferred, and such films showed—sometimes for the first time—a genuine attempt to represent sections of the British working class in a manner other than dismissive or derogatory. Equally, council estates are sites of political authority: a location of social enclosure for a narrow range of citizens drawn from the lowest incomes and most vulnerable. Consequently, they have in recent times represented a somewhat anthropological expedition for realist film-makers into the lowest corners of class in the United Kingdom. This chapter is concerned with the contemporary cinematic registration of socially specific physical landscapes as ‘problem neighbourhoods’ engaging with the rendition of the council estate as a cultural process; how has recent British social-realist cinema in its framing of the estate and its inhabitants produced a form of decontextualization? Explored through interwoven themes including verisimilitude, political ideology and media discourses, I interrogate the varied contemporary representations that arise from the cinematic rendering of both urban and suburban social locations: what relationships are produced between the council estate and its inhabitants when assembled through film?