Reframing the contested city through ethnographic film: beyond the expository on housing and the urban

Abstract

The legacy and future of the ‘ethnographic film’ has been the subject of much scrutiny and refinement in recent decades, mirroring the reinvention of ethnography itself. A number of innovative strands such as observational film, direct cinema, and sensory ethnographic film have attempted to reframe the ‘ethnographic film’ beyond its narrative expository documentary origins. In reinventing the ‘ethnographic film’, filmmakers have addressed important questions regarding representation, the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject, and the need for a more open-ended interpretation and contextualisation to involve the audience. Concomitantly, an ever-increasing number of films direct their focus towards the contested nature of housing and urban redevelopment in cities. Despite this, the use of film in housing and urban studies remains under-examined and in need of urgent critical engagement. In this paper, we discuss the representation of two contested housing and urban redevelopment projects in London, the Robin Hood Gardens public housing estate, and the Seven Sisters Indoor Market. We analyse a relatively large number of films made on these projects and compare their treatment of representation and audience to assess the significance of the ‘ethnographic’ approach, consequently arguing that filmmakers and researchers probing contested cities can benefit from a closer engagement with productive debates with it. We argue that the dialectical engagement between ‘ethnographicness’ and ‘filmicness’ can help realise the immense generative potentials presented by the filmmaking medium, allowing a reality to emerge from the film, rather than reduce the film to a representation of textually reproduced reality. In doing so, we consider the importance of the contested nature of housing and the urban as cinematic subjects. As a conclusion to the paper, we present some reflections on the need for moving towards filmmaking that dwells on the liminal experiences of communities inhabiting contested housing and urban redevelopment projects.

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