Architecture on Film: Public Housing

Frederick Wiseman is the world’s living master of documentary film making; frequently referred to as ‘a genre unto himself’ and ‘one of the greatest non fiction filmmakers who ever lived.’ Perhaps best known for the controversy surrounding his documentary on a Massachusetts psychiatric institution, Titicut Follies (1967), which was forbidden from distribution for 23 years due to its perceived exposure of the state’s failings. Through an important catalogue of now 38 films Wiseman has continued to chart over 40 years of American life in an ongoing dialogue between people and institutions, reality and filmmaking. With a novelistic take on the documentary form, Wiseman’s methods see him capture hundreds of hours of footage with a minute crew, transforming in the edit suite but a fraction of these candid observations into feature films with drama and narrative, structure and rhythm, that tell stories and open windows onto worlds and situations. In Public Housing, widely acclaimed as one of Wiseman’s greatest works, the director turns his lens towards the community of Chicago’s Ida B. Wells housing estate. A portrayal of architecture in both its physical and social forms, the film observes the estate’s residents as characters in an urban set, in an unfolding conversation with their environment. There are pest control workers with hearts of gold; police constantly exploring the line between empathy and enforced order; block parties; residents association meetings, and even an opportunistic music video shoot – all played out to a background of drug use and hope, frustration and enterprise. This is the flip side to The Wire’s gun toting urban storytelling; offering instead a subtly epic and immersive observational experience. Public Housing is a masterful film about the distance between problems and solutions, structures and people – and therein perhaps the true core essence of architecture itself. A rare opportunity to see the work of this modern master on the big screen. The Architecture Foundation