Public Housing [1997]

 Through his extensive, sprawling and immersive documentation of the Ida B. Wells public housing development in Chicago, Frederick Wiseman traversed both the particular (a specific public housing community) and the universal (what we see in this desolate, messy and yet furiously “alive” complex resonates far beyond its specific geographic and temporal milieus). Emerging through this disarmingly ambitious 3-½-hour piece of unsparing, novelistic and observational portraiture – that can very well be classified as “Wisemanian” – was therefore a radical and humanistic ethnographic study of a ghettoized community and a marginalized people. The apartment building complex, named after the eponymous civil rights activist – that was eventually demolished between 2002 and 2011 – housed over 5000 African-American residents. Impoverished, mostly unemployed, mired in familial dysfunction and teenage pregnancies and addiction, under constant surveillance and harassment of cops permanently stationed around the society who treat the residents as drug peddlers and criminals by default, frequently patronized by unctuous authority figures who lecture them how they can easily improve their economic conditions if only they put in some efforts and enterprise, and at the absolute mercy of a distant and bureaucratic state, this is less a habitat and more an oppressive architecture. Yet, despite the hardships, squalor and violence, it also thrives through its feisty community leader Helen Finner who isn’t afraid of picking battles with those in positions of power, joyous expressions of fleeting freedoms through hip-hop dance celebrations and lively basketball games, selfless community programs hoping to drive micro improvements in the inhabitants’ lives, and incremental steps to elevate themselves from the daily grind of survival. Wiseman stitched these myriad interweaving vignettes – shot on low-fi 16mm colours – with nuance, compassion and undercurrents of irony.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary

Language: English

Country: US