Home Screens - by Lorrie Palmer (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

How do film and television makers around the world depict public housing? Why is public housing so often chosen as the backdrop for drama, horror, social critique, rebellion, violence, artistic creativity, explorations of race relations and political intrigue?

Home Screens answers these questions by examining the ways in which socialized housing projects around the world are represented on screen. The volume brings together a diverse group of interdisciplinary scholars, who explore documentary and fictional portrayals of the architecture of public housing, and the communities that inhabit it, ranging from the 1950s to the present. Examining international film and media texts such as Die Architekten (1990), Swagger (2016), Cooley High (1975), Mee-Pok Man (1995), Treme (2010-2013), Mamma Roma (1962), The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011), and Below the Lion Rock (1972-1976), essays within this book consider public and private attitudes toward socialised housing, explaining how onscreen representations shape perceptions of these ubiquitous, often-stigmatized urban locations.

Review Quotes

"This wide-ranging and very necessary volume grapples with what it means for public housing to become an image. Across twelve strikingly argued chapters, Palmer and her contributors show how film and television not only materially contribute to that image on a global scale, but how they can iterate, complicate, or question it and, in doing so, redefine our image of the home." --Erica Stein, Vassar College, USA

"Home Screens is a must read for anyone interested in government-financed housing in both material reality and cinematic space. Palmer and her contributors deftly examine how diverse tenants try to create a sense of "home" in its contained, often precarious spaces." --Merrill Schleier, University of the Pacific, USA

About the Author