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- Title
Concrete universality: Tower blocks, architectural modernism, and realism in contemporary British cinema.
- Authors
Burke, Andrew
- Abstract
This article examines the representation of tower blocks in Last Resort (Pawlikowski 2000) and Red Road (Arnold 2006). Commonly associated in the popular imagination as the site of major social problems (crime, poverty, antisocial behaviour), the concrete high-rise has become the symbol of the decline of contemporary Britain. Both films recognise the structural decay that characterises many post-war housing developments and acknowledge the social problems that plague them, yet they seek to understand this deterioration as a consequence of larger social and political decisions and developments. Last Resort records the transformation of tower blocks into holding cells for asylum seekers. Red Road turns the proliferation of CCTV cameras on a Glaswegian housing estate into a metaphor for a society fearful of those people and places incongruent with a modern, affluent Britain. In each case, dramatisation enhances documentation rather than compromises it, and the tower block becomes the setting for what iek terms concrete universality, the process whereby fiction explodes documentary from within (iek 2006: 31). In this way, these films constitute a revitalised realism in which the truth of the antagonisms that divide society can best be shown in the guise of fiction.
- Subjects
UNITED Kingdom; CONCRETE; TALL buildings; SOCIAL problems; ARCHITECTURE; REALISM; MOTION picture theaters
- Publication
New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 2007, Vol 5, Issue 3, p177
- ISSN
1474-2756
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1386/ncin.5.3.177_1