Plans on Film

Abstract

This paper investigates how the ideals of modern architecture and planning were represented to public audiences in Britain and Australia through the documentary film medium. The six films selected for analysis emanate from the British documentary tradition and describe the design and implementation of new urban plans and public housing from the 1930s through to the 1950s. Through these snapshots, questions are posed as to the potential role of the documentary genre in providing valuable – if highly mediated – evidential documents for the architectural historian.

These films, all created within the Grierson School of British documentary making, vary in their portrayal of the professional architect and planner. Techniques including the face-to-face interview, the staged meeting, the guided building tour and the explication of drawings and plans are all incorporated into these films. The voice of the individual architect, however, is often surprisingly and strangely absent during this period. This observation will be teased out through an interrogation of scenes showing overt and oblique professional opinion, influence and agency. By way of contrast and conclusion, the persona of the architect and planner in the contemporary documentary will also be touched upon, through the film UtopiaLondon (2011). This documentary revisits the territory of modern planning and public housing design of the 1930s to the 1960s and provides a platform for the architects involved to retrospectively express their desires, doubts and intentions in the realist tradition of interview and self-reflection.

Notes

^1. Hannah Lewi, “Art, Business or Social Service,” in History in Practice: 25thInternational Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, eds. David Beynon and Ursula de Jong (Geelong: Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 2008); John Gold, The Experience of Modernism: Modern Architects and the Future City, 1928–1953 (London: E&FN Spon, 1997), 123.

^2. There were very few that fit this prescription created in Australia within the given decades.

^3. S. Cunningham, “The Decades of Survival: Australian Film 1930–1970,” in The Australian Screen, eds. Albert Moran and Tom O'Regan (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1989), 61.

^4. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1959).

^5. Mark Tewdwr-Jones, “‘Oh, the Planners Did Their Best’: The Planning Films of John Betjeman,” Planning Perspectives 20, no. 4 (2005): 393.

^6. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 27.

^7. Tewdwr-Jones, “Oh, the Planners Did Their Best,” 395.

^8.The Way we Live, and referred to in Tewdwr-Jones, “Oh, the Planners Did Their Best,” 389–411.

^9. Tewdwr-Jones, “Oh, the Planners Did Their Best,” 394.

^10. Frank Mort, “Fantasies of Metropolitan Life: Planning London in the 1940s,” Journal of British Studies 43, no. 1 (January 2004): 124.

^11. Mort, “Fantasies of Metropolitan Life,” 125.

^12. Mort, “Fantasies of Metropolitan Life,” 130.

^13. Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose, “Spatial Phenomenotechnics: Making Space with Charles Booth and Patrick Geddes,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (2004): 225.

^14. Hayden White, “Historiography and Historiophoty,” American History Review 93, no. 5 (2001): 1193–99.

^15. Julia Hallam, “Mapping City Space: Independent Film-makers as Urban Gazetteers,” The Journal of British Cinema and Television 4, no. 2 (2007): 282.

^16. This reading of the city in film contrasts with recent readings of cities in films, as in the documentaries produced about Liverpool in the twentieth century. See Les Roberts, Film, Mobility and Urban Space: A Cinematic Geography of Liverpool (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012).

^17. Elizabeth Lebas, “The Clinic, the Street and the Garden: Municipal Film-making in Britain Between the Wars,” in Spaces in European Cinema, ed. M. Konstantarkos (Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000), 149.

^18. Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2006), 78.

^19. Mort, “Fantasies of Metropolitan Life,” 130.

^20. Rosenstone, History on Film, 71.

^21. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 145; and Rosenstone, History on Film, 72.

^22. Rosenstone, History on Film, 72.

^23. Brian Winston, “Documentary Film,” in The Routledge Companion to Film History, ed. W. Guynn (London: Routledge, 2011), 84.

^24. John Gold and Stephen Ward, “Of Plans and Planners: Documentary Film and the Challenge of the Urban Future 1935–52,” in Cinematic City, ed. D. B. Clarke (London: Routledge, 1997), 62.

^25. Brian Winston, Claiming the Real (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 148.

^26. Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera as Historian (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Roberts, Film, Mobility and Urban Space.

^27.The Documentary Film in Australia, eds. Ross Lansell and Peter Beilby (Melbourne: Cinema Papers and Film Victoria, 1982). See also Gold, “Of Plans and Planners,” 63; and John Gold and Stephen Ward, “We're Going To Do It Right This Time: Cinematic Representation of Urban Planning and the British New Towns, 1939 to 1951,” in Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, eds. S. Aitken and L. Zonn (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 232.

^28. Eric Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 198.

^29. See Ward, “We're Going To Do It Right This Time,” 232; and Tewdwr-Jones, “Oh, the Planners Did Their Best,” 394.

^30.Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (London: Faber and Faber, 1946), 65; and Winston, Claiming the Real, 148.

^31. See, for example, the chapters in Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place, eds. Les Roberts and Julia Hallam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).

^32. These diffused patterns of audience consumption have been recently well documented within a new genre of film historiography, which is mapping distribution and consumption, rather than focusing on film analysis.

^33. Ward, “We're Going To Do It Right This Time,” 229.

^34. Ward, “We're Going To Do It Right This Time,” 232.

^35. Kevin Bales, “Popular Reactions to Sociological Research: The Case of Charles Booth,” Sociology 33 (1999): 161. See also Mort, “Fantasies of Metropolitan Life,” 144; and Miles A. Kimball, “London through Rose-Coloured Graphics: Visual Rhetoric and Information Graphic Design in Charles Booth's Maps of London Poverty,” Technical Writing and Communication 36, no. 4 (2006): 361.

^36. Lebas, “The Clinic, the Street and the Garden,” 141.

^37. Barnouw, Documentary, 91.

^38. Barnouw, Documentary, 231.

^39. Mort, “Fantasies of Metropolitan Life,” 128. 10,000 copies of the County of London Plan were sold in 1943, and a popular edition was produced by Penguin with many maps and images, as well as an abridged booklet made available to children and troops and an exhibition mounted.

^40. Ward, “We're Going To Do It Right This Time,” 242.

^41. Mort, “Fantasies of Metropolitan Life,” 126.

^42. Mort, “Fantasies of Metropolitan Life,” 126.

^43. Ward, “We're Going To Do It Right This Time,” 254.

^44. Tewdwr-Jones, “Oh, the Planners Did Their Best,” 395.

^45. Michael Twyman, “The Significance of Isotype,” accessed May 2014, http://isotyperevisited.org/1975/01/the-significance-of-isotype.html.

^46. A. Moran, “Constructing the Nation: Institutional Documentary Since 1945,” in The Australian Screen, eds. A. Moran and T. O'Regan (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1989), 154.

^47. For example, Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania all introduced planning legislation modelled on British town and country precedents in 1944–45. See Robert Freestone, Urban Nation: Australia's Planning Heritage (Collingwood: CSIRO, 2010), 23.

^48. Renate Howe, “A New Paradigm: Planning and Reconstruction in the 1940s,” in The Australian Metropolis: A Planning History, eds. Stephen Hamnett and Robert Freestone (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 2000), 92.

^49. Nicholas Brown, Governing Prosperity: Social Change and Social Analysis in Australia in the 1950s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 185.

^50. Freestone, Urban Nation, 149.

^51. Kimball, “London through Rose-Coloured Graphics,” 359; and Mort, “Fantasies of Metropolitan Life,” 134.

^52. Freestone, Urban Nation, 25.

^53. Hannah Lewi, “Back to School: Understanding the Evidential Value of the Modern Documentary,” forthcoming.

^54. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life; and Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986).

^55. Anthony Giddens, “On Rereading The Presentation of Self: Some Reflections,” Social Psychology Quarterly 72, no. 4 (2009): 292.

^56. Louis Menand, “Some Frames for Goffman,” Social Psychology Quarterly 72, no. 4 (2009): 299.

^57. Staci M. Zavattaro, “Expanding Goffman's Theater Metaphor to an Identity-Based View of Place Branding,” Administrative Theory & Praxis 35, no. 4 (2013): 510–28.

^58. Robert Proctor, “The Architect's Intention: Interpreting Post-War Modernism through the Architect Interview,” Journal of Design History 19, no. 4 (2006): 295.

^59. Mort, “Fantasies of Metropolitan Life,” 126.

^60. Mort, “Fantasies of Metropolitan Life,” 151.

^61. Lebas, “The Clinic, the Street and the Garden,” 118.

^62. Tewdwr-Jones, “Oh, the Planners Did Their Best,” 391.

^63. As discussed with Tom Cordell in an interview with the author in July 2013.

^64. As highlighted in Goffman by Giddens, “The Presentation of Self: Some Reflections,” 292.