Aestheticising rural poverty: representations of white working class youth in the documentary Rich Hill (2014)

ABSTRACT

This paper examines representations of white rural working class youth in the award winning United States observational documentary Rich Hill (2014) through the lens of the aestheticisation of poverty. We begin the paper by establishing what we mean by the aestheticisation of poverty arguing it is a common trope in western culture which positions the poor as ‘other’ rendering them either invisible or as a failure. Following this, we situate our analysis within the literature on ethics in documentary film, examining debates which have inflected the release of other documentaries focused on the poor. In the next section we examine the film-makers’ positionality revealing that while they foreground their historical connection to the town, they mute their middle-class subjectivity. The close textual analysis of the film in the subsequent parts of the paper detail the ways in which the film aestheticises poverty, that is via its particular visual style, sound/image relationship and deliberate focus on youth. Despite the director’s intent the film does not challenge poverty but instead aestheticises it because it does not elaborate upon the complex factors which have given rise to the social problem that is rural poverty, and rendered it so intractable.

KEYWORDS:

• Documentary
• aesthetics
• ethics
• rural
• working class
• youth

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the ‘Troubled Images Symposium’ held at the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research, Griffith University, December 8–9, 2016. We are grateful to the convenors Margaret Gibson, Bruce Buchan, Amanda Howell and Samid Suliman for the invitation to present at this symposium and to participants for their interest and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Wendy Keys lectures in screen media studies in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences at Griffith University, Australia. She has a background in audience research and policy specialising in children and young people and her work is informed by contemporary debates in film, media, communication and cultural studies.

Barbara Pini is a Professor in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences at Griffith University, Australia. She has an extensive research record of research in rural social science exploring questions of how rural identities intersect with other social locations such as age, social class, sexuality, ethnicity, indigeneity and disability to create inclusions and exclusions.

ORCID

Wendy Keys http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1718-2595