Tag: Gentrification

The Street

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The devastating effects of gentrification are meticulously observed in documentary The Street, a scathing indictment of Tory austerity over the past four years. An empathetic portrait of a community in flux, it doubles up as a wide-spanning lament for a country that has seemingly lost its way.

The Street keeps things very local, maintaining all its action across one street in Hackney. It makes sense: London has always been a city of villages. You can still feel the distinct characters of certain districts as they flow into each other, blending contrasting architectural styles, eras and social types. Hoxton Street is one such village— located only one mile from the City of London, its characterised by its authentic East London feel. Yet with increasing monoculture on the rise, caused by the influx of the monied middle-classes, the street is in danger of losing any of its original authentic character.

It starts off pretty bleak. Nearly all the pubs are closed. Replaced by cafes. Garages, replaced by flats. Authentic eateries, replaced by craft beer bars. Only a few places hang on: an old garage sandwiched between two housing developments; a meat and pie shop that’s been in business for several generations; and a traditional bakery selling gingerbread men and apple tarts for a handful of change.

The Street

Photographer turned filmmaker Zed Nelson is a great listener, inserting himself when he needs to but rarely asking questions with a particularly pointed agenda. We talk to Octogenarian Coleen reminiscing about her lost loves; an Anglican priest about to lose his home when he’s forced to retire at 70; a homeless man living under a bridge. Nelson lets these locals speak more or less for themselves, explaining their sad situation and how rampant capitalism is making their lives increasingly more difficult.

But he’s also smart enough not to paint anyone’s struggle in simple black-and-white — and to simply take the word of the locals as the final point on the matter — creating a complex picture of both locals and those moving in. While some of the gentrifiers hang themselves with the rope they’re given (one barista calls Hoxton a “shithole”), other affluent immigrants are far more complex. An owner of an art gallery seems pretty attuned to the plight of her community even as she repurposes a laundromat. A late, heartbreaking twist turns her personal story on its head, reminding the viewer never to make assumptions and that ultimately we are all in this together.

It’s a vicious cycle: the things that made Hoxton Street great are the same things that cause its demise, in turn ruining anything that made it special in the first place. It’s one thing for a place to evolve positively— such as with the introduction of the Windrush generation and the rising economic power of the City — yet any change should’ve been properly managed with the help of the government, The Street squarely laming the blame on the negligence of the Conservative party.

As the double infliction of Brexit and Grenfell Tower impose even greater mental and physical harm upon the local population, the tragedy of Hoxton Street over the past four years becomes the tragedy of London, and by extension, the UK itself. Do the government care about working class people at all? Judging from this film, all evidence points to the contrary. While pointedly didactic (it may as well have said “Vote Labour” at the end) it earns the right to be, caring deeply for its subjects and begging for an empathetic solution.

The Street will be released in UK Cinemas on Friday, November 29th. On VoD in March!

The Last Black Man In San Francisco

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The tides of gentrification cannot be quelled in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a deeply felt exploration of the African-American experience in the USA. Mixing melancholy with naivety, beauty with desolation, this is a resounding and exciting debut from director Joe Talbot.

It stars Jimme Fails playing a fictionalised version of himself. As the last name tragically suggests, he isn’t doing so well. He has a job as a carer in an old person’s home, but still cannot afford a place of his own, so sleeps in the same room as his good friend Montgomery Allen (Jonathan Majors). He has his eye on somewhere to move in though, an old Victorian-looking house on Fillmore Street.

It used to be a predominantly Japanese area, until the WW2 internment camps left them empty. African-Americans then moved in (including Jimmy’s grandfather, who we are told built the house himself) leading the area to be dubbed “the Harlem of The West.” But Jimmie’s family split up, and for one reason or another, they lost the building completely. When the white couple who now occupy the house break up, Jimmie has a window of opportunity to restore to its former glory.

Gentrification pervades the entire movie. Black folk feel that the city no longer works for them. Although there are many obvious signifiers, such as a “party tram”, segway tours and annoying white girls, the effects of the tech boom are mostly absent. The fact it isn’t really tackled head on only strengthens the film, as it shows just how shut off locals have become from the city’s vast growth in wealth. Nonetheless, this isn’t a dictatic piece, a late in the game revelation turning simple political theses on their head. Instead, Talbot and Rob Richert, working from Fails’ story idea, zoom in on Jimmie himself (both literally and thematically), allowing the piece to grow in both complexity and universality.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco

After all, having your own place to live is a simple human right, currently unavailable to the vast majority of people in the Bay Area. This is an issue across the entire States, where there isn’t a single county where a minimum wage job can pay the rent for a two-bedroom apartment. Additionally, in cities as diverse as London, Berlin and Paris, rich white people move in, and non-white communities find their way of culture completely priced out. What’s remarkable about the film is that the director himself is white, yet, finds no need to insert a white perspective into the film. It’s rare to see so much humility in telling other people’s stories.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a quintessential debut film: deeply felt, ambitious and full of life, but also messy, structurally flawed and lacking spatial awareness. Talbot and Fails have put their heart and soul into this piece, always looking for the emotion in every scene, lusciously complemented by a clarinet and string-heavy soundtrack; at times it feels overdone and uneccessary, and interrupts the flow of the screenplay, yet at other times they hit on something truly vital. They have put absolutely everything into the film and it really shows.

It makes sense that A24 acquired and distributed this film, containing many of their trademarks: skateboarding, an obsession with faces, and neat musical moments that can easily be shared via Twitter. Yet The Last Black Man In San Francisco is not simply form for its own sake; ambitious camerawork and musical moments bringing the city to life, doubling up as a documentary of faces and places, culture and customs, a testament to a city on the precipice of irreversible change.

The Last Black Man In San Francisco premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, when this review was originally written. It’s out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 25th. On VoD in April!

Bait

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

This is one of the best, most distinctive, and formally stimulating films at Berlinale, while also a fully accessible, funny movie that draws unbearable tension out of pulling pints and nodding heads. Bait takes place in the height of Summer, though you wouldn’t know it from the murky black and white cinematography. As a Cornish fishing village is swamped by tourists tensions are on the rise after a rich city family has bought up a street’s worth of property and turned them into Airbnbs.

Like a modern-day A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1936), Bait observes the tension between rural and city folk and sees the darkness to which such misunderstanding can lead. Edward Rowe’s increasingly desperate fisherman takes us along with him, as he lives hand to mouth and dreams of buying a boat to improve his catch. The tourists he was forced to sell his family home to, who repeatedly refer to themselves as a part of the community, keep trying to make his life even harder, though of course its all within their legal rights.

Bait is also great Brexit movie. But that’s not to say that it’s a single issue movie. This film will still be relevant long after we’ve got our blue passports, because these are battles that have always taken place, probably always will. But the way Jenkin relates past and present, generational and class divide, allows the film to take on mythic qualities.

That is motivated in part by the extraordinary formalism of the film, which features sustained use of extreme close-ups and rapid-fire editing. Rarely does a shot last more than 6 seconds. So when it does, you feel the stretch of time and movement across the frame. It controls you with that rhythm, toys with your heartbeat. Every cut manages to extend time by sort of starting again, a Bressonian method of separating people. Restricting perspective in this case actually spreads it, we see the community in snatches, views of the village through open doors or window panes. We hear things that we don’t see. This forces us to complete the village, to fill in the gaps.

One bravura moment has two conversations occur simultaneously, with each cut to a different face as the actor says their line. It almost moves too fast to follow, this constant dislocation between faces pushes you into the harsh anxiety within the pub, as you try to catch up on one conversation while falling behind on another. It’s a radical moment of sound design, I feel like I witnessed something akin to when M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970)premiered, and audiences complained about its non-intelligibility. But this is almost the inverse of Altman’s maximalism, where the cacophony is achieved by stripping away elements from the scene.

This tableau approach to the framing of each shot means that the characters become figural, expressions of their status within the town, and the larger social class system. But within that, the actors give such spirited performances that mere gestures count for everything. When Simon Shepherd’s uber-Tory pulls a flat face at our fisherman to shut him down, his pout and sagging jowls belie an entire personality, an entire class of person who will keep on taking what they believe should be theirs.

Jenkin also uses this approach to turn his faces into the folkloric. The local pub is covered in statues of British insignia – so people look at the bust of Queen Victoria bust as though it’s a person, and Jenkin treats it as though that is the case. It’s a pub crowded with faces, British portraits in shadow, macabre and demonic, like faces in a Welles film.

Bait is real tactile cinema. The 16mm grain, the scratches and the flickers of light draw our relationship to these spaces. And those objects, which our characters have lived with all their lives and are seeing reappropriated for the sake of a holiday, become increasingly important to the film’s escalating sense of dread. When this film makes it into cinemas, it needs to be seen. Because nothing else coming out of Britain right now has the same rage or daring as this.

Bait premiered at the Berlinale in February, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 30th. Available on various VoD platforms as of January 2023.