1935HOUSING PROBLEMS

COMMENT

This film by Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey marks a watershed in British documentary making. For the first time ordinary people spoke directly to the camera about their plight. The clumsy sound-recording equipment (packed into a truck parked outside the locations in Stepney) enabled the directors to achieve huge impact by filming the slum dwellers as they described life inside their wretched houses. The dignity of these working class Londoners is emphasized further (and certainly unwittingly) by the patronising commentary intoned in the clipped Oxbridge-style voice-over of the time. The theme of the film is a report on the way new housing is changing the lives of these people, so we also hear directly from satisfied ex-slum dwellers moved from demolished Victorian back-to-backs to the new airy flats looming on the skyline a little further away. The film was made to promote the use of gas as a clean and modern fuel by associating it with the throwing out of the old and the building of the new. But it's the first-hand sync-sound descriptions of poverty that have stood the test of time.