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FILM
THE PRUITT-IGOE MYTH
Directed by Chad Friedrichs
UK release date: Spring 2012
Review by Gwen Webber
The story of Pruitt-Igoe, the Fifties' public housing project that Charles Jencks famously used to pinpoint the exact time of modernism's death, is not a simple tale of blighted aesthetic ideals.
Pruitt-Igoe is commonly used to illustrate modernism's misgivings about public space and private dwellings, which are also attributed to Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation. Now documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth places the housing devlopmenfs demise in a more complex web of social and economic ills typical of cities in post-war America. Within this.the film's most poignant thread is the intimate portrayals of PruittIgoe's former residents and life on the ill-fated estate.
Charting the history of the 33block development in downtown St Louis, the film's director Chad Friedrichs teases out the experiences of four Pruitt-Igoe tenants. Tentatively, the stories are woven into a historical and sociological framework. The often harrowing, sometimes humorous, anecdotes are interjected with excerpts from latter-day newsreels and a frank analysis by urban historians Robert Fishman and Joseph Heathcott of the urban migration pattern in American cities in the Fifties and Sixties. Hoping to offer an alternative...