Housing Problems

Here's an early sound documentary on slum clearance. Like a lot of documentaries, it's intended as a bit of advertising, to get people to do something that will benefit it: in this case, it's sponsored by the British Commercial Gas Association, a trade group that expected that the various council flats, or estates as they call them in England, would have gas set-ups for heating a cooking.

It seems to have been a very early example of interviewing ordinary people. They tell of some of the issues of the old slum houses they dwell in: rats, cockroaches, rotting wood, a family living in a single, cramped room. There is some discussion of what you do with the people while the the slums are torn down and new housing put up. Five years later, the Blitz rendered that question moot.

Sister to the famous John Grierson, Ruby Grierson revolutionized the documentary forever by the introduction of a totally new concept: the interview.

That she was uncredited on the film is a shameful, that she remains so obscured by posterity is a genuine scandal. She had real revolutionary aims: she said to the slum-dwellers she interviewed that the camera and microphone were theirs- "to tell the bastards" what they had to go through living in slum conditions.

A series of residents appear and tell for the first time on film their own account, in their own words, (unlike the scripted dialogue derived from observed reality, of her brother's documentaries) of the appalling conditions of living in the slums of East London in the 1930's and 40's.

This unique film shows she should be in the greatest Hall of Fame of all.