Film Studies Events
[PAST EVENT] "Modern Housing Media: On Catherine Bauer's Environmental Design" by Justus Nieland
"Modern Housing Media: On Catherine Bauer's Environmental Design." This talk discusses an underexplored genre of infrastructural media—the planning film— through the multimedia practice of housing activist and educator Catherine Bauer. During the 1930s, Bauer established herself at the forefront of radical, New Deal era housing reform in the U.S. through the publication of her landmark study Modern Housing (1934), a manifesto for affordable, contemporary housing as a public right. This book was just part of a broad range of Bauer’s experimentation with various forms of vanguard architectural mediation throughout her career: exhibitions, film projects, photographs, syllabi, and experiments in information design that sought to change public opinion about social housing. Exploring several examples of planning and housing media produced in Bauer’s interdisciplinary network of midcentury “housing research,” my talk demonstrates how Bauer’s understanding of housing as a medium with environmental scale and complexity increasingly embraced social-scientific methods—especially those aimed at combatting racially exclusive housing practices and policies.
Justus Nieland is currently Professor of English and Film Studies at Michigan State University. He is a film and media historian with a range of interdisciplinary interests, including modern design and architectural history, industrial film and corporate media, materialist and infrastructural approaches to the media, and the environmental humanities. His most recent book, Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) was shortlisted for the 2021 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. He is also the author of David Lynch (University of Illinois Press, 2012), Film Noir: HardBoiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization, with Jen Fay (Routledge, 2009), and Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (University of Illinois Press, 2008). He is co-editor of the Contemporary Film Directors book series at the University of Illinois Press.
Sponsored by: The William & Mary FMST program