ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the tension between poverty and precaritization in recent reality-based media culture through an analysis of The Briefcase and American Winter, a 2013 documentary about multiple families similarly grappling with housing eviction, food insecurity, health care costs, unemployment, indebtedness, and financial distress. While American Winter advocates a progressive challenge to neoliberal policies, it also reproduces the uneven power dynamics of earlier approaches to poverty documentation. The 1930s were especially receptive to liberal documentary due to the economic turbulence of the era and the public funding for documentary that materialized during this time. Taking real life as the raw material for storytelling, John Grierson expanded on the instrumental uses of recording technology operational since the late 1800s, setting the stage for documentary film and television for decades to come. Housing Problems, one of his most famous productions, presents impoverished slum dwellers who describe the wretched living conditions inside decrepit city tenements—a scenario reminiscent of How the Other Half Lives.
