Avant-garde films function as unintended documents of pre-gentrification neighborhoods

Evidence

Wavelength was in many respects a neighborhood affair. Some thirty years after Farber suggested that Wavelength was a document, Richard Kostelanetz would write that, by recording the wood plank floor and pressed tin ceilings of his Canal Street studio, Snow had preserved a ruin—“simply, this is how SoHo looked before artists’ renovations set in.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1122

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the ‘Grafting & Growth’ / gentrification-infrastructure thread — artists as recorders/bearers of the very conditions that precede displacement.
• XREF: Connects to the book’s core SoHo / artists-as-gentrification-advance-guard thesis, and to critical regionalism generally. — connects to: Artists unknowingly trigger gentrification that displaces poor racialized residents — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 462; Science fiction about abandoned cities descends from an ancient lineage of image-making — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 399