Concrete universality: Tower blocks, architectural modernism, and realism in contemporary British cinema
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the representation of tower blocks in Last Resort (Pawlikowski 2000) and Red Road (Arnold 2006). Commonly associated in the popular imagination as the site of major social problems (crime, poverty, antisocial behaviour), the concrete high-rise has become the symbol of the decline of contemporary Britain. Both films recognise the structural decay that characterises many post-war housing developments and acknowledge the social problems that plague them, yet they seek to understand this deterioration as a consequence of larger social and political decisions and developments. Last Resort records the transformation of tower blocks into holding cells for asylum seekers. Red Road turns the proliferation of CCTV cameras on a Glaswegian housing estate into a metaphor for a society fearful of those people and places incongruent with a modern, affluent Britain. In each case, dramatisation enhances documentation rather than compromises it, and the tower block becomes the setting for what iek terms concrete universality, the process whereby fiction explodes documentary from within (iek 2006: 31). In this way, these films constitute a revitalised realism in which the truth of the antagonisms that divide society can best be shown in the guise of fiction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".