Suburban Living: Six Solutions
1960 · 58m · Canada
Directed by Richard Gilbert
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Town planners and architects compare housing responses to suburban living in London, Marseille, Rotterdam, Stockholm and Toronto, including Marseille's vertical neighbourhood on stilts containing stores, homes and playgrounds.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1960 town-planning doc sounds like the death of cinema, except Gilbert is basically asking "what if we built cities *differently*?"—and that Marseille stilts neighbourhood is such a gloriously weird answer that it makes you wonder why we stopped thinking this radically about how humans should actually live.
Gilbert's comparative method—five cities, one question, no editorializing—is deeply rooted in the tradition of structural documentary inquiry; the formal restraint and the precision of each locale's argument create a kind of visual rhetoric that rewards slow attention and positions architecture as a language worth parsing with real rigor.
The decision to let each city's solution breathe without hierarchical ranking, just observe and compare, is deceptively simple but it's what makes this work—the film trusts the viewer to see the stakes in housing *choice* rather than imposing judgment, and that restraint, especially in 1960, is the entire film.