Full Frame Review: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

by Allie Yee

At the beginning of The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, director Chad Freidrichs presents his audience with the jarring image of an 11-story high rise collapsing onto itself, disappearing into a massive white cloud of debris. It was the first of thirty-three high rises in Pruitt-Igoe—a housing project in St. Louis—that was brought down after the project had disintegrated into disrepair and was declared an utter failure.

But Pruitt-Igoe wasn’t always the emblem of public housing failure. Freidrich goes back to St. Louis in the late 1940s, where a postwar economy was shifting populations, and the urban poor lived in cramped, grimy conditions. At that time, the construction of Pruitt-Igoe was a symbol of hope, lifting families from dirty alleyways to clean, furnished high-rise apartments.

Using news reports and photos from the period, Freidrich chronicles Pruitt-Igoe’s progression from sunny, safe home to imploding structure and intersperses them with interviews of academics and testimonials from former residents. The grainy images of archival footage are juxtaposed with glaringly white backdrops of individual interviews, jolting the viewer’s focus to how changing housing policies were experienced by the people actually living in Pruitt-Igoe.

The narrative is really brought to life with Benjamin Balcom’s original score. A steady drumbeat runs strong, keeping the story plodding forward and setting the tone for each segment of the film. It creates a sense of trepidation, nostalgia, anger and sorrow as the former residents recount Christmas lights in the winter, elevators that smelled like urine, people dancing around a record player in the evenings and boys toughening up and fighting each other.

Throughout the film, everyone knows the story will circle back to the image of the collapsing high rise. But when Friedrich finally shows the footage and we see the building slowly starting to cave in—the white cloud building up, the structure gaining momentum as it falls down—we understand it is not just an example of architectural failure. It is not just the symbol of a political blunder. It is someone’s home and the myriad childhood memories contained within that is crashing to the ground.