The only people who speak (at length) in this film are those who are experiencing homelessness, and those who advocate for them. What makes this film interesting from a creative standpoint, is its lack of narration, and its lack of a central protagonist. And Hayes unleashes a flood of uncomfortable images of people being forcibly evicted from a makeshift tent encampment in the middle of a snowstorm. Through Troxell, the audience also learns that in the United States it is possible for someone to work forty hours a week and not make enough money to afford a place to live.Īt this point, the cracks in the figurative dam Hayes has built for viewers break. As Troxell explains, “they became condos, they became parking lots the YMCA got out of the business.” The term was accepted into common vernacular around the time when single room occupancies disappeared from the housing market. Viewers learn from an advocate named Richard Troxell, who is based in Texas, how the term “homeless” was coined.
It starts first with a glimpse of the facts.
Although Hayes will not admit to this, the story told here, in many ways, resembles Hayes’s own journey of discovery into the subject of homelessness. The film takes place nation-wide over the span of one 24-hour period to explain what Hayes says are the three major causes of homelessness (“the attack on affordable housing,” income inequality, and criminalization). What happened next is the subject of Hayes’s new film, “The Invisible Class.” It is the result of eleven years of research and thousands of hours of taped video and audio interviews. They later had a talk that would change Hayes’s life. For him, people as subjects seemed far more interesting.Īnd so Hayes approached a man he saw who was homeless in a park and asked the man if it would be all right to photograph him in exchange for some money. Instead of taking thousands of photos of the Golden Gate Bridge like all his other classmates, Hayes thought he could focus his project on something slightly more challenging. He was working on a photography project when he came upon a novel idea. There’s no such pathos for Whannell’s purely villainous Adrian, who can become un-invisible whenever he wants, exercising the same kind of perfect control he has over everything in his life.Josh Hayes stumbled onto the subject of homelessness almost by accident. These two methods for becoming invisible fit the respective characters well: The chemical process Wells’ Griffin uses is painful and irreversible, and it’s the finality of that predicament that makes Wells’ Invisible Man such a pathetic figure. The technology at work is just as impenetrable as the stark modernist house where Adrian and Cecilia live as an unhappy couple before she escapes. In contrast, we don’t really get to see how Adrian built his very cool, camera-covered invisibility suit. (In the book, Griffin is not actually vivisecting the cat in question, though he is subjecting it to painful chemical treatments.) At one point, a neighbor accuses him of performing vivisection on a cat-a nod to the controversy in public conversations around science at the turn of the twentieth century over using live animals in experimentation. Griffin, an awkward person without many social graces, makes people around him nervous even before his transformation into the Invisible Man. When Wells wrote this book, scientists weren’t highly regarded in British culture.
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