Down and Out in Birmingham and Leeds: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat in the Films of Penny Woolcock

Portrayals of working-class people have long been part of British culture, be it in art, literature, music, theatre, photography, film or television. Perhaps the most notable shift in terms of how the working class are depicted in British film and television in recent years has been the increasing attention paid to what is variously known as the ‘impoverished underclass’, the ‘undeserving poor’, the ‘social residuum’ or the ‘lumpenproletariat’. Drawing on the current resurgence of working-class studies in the social sciences and humanities, this article rethinks these social categories in and through several films of Penny Woolcock that focus on ‘estates culture’ in the inner cities of Birmingham and Leeds. In so doing, this article suggests that, whilst filmed over twenty-odd years ago, Woolcock’s Macbeth and Tina Trilogy remain timely and apposite filmic representations in terms of thinking the idea of the lumpenproletariat in contemporary Britain.