Unhomely Street, a twenty minute essay film by Susannah Gent, takes as its starting point anecdotal accounts of perceived relations between capitalism and mental illness. The film was produced when the filmmaker had post-concussive syndrome following a head injury and explores the subjective landscape of a character who experiences deep anxiety in the face of a precarious future. The narrative is underpinned by a sense of unrest in the face of the political, social, and environmental landscape of the twenty-first century. Derrida’s critical framework of hauntology is introduced through the film’s anachronistic temporal structure, a partially veiled narrative suggesting responsibility to those dead and those not yet born, and a character who is haunted by the past in the face of the future yet to come. Short extracts from Spectres of Marx feature in the closing section of the film describing the human as unheimlich. 

Some of the atrocities recounted in the voice-over of Unhomely Street are little known. They are not dwelt upon, perhaps because they induce shame and fear, and combined they amount to humankind’s dark secrets that impact upon the collective living ego like Abraham and Torok’s transgenerational phantom. Regarding the future-to-come, Derrida considers whether its expectation prepares for its coming or if it ‘recalls the repetition of the same’. This echoes the sentiment of the film in which historical atrocity becomes evidence of an imagined future outcome. 
Unhomely Street is a representation of mental illness, a commentary on the mood of our times, and an artistic response to a perceived state of emergency. The making of Unhomely Street was the subject of a Journal of Artistic Research exposition, ‘Exorcising Unhomely Street: Filmic intuition and the representation of Post-concussive syndrome’, issue 14, 2017. This proposal for SAR 2020 is to show the film in full and respond to questions.