Of course, homelessness is one of the major problems facing society today. Part of the impetus for this project was to think historically about representations of homelessness to see how media, and especially films, negotiate attitudes toward the homeless. But rather than simply focus on stereotypical ways we typically imagine the homeless—in terms of people in poverty living on the street—and look for examples of that in cinema, I worked from the films themselves to see what they could uncover about attitudes toward mobility and placelessness. In the process, I discovered different modes of being unhomed that were more varied and surprising than a consideration of “homeless films” might indicate. This much more complex and contradictory picture of the past illuminates aspects of history that have been forgotten or lost.Unhomed considers different ways of being unhomed—both by those who choose to be uprooted and mobile and those who have no choice; those who resist the trappings of home and those who desire them; those who perceive themselves as free and those who perceive themselves as unmoored or homeless. Unhomed also considers different kinds of mobility, including walking, train travel, public transit, and hitchhiking; and different scales of mobility, ranging from travel across the country and overseas to small circuits of movement within a city or neighborhood. These include the tramp’s movement on foot and by rail, governmental movement of troops by train during World War II, young women hitchhiking, the wanderings of homeless people in urban centers, and the constant movement of workers in a gig economy. In Unhomed, I consider placelessness as being without anchor and moving through transient non-places; as not confined to place, not bounded or defined; and as having no place in the social fabric, being marginal or even disposable.In looking at five distinct film cycles, I endeavor to recover the density of representation, to chart patterns across a large body of films, and to uncover themes, aesthetics, and plots that traverse large numbers of films. The broad investment in the unhomed documented with a vast number of film examples across historical cycles, shows a different side of American cinema and underscores its affective and ideological investment in precarity. Unhomed is about a curiously neglected dominant in American culture: mobility without manifest destiny, movement without terminus, geographic mobility that does not produce hope of social mobility. Unhomed is also about the panics, anxieties, desires, and envy projected into figures who are unhomed, mobile, and placeless. In thinking through film about the various ways in which we imagine the unhomed, I am hoping that this project makes us see the unhomed, and see them differently.