The last several decades have witnessed the transformation of social and political forms of public life in the United States through the privatization of public buildings and infrastructure that were created for the welfare of society. Jeffrey Skoller’s (Film & Media) essay film “Private Commons, and the Ends of Public Space” explores a series of questions concerning the privatization of a range of public spaces. What does economic and social privatization look like? Do shifts in ownership and development away from the public sector to private entrepreneurship leave traces in the built environment and its social uses? Can we make the transforming conception of the public commons visible to the viewer’s eye? In the process of addressing these questions, Skoller’s film takes up the formal and aesthetic challenge of representing by cinematic means the ephemeral, conceptual, and non-visualizable to create an awareness of the ideologies that construct the built world around us.