The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections

The City and the Moving Image

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The City and the Moving Image Urban Projections Edited by

Richard Koeck and Les Roberts

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Richard Koeck and Les Roberts 2010 Preface © Julia Hallam and Robert Kronenburg 2010 Individual chapters © Contributors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–24338–5

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The city and moving image: urban projections/edited by Richard Koeck, Les Roberts. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–24338–5 (hardback) 1. Cities and towns in motion pictures. 2. Architecture in motion pictures. 3. Motion pictures and architecture. 4. Motion pictures—History—20th century. 5. Documentary films—History—20th century 6. Actualities (Motion pictures)—History and critisism. I. Koeck, Richard, 1969– II. Roberts, Les, 1966– PN1995.9.C513C58 2010 791.43'6358209732—dc22 2010027526 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Figures and Table

vii

Preface Julia Hallam and Robert Kronenburg

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Notes on Contributors

xii

Introduction: Projecting the Urban Richard Koeck and Les Roberts

1

Part I Projecting the City: Place, Space and Identity 1 ‘Old World Traditions … and Modernity’ in Cunard’s Transatlantic Films, c. 1920–35: Making Connections between Early Promotional Films and Urban Change Heather Norris Nicholson 2 Nice: Virtual City Isabelle McNeill

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21 36

3 Visions of Community: The Postwar Housing Problem in Sponsored and Amateur Films Ryan Shand

50

4 ‘City of Change and Challenge’: The Cine-Societies’ Response to the Redevelopment of Liverpool in the 1960s Julia Hallam

69

Part II Of Time and the City: Landscapes of Memory and Absence 5 Towards a History of Empty Spaces Charlotte Brunsdon 6 Tacita Dean’s Optics of Refusal Tara McDowell

89 91 104

7 Searching for the City: Cinema and the Critique of Urban Space in the Films of Keiller, Cohen, and Steinmetz and Chanan Ian Robinson 8 A Tale of Two Cities: Dachau and KZ Munich Alan Marcus

v

114 125

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Part III Cinematic Cartography: Film, Mapping and Urban Topography 9 Mapping the City through Film: From ‘Topophilia’ to Urban Mapscapes Teresa Castro

141 144

10 Towards (East) London 2012: Emily Richardson’s Transit (2006) and Memo Mori (2009), and the Work of Iain Sinclair Paul Newland

156

11 The Cinematic Production of Iconic Space in Early Films of London (1895–1914) Maurizio Cinquegrani

169

12 Projecting Place: Location Mapping, Consumption, and Cinematographic Tourism Les Roberts

183

Part IV Cine-Tecture: Film, Architecture and Narrativity

205

13 Cine-Montage: The Spatial Editing of Cities Richard Koeck

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14 Informing Contemporary Architectural and Urban Design with Historic Filmic Evidence Robert Kronenburg

222

15 The Real City in the Reel City: Towards a Methodology through the Case of Amélie François Penz

233

16 Let Architecture ‘Play’ Itself: A Case Study Helmut Weihsmann

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Index

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List of Figures and Table Figures 3.1

Still from Progress Report No. 2 (1948). Frame enlargement reproduced courtesy of National Library of Scotland

54

3.2

Still 1 from Let Glasgow Flourish (1952–6). Frame enlargement reproduced courtesy of National Library of Scotland

58

3.3

Still 2 from Let Glasgow Flourish (1952–6). Frame enlargement reproduced courtesy of National Library of Scotland

59

Still 3 from Let Glasgow Flourish (1952–6). Frame enlargement reproduced courtesy of National Library of Scotland

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Walking around St John’s Market: Jim Gonzales’s film tour early 1960s. Image courtesy of Les Roberts. (© Crown Copyright and Landmark Information Group Limited (2010). All rights reserved (1955).)

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St John’s Market, Roe Street looking towards St George’s Hall. Jim Gonzales, courtesy of Angus Tilston

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3.4 4.1

4.2

6.1 Tacita Dean, Fernsehturm, 2001. Film still, 16 mm colour anamorphic, optical sound, 44 min. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Firth Street Gallery, London 6.2

105

Tacita Dean, Palast, 2004. Film still, 16 mm colour, optical sound, 10 min. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Firth Street Gallery, London

108

8.1

Theodore Pais, In Place of Death (2008), dir. Alan Marcus

126

8.2

Main gate at Dachau, In Place of Death (2008), dir. Alan Marcus

129

10.1

Transit (2006)

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10.2

Memo Mori (2009)

163

11.1

View of London from The Illustrated London News, No. 3034, Vol. CX, Saturday, 12 June, 1897

170

12.1

Images from North West Vision and Media’s Location Database (Courtesy of Dave Wood/Liverpool Pictorial and Liverpool Film Office) 194

12.2

GIS map of Liverpool and Merseyside ‘City in Film’ locations (full extent) vii

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viii List of Figures and Table

12.3 GIS map showing locations featured in Us and Them, an amateur film shot in the Vauxhall area of Liverpool in 1969–70. The map shows the part of a proposed (and subsequently abandoned) elevated motorway scheme planned for the city in the 1960s. The map also shows the ArcGIS identify tool box from which users can access a video of the film, interviews and other contextual materials linked to the specific locations queried.

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13.1

Liverpool city centre (author’s photo)

211

13.2

Casa da Musica, Porto (courtesy of R. Kronenburg)

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14.1

Liverpool Lime Street: Lumière still from 1897 and contemporary still from 2007 (top); Liverpool The Strand (Cat. Lumière N°701): Anson Dyer still from the 1929 film A Day in Liverpool and contemporary still from 2007 (bottom). Lime Street [Alexandre Promio], 1897 © Association frères Lumière

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Liverpool Church Street: Lumière still from 1897 and contemporary still from 2007 (top); Jim Gonzalez, Liver Cine Group still from 1975 and contemporary still from 2007 (bottom). Church Street (Cat. Lumière N°700) [Alexandre Promio], 1897 © Association frères Lumière

230

14.2

15.1

Various locations in Montmartre showing strong topographical coherence in Amélie 242

16.1

Helmut Weihsmann: Cinetecture, Vienna 1995. 1 Villa with garden terrace; 2 Cubic triangular garden; 3 Existing cloister buildings; 4 Sport deck; 5 Salon rose; 6 Swimming pool; 7 Terraces; 8 Squash court; 9 Guest quarters

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Table 15.1 Summary of Criteria

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Preface The essays in this collection are the culmination of a two-year research project, ‘A City in Film: Liverpool’s Urban Landscape and the Moving Image’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2006 to 2008. The project evolved from an initial idea of Robert Kronenburg, Professor of Architecture at the University of Liverpool, to explore the relationship between film, architecture and the city through a focus on one city, Liverpool. In partnership with Julia Hallam from the Department of Communication and Media, the project matured to encompass the ways in which Liverpool had been depicted in film from 1897 to date, with a particular focus on illuminating the work made in or by filmmakers about the urban landscape. A strong motivation underlying the development of the ‘City in Film’ project was the necessity to create an easily accessible online catalogue of films made in and about the city held in a wide range of private and public collections on Merseyside. This resource would be of use to researchers and historians but also to anyone interested in the physical development of the city, including those using or developing the historic infrastructure. Information was gathered from a wide range of sources including amateur and independent private collections, commercial newsreel and television company archives, national, regional and local museums, libraries, public record offices and film archives. At the time of writing, the database holds information on over 1700 moving-image items ranging from short sequences to feature films (http://www.liv.ac.uk/lsa/cityinfilm/catalogue.html). As well as the usual search categories such as title, director, production company, date and genre, wherever possible films have been viewed and their spatial content and use analysed utilizing criteria developed by Kronenburg in previous architectural history projects. The categories of spatial use included public buildings and spaces, commerce, industry, education, health, law enforcement and military installations. These were identified to accommodate the changing functions of buildings and spaces over time as the city responded to the twin forces of economic and social modernization and redevelopment. Using these criteria, a fine-grained analysis was developed to show how the landscape of the city has been spatially depicted and imagined across all moving-image genres at different times. The database enables a range of questions to be asked that interrogate specific issues such as how iconic buildings and vistas, present in many of the films, figure in the making and marketing of place, the ways in which these symbolic icons are depicted in relation to changing conventions of amateur, professional ix

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and independent film practices, and how the consumption of place is inextricably entwined with this iconic cinematic cartography. A parallel strand of work has explored the relationship between film language and architectural mappings of the design of buildings and spaces. This work has entailed the remapping and overlaying of sites of urban change with moving image ‘maps’ showing spaces and urban landscapes lost to redevelopment – a process that has enabled the research team to enhance understandings of the ‘lived realities’ shaped by architectural design – as well as the reinterpretation and mapping of historical footage that establishes a virtual space of Liverpool waterfront, an iconic UNESCO world heritage site. These and other research themes have been explored in publications, seminars, conferences, film screenings and exhibitions that have resulted from this research. Many events contributed towards the City of Liverpool’s 800th anniversary celebrations in 2007 and its tenure as European Capital of Culture in 2008. As part of these celebrations, the project team organized exhibitions, film screenings and public events around the city, and collaborated with local, regional and national partners such as the British Film Institute, North West Film Archive, National Museums Liverpool and Tate Liverpool. Working with local amateur filmmaker, producer and collector Angus Tilston, Richard Koeck created a montage of the city’s history in moving images, Liverpool: A Journey in Time and Space (Tilston and Koeck, 2006), that was shown on the BBC Big Screen in 2006. Other projects included the ‘Waterfront’ series of screenings at Tate Liverpool’s Centre of the Creative Universe Exhibition (2007), Mitchell & Kenyon in Liverpool: Films of an Edwardian City screening in St George’s Hall (May 2008), and Magical Mysterious Regeneration Tour: Artists, Architecture and the Future of the City conference, Tate Liverpool/Liverpool School of Architecture (12–14 June 2008). The conference from which this essay collection has been developed, Cities in Film: Architecture, Urban Space and the Moving Image, took place at the University of Liverpool in March 2008. Its programme has shaped the four sections that form the structure of this volume. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Dr Richard Koeck and Dr Les Roberts for their hard work in bringing to fruition the projects’ numerous commitments, including this collection of essays, and we gratefully acknowledge their contributions that have brought inspiration, intellectual rigour and excitement in equal measure to a project that will undoubtedly become a landmark in the field. Julia Hallam and Robert Kronenburg February 2010

Acknowledgements This idea for this book originated from the Cities in Film conference held at the University of Liverpool in March 2008 which we organized as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘City in Film: Liverpool’s Urban Landscape and the Moving Image’. We would therefore like to thank the University of Liverpool and Liverpool School of Architecture for hosting the event, as well as our invited keynote speakers, discussants and delegates whose contributions have formed the basis of this volume. Strongly interdisciplinary in scope, the principal aim of the conference was to explore the relationship between film and urban landscapes. Organized around key themes and theoretical perspectives, the structure of the conference programme has directly informed the thematic focus of this collection. We would also like to thank the grant holders of the ‘City in Film’ research, Dr Julia Hallam and Professor Robert Kronenburg, for their support, encouragement and inspiration. Alongside them we would like to express our gratitude to the many collaborators and partners whom we have worked with during the course of this research, without whom we simply could not have met our research objectives. These include the North West Film Archive in Manchester, the British Film Institute, and, in particular, the amateur filmmaker and producer of the Pleasures Past series of Liverpool archive films, Angus Tilston MBE. Finally, we would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their generous support, Martin Winchester for designing the book cover, and Christabel Scaife and Catherine Mitchell at Palgrave Macmillan for their assistance and commitment to the book from the idea stage through to completion.

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Notes on Contributors Charlotte Brunsdon is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. Her books include The Feminist, the Housewife and the Soap Opera (OUP, 2000), London in Cinema: The Cinematic City since 1945 (London, BFI, 2007), and Law and Order (BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Teresa Castro teaches film studies at the Université de Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris). Having studied Art History in Lisbon and London, she completed a thesis on cinema and the mapping impulse of images. Her current research focuses on cinematographic and photographic atlases, colonial and post-colonial cinema and the relations between cinema and contemporary art. A co-founder of the research collective Le Silo, she also curates film programmes and exhibitions. Maurizio Cinquegrani completed an AHRC-funded PhD thesis on imperial spectacle, the city and early cinema at King’s College London (2010). His research investigates urban life, nineteenth-century travel, modern technology, and the media. Maurizio has published widely on visual culture in late-Victorian Britain. Articles have appeared, or are due to appear, in the Journal of British Cinema and Television, Nineteenth Century Contexts and the Early Popular Visual Culture. He also co-edited La natura non indifferente, a volume on Swedish pioneer filmmaker Victor Sjöström. Maurizio has taught on several modules at King’s College London and London Metropolitan University. Julia Hallam is Reader in Film and Television Studies and Head of the Department of Communication and Media, University of Liverpool; she was principal investigator on the AHRC-funded ‘City in Film’ project from 2006 to 2008 which organized numerous public screenings and scholarly events as part of celebrating Liverpool’s 800th birthday in 2007 and its status as European Capital of Culture in 2008. She is currently leading ‘Mapping the City in Film: A Geo-Historical Analysis’ (AHRC, 2008–10) and has published widely on various aspects of film and television drama history and aesthetics. Richard Koeck is a lecturer at School of Architecture, University of Liverpool. After his Ph.D. studies at Cambridge University, he worked as research associate on the AHRC project ‘City in Film: Liverpool’s Urban Landscape and the Moving Image’ and co-developed the AHRC project ‘Mapping the City in Film’. His publications include articles on early urban film practices, the modern city and cinema, and screen-influenced legibility of cities. His book Cine-Scapes: Cinematic Spaces in Architecture and Cities in the Spring of 2012 xii

Notes on Contributors

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with Taylor and Francis. Richard is Director of the Centre for Architecture and the Visual Arts (CAVA) and founding Director of CineTecture Ltd., a Liverpoolbased production company. Robert Kronenburg is an architect and holds the Chair of Architecture at Liverpool School of Architecture, Liverpool University, UK. His research engages with innovative forms of architectural design, film and popular music. He is a principal researcher on the AHRC-funded projects ‘City in Film: Liverpool’s Urban Landscape and the Moving Image’ and ‘Mapping the City in Film’. His books include Houses in Motion, Spirit of the Machine, Portable Architecture, Flexible: Architecture that Responds to Change and he is co-editor of the Transportable Environments book series. His book Live Architecture: Music Venues, Stages and Festival Structures will be published by Taylor and Francis in 2011. Tara McDowell is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on American and European art, film, and theory from 1945 to the present. She is also an independent curator and critic, and is currently senior editor of the journal The Exhibitionist. Isabelle McNeill is an affiliated lecturer in the Department of French at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall, where she teaches French cinema and literature. She is the author of Memory and the Moving Image: French Film in the Digital Era (EUP, 2010) and has published various essays on memory, cinema and new media in French film. She is co-editor of Transmission: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Cinema (Peter Lang, 2007). Her current research is on the trope of the journey in contemporary Maghrebi-French cinema. She is co-founder and trustee of the Cambridge Film Trust, which runs the Cambridge Film Festival. Alan Marcus is Reader in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen. His writings on memory and landscape include Relocating Eden (1995), and work on visual representations of the urban environment include Visualizing the City (2007) and guest edited special issues of The Journal of Architecture (2006), The History of Photography (2006) and Film Studies (2007). Themes on stature of place, tourism and the banal are explored in his experimental films In Place of Death (2008) and The Ghetto (2009), for the research project ‘In Time of Place’ on sites associated with the Jewish diaspora and the Holocaust. Paul Newland is a lecturer in film at Aberystwyth University. He was previously research associate in the School of Arts, Languages and Literatures at the University of Exeter. He has published on British cinema, and representations of space, place and landscape in film and television. He is author of The Cultural Construction of London’s East End (Rodopi, 2008) and editor of Don’t Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s (Intellect, 2010).

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Heather Norris Nicholson is a research fellow with the Department of History and North West Film Archive at Manchester Metropolitan University, England, UK. She is completing a monograph on amateur filmmaking practices in Britain, c. 1927–77 (Manchester University Press, 2010) and involved in various outreach projects using archive film in different public settings. She teaches and also writes extensively on aspects of visual representation and interpretation, with particular reference to archive film and amateur visual cultures. François Penz, an architect by training, teaches in the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art at the University of Cambridge where he is Reader in Architecture and the Moving Image. He directs the Digital Studio for Research in Design, Visualisation and Communication where he runs the PhD programme. He also contributes to the interdisciplinary Universitywide MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures. François’s work on the history of the relationship between architecture and the cinema informs his research on new forms of digital moving-image narratives and techniques with a view to visualize and communicate architecture and the city. He is a Fellow of Darwin College and a founder director of the company ScreenSpace. Les Roberts is a researcher based in the School of Architecture, University of Liverpool. His work explores the broad intersection between ideas and practices of space, place and mobility, particularly in relation to film. This has formed the basis of a number of publications, with his more recent work focusing on the relationship between film, urban landscapes and cartography. He is the author of Film, Mobility and Urban Space: A Cinematic Geography of Liverpool, to be published by Liverpool University Press in 2011. Ian Robinson is a doctoral candidate in the Joint Programme in Communication and Culture at York University. He is currently completing research on urbanism and locality in contemporary film, focusing on the role of film and photography in the struggle over representations of place and the formation of identities associated with urban spaces. Ian is a member of the collective LOT Experiments in Urban Research. He has previously published in the journal Public. Ryan Shand is a research associate on the project ‘Mapping the City in Film: A Geo-historical Analysis’ at the University of Liverpool, UK. He completed his PhD in the Theatre, Film and Television Studies Department of the University of Glasgow, UK. His thesis was entitled ‘Amateur Cinema: History, Theory, and Genre (1930–80)’. His work has appeared in The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and in the edited collection Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). Helmut Weihsmann, a resident of Vienna, received degrees in architecture and film studies from the Universities of Vienna and Paris XIII. Ever since

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his graduation in 1980 he has been freelancing as a historian, critic at many universities and institutions in Austria, Germany, Turkey, England and the US. Besides publishing numerous articles and key texts on architecture, film and modernism, he has been an honorary guest professor, critic, lecturer and leader of workshops at key events at leading universities and museums. Since 1999 he has been the director of the film-series ‘Urbanity and Aesthetics’ at several international institutions.

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Introduction: Projecting the Urban Richard Koeck and Les Roberts

Problematizing the urban Of the celebrated ‘coincidences’ that the birth of cinema shared with other emerging modernist projects, such as psychoanalysis, nationalism, consumerism, and imperialism (Shohat and Stam, 1994: 100), cinema’s emergence as a quintessentially urban set of practices has ensured that the city and the moving image have, from the very outset, remained inseparable constituents of the modern urban imaginary. The fascination and spectacle of the moving image experienced by early cinema audiences drew its strength and affective potency from the technological, perceptual and spatial transformations that were shaping rapid processes of urbanization in large parts of the industrialized world at the turn of the twentieth century. While it is undoubtedly the representational spaces of the montage-based ‘city symphony’ that have played the most prominent role in forging the aesthetic and formal convergence of the filmic and the urban in early moving image cultures, a reappraisal of actuality film shot in urban environments – for example, ‘phantom rides’ filmed from moving vehicles such as trams and trains – has demonstrated the capacity of film to prompt renewed critical engagements with the lived experiential spaces that have defined the everyday landscapes of cities. As writers and filmmakers such as Patrick Keiller (2003, 2004) have noted, the topographic nature of early actuality material has furnished a largely untapped urban archive by which to navigate the cinespatial geographies of historical urban landscapes. As such, and as increasingly acknowledged across a number of academic disciplines, geographies of film can inform new historiographical perspectives on architecture, space and the urban imaginary, and advance new critical insights into the geo-historical formation of urban modernity. In this regard, AlSayyad’s aim ‘to make the urban a fundamental part of cinematic discourse and to raise film to its proper status as an analytical tool of urban discourse’ (2006: 4) represents a timely response to the limitations posed by much of the extant research on film and urban space insofar as 1

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Introduction

this can be said to overlook (or inhibit) critical observance of the spatially embedded geographies of film, as well as, more crucially, the inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary contextual framings shaping current debates on the city and the moving image. Picking up this thread, Edward Dimendberg, in his insightful study of American film noir and urban space, comments: Few commentators … travel to the extracinematic precincts of geography, city planning, architectural theory, and urban and cultural history … Treating the city as expression of some underlying myth, theme, or vision has tended to stifle the study of spatiality in film noir as a historical content as significant as its more commonly studied formal and narrative features. (2004: 9, emphasis in original) Drawing productively on the work of spatial theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Dimendberg and others highlight the importance of spatiality as a point of critical departure in the study of the city and the moving image, reinforcing the central contention (one that runs throughout the present volume) of the need to situate – epistemologically, spatially, dialectically – the textual and representational geographies of film within the ‘material and symbolic’ (Highmore 2005) fabric of historicized urban spaces. Problematizing the spatial – that is, ‘mapping’ the social and cultural processes by which ideas, perceptions and lived experiences of urban space are made manifest ‘across different cultural and social contexts ranging from the actual city to its representations’ (Dimendberg 2004: 108) – is thus acknowledged as both a prerequisite to and analytical focus of recent and emerging studies into the dynamic and multifaceted relationship between the filmic and the urban. In rushing to foreground the spatial attributes of urban cinematics, however, it is necessary at this juncture to qualify the above assertion that the architectures of the moving image are in some way analogous to those of the city per se. In an interview with Karen Lury, the geographer Doreen Massey (Lury and Massey, 1999) observes how discussions of place and space in relation to film typically presuppose, by default, links between cinematic space and that of the city, particularly in relation to questions of mobility and transit (see, for example, Bruno, 1993; 1997; 2002; Clarke, 1997; Friedberg 1993; Harvey, 1990). The well-established figure of the flâneur, for instance, represents an embodiment of the quintessentially mobile, spectacular gaze of the urban (invariably male) voyeur which would find its obvious parallel with the emerging technology of cinema: a medium which rendered accessible hitherto un-navigable spaces of desire, mobility and urban spectacle. Yet, as Massey notes with reference to Bruno’s discussion of early cinematic spaces of flânerie in Western cities, It is not just city spaces which were ‘of transit’ or even transitory. Empirically, one might (perhaps should) point to that other set of mobilities – the

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massive mobilities of imperialism and colonialism – which were underway – beyond, way beyond, the little worlds of flânerie – at the same period of history. Other ‘spaces’ too were mobile. (Massey in Lury and Massey, 1999: 231) For Massey, this tendency to restrict discussions of space, place and film to geographies of the city runs the risk of essentializing ‘the urban’ to the detriment of a broader field of enquiry: ‘the relation between film and spatiality in general’ (ibid.). Moreover, in terms of mobility, the urban flâneur has arguably left less of a mark on the geographic and cinematic imagination of the modern era than those forms of convergent mobility which, since the early days of film, have cemented the ontological foundations of the ‘voyager-voyeur’ (McQuire, 1999: 144). As such, ‘[i]t is not the pedestrian flâneur who is emblematic of modernity but rather the train passenger, car driver and jet plane passenger’ (Lash and Urry, 1994: 252). In probing the relationship between the city and the moving image, therefore, the question of movement and mobility – and, by extension, that of time and ‘rhythmicity’ (Wunderlich, 2008) – reinforces the essentially dynamic, affective and ‘emotional’ (Bruno, 2002) properties of urban space. Less a fixed or static representational form (exemplified by the Cartesian projections of architects, cartographers and city planners), film, in the words of Walter Benjamin, ‘burst this prison world asunder’ (in Cresswell and Dixon, 2002: 5), and inaugurated radically new perceptions and experiences of urban environments. ‘Calmly and adventurously’ travelling (ibid.) among these new spaces of representation, early film audiences were thus confronted with a spatial and visual phenomenology analogous to that which characterized the ‘perceptual paradigm’ (Kirby, 1997: 2) – described by Schivelbusch as ‘panoramic perception’ (1986) – instilled by the expansion of the railways in the nineteenth century. But the question of mobility in relation to the urban also prompts further areas of consideration that are briefly worth exploring here. The note of caution which Massey raises with regard to the valorization of the urban in discussions of film and spatiality provides a valuable reminder of the constitutively relational properties that have informed the social, cultural and historical development of specific urban environments (see also Massey, 2005). This in turn prompts reflection as to how – or indeed where – we might draw the boundaries (structural, cognitive, geographic) that define ‘the urban’ and, by corollary, its representation in film. The ‘massive mobilities’ of colonialism and imperialism which Massey refers to, for example, highlight the extent to which the panoptic spatialities of what Shohat and Stam (1994: 104) describe as ‘the I/Eye of empire’ – architecturally embodied in the urban fabric of cities such as London, Liverpool or Paris – were instrumental in ‘turning the colonies into spectacle for the metropole’s voyeuristic gaze’ (ibid.). By way of illustration, the geographic ‘heart’ of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness is as much London (or, more accurately, the Thames

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Introduction

Estuary from where the narrator Marlow’s tale unfolds) as it is the Belgian Congo. Examining a selection of early actuality films of London, Maurizio Cinquegrani’s chapter in this volume shows how early films supported the imperial message by focusing on London’s monumental and ceremonial spaces in which the spectacle of an ‘exotic other’ – colonial subjects and themes drawn from the far flung corners of the British Empire – was ideologically inscribed at the heart of the urban experience. ‘Projecting the urban’ in this context thus entails the mediation of relations of power reinforcing the spatial, cultural and geographic domination of the metropolitan centre over the ‘peripheral’ landscapes of the other (an observation which applies with equal validity within as well as beyond national boundaries: in the UK, for example, the dominance of London and the South East over the otherwise peripheral regions of ‘the North’ remains a perennial cause of contention).

Spectacular urbanism: Space and visuality As a phenomenon and modernist spectacle – or ‘illuminating virtuality’ as Lefebvre puts it (2003: 16) – it is instructive to regard ‘the urban’ not so much as a coherent object or ‘accomplished reality’ (ibid.), but rather as a central problematic that articulates some of the key socio-spatial contradictions that have continued to emerge as the spatialization of modernity and the urbanization and cinematization of everyday life gather pace. According to Lefebvre, ‘the urban phenomenon is made manifest as movement … The centrality and the dialectical contradiction it implies exclude closure, that is to say immobility … The urban is defined as a place where conflicts are expressed’ (2003: 174–5, emphasis added). Conceived in terms of a dialectical field: a dynamic assemblage of relational structures and spatio-temporal formations that elude the straightforward ‘fixity’ or ‘capture’ of representational forms; the urban engenders a problematic that calls into question the conceptual efficacy of ‘the city’ as a geographic entity (as distinct from the lived spaces, collective histories and localized structures of feeling that make up specific cities: i.e. as unique urban agglomerations of people and place). For a collection entitled The City and the Moving Image this may appear a slightly curious point of reflection. However, in problematizing the object of study, and drawing attention to the spatial complexities framing the representational modalities that govern the relationship between the virtual and material, our aim is to foreground the critical mapping of this relationship, and to point towards new theoretical and methodological frameworks of cine-spatial enquiry in an urban context. As Ian Robinson in this volume contends: ‘The problem is that we do not know how to represent the urban’. Put another way, we do not know how to orchestrate the at times dissonant spatial formations which, taken collectively, inform and structure our everyday understandings, experiences and perceptions of the urban. Barthes’s observation that it is not so important

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to multiply the surveys or the functional studies of the city, ‘but to multiply the readings of the city’ (1997: 171) provides a critical acknowledgement of the limited value of technocratic modes of urban representation, pointing to the need to develop a more ‘fuzzy’ and multi-layered semiotics of space, place and urban memory. One of the principal foci of discussion and debate that The City and the Moving Image is designed to stimulate, therefore, is the capacity of moving image practices – in all their diversity and singularity – to articulate or ‘project’ a politics, poetics and aesthetics of the urban. The proliferation of virtualized spaces of representation that have increasingly come to define the phantasmagoric landscapes of postmodern cities – whether, for example, in the form of digital screens and image-façades that now dominate many urban cityscapes (Koeck, 2010); the marketing and consumption of cities as sites of film and television-induced tourism (see Roberts’s chapter in this volume; Beeton, 2005); or the ‘centrifugal’ (Dimendberg, 2004) siphoning of lived spaces of everyday urban practice to an ever more expansive mediatized realm of corporate spectacle – paints an altogether more challenging picture of the way the moving image and the material structures of urban space are finding (or at least seeking) further convergence. In this regard, in terms of a cultural politics of urban space, Lefebvre’s dismissal of visual imagery such as photography and cinema as ‘incriminated media’ would appear to have some currency. This contention is premised on Lefebvre’s critique of what he calls the ‘illusion of transparency’ in which space is assumed to be open, luminous and intelligible; an assumption informed by the privileging of the visual and optic over other senses: Where there is error or illusion the image is more likely to secrete it and reinforce it than to reveal it. No matter how ‘beautiful’ they may be, such images belong to an incriminated ‘medium’ … images fragment; they are themselves fragments of space. (1991: 96–7) For Lefebvre, then, filmic representations of urban spaces are potentially problematic insofar as they compound rather than expose the ‘illusion of transparency’ and the spatial contradictions it otherwise conceals. From this standpoint, images fragment space and contribute towards the increasing abstraction and spectacularization of society, a critical approach similar to that advanced by groups such as the Situationists, most notably in Guy Debord’s seminal polemic The Society of the Spectacle (1992 [1967]). Rather than reading this as a dismissal of film per se (where the valorization of lived space negates any possibility of a critical geography of film and urbanism), it is more instructive to look upon this critique in terms of its capacity to incite and problematize further the explicit nature of the relationship between the city and the moving image, as well as to explore the

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potential for an anti-spectacular aesthetic of the city in film: a strategy which, as argued above, demands a process of re-engagement with the constitutive and material spatialities from which these and other forms of urban projection are abstracted.

Navigating the spatial turn To recap then: one of the defining characteristics that is shaping current theoretical directions in research on cities and the moving image is a more rigorous engagement with ideas of space and place. The much discussed ‘spatial turn’ (Döring and Thielmann, 2008; Falkheimer and Jansson, 2006; Warf and Arias, 2009) that has exerted a dominant sway over social science and humanities research over the last two decades has brought with it an increased awareness of the socially constructed attributes of space, and the open and dynamic nature of spatiality as a constitutive element in the formation of, for example, structures of identity, place, embodiment, relationality and mobility, as well as everyday patterns of social and cultural practice. As we discuss below, the spatial turn has been met by an equally decisive ‘cultural turn’ in spatial disciplines such as geography and architecture. Scholars from both of these disciplines are recognizing the role popular visual culture such as film can play in critical analyses of the relationships between virtual and material spaces, a trend that has also left its mark on film and cultural studies research more generally.1 Given the diverse and multidisciplinary nature of perspectives in which a ‘turn to space’ is increasingly evident, as a generic marker of a shift towards questions of spatiality in film and cultural studies research, precisely what is meant by this putative ‘spatial turn’ is becoming increasingly difficult to reliably gauge. Part of this disorientation may be attributed to the rich appeal that spatial, mapping and geographical metaphors offer the would-be critical or hermeneutical ‘navigator’ of cultural texts and practices. There has, therefore, arisen an urgent need to re-engage more closely with the material and empirical spatial practices underpinning the cultural production of textualities and representational forms (in both urban and non-urban environments). The emergence of studies drawing on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and digital mapping technologies, for example, is but one indicator of a turn to space in which film scholars are venturing beyond exclusively textual modes of critical enquiry towards more empirically focused analyses of film, space and the urban imaginary, particularly in relation to historical geographies of film (Allen, 2006; Hallam and Roberts, 2009; Klenotic, 2008). Ruminating on the temporal bias in philosophical discourses of modernity, Foucault suggests that ‘[s]pace was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic … If one started to talk in terms of space that meant one was hostile to time’ (1980: 70). Indeed, applying this formula to the work of

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contemporary radical theorists such as Ernesto Laclau (1990; cf. Massey, 1993), it can be seen that this deep and lingering suspicion towards the spatial is still very much in evidence. By contrast, for others writing from a Marxist background, space has proved far from marginal or theoretically suspect. Drawing on the work of Lefevbre and others, critics such as Harvey (1990), Jameson (1991; 1992; 2009) and Soja (1989; 1996) and have all sought to emphasize the crucial importance of space in contemporary analyses of postmodernity, globalization, and what Jameson refers to as multinational, or late capitalism. Space, for these writers, represents a key factor in the epochal distinction between the modern and the postmodern. While an effective means of demarcating a cognitive, historical or epistemological shift in relation to contemporary forms of cultural practice, the idea of a ‘spatial turn’, at this juncture at least, has arguably become too sprawling and imprecise. The unproblematized and ubiquitous deployment of tropes of ‘mapping’, for example, or a reliance on somewhat vague references to space and place in much cultural criticism, may perhaps be read as indicators of a creeping rhetoric of space which downplays the situated nature of everyday spatial cultures. In order to outline the practical and conceptual parameters by which questions of spatiality in film might thus be rendered more clearly navigable (or sustainable), there is, we are suggesting, a need to draw out and refine further the specificities and coalescent features by which to chart (or excavate) an intellectual topography of the city and the moving image. This could of course take shape in a number of ways, as, indeed, work developed by many of the scholars cited in this Introduction has cogently demonstrated. In this volume we have sought to represent a selection of thematic approaches that take as their focus aspects of the architectural and geographical specificities underpinning the relationship between film and urban landscapes, both historical and contemporary. We will outline these in further detail shortly. Before doing so, we will explore more closely debates in architectural theory and urbanism where cinema and the moving image have come to exert an increasingly pervasive influence in terms of both shaping understandings and perceptions of cities, as well as, in a more material way, shaping the design and aesthetics of the physical urban fabric of (post)modern urban landscapes.

Visualizing the urban in early film While a considerable amount of critical scrutiny has been dedicated to the architectural significance of film in recent years (Albrecht, 2000 [1986]; Clarke, 1997; Neumann, 1996; Thomas and Penz, 1997), conversely, there is also evidence of a growing interest in the filmic properties of architecture and urban environments (see, for instance, AlSayyad, 2006; Koeck, 2008b;

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Pallasmaa, 2001). This latter trend in research on the city and the moving image prompts the development of new areas of consideration as to the ways film and moving image practices have historically informed our understanding of architecture and cities. In this regard, the subtitle of this volume – Urban Projections – is intended to convey the range of interpretations and critical perspectives that are shaping the complex bi-directional relationship between material and immaterial structures of the urban imaginary. Going back to the early years of moving images in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – a time when cinematic apparatuses recorded only images without sound – film making was a light and mobile practice that was more often than not carried out in the bustling streets and landscapes of the metropolis. This scopic affinity between medium and place can perhaps be explained by the fact that the emerging modern city seemed to naturally complement the ability of the cinematic apparatus to capture the city’s defining characteristics: its architectural forms, movements, illuminations, as well as, of course, its people. Moreover, the urban landscape provided a readily available resource for filmmakers to work with; a factor that is often overlooked in the well-established canon of work and critical orthodoxies surrounding the relationship of the city and the moving image. Nevertheless, film, arguably better than any other medium, seemed to be able to engage with the city’s physical disposition – its simultaneity, temporality and ephemerality – in ways that had hitherto been only imagined. This symbiotic relationship between two emerging phenomena of modernity – the city and film – manifested itself not only in terms of capturing the spaces in ‘transition’ (Webber and Wilson, 2008), but also in the form of screenings to an urban audience. Internationally such early projections of urban life were made possible by entrepreneurs and early film pioneers such as the Skladanowsky brothers in Germany, the Lumière Company in France, the Mitchell & Kenyon company in England, and Thomas Edison in the US to name but a few. The pioneering endeavours of these and other early luminaries gradually turned film from being a ‘scientific curiosity’ and fairground attraction to being a ‘seventh art’ that would eventually transform the appearance, geography, and socio-spatial organization of cities (in the form of, for example, nickelodeons, leisure parks, film theatres and such like) (Canudo, 1988a [1911]: 67; 1988b [1923]: 291). Thanks to the seminal texts by scholars such as Christie (1994), Musser (1990), Toulmin (2006) and the edited volumes by Elsaesser and Barker (1989), Kessler, Lenk and Loiperdinger (KINtop, 1992–2006), Kessler and Verhoeff (2007) and many others, we continue to gain a detailed understanding of how early film activities, such as production, distribution and exhibition, have operated within – and shaped – modern cities. In this context it is worth noting that, compared to modern, DolbySurround-optimized cinema complexes of today, early theatrical screenings were characterized by a far more active engagement of the audience with

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the images projected on screen. It is perhaps only at special screenings of long-forgotten archive or amateur footage (of which our research group has organized many over the last few years in relation to the UK city of Liverpool) that an almost dialogic connection between the audience and the projected film can be observed. Particularly noteworthy in this regard are screenings of film footage that make use of original locations (either in the form of the location that is seen on the screen or the location of the theatrical event where the footage is re-screened), which is one of a series of ‘cine-spatial strategies’ that found application in recent years (Koeck, 2008a). Such practices of participatory and collective re-enactment restore a sense of authenticity and ‘aura’ which not only offers a visual connection with the history of the city, but also an embodied experience of lost spatial practices that provides a unique window into places of the past. While the screening of archive footage in the ways described above contributes to a shared experience of the event, it also raises questions about the collective nature, and as such the physical presence, of the city itself. The aforementioned dialogic relation between people and place serves as a poignant reminder of how much this alliance has become absent in contemporary everyday practices that are, by comparison, characterized by ever more passive modes of socio-spatial consumption. Archive film screenings and similar events create an embodied space of memory in which forgotten practices, affects and experiences of the past can – albeit as mediated forms of what MacCannell (1976) terms ‘staged authenticity’ – be recreated and thus re-embodied as a collective space of representation and urban spectacle. Moreover, such forms of cine-spatial urban engagement highlight the extent to which, as Highmore notes, ‘our real experiences of cities are “caught” in networks of dense metaphorical meanings’ (2005: 5) in which symbolic, affective and material experiences of the city play equally important roles in constructions (or indeed reconstructions) of the collective urban imaginary.

Design in projected spaces: Architecture in film A few years after Ricciotto Canudo (1911), Louis Delluc (1920) voiced a demand for film being regarded as an autonomous art form that comes to terms with its very own means of design (e.g. light, decor, rhythm). He introduced the term photogénie, which Jean Epstein relates to the theory of a fourth dimension – the medium’s ability to manipulate space and time. It could be argued that it is this concept of photogénie – essentially a characteristic that sets film apart from other arts – that creates the terms in which filmmakers are able to use architecture and urban environments in such a way that they ‘are enhanced by filmic reproduction’ (Epstein, 1924: 314). Commenting on the same phenomenon, Patrick Keiller notes that the ‘newness of spaces of the cinema is a product, not of set-building, but of cinematography’ (2002: 37). He draws attention to the ‘new, virtual world

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of cinema’, which in its early years was, in terms of the subject matters and portrayed locations, full of extraordinary experiences (ibid.). This observation finds application also from the perspective of a viewer of early archive footage today. When viewing film footage of urban landscapes, such as those by the Lumière Brothers or Mitchell and Kenyon, the medium of film creates a spatial depth that is different to that of other forms of visual representation. The framing of the location, the lack of colour, the richness of the picture contrast, the movement of the shutter, and, not least, the unedited nature of the footage render real spaces in a new light that is specific to the magical and photogenic properties of early film. Although the first three decades of the twentieth century are often regarded as the Golden Age of the visionary architect and planner, even the designs of the avant-garde of architectural modernity – such as Adolf Loos, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Bruno Taut, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius – proved to be simply unbuildable in a politically charged and economically devastating climate. During the same period the film industry, on the other hand, often employed directors and designers who were architecturally trained and able to create imagined architectures and urban environments that not only benefited from the lack of constraints which modernist urban designers were otherwise confronted with, but which were also remarkable in terms of the increasing precision that characterized the work of this new breed of film professional. The German film industry in particular, before being caught in financial and political turmoil and the subsequent dispersal of personnel and expertise to Britain and the US and elsewhere, is recognized as being one of the fertile grounds for innovations in production standards and trick photography, employing miniature models, double exposures and mirror techniques (see, for instance, the Schüfftan technique). Today, it seems that a generation of students and scholars has emerged who, profiting from and inspired by the often high quality of set design of this early modern period, set out to offer a new method of reading films: one that moves towards seeing film not only as a genre-dependent text, but also as a rich map of socio-cultural, political, economic and, of course, architectural discourses. This is supported by a number of encyclopaedic literatures dedicated to the specificity of urban location portrayed in film within a global context, such as Die Stadt im Kino (Vogt, 2001), Celluloid Skyline (Sanders, 2001), La Ville au Cinéma (Jousse and Paquot, 2005) and City ⫹ Cinema (Griffiths and Chudoba, 2007). In fact, as in the case of the latter publication, a series of scholars rising with increasing frequency from architectural schools have begun to specialize in the analysis of projected architecture and places found, most prominently, in feature films, but also in documentaries, city symphonies and computer games (Thomas and Penz, 1997), which they regard as a rich source for the contextualization of what Helmut Weihsmann poetically refers to as the Architektur des filmischen Raums (1995: 25): the architecture of filmic space.

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Following Donald Albrecht’s (1986) and Helmut Weihsmann’s (1988) pioneering publications on modern set-design, considerable research has gone into films of the 1920s and 1930s which, since they are cultural products of that particular age, are full of detailed references to modern architectural debates. From the point of view of design, the aim of such a historical perspective is to furnish knowledge of the ways in which certain architectural forms have been used in film, and thus to contextualize these design practices so as to serve an instrumental role with respect to present architectural thinking. Yet, it is not just the formal merits of architectural objects found in film that warrant scholarly investigation. Projected cities can share with real cities a sense of place in – as in the Wachowski brothers’ 1999 film of the same name – an almost infinite matrix of space and time; one that goes well beyond the Weimar years, or, in the words of Dietrich Neumann, ‘from Metropolis to Blade Runner’ (1996).

Projected cities: Filmic functions of architecture and cities Recent publications in film and urban cultural studies, such as Mennel’s Cities in Cinema (2008) offer a pedagogical model of, in essence, ‘how to read a city’ through film (2008: 15). Yet, the ‘representation’ of architecture in film – which, as discussed above, often finds application in a modern context – is not the only form of critical engagement with moving imagery that is relevant for architecture and urban design practices. Moving towards what could be termed narrative functions, it is evident that the term ‘urban projections’ can be readily applied to describe a series of postmodern architectural and urban design phenomena. While many studies have established that film can reflect a postmodern architectural condition, in which the ‘real’ city is conceived as inseparable from, or a product of ‘reel’ urban projections – the virtual and material converging in a parallel space of ‘cinematic urbanism’ (AlSayyad, 2006) – it could, by contrast, be argued that the postmodern condition in an architectural context is essentially filmic (see also, Barber, 2002: 156). This is expressed in two ways, both of which have a physical, yet in design terms vastly different implication. First, as Guy Debord notes in Society of the Spectacle (1992 [1967]) and later in his Comment on the Society of the Spectacle (1990), we live as spectators in an unreal society in which the individual is reduced to a passive consumer of, among other things, the commodified spectacle of urban space. This unreality is supported by an acute sense of social, spatial and economic instability of urban centres which, in a visual context, and through the use of light advertisement and illuminated façades, has had a profound impact on our perception of architecture. While the beginning of this phenomenon is rooted in the electrification and commercialization of urban space – and as such, as Neumann (2002) illustrates, an ‘architecture of the night’ – increasingly powerful LED technology and daylight projectors lead to the

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Introduction

shaping of city façades by the means of light and moving imagery that transforms cityscapes without the requisite availability of natural illumination. In fact, the operation of electric advertisements in city centres is only limited, if at all, by the opening hours of retail shops or the calculated timemargin necessary for the efficient functioning of profit-driven and increasingly privatized consumerscapes of postmodern cities. Yet, perhaps the future is not as bleak as these developments might otherwise portend. The cinematization of urban space has ushered in an era of optimized, responsive, and interactive façades. The electronic pixilation of urban environments (Seitinger, Perry and Mitchell, 2009), for example, not only offers new opportunities for more sophisticated cinematic experiences of urban space (with the proviso that in most instances this means the inevitable provision of more sophisticated methods of stimulating would-be consumers), but also provides hitherto unrealized and unexploited narrative possibilities for cities. Second, the architectural practices of Juhani Pallasma, Bernhard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, Coop Himmelblau, Jean Nouvel and others have begun to see architecture as part of the creation of experiential, cognitive and in some instances even ‘existential spaces’ (Pallasmaa, 2001) which strongly relate to film and/or the principles of film language. In the same way that directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky or Stanley Kubrick have demonstrated that spaces in cinema are more than just passive backdrops – playing host to a narrational, place-defining function – so have architects and designers begun to construct spaces along a Corbusian promenade architectural or as part of a system in which architecture becomes akin to a cinematic, story-telling apparatus. In spaces and buildings, such as the Parc de la Villette in Paris or the Case da Musica in Porto, architectural space arguably becomes animated and consequently activated through the movement of the human body through space. The nature of such film-like spaces is explained through, and theoretically underpinned by, well-known film theories by Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, whose montage approach to film making seems able to be appropriated to the non-linear multiplicity of experiences offered by many postmodern cities.

Projecting the future While the architectural examples cited above have done much to rationalize the product of urban design by drawing on innovations from film theory and practice, what is arguably lacking is an epistemologically consistent rationale as to the ways in which insights learned from film can be applied to the processual and pedagogic modalities of architectural and urban design. Since entering the digital age, moving images have seen a transition from being an aesthetic mode of spatial expression (architecture and geography as narrative forms of cinematic representation), to a spatially expressive and

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site-specific consumer practice (in the form of, for example, handheld devices and mobile screens): developments that will radically transform the spatial and perceptual dynamics of everyday urban environments. The introduction of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and GIS technologies – virtual spaces placed literally in the palms of our hands – will generate a wealth of new time-based spatial and geographic data for which, at present, there remain inadequate methodological resources to incorporate within existing structures of knowledge production relating to the city and the moving image. The ability, for instance, to record people’s physical movement through urban landscapes, as with navigable interactive environments in the virtual world (Thomas and Penz, 2003), while a boon to state and corporate bureaucracies who are embracing the panoptic potential of the creeping surveillance society, also provides unparalleled opportunities to map these movements within broader, multidisciplinary contextual frameworks (historical, social, economic, demographic, etc.); bringing specific forms of spatio-temporal mobility and urban-architectural engagement into critical dialogue with information drawn from a range of data sets. ‘[M]ultiply[ing] the readings of the city’, to again quote Barthes (1997: 171), the new and rapidly evolving relationship between the city and the moving image is yielding further insights into the ways people engage with architecture and everyday urban spaces. These and other digital innovations bring a renewed focus on experimental and practice-based applications in architectural design, in which digital moving images are instrumental in understanding the processes that shape existing as well as newly designed urban spaces. Indeed, it is far from coincidental that leading schools of architecture in the UK and elsewhere have begun to offer practical workshops, research units, and degree programmes that use film as a critical tool in the analysis and design of architecture and urban spaces. In more than one sense, this interdisciplinary spirit echoes that which characterized early film making and architectural practices around the 1920s; a time when new technologies and the cross-fertilization of ideas changed the way we perceive the built environment. In keeping with this spirit, The City And The Moving Image is intended to appeal to architects, planners, geographers, as well as scholars and practitioners in film and urban cultural studies who are embracing the potential of time-based media as a way to respond to an increasingly visual-centric and rapidly changing postmodern urban culture. The structure of the book falls into four main thematic areas which are designed to focus critical attention on issues relating to (1) space, place and identity; (2) landscape, memory and absence; (3) cartography and mapping; and (4) architecture and urban narrativity. Short introductions featuring a summary of the chapters relating to each theme are provided at the beginning of each section. Although these thematic groupings address specific areas of scholarly analysis in relation to cities and the moving image,

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Introduction

the broader theoretical and analytical concerns we have outlined in this Introduction provide a common thread which runs throughout the volume as a whole, giving shape to a more nuanced and multifaceted understanding of the different ways in which film and moving image cultures can be shown to project the urban.

Notes 1. See for example: Aitken and Zonn, 1994; AlSayyad, 2006; Bruno, 2002; Brunsdon, 2007; Caquard and Taylor, 2009; Conley, 2007; Cresswell and Dixon, 2002; Dimendberg, 2004; Everett and Goodbody, 2005; Fish, 2007; Hallam, 2007; Keiller, 2002; 2003; 2007; Koeck, 2009; Konstantarakos, 2000; Lefebvre, 2006; Lukinbeal and Zonn, 2004; Marcus and Neumann, 2007; Porter and Dixon, 2007; Roberts 2005; 2010a; 2010b; Roberts and Koeck, 2007; Rohdie, 2001; Shiel and Fitzmaurice, 2001; 2003; Sorlin, 2005.

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Conley, T. (2007) Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Cresswell, T. and D. Dixon (eds) (2002) Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield). Debord, G. (1990) Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (London, New York: Verso). Debord, G. (1992) [1967] Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press). Delluc, L. (1920) Photogénie (Paris: Editions de Brunoff). Dimendberg, E. (2004) Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (London: Harvard University Press). Döring, J. and T. Thielmann (eds.) (2008) The Spatial Turn: Paradigms of Space in the Cultural and Social Sciences (Bielefeld: Transcript). Elsaesser, T. and A. Barker (eds) (1989) Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute). Epstein, J. (1988) [1924]. ‘On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie’, in R. Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology 1907–1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Everett, W. and A. Goodbody (eds) (2005) Space and Place in European Cinema (Oxford: Peter Lang). Falkheimer, J. and A. Jansson (eds) (2006) Geographies of Communication: The Spatial Turn in Media Studies (Göteborg: Nordicom). Fish, R. (ed.) (2007) Cinematic Countrysides (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Foucault, M. (1980) ‘Questions on Geography’, in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (Brighton: Harvester Press), pp. 63–77. Friedberg, A. (1993) Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press). Griffiths, G. and M. Chudoba (eds) (2007) City ⫹ Cinema: Essays on the Specificity of Location in Film (Tampere: Department of Architecture, Tampere University). Hallam, J. (2007) ‘Mapping City Space: Independent Filmmakers as Urban Gazetteers’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 4(2): 272–84. Hallam, J. and L. Roberts (2009) ‘Projecting Place: Mapping the City in Film’, IEEE eScience 2009 Conference Proceedings, Geospatial Computing for the Arts, Humanities and Cultural Heritage Workshop, University of Oxford, 9–11 December 2009. Harvey, D. (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell). Highmore, B. (2005) Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso). Jameson, F. (1992) The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (London: BFI Publishing). Jameson, F. (2009) Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso). Jousse, T. and T. Paquot (eds) (2005) La Ville au Cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma). Keiller, P. (2002) ‘Architectural Cinematography’, in K. Rattenbury (ed.), This is Not Architecture: Media Constructions (London, New York: Routledge), pp. 37–44. Keiller, P. (2003) ‘City of the Future’, City 7 (3): 376–86. Keiller, P. (2007) ‘Film as Spatial Critique’, in J. Rendell, J. Hill, M. Dorrian, and M. Fraser (eds), Critical Architecture (London: Routledge).

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Kessler, F. and N. Verhoeff (eds) (2007) Networks of Entertainment: Early Film Distribution 1895–1915 (Eastleigh: John Libbey & Co). Kessler, F., S. Lenk and M. Loiperdinger (eds) (1992–2006) KINtop (Frankfurt: Stromfeld). Kirby, L. (1997) Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press). Klenotic, J. (2008) ‘Film History at the Crossroads: GIS and the Road Less Travelled’, unpublished conference paper presented at the GIS for Cultural Research Workshop, University of Wollongong, 17–18 March. Koeck, R. (2008a) ‘Cine-Spatial Strategies: Ways Of Engaging with Archive Footage of the City’, unpublished conference paper presented at the Design Cinema Conference, Istanbul, 19–22 November. Koeck, R. (2008b) ‘Cine-Tecture: A Filmic Reading and Critique of Architecture in Cities’, in J. Hallam, R. Koeck, R. Kronenburg and L. Roberts (eds), Cities in Film: Architecture, Urban Space and the Moving Image, conference proceedings (Liverpool: Liverpool School of Architecture). Koeck, R. (2009) ‘Liverpool in Film: J. A. L. Promio’s Cinematic Urban Space’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 7 (1): 63–81. Koeck, R. (2010) ‘Urban Regeneration in Liverpool: Sign-Structures of the Visible and the Invisible’, in J. Harris and R. Williams (eds) Regenerating Culture and Society: Art, Architecture and Urban Style within the Global Politics of City-Branding (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). Konstantarakos, M. (ed.) (2000) Spaces in European Cinema (Exeter: Intellect). Laclau, E. (1990) New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time (London: Verso). Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell). Lefebvre, H. (2003) The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Lefebvre, M. (ed.) (2006) Landscape and Film (London: Routledge). Lash, S. and J. Urry. (1994) Economies of Sign and Space (London: Sage). Lukinbeal, C. and L. Zonn (eds) (2004) ‘Special Issue: Cinematic Geographies’, GeoJournal 59 (4). Lury, K. and D. Massey (1999) ‘Making Connections’, Screen 40 (3): 229–38. MacCannell, D. (1976) The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (London: Macmillan). McQuire, S. (1999) ‘Blinded by the (Speed of) Light’, Theory, Culture and Society, 16 (5–6): 143–59. Marcus, A. and D. Neumann (eds) (2007) Visualizing the City (London: Routledge). Massey, D. (1993) ‘Politics and Space/Time’, in M. Keith and S. Pile (eds), Place and the Politics of Identity (London: Routledge), pp. 141–61. Massey, D. (2005) For Space (London: Sage). Mennel, B. (2008) Cities and Cinema (London, New York: Routledge). Musser, C. (1990) The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Charles Scriber). Neumann, D. (ed.) (1996) Film Architecture: Set Design from Metropolis to Blade Runner (Munich and New York: Prestel). Neumann, D. (2002) Architecture of the Night: The Illuminated Building (Munich and New York: Prestel). Pallasmaa, J. (2001) The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema (Helsinki: Rakennustieto). Porter, L., and B. Dixon (eds) (2007) Picture Perfect: Landscape, Place and Travel In British Cinema before 1930 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press).

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Roberts, L. (2005) ‘Non-Places in the Mist: Mapping the Spatial Turn in Theo Angelopoulos’s Peripatetic Modernism’, in W. Everett and A. Goodbody (eds), Space and Place in European Cinema (Oxford: Peter Lang), pp. 325–44. Roberts, L. (2010a) ‘Making Connections: Crossing Boundaries of Place and Identity in Liverpool and Merseyside Amateur Transport Films’, Mobilities, 5 (1): 83–109. Roberts, L. (2010b) ‘Dis/embedded Geographies of Film: Virtual Panoramas and the Touristic Consumption of Liverpool Waterfront’, Space and Culture 13 (1): 54–74. Roberts, L. and R. Koeck (2007) ‘The Archive City: Reading Liverpool’s Urban Landscape Through Film’, in C. Grunenberg and R. Knifton (eds), Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), pp. 84–93. Rohdie, S. (2001) Promised Lands: Cinema, Geography, Modernism (London: BFI Publishing). Sanders, J. (2001) Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies (New York: Knopf). Schivelbusch, W. (1986) The Railway Journey: The Industrialisation of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Leamington Spa: Berg). Seitinger, S., D. S. Perry and W. J. Mitchell (2009) ‘Urban Pixels: Painting the City with Light’, 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Boston, MA, 07 April. Shiel, M. and T. Fitzmaurice (eds) (2001) Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Shiel, M. and T. Fitzmaurice (eds) (2003) Screening the City (London: Verso). Shohat, E. and R. Stam. (1994) Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge). Soja, E. W. (1989) Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso). Soja, E. W. (1996) Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers). Sorlin, P. (2005) ‘Urban Space in European Cinema’, in W. Everett and A. Goodbody (eds), Space and Place in European Cinema (Oxford: Peter Lang). Thomas, M. and F. Penz (eds) (1997) Cinema and Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia (London: British Film Institute). Thomas, M. and F. Penz (eds) (2003) Architectures of Illusions: From Motion Pictures to Navigable Interactive Environments (Bristol: Intellect Books). Toulmin, V. (2006) Electric Edwardians: The Story of the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection (London: BFI Publishing). Vogt, G. (2001) Die Stadt im Kino: Deutsche Spielfilme 1900–2000 (Marburg: Schüren). Warf, B. and S. Arias (eds) (2009) The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: Routledge). Webber, A. and E. Wilson (eds) (2008) Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis (London: Wallflower). Weihsmann, H. (1988) Gebaute Illusionen: Architektur im Film (Vienna: Promedia). Weihsmann, H. (1995) Cinetecture (Vienna: PVS Verleger). Wunderlich, F. M. (2008) ‘Walking and Rhythmicity: Sensing Urban Space’, Journal of Urban Design, 13 (1): 31–44.

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Part I Projecting the City: Place, Space and Identity

Introduction From the earliest days of the medium, film has played a prominent role in the projection and promotion of cities and regions. Ranging from actuality footage shot by the early pioneers such as the Lumière Brothers or, in Britain, Mitchell and Kenyon; to the ‘city symphonies’ of the 1920s and 1930s; the didactic documentaries of municipal or state socialism; through to more recent use of moving image media to stimulate tourist investment, consumption and urban regeneration; the political, economic and ideological efficacy of film has remained a central factor in the symbolic construction of civic and urban identity by city authorities, businesses, community groups, trade associations and unions, and other forms of collective organization in cities. In her chapter ‘Old World Traditions … and Modernity’, Heather Norris Nicholson focuses on the promotional films that were produced between 1920 and 1935 to advertise Cunard’s shipping routes between Montreal and Quebec City in Canada and the ports of Liverpool and Southampton in the UK. As both literal and symbolic vehicles for economic and urban development, the ships operated by C unard played a constitutive role in shaping emerging discourses of modernity and urban, industrial and civic identity in these and other cities. Tracing the historical circumstances framing the mercantile growth (and decline) of port-cities such as Liverpool, Norris Nicholson also reflects on the capacity for archival film images to prompt forms of engagement with landscapes of the past, drawing productive associations between the post-industrial reconfiguration of urban waterfronts and the institutional and discursive impacts of new media and digitization on archive film and its related practices. Isabelle McNeill examines another port-city, Nice in France; a city which has also been shaped by centuries of patterns of mobility. Nice reflects a dynamic urban geography that has played host to movements of migrants, tourists and mercantile trade, and in this capacity lends itself well to cinespatial analyses in which the historical and spatial transitions associated

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with mobility cultures are foregrounded. Mapping the tensions between urban geometries of transition and the accumulations and collective structures of localized memory, McNeill explores the ways in which cities produce and sustain virtual spaces within which the shifting landscapes, histories and narratives can be navigated as both an ‘intimate memory map’ and as a lived sociality of urban experience. Ryan Shand’s chapter analyses the contrasting representations of Glasgow as documented in amateur and sponsored films of the city. In response to the urgent demands posed by the postwar housing crisis in the city, the Glasgow Corporation outlined plans for large-scale development of municipal housing. Accompanying these proposals were two sponsored films which were commissioned by the Corporation’s Housing Department. Basing his analysis in part on the Corporation films, Shand goes on to consider the example of an amateur cine-club production, ‘Let Glasgow Flourish’, which was made in opposition to Corporation plans to sell off some of its newly built housing stock in the early 1950s. Frequently held up as an example of a resistant and oppositional mode of amateur film practice – one that was defined against their sponsored counterparts – Shand questions whether this rather neat dichotomy, drawn along lines of genre and production, is as clear cut as established convention would otherwise suggest. Picking up similar themes, Julia Hallam shifts the geographical focus from Glasgow to Liverpool to examine how amateur filmmakers in Merseyside responded to urban changes that dramatically transformed large parts of the city in the 1950s to 1970s. As with Glasgow, city authorities in Liverpool were keen to exploit the opportunities offered by film in promoting both the city and the services and municipal beneficence of its elected officials. In contrast to these ‘official’ film narratives, which typically emphasized the cultural life of the city, and its industry and manufacturing base as a means to attract inward investment, amateur filmmakers recorded everyday street scenes, buildings and public spaces, as well as the people moving through and inhabiting these spaces. Examining the ways in which the cine societies developed on Merseyside, Hallam goes on to consider the example of city films produced by two local amateur filmmakers, and argues that the contribution of these and other filmmakers to what she defines as a ‘spatial documentary’ film practice represents a neglected area of research on film; one which demands close attention to the historical and social contexts surrounding amateur film practice, and the urban transformations wrought by modernist planning and development strategies in the postwar period.

1 ‘Old World Traditions … and Modernity’ in Cunard’s Transatlantic Films, c. 1920–35: Making Connections between Early Promotional Films and Urban Change Heather Norris Nicholson Where cities meet the sea, their pasts intermesh with the changing histories of trade and migrations. Their biographies, and those of their individual buildings, brim with signs, memories and chronologies in which local particularities collide with regional, national and global considerations. Such waterfronts may also testify to former times of mercantile strength and ruthless ideologies of exploitation. The style, scale and symbolism of commanding harbour buildings and port facilities may offer littoral urbanscapes still inscribed with clues to past imperial and commercial ambitions. Alongside these relics of contested pasts – that often increasingly now survive mainly as valued cultural heritage resources within leisure-orientated urban economies – are signifiers of more contemporary urban identities. Retailing, recreational and residential places and spaces adjoin, encroach, replace and transform former quayside and adjacent urban environments. Historical traces and spaces have long survived where conservation interests have been accommodated within plans to entice corporate and commercial interests (see, for instance, Hoyle and Pinder, 1992; Raco, Henderson and Bowlby, 2008: 2652). Past memories and material remains of where once vital urban functions met the water’s edge sometimes continue only in the names of a public plaza, apartment block and dining facility, fascia embellishment or the occasional piece of commissioned public art and themed street furniture (Buurma 2008: 41). Where decline, neglect and decay have given way to regeneration and transformation, waterfronts may have been restitched physically and experientially (Bruttomesso, 1993: 10; Vigarié, 1983) back into the tissue of adjacent urban areas. Yet, perhaps, as Grenville hints in broader discussions of urban conservation, they may remain severed visually and psychologically from their former role as points of arrival and departure (Grenville, 2006; 2007). Has moving image a role in linking the past and present experiences of such urban spaces? 21

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Archive film, like many urban waterfronts, has undergone profound reappraisal during recent decades and particularly with the advent of digitization. After years of being neglected and rather sidelined within wider narratives of cinematic endeavour, archive moving image now has both value and distinct cachet as resource and inheritance of public significance. For not entirely unconnected reasons, the life cycles of both archive imagery and the quayside environments of settlements large and small have extended as changing aesthetic, economic and technical opportunities have bestowed new significance upon these respective distinctive components of visual heritage and urban areas. Each has now become a commodity with an associative exploitable value that, in some way, may conflict with concerns about more intrinsic interest, historical value or integrity. How does the apparent freedom of the market, whether considered in relation to the waterfront or archive film, create imaginative spaces for reuse without contributing to forms of visual and historical amnesia? Can archive footage help to reconnect past urban spaces with some of their former significance? Are there places for encountering archival footage of past quayside activity within our reconceptualization of urban waterfronts? Can juxtaposing two seemingly different forms of inscribing past urban experience contribute to how we encounter regenerated urban space? Can flickering images of past times, like maps and photographs, inform and enrich contemporary urban experiences (Pulling, 2007)? This discussion of urban waterfront-related archive footage may be set within the broader context of considering changing relationships between film and urban spaces, identities and meanings during the past century (AlSayyad, 2006: 3–4; Barber, 2002: 13–65; Brunsdon, 2007; Clarke, 1997: 10–17; Shiel and Fitzmaurice, 2001: 1–2; 2003: 1–2). Attention focuses on promotional footage produced for the shipping company Cunard, and the associated water frontages depicted in advertising transatlantic routes between Liverpool and North America during the 1920s and 1930s (Norris Nicholson, 2007). Reference to Cunard’s use of Liverpool, in particular, to strengthen its own corporate identity and reputation, contrasts with other urban identities presented in company films but permits wider discussion of how archive footage, changing urban identities and memories intermesh in relevant and creative ways that contribute to emerging research and creative practice in the fields of film, architecture and urban design. It would be misleading to overstate the analogy between urban waterfront regeneration and how digitization of archive film is bringing about its rediscovery and widening access. However, several shared similarities occur. Neither development occurred without deliberate intervention and both involved much dedicated campaigning. The battle that helped to reposition once neglected archive imagery within more inclusive cinematic histories and more nuanced understandings of past visual cultural practice (see, for instance, Houston, 1994; Ishizuka and Zimmerman, 2007: 2–3)

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was not unlike early campaigns to safeguard urban waterfronts as valuable and distinctive but disappearing components of wider urban and international histories (Hoyle, Pinder and Husain, 1988; Mann, 1988; Norcliffe, Bassett and Hoare, 1996). Treatment has been uneven in both areas, too. Some archive film long remained more readily available than other footage, its selection determined in part by geography, convenience, cost and familiarity as well as by the name of its original producer or distribution (Norris Nicholson, 2001: 152–63). Newsreel, actuality films, documentaries and professionally produced footage were used repeatedly to confer visual authenticity and realism. Then programme researchers became familiar with regional archives that had searchable online catalogues as well as amateur film holdings that were often available for use with fewer copyright and cost restrictions. Likewise, geographical specificities, economic circumstances and prevailing ideologies ensured that some waterfronts survived longer or underwent regeneration earlier than others. It is to the issue of selective reuse and reworking that attention next turns. From the past obscurity of regional archival holdings, scholarly attention now lifts early footage shot at factory gates (Toulmin, Russell and Popple, 2004), roll of honour films (Hammond, 2000) and the visual abundance of amateur cinema (Craven, 2009: 1–34; Ishisuka and Zimmerman, 2007: 18–20; Norris Nicholson, 2010a). Such material is now being reinstated within more complete visual histories of regional, national and global significance. Instances of such footage being shown regularly to public audiences or imaginatively edited, reworked or creatively included in diverse forms of outreach and community engagement are increasingly widespread as shown by working papers, annual reports and newsletters from film archives in Britain and overseas. They derive from partnerships rooted in shared wishes to kindle wider interests – from schoolchild or scholar to senior citizen. They rely on funding arrangements that often bring private and public sources imaginatively together, as well as considerable determination. Yet, despite such advocacy of archive material and, in particular, the recent explosion of interest in amateur footage witnessed in writing, television series and forms of public outreach, other kinds of imagery are still often overlooked. While important work highlights the significance of early topicals (BFI, c.2003) and various genres of educational and instructional footage (BFI, c.2002; Ostherr, 2010; Peterson, in press), other kinds of promotional material remain less explored. Commercial material – with some notable exceptions including work on Canadian Pacific Railway’s use of film to advertise their travel services (Melnyk, 2004: 15–16), and on the exhibiting of film in the Wanamaker department stores in New York and Philadelphia to educate staff, attract shoppers and encourage sales of children’s toys (McGrath, 2009) – has attracted less attention. Many more early promotional films still lie untouched in archives. Easily derided for their

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apparent lack of sophistication or visual ambition, they are nonetheless important components of advertising media history. They readily point to early recognition of moving imagery as a persuasive marketing tool. Within the present discussion of city and moving image, urban identities may be identified as important components of advertising films made by rival shipping companies in the early decades of the twentieth century (Norris Nicholson, 2007). As with the examples mentioned above, imagery and inter-titles sought to be informative and entertaining, and are reminders that watching moving imagery was still a novelty for many people, particularly those living beyond easy access to public newsreel screenings and locally arranged film shows. Promotional films, made between the early 1920s and mid-1930s to advertise Cunard’s routes between Montreal/Quebec City and Liverpool/ Southampton, for instance, were essentially about encouraging people to travel by boat. But amidst all the shipboard scenes of how passengers travelled – obviously filmed on reassuringly sunny days when the ships did not roll – the footage also reveals extensive waterfront scenes shot at either end of the journey and also during the voyage. Cunard’s early films were travelogues that were shot and edited for maximum appeal. That meant showing the boat and its different decks of accommodation and facilities, as well as contented passengers who were happily occupied with shipboard activities and sightseeing, while making their journeys. Reassurance about safety, speed, comfort and catering meant films included shots of lifeboats and safety drills, cabins, different areas for recreation and relaxation, dining and engine room, bridge and kitchen scenes, as well as nursery facilities. Such scenes featured between lengthy quayside sequences during embarkation and landfall, as well as ports of call along the route. The opportunities for onboard shooting from varied angles, in different settings including the challenges of boiler room shots and filming on crowded decks, plus the scope for amusing vignettes of local life ashore and busy harbour scenes attracted commercial production companies to undertake such commissions. Much less appealing than the colourful poster art of the same period, these grainy monochrome films are valuable visual travel texts that articulate issues of class, gender and sexuality within frameworks of empire and the changing geographies of twentieth-century mobility (Norris Nicholson, 2002: 43–68; 2010b). They also offer insights into contemporary metropolitan identities, as well as sociocultural history during decades when speedy travel by ships and new scales of urban architecture became familiar symbols of modernity (Redford, 1929). Tall buildings, bridges and other advertising icons of civic culture and urban economies were already familiar through prints and still photography by the early 1900s. They assumed new potency in promotional cinematic travelogues, as film seemed ideally suited to capture the dynamism, mobility and scale of the urban environment and the equivalent qualities of the modern transatlantic passenger ship. The Cunard footage

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was made by the Ontario Motion Picture Bureau (OMPB), one of three agencies making film for different governmental departments in Canada by 1920 (Norris Nicholson, 2007). The company mainly produced documentary and educational material, and produced some travel films during the 1920s, sending film crews overseas, including to Britain. Although perceived as exotic extravagance and never adopted for classroom use, the agency’s travelogues remained popular with audiences, and the making of promotional films provided OMPB with income through until the early 1930s. Migration agents and transport companies had used film from early in the century to attract potential new settlers into Canada and elsewhere. From the early 1920s, shipping companies saw the benefits of using films to also promote recreational cruise travel and thus reinvent themselves after the First World War, during which Cunard had lost much of its Canadian fleet. Migration flows were changing too and there were new restrictions on passengers entering the US. Cunard seized the initiative to promote new possibilities of comfortable peacetime travel and commissioned a fleet of redesigned vessels for its Canadian route. Film helped to sell the idea of recreational cruise travel in purpose-built accommodation to a middle-class market on both sides of the Atlantic. The strict delineation of onboard space for passengers travelling on different tickets is articulated through careful visual framing of separate gangways, dining rooms, recreational areas and cabin accommodation, even as the dense quayside crowds seem visually united in a vast flutter of raised white handkerchiefs as bystanders wave off departing ships.1 OMPB’s surviving Cunard films are silent, monochrome and titled in English. Some sequences have been edited into different films for British and North American audiences. The films were made originally on 28mm safety film stock – Ontario’s fire regulations did not allow 35mm film in many rural exhibition venues – but later transferred as part of an ambitious but ultimately flawed expansion in the later 1920s. Imagery would thus have been seen by rural and urban audiences. The filming is straightforward. Each story line is simply the journey from embarkation to landfall. Scenes inform potential passengers about life aboard and the efficient transfers between boat and train for travellers continuing onwards. The films became part of a wide-ranging campaign to sell transatlantic crossings, holiday cruises and inclusive holidays in Britain and mainland Europe. They reveal Cunard in a transitional phase, still offering a migration service but also aiming for the holiday traveller (Babcock, 1931: 169–73). Clothing and luggage styles indicate that migrants from southern and eastern Europe were still journeying westwards in search of new lives as well as the mix of more westernized urban passengers in working clothes and suits seen boarding on different gangways with cases and sometimes porters and nannies in tow. Cunard operated between Liverpool – Belfast and later Southampton – and the St Lawrence Seaway as a summertime route that combined adventure,

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history and – still for some migrants – dreams of new futures, with the practical advantages of a shorter open-sea crossing. The 900-mile journey along the St Lawrence offered strong visual contrasts. Seeing French Canada en route to Europe is highlighted as a particular bonus for travellers from outside Quebec – probably the majority – given contemporary demographics in eastern Canada. ‘It is like adding to their itinerary a new country, with all the delightfully strange customs, sights and idioms of language, of a people and civilization entirely different from that of any other of America’ (Cunard brochures c.1927). Antiquity and modernity are juxtaposed repeatedly in text and image. The sleek, funnelled ships denote speed, efficiency and technological supremacy over nature. Filming tries to replicate the optical illusion that suggests a ship cannot pass under the Quebec Bridge, and different versions of this particular sequence recur in many of the Cunard travel films. Girders, rivets and engineering feats offer visual interest for the filmmakers: they echo the rhythmic efficiency of disciplined teamwork onboard in the kitchens, printing and engine rooms, and on the navigational bridge. In some re-edited sequences, long shots disclose Montreal’s once teeming industrial waterfront. Few of its grain elevators, berths for ocean-going vessels and piers for river steamers now flank the repaved and tree-planted restyled public spaces. Successive regeneration programmes, pioneered by the city’s hosting of Expo ’67, have redesigned the former quaysides right back to street level where the designation of warehouses and offices as heritage buildings with new uses has maintained a few reminders of former function and visual distinctiveness. Footage of an emerging high-rise skyline symbolizes the city’s commercial wealth and metropolitan character that contrast with the historical associations of other smaller settlements passed elsewhere downstream. Upper-deck passengers are invited to follow Cunard’s route on fold-out, annotated maps that link them to other modern communications systems too: at the Victoria Jubilee Bridge they learn how it ‘carries the motorist to Albany and New York’ and, much further on, they pass the ‘giant towers for transatlantic wireless transmission’. Cunard’s promise of effortless travel sets tropes of modernity alongside a montage of unchanging riverine rural life scenes.2 The OMPB wished to maximize its distribution so it evoked both old and new, particularly in its representation of Quebec City as ‘the one city in Canada full of old world traditions and the romance of martial France’. Inter-titles emphasize these visual juxtapositions, somewhat unequally, offering both ‘reminders of the past’ and ‘symbols of the present’. Telegraph poles and wires crisscross through the pattern of shadows and early morning sunlight of intersecting and steep residential streets, as signs of modernity’s penetration towards the congested dwellings, pitched roofs and washinghung narrow alleys and entrances of the Upper Town. Quebec’s contemporary economy is also captured in views of the ‘magnificent harbour … port

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of entry into the heart of a continent’. OMPB’s constant care to describe Quebec as a ‘city of life, history and tradition’ suggests a filming brief to make Cunard’s cruises equally attractive to those in search of age and modernity on either side of the Atlantic.3 Liverpool’s waterfront, by contrast, is busy, motorized and has building and crowds on an enormous scale. For the Canadian-based production company, the clichéd shots were accessible to OMPB’s camera crew who, as revealed by printed sources and other films, were prepared to travel in search of unusual filming opportunities. Yet, a quick succession of views of streets and key buildings adjacent to Pierhead essentialize the city for domestic and overseas consumption and company marketing. These Cunard sequences have an immediacy in capturing the city’s waterfront identity.4 Liverpool was already an established symbolic and literal gateway between Old and New Worlds. Ships and waterfront, in the Cunard footage, seem extensions of each other, as passengers and crew are seen to flow between the crowds ashore and those lining the upper-deck rails. The liners physically extend the company’s and city’s reach across water as well as bearing witness to the political and economic power of the nation. Maritime influence quite literally transcended and exceeded the spatial limits of both city and country. Moreover, as Cunard’s mercantile links with the city dated to 1840, it was a fitting place for the company’s new headquarters building to be built in 1917. The Cunard Building’s commanding position on Pierhead, as one of the three most prominent waterfront buildings, foregrounds its quayside role in the company’s subsequent films. It virtually starts one 1923 film, as it comes after a now damaged opening sequence that shows a Cunard vessel sailing across a maple leaf. The long held shot allows viewers time to absorb image and text. Slow movement up and across the building’s numerous storeys permits an audience to appreciate its structure, its size compared to older dwellings nearby and its compatibility – in scale if not design and style – with its neighbours, the Royal Liver Building and the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board Offices. OMPB’s camerawork echoed the architectural hyperbole associated with the Cunard Building’s development five years earlier. The structure was an amalgamation of old and new and a material expression of Cunard’s service to its passengers and economic global strength. The company’s influential role in Liverpool’s maritime and commercial expansion and its wish to reassert its mercantile strength and post World War One recovery, were given visual expression in footage of the massive new building in Portland stone. The building’s features borrowed stylistically from the midsixteenth-century Farnese Palace in Rome and assert authority, or give, as Cunard’s own staff wrote, an ‘impression of rugged strength and forcefulness’ (Cunard Steamship Company, 1917: 76). ‘Behind the massive solid elegance suggestive of great spaciousness and comfort’ (ibid.: 25), however, were reinforced concrete and steel. Other descriptions could equally fit

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the fleet’s passenger liners: ‘massive dignity and strength, combined with refined classic beauty’. And yet, from both shipboard scenes below deck and promotional brochures, the ships themselves carried many reassuring motifs drawn from antiquity and later historical periods. It seems as if Tudor furnishing, rococo interiors, medieval tapestries and even ‘Tourism Third Class’ dining rooms and deck activities visually and materially helped to cocoon passengers on different liners on different tickets from the dislocating effects of unprecedented forms of speedy, mass passenger travel by sea.5 Boats and building linked in various ways. Prospective passengers would pass through the company headquarters, which replaced earlier premises in nearby Water Street, each according to their status, using different entrances to access the waiting rooms, ticket offices and other facilities. Third-class travellers entered, for instance, on the lower ground floor (on one of the basement levels) that was ‘specially designed (to meet) the peculiar and exacting demands of this section of the North Atlantic passenger trade’ (Cunard Steamship Company, 1917: 54). At whatever level, on seeing the new building, the intending passenger ‘must carry away a mental picture in which massive grandeur, chaste refinement, grandeur, and a general pervading air of comfort have been artistically blended’ (ibid.: 53). Like the company’s vessels, the Cunard Building was a potent symbol ‘enshrining as it does the brain centre of the company’s world wide operations’ (ibid.: 28). Camera attention thus promoted quaysides, the vessels themselves and passenger services.6 Among numerous high angle sequences that stressed the ships’ size and passenger capacity, more individual cameos occur too; private farewells cut short by awareness of the camera’s intrusive gaze; the agitation of station porters wheeling trolleys, closing train doors and passengers leaning from gaping windows, clutching hats and children. These familiar visual tropes of departures and silenced last words, despite their anonymity and distance, evoke lost memories, experiences and the emotional geographies of specific localities. Such scenes are private but intensely theatrical too. Liverpool’s waterfront is described as a floating stage. The vessels are ‘ocean leviathans’ that tower like ‘giants among pigmies’ (Cunard Steamship Company, 1917: 28) ‘over cosmopolitan crowds from every nation under the sun’. Through these clichéd descriptions, maritime spectacle is exploited to sell travel and migration opportunities. Yet personal responses glimpsed through gesture, body language and expression are also powerful reminders of myriad real-life dramas, emotions, ambitions and regrets that routinely swirled through those points of contact and separation at the water’s edge. All archive film, including early promotional material, may be approached from multiple positions. Based upon a commercial imperative, promotional films might seem one-dimensional and cruder, arguably more naive filmic forms than other genres of archive imagery. Yet they clearly disclose how people sought to show, share and shape meanings about their products, their prospective consumers and the world around them. Cunard’s footage

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weaves its message of reassurance combining innovation with tradition in ways that mirror wider expressions of modernity’s unevenness, complexity and interconnectedness. As global imperatives transformed older transatlantic associations, the particularities of key urban functions redefined spatial form, fabric and practice. While changing technologies impacted on urban waterfronts and redesigned ships for pleasure rather than mass migration, cameras became indispensable to the promotion and consumption of leisure. Advertising films borrowed stylistically from actuality, newsreel reportage and comedy to construct their persuasive narratives. Fiction films set aboard ships, particularly those involving melodrama, mystery, murders or robberies became popular feature films (Norris Nicholson, 2009a: 49). Passenger ships, like the waterfronts and skylines of the huge ports they connected, attracted admiration. Yet memories of the Titanic disaster and wartime losses were not yet distant. The new Cunard Building was completed only five years after one of the worst losses of civilian passengers in shipping history. Complex identities and meanings are thus embedded within Cunard’s visual interweaving of old world/new world imagery and the particularities of places where ships and people met. Such material sensitizes us to the archived memories and invisible traces of past experience associated with urban waterfronts. Archive film represents visual testimony to the plethora of human experiences that lie outside many other historical texts. Here, the impersonal focus captures moments that complement individual travel texts of diaries and holiday accounts (Norris Nicholson, 2006: 13–36) or the visible rupture to normality that attracts the news gatherer in search of an unusual and unexpected visual drama. Promotional footage provides an eye upon the working routines of weekly sailings and quayside activities and Cunard’s promise of predictability for future travellers. Herein lies its value, both frame-by-frame and as moving history. This discussion reconsiders promotional footage as visual documents and historical artefacts, products of specific circumstances and opportunities. Obscured by better known uses of early interwar filmic techniques in marketing and advertising, for instance, the short-lived Empire Marketing Board (1928–33) and predecessor to the GPO Unit also under the leadership of John Grierson, shipping company footage discloses other hidden histories within its frames. Its horizons, like the waterfronts and ships it portrays, are expansive and transnational in their links between people, places and the politics of mobility and migration. They link the local with the global, the personal with the political and the past with the present. Within a more inclusive understanding of cinematic legacies that embraces archive film as well as feature films, even neglected strands of visual heritage may become active within processes of urban re-imagining and reinvention. New digital technical capacities, in fact, widen opportunities to bring unprecedented amounts of neglected and unknown early film from obscurity, as repositories recognize the potential of their holdings and seek ways to make

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their material better known. For those interested in exploring visualization of urban spaces, from their watery boundaries to innermost congested areas, rapid developments are making catalogue content and moving image available online. There are abundant possibilities for working with historical footage in different ways. The imaginative shifts that brought about the reassessment of urban waterfronts involved vision, economics, technology and political expedience that have their parallels in how members of the archive film world are engaging with practical, theoretical and conceptual implications of digitization. They too continue to negotiate their own uncertain futures located as they usually are within fast changing financial, technological and institutional landscapes. In theory, digitization offers new means to store data for the future, while acknowledging the unproven longevity of the technologies now in operation. As with finding new uses for old buildings, digital storage protects as long as the function remains useful or the technology continues to function. Digitization enables important access to more archive imagery than ever before, but easy availability does not automatically disclose historical significance and different levels of mediated meanings. Images, like buildings, have stories that merit being passed on rather than forgotten. Ideally, future users of web-based digitized imagery should be able to access background information and comment (Sheldon and Bibber, 2008: 1–4). Digital encoding of descriptive metadata about provenance – stories concerning an image’s origins and meaning – enrich interpretation and broaden ways of approaching archive film. Sometimes archives have undertaken detailed shot listing, research or specialist consultation. Accompanying online materials might also include details of scripts, shooting locations, planned sequences that were never shot or edited out – as in some large-scale national initiatives (BFI, 2009). Making background material accessible online does not foster merely historical approaches to inherited visual text. Rather it provides stronger and reinvigorated bases for reappraising the significance of archive film and its interdisciplinary applications in contemporary ways. Protecting the visual integrity of archive footage seems urgent, as initiatives digitize, stream and develop other ways to put imagery online. Finding sustainable ways of valorizing urban water frontages remains important too as links with a generation that had direct experiences and memories of their former working and transport functions lessen. Their respective accumulated meanings merit more than simple designation as reusable spatial resources (Gordon, 1998: 91–7). Within redesigned heritage settings, museums and interpretation centres often act, for different age groups and audiences, as important conduits of historical understanding into the present and enable new patterns of connection with the past.7 In such exhibition spaces, archive moving image often plays a key role. Imagery exposes the unfolding stories of urban transformation as building, places and activities survive, disappear or change over time. Such visual encapsulation offers reference material and

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inspiration for diverse users including those charged with the task of designing and managing urban spaces in vibrant and creative ways. Historic archive imagery – with its evocative capacity to interest and simply to attract the human eye – connects with the gathering and shaping of place-related memories and identities in other ways also of relevance to discussions about city and film. The imaginative use of open-air projections that increasingly feature in urban marketing and festival animations illustrates the value of visual heritage in generating contemporary meanings and responses. The distribution of outdoor projected imagery at five locations across the city, including locally specific historical imagery, attracted critical acclaim at Trondheim’s International Film Festival in 2005 (Sorenssen, 2009), but such events form part of a longer trajectory of outside urban film shows. New media and digital technologies have generated diverse outdoor projection opportunities in many urban locations. During the summer and autumn of 2009, spectacular examples of urban outdoor projection took place in Liverpool. They resulted from imaginative collaborations between cultural policymakers and local authorities as well as archivists and other professionals. One city-centre initiative during August 2009 provided highly innovative means of reaching to and involving public audiences (NWFA, 2009). Using interactive and responsive camera technologies, the Places of Public Resort installation at Clayton Square, in Liverpool, enabled bystanders’ hand movements to generate sequential displays of pre-loaded archive footage. News reports and clips, from BBC footage dating between 1966 and 1986, thus featured in a busy public retailing space on a large-screen that normally displays current news and contemporary events. Old and new imagery interwove as the backdrop for passersby and enabled others to engage more directly. A few weeks later, creative partnership transformed Pierhead and adjacent open-air quayside spaces for watching a range of classic and new productions. Over a two-day period, and undeterred by the vagaries of weather, events planners transformed the Museum of Liverpool’s vast window space into a gigantic cinema screen on which people could watch locally produced short films and innovative contemporary moving images. Screening also included Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront and The Long Day Closes, the second part of Terence Davies’s autobiographical trilogy about growing up in the city.8 Such transferable applications of public outreach and visual projection in specific venues and locations may contribute to enhancing people’s relationships with their surroundings, and foster a sense of place. Certainly, the publicity linked to such spectacles serves as a reminder of how particular urban locations once served other functions and held other meanings. Even if past maritime memories now reach the public as part of sometimes problematic broader trends in leisure consumption and regenerated space (see, for instance, Wharton 2007), such visual links also connect to Liverpool’s mercantile past and its status, since 2004 as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.9

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Through an initial focus on early promotional film, and its depictions of particular locations, another argument for advocacy emerges. Early promotional commercial material, although a precursor to better known later productions developed on behalf of different public and quasi-public organizations at local, regional and national level, has attracted less scholarly attention than most other non-fiction genres of early film. Its imagery may disclose specific nuances of place association during particular decades that may have contemporary relevance in the design, detailing and experience of urban spaces. Archive moving image, including early promotional pieces, is a diverse and remarkable expression of twentieth-century experiences. Its study complements other ways of discussing relationships between film, architecture, and urban space. It offers a source of visual stimuli that could be used to generate urban distinctiveness and also to maintain historical connections. Such practical applications may help to offset contemporary processes that undermine urban identity, belonging and social cohesiveness. As regeneration trends swing through different urban locales, each with its own distinctive inheritance of challenges and opportunities, archive imagery may contribute in versatile ways to how we make real places relevant and meaningful. Our attitudes towards safeguarding both the integrity and the meaning of archive moving images and the urban built environment may inform how we understand and bequeath components of our visual and material heritage to future generations.

Acknowledgements Research on Cunard films and printed material held at the Library and Archives of Canada, Ottawa was supported by a Prix de Quebec, awarded by the Government of Quebec (2007). Sincere thanks are also due to those who have shared their memories of transatlantic passenger ship travel, former students for sharing my interests in waterfront regeneration projects and to staff at the North West Film Archive at Manchester Metropolitan University for their wonderful patience and help in making film and acquisition files available. Useful comments arose while presenting an earlier version of this chapter at the City in Film: Architecture, Urban Space and the Moving Image, University of Liverpool, 26–28 March 2008.

Notes 1. Travel Cunard Line – Canadian Route (Cunard [Ontario Motion Picture Bureau], 1923), North West Film Archive, Manchester Metropolitan University, Accession no. 55. 2. Westward; The Treasures of Britain (Ontario Motion Picture Bureau, undated) Library and Archives Canada, ISN 277699. See also Treasures of Britain (Ontario Motion Picture Bureau, undated), Library and Archives Canada, ISN 277697. 3. In Old Quebec (Ontario Motion Picture Bureau, undated), Library and Archives Canada, ISN 244225.

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4. Travel Cunard Line – Canadian Route (Cunard [Ontario Motion Picture Bureau], 1923), North West Film Archive, Manchester Metropolitan University, Accession no. 55. 5. Cunard and Anchor Donaldson: Excerpts (Ontario Motion Picture Bureau, undated), Library and Archives Canada, ISN 205694. 6. Cunard from Canada (Cunard [Ontario Motion Picture Bureau], 1927), North West Film Archive, Manchester Metropolitan University, Accession no. 56. 7. North of Liverpool, amateur film clips contribute to trawler fishing industry presented at Fleetwood Maritime Museum, Fleetwood Maritime Museum, Lancashire, England, UK. Available at http://www.lancashire.gov.uk/acs/sites/ museums/venues/fleetwood/index.asp?siteid=4049&pageid=16512&e=e (accessed on 14 September 2009). Personal communication with donor of footage, summer 2009 during research for H. Norris Nicholson (2010a). 8. Film on the Waterfront was produced in partnership with Culture Liverpool, Liverpool City Council’s culture service, Abandon Normal Devices (AND), a new north-west festival of cinema and digital arts, available at http://andfestival.org. uk/siteNorm/home.php (accessed on 18 September 2009), and Walk the Plank, available at http://www.walktheplank.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/ film-on-the-waterfront-web-friendly-leaflet2.pdf (accessed on 18 September 2009); see also, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (Liverpool), available at http://www.fact.co.uk/ date (accessed on 18 September 2009). 9. Liverpool World Heritage homepage, available at http://www.liverpoolworldheritage. com/index.asp (accessed on 21 September 2009).

Bibliography AlSayyad, N. (2006). Cinema Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Real to Reel (London and New York: Routledge). Babcock Lawrence, F. (1931). Spanning the Atlantic (New York: Alfred H. Knopf). Barber, S. (2002). Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (London: Reaktion Book). British Film Institute (BFI) (c. 2002). The Educational and Television Films Collection (ETV), available at http://www.bfi.org.uk/nftva/access/afs/etv/index.html, date accessed 14 September 2009. British Film Institute (BFI) (c. 2003). Topical Budget Introduction, available at http://www.bfi.org.uk/nftva/access/afs/topicalbudget/intro.html, date accessed 14 September 2009. British Film Institute (BFI) (2009). InView: British History through the Lens, available at http://www.bfi.org.uk/inview/intro date accessed 14 September 2009. Brunsdon, C. (2007). London in Cinema: The Cinematic City since 1945 (London: Macmillan and British Film Institute). Bruttomesso, R. (ed.) (1993). Water Fronts. A New Frontier for Cities on Water (English trans.) (Venice: International Centre for Cities on Water). Buurma, D. (2008). ‘New Planters in Lemon Quay (Truro)’ Green Places, 49 (Oct): 44. Clarke, D. B. (1997). The Cinematic City (London: Routledge). Craven, I. (ed.) (2009). Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press). Cunard Steamship Company (1917). The New Cunard Building (Liverpool: Cunard Steamship Company). Cunard Steamship Company, Cunard-Anchor Donaldson and Cunard White Star (1923–37). Cunard, Cunard-Anchor Donaldson and Cunard White Star Brochures [available at Library and Archives, Ottawa, Canada].

34 Old World Traditions … and Modernity Gordon, D. L. A. (1998). ‘Different Views from the Water’s Edge: Recent Books on Urban Waterfront Development. A Review Article’, Town Planning Review, 69 (1): 91–7. Grenville, J. (2006). ‘A Psychological Approach to Urban Change’, Context, 100: 27–33. Grenville, J. (2007). ‘Conservation as Psychology: Ontological Security and the Built Environment’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 13 (6): 447–61. Hammond, M. (2000). ‘“The Men Who Came Back”: Anonymity and Recognition in Local British Roll of Honour Films (1914–18),’ Scope, December 2000, available at http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/, date accessed 24 May 2008. Houston, P. (1994). Keepers of the Frame: The Film Archives (London: British Film Institute). Hoyle, B. S., Pinder, D. A. and Husain, M. S. (eds) (1988). Revitalising the Waterfront: International Dimensions of Dockland Redevelopment (London: Belhaven Press). Hoyle, B. S. and Pinder, D. A. (eds) (1992). European Port Cities in Transition (London: Belhaven Press). Ishizuka, K. and Zimmerman, P. R. (2007). ‘The Home Movie Movement: Excavations, Artifacts, Minings’, in K. Ishizuka, and P. R. Zimmerman (eds). Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 2–3. McGrath, C. (2009). ‘This Splendid Temple: Watching Films in the Wanamaker Department Stores’. Unpublished paper presented at the North East Historic Film Archive Summer Film Symposium, 24–25 July 2009, Bucksport Maine, US. Mann, R. B. (1988). ‘Ten Trends in the Continuing Renaissance of Urban Waterfronts’, Landscape and Urban Planning, 16 (1–2): 177–99. Melnyk, G. (2004). One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Norcliffe, G., Bassett, K. and Hoare, T. (1996). ‘The Emergence of Postmodernism on the Urban Waterfront: Geographical Perspectives on Changing Relationships’, Journal of Transport Geography, 4 (2): 123–34. Norris Nicholson, H. (2001). ‘Regionally Specific, Globally Significant: Who’s Responsible for the Regional Record?’, The Moving Image 1(2): 152–63. Norris Nicholson, H. (2002). ‘Telling Travellers’ Tales: Framing the World in Home Movies, C. 1935–1967’, in T. Cresswell and D. Dixon (eds). Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield), pp. 47–68. Norris Nicholson, H. (2006). ‘Through the Balkan States: Home Movies as Travel Texts and Tourism Histories’, Tourist Studies 6: 13–36 (Reprinted with permission in ‘Tourism’, a special issue of Panoptikum (2009, Poland)). Norris Nicholson, H. (2007). ‘Old World Traditions … Romance’ and Modernity: Cunard’s Transatlantic Travel Films, c. 1920–35’. Unpublished paper presented at the British Association of Canadian Studies Annual Conference, University of Durham, 11–13 April 2007. Norris Nicholson, H. (2009a). ‘Floating Hotels: Cruise Holidays and Amateur FilmMaking in the Inter-War Period’, in D. Clarke, M. Doel and V. Crawford Pfannhauser (eds). Moving Pictures/Stopping Places: Hotels and Motels on Film (Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield), pp. 49–72. Norris Nicholson, H. (2009b). ‘Framing the View: Amateur Filmmaking and Britain’s Amateur Film Movement c. 1925–1950’, in I. Craven (ed.). Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press), pp. 93–129. Norris Nicholson, H. (2010a). Visual Pursuits: Amateur Film Practice, Culture and Meaning, c. 1927–1977 (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Norris Nicholson, H. (2010b). ‘Tradition, Romance and Modernity in Cunard’s Transatlantic Travel Films, c. 1920–1935’, British Journal of Canadian Studies.

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North West Film Archive (NWFA) (2009). Places of Public Resort, available at http:// www.nwfa.mmu.ac.uk/, date accessed 14 September 2009. Ostherr, K. (2010). ‘Empathy and Objectivity: Health Education through Corporate Publicity Films’, in K. Ostherr (ed.). Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture. Peterson, J. (in press, 2010). ‘“Education Manufactured Wholesale”: Nature Films and the Emergence of Classroom Cinema in the 1920s’, in D. Streible, M. Orgeron and D. Orgeron (eds). Learning with the Lights Off: A Reader in Educational Film (London: Oxford University Press). Pulling, J. (2007). ‘Regeneration – Portsmouth: Heart Transplant’, Cabinet Maker (April 20), 44. Raco, M., Henderson, S. and Bowlby, S. (2008). ‘Changing Times, Changing Places: Urban Development and the Politics of Space-Time’, Environment & Planning A 40 (11): 2652–73. Redford, R. (1929). The Inspiring Story of Maritime Enterprise. Robert Redford Co. Ltd (General agents for the Cunard, Anchor and Donaldson Line). Sheldon, K. and Bibber, T. (2008). North East Historic Film: Finding and Using Moving Images in Context (Bucksport, Maine: North East Historic Film. Digital Start-Up/ Institute of Museum and Library Service). Shiel, M. and Fitzmaurice, T. (eds) (2001). Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell). Shiel, M. and Fitzmaurice, T. (eds) (2003). Screening the City (London and New York: Verso). Sorenssen, B. (2009). ‘Local Film History as Part of Contemporary Audiovisual Practices’. Unpublished paper presented at the North East Historic Film Archive Summer Film Symposium, 24–25 July 2009, Bucksport Maine, US. Toulmin, V., Russell, P. and Popple, S. (eds) (2004). The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film (London: BFI). Vigarié, A. (1983). ‘Le navire, le port et la ville’, Transports et mutations actuelles, Paris: SEDES/ CDU, 7–113, cited in J. Charlier (1992). ‘The Regeneration of Old Port Areas for New Port Uses’, in B. S. Hoyle and D. A. Pinder (eds). European Port Cities in Transition (London: Belhaven Press), pp. 137–54. Wharton, C. (2007). ‘The Newcastle Look: Culture as Spectacle’, in H. Fawcett (ed.). Made in Newcastle: Visual Culture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University Press), pp. 153–69.

2 Nice: Virtual City Isabelle McNeill

Nice is a city that highlights the mobility of urban space within an apparently static, touristic ideal. It is a city whose geographical location near frontier and sea has seen it shaped by centuries of tourism, immigration, arrivals and departures. Its indeterminate nationality, having belonged to various Mediterranean realms and countries, as well as its fame as primarily a tourist location of dramatically changing fortunes, foregrounds in Nice the constant change that mobilizes all urban spaces. Yet at the same time, aspects of its image have crystallized in the popular imagination, such as the palm trees that line the famous Promenade des Anglais along the azure curve of the Bay of Angels. It therefore reveals the way cities can change almost beyond recognition and yet remain familiar: somehow the same. As Robert Kanigel puts it in High Season in Nice: Nice has undergone vast change over the centuries. And yet, for all the change, there is this one constant: its beguiling invitation, held out to each new generation of travelers. (Kanigel, 2003: 3) This combination of mobility and persistence in Nice is a characteristic of cities, and it is something both revealed by and mediated by film. In their joint press release for their 1930 film À Propos de Nice, Jean Vigo and Boris Kaufman described the film in the following terms: Blue sky, white houses, bedazzled sea, sunshine, multicoloured flowers, hearts full of joy, such would appear at first the atmosphere of Nice. But this is only the ephemeral and transient appearance of a city of pleasures watched by death. Beyond this mortal aspect, the young filmmakers of À Propos de Nice wanted to make visible the becoming of a city. (Vigo and Kaufman, cited in and translated by Temple, 2005: 20) 36

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Beyond a straightforward visual document of Nice, Vigo and Kaufman clearly intended the film to reveal hidden aspects of the city. This points to film’s capacity to make visible more than a city’s bodies and buildings. À Propos de Nice evokes the textures of the social fabric of the city and offers political and metaphysical readings in response to it. Their stated intention goes even further than this, however, suggesting that the film should make visible the becoming of a city. This implies that for Vigo and Kaufman film can reveal time at work in the lived environment. Through the patterns and juxtapositions of editing, in particular a mixing of the animate and inanimate through images of masks, dolls, statues and effigies which intermingle with the movements of people, the filmmakers evoke the future and past of Nice: the future death that awaits rich and poor alike, and the past ghosts of previous incarnations. This essay examines the premise that film is able to do precisely this: evoke the becoming of a city, revealing it to be continually in transition, but at the same time unveiling it as a site of accumulated collective memory, shaped by the persistence of the past, a persistence in part cinematically formed. I will first discuss the city as a zone of memory, not as a static container, but rather in terms of a shifting, dynamic virtuality.1 I will then turn to filmic visions of Nice in order to explore film’s relation to that virtual space.

The city as memory zone Cities are places which bear a particularly powerful association with memory: like memory itself, they are formed through a continual process of construction, preservation, destruction and reconstruction. They are dense, evolving places where various temporal layers are visible in the contours of different architectures. However, it might be said that these different architectures and juxtaposed historical forms are only the visible sediment of a multitude of lives that have inscribed their habits into the city and have housed their memories there. Cities also constitute virtual memory zones where continual activity produces a collective mental life with its own histories. As James Donald suggests, ‘in the recesses and margins of urban space, people invest places with meaning, memory and desire’ (1999: 69). The inscription of everyday movements within urban spaces has been discussed by Michel de Certeau in his seminal writings on city space in The Practice of Everyday Life. He opposes the messy accumulation of quotidian movements to the overarching, panoptic viewpoint of authorities who theorize the city as a space to be made orderly and functional (de Certeau, 1984: 93–5). This latter viewpoint is constantly being resisted by what he calls ‘the semantic wanderings’ of the city’s ordinary inhabitants.2 De Certeau sees this in terms of a constant dispersal and rearrangement of narrative and therefore of the memorable.

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However, traces still persist in what he calls ‘legend’, which one might also describe as the cultural memory of the city: Fragments of [memory] come out in legends. Objects and words also have hollow places in which the past sleeps, as in the everyday acts of walking, eating, going to bed, in which ancient revolutions slumber. (de Certeau, 1984: 108) What is particularly suggestive here for my argument is the connection between this notion of material containers of memory and the mobile habits of the collective body. For it evokes a crucial link between the concrete spaces of the city and the virtual zones of memory and, by extension, media. Recalling the etymology of the word habit, it suggests a dual movement by which inhabitants of a city ‘clothe’ the space in memory at the same time as the city ‘clothes’ or contains them as the receptacle of their memories and therefore of a shared zone of identity. As lived spaces, cities combine the visible, concrete signs of temporal change with more intangible, spectral traces, which may or may not be invoked and which may or may not remain dormant forever. This can be seen in terms of virtuality in the Deleuzian sense: in other words not opposed to the real (whose opposite would be the possible) but rather to the actual, and therefore parallel, immanent space (Deleuze, 1994: 211). The question that arises then concerns how, in the age of continual flows of information, something as relatively fixed as a film may account for these shifting layers of urban memory traces, Various theorists offer answers: Deleuze (2009) posits cinema as the art of virtuality par excellence, while Stephen Barber remarks upon the continued importance of film form in the multiplying visual spaces of what he terms ‘the digital city’. He claims that ‘the often hallucinatory apparition of the city is preeminently rendered and narrated in filmic style’ (Barber, 2002: 156). Even in the age of video games and the Internet, films are a powerful means of representing both actual and virtual spheres of city life.

Cinematic Nice However, filmic images not only have a particular representational power, they also feed into our collective mental representations by developing the imaginary of a city. James Donald has argued persuasively that ‘the imagined landscape of the city has become, inescapably, a cinematic landscape’ (1999: 68). I want to explore cinematic Nice as an example. The long association between Nice and cinema has been overlooked by film scholars, while more attention has been given to the larger, more industrial Mediterranean city of Marseille. It is worth taking a brief detour through this other key city of France’s south-east coast3 in order to gain a comparative understanding of Nice’s position in cinematic history. Entering

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the popular imagination through Marcel Pagnol’s classic 1930s ‘Trilogie marseillaise’,4 Marseille has rightly been given an important place in the history of cinema, notably by Stephen Heath, who suggests that ‘Marseille and cinema go together from the start’ (Heath, 2002: 63). Pointing to the role of cinema in constructing the city’s image, Heath argues that Pagnol, ‘catches up and moulds stereotypes into a popular representation that comes to stand as an accepted reality of Marseille’ (ibid.: 65). An affectionate vision of a city marked by strong local accents and populated by lively, sentimental, humorous ‘characters’ in a bustling working-class port, Pagnol’s nostalgic idea of Marseille distilled aspects of the city popularized by Alphonse Daudet in books such as Lettres de mon Moulin (1869). It also resonated with some elements of earlier, grittier, avant-garde Marseille films such as Louis Delluc’s Fièvre (1921) and Jean Epstein’s Cœur Fidèle (1923); Pagnol’s light, sympathetic version of Marseille set the tone for a certain genre of Marseille film that remained popular throughout the period and remains a reference point for more recent filmic love letters to the city, such as Robert Guédiguian’s Marius et Jeannette (1997). Marseille is equally famous for its dark, criminal side, however, something the early films like those of Delluc and Epstein confronted more explicitly and which developed an alternative cinematic tradition alongside the goodnatured Pagnol films. ‘Gangsters, drugs, prostitution, violence are staple cinema ideas of the city’ states Heath (2002: 66), as seen in a long roll-call of films from Maurice Tourneur’s Justin de Marseille (1931) to Total Khéops (Alain Bévérini, 2002). So powerful is cinema’s ability to construct and disseminate an image of the city that tourist guidebooks endeavouring to defend Marseille are led to complain of its ‘godawful international reputation put about by films like The French Connection’ (Facaros and Pauls, 1994: 198). They are referring to William Friedkin’s 1972 Brooklyn-set police drama featuring Marseillais drug smugglers, and its sequel in which the American detective follows the trail to Marseille itself in hot pursuit of the French villain who eluded him in the first film (The French Connection II, John Frankenheimer, 1974). Comparisons with these well-known cinematic visions of Marseille help to define Nice’s particularity as a cinematic city. Like Marseille, Nice has both a light and a dark side, structuring opposites that are central to representations of the city. But if Marseille’s binary image opposes local, working-class bonhomie to the sinister machinations of a criminal underworld, in Nice the city’s sunny side is precisely what gives rise to the corresponding unpleasantness. More associated with leisure than work, and signified by a landmark that involves strolling (the Promenade) rather than labour (Marseille’s Old Port), it is Nice’s 2000-year-old history as a tourist destination that has shaped its popular and cinematic image. The opening credits of Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955) unfold over a travel agent’s window covered in inviting, palm-fringed advertisements for France and the Côte d’Azur, with a poster of

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Nice in the centre, all blue sky, bay and beach. Yet this historic connotation of Riviera indulgence goes hand in hand with idleness and greed. As Facaros and Pauls tell us: It was the presence of so many rich, idle foreigners that formed the city’s character, its reactionary politics and unsavoury links with the Mafia […] its high density of poodles and frown-faced poodle ladies and its ornate holiday-villa architecture. (1994: 103–4) This connection between tourism and corruption, pleasure and emptiness is highlighted in À Propos de Nice, with its critical perspective on the ‘city of pleasures watched by death’ as Vigo and Kauffman put it in the statement cited earlier. Gyula Zilzer, who helped with the shooting of the film, saw in it a vision of ‘the boredom of the rich and the enthusiasm of the poor, eager to entertain them’ (1947–8: 126). Robert Kanigel, meanwhile, remarks upon the lack of resistance demonstrated by the Niçois during the Second World War, linking it to the mercenary habits of a touristic city used to different ‘owners’ and visitors: As for Nice, whether because of historically blurred national identity, or its sweet Italian streak, or tolerance born of welcoming visitors from everywhere, it couldn’t be much bothered with choosing sides. Italians? French? Germans? Americans? Did it matter in the end? Not so long as visitors filled the hotels, crowded the clubs, and left fat tips. (2003: 202) This sense of a place whose very ‘character’ has been formed by a combination of the desire for indolent pleasures and the opportunity to make money by fulfilling such desires is reinforced in the association with organized crime. After a female friend became disastrously involved with a member of ‘le milieu’, as the Nice mafia is known, the author Graham Greene famously wrote a damning pamphlet, J’Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice, instructing wouldbe visitors to ‘avoid the region of Nice which is the preserve of some of the most criminal organisations in the South of France’ (1982: 7). However, the story Greene recounts is not just an exposé of Nice’s criminal underground, it also targets the institutional infrastructure, describing a city in which an unassailable criminal network is protected by police, magistrates and the legal system. Surprisingly, however, unlike Marseille, the straightforward gangster or policier film has not been one of Nice’s most prominent cinematic genres, in spite of a few scattered examples such as Opération Magali (László V. Kish, 1952) and others which take a tour through Nice en route from Italy like Classe tous risques (Claude Sautet, 1959), with its shoot-out on the beach. It is perhaps

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precisely because Nice’s ‘dark side’ appears so inextricably interconnected with its very structure as a wealthy tourist paradise, drenched in sunshine, that Nice films have sometimes taken a comic approach to criminality, for example Georges Lautner’s Il était une fois un flic (1972), in which an undercover cop and hardened bachelor takes on the Nice mafia with ‘borrowed’ wife and child in tow, mingling policier and romantic comedy. Nice films often focus on the all-important topics of money, luxury and wealth rather than the traditional crime narrative, with the hotel and the casino figuring as the pre-eminent Niçois locations. Jacques Demy’s La Baie des anges (The Bay of Angels, 1963), starring Claude Mann and Jeanne Moreau, is an unusual love triangle in which Jean (Mann) falls for Jackie (Moreau) whose only love is gambling. The film takes its name from one of Nice’s most well-known geographical features and figures it as a gambler’s nightmarish paradise, highlighted when Jean tells Jackie on an ill-fated excursion to Monte Carlo, ‘let’s go back to the Bay of Angels, that’s what brings us fortune’. With hints of noir in its atmosphere, the film nevertheless reaches a last-minute upbeat ending when Jean finally manages to persuade Jackie to escape the trap of the rattling roulette wheel. As early as 1930 À Propos de Nice had symbolized the dangerous lure of the casino. In one of the opening scenes chips are scooped up from a gaming table by a croupier’s rake; a dissolve leads to an animated sequence in which figurine tourists arrive on a model train, only to tumble and be raked up in their turn, transforming into disposable effigies swept up among the casino’s takings. Even when films emphasize the glamour of Nice as a luxury holiday location, a sense of the sordidness of material obsessions often tempers the lightness of the cinematic vacation. In the romantic comedy Hors de prix (Priceless, Pierre Salvadori, 2005), Audrey Tautou plays a professional mistress adept at prising expensive gifts from her wealthy marks. Yet she only finds happiness once she falls for a shy, impoverished waiter. Cinematic renditions of Nice often bear a moral message about the emptiness of material wealth and its pursuit. The curious heist movie Les Égouts du paradis (José Giovanni, 1979) would appear to depart from this tendency, privileging as it does a criminal mastermind who gets away with the loot. Reputedly based on a true story, the ‘sewers of paradise’ in the title refer quite literally to the underbelly of Nice, where the film’s charismatic protagonist Albert Spaggiari (Francis Huster) plans an unusual robbery, entering the vaults of the Société Générale bank via the sewer system. Its narrative, complete with brooding voiceover, generates a sympathetic portrait of Spaggiari, whose motto for the job is ‘neither weapons, nor violence, and without hatred’, a message he leaves scrawled in chalk on the side of one of the empty safes. Yet despite the success of the heist, there is relatively little emphasis on material gains; instead the film highlights Spaggiari’s daring and cunning, and his longing for adventure in the aftermath of the revolutionary fever and failures of May 1968. Almost an hour of the film is spent in the dankness of the sewers, as a dusty six-metre

42 Nice: Virtual City

tunnel is painstakingly dug through to the vaults; it is a clear refusal of the touristic vision of hotels, blue skies and palm trees more usually associated with Nice. Instead of this, the dark, underground spaces are contrasted with the liberating, mountainous rural regions beyond the city which provide the hero with his final escape route. In spite of its endorsement of theft, the film still manages to reject the materialism of Nice as holiday resort. More recent Nice films, such as À Propos de Nice: la suite (Kiarostami et al., 1995), Mimi (Claire Simon, 2003), both of which will be discussed below, and Tony Gatlif’s Mondo (1995) have further problematized the tourist’s view of the city, particularly by highlighting Nice’s ethnic multiplicity. The eponymous protagonist of Mondo is a 10-year-old gypsy boy, defined in the voiceover as having come from ‘very far away’. He wanders through the streets, beaches and parks, dreaming of other places (as when a former sailor tells him stories of Africa), while simultaneously representing the continual movement of otherness at the heart of the city, as when a cluster of oranges inscribed with Arabic writing washes up onto the beach where he sleeps. The film visits tourist hotspots, in its opening establishing shot of the Promenade des Anglais for example, or the scenes of the market in Old Nice. Yet Gatlif uses the close-up to re-imagine familiar places, with shots of dusty paths, leaves and insects that capture the intimate textures of Mondo’s itinerant gaze upon the city. Based on a short story by Niçois Nobel prize-winning author J. M. G. Le Clézio, Mondo views Nice from the margins, evoking a space that is both outside time and continually in motion. Admittedly Nice does not have the cinematic equivalent of Marseille’s Pagnol or Guédiguian. Yet this does not diminish its status as a cinematic city. The full richness of Nice’s historical association with cinema is in part concealed within the constructed ‘elsewhere’ of the Studios de la Victorine, an important film production centre conceived as a French Hollywood (known as Studios Riviera since 1999). Founded in the 1920s by Serge Sandberg and Louis Nalpas, the studios found international acclaim when taken over in 1924 by the Hollywood director Rex Ingram. The impressive list of films making use of the Studios during their postwar glory days includes Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis (1945), Max Ophuls’s Lola Montes (1955), Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955) and Lady L. with Sophia Loren and Paul Newman (Peter Ustinov, 1964).5 François Truffaut’s La Nuit américaine (Day For Night, 1973) highlights the extent of the intertwining between the site of Nice and the constructs of cinema itself, since it features the Studios de la Victorine as the location for its film-within-a-film, the romantic melodrama Je Vous Présente Pamela. Alongside this, the emotional dramas of the cast and crew making the film are enacted in Nice, at the Atlantic Hotel (renamed Hotel Windsor in the film) and the Aéroport Nice Côte d’Azur, where Julie, the star of Je Vous Présente Pamela, holds a press conference. The title, meaning ‘American night’, refers to a cinematic

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process which recreates the illusion of nighttime in scenes shot during the day. Thus the film could be seen to distil some of the most strident, defining characteristics of Nice as cinematic city: hotels, airports, filmmaking, and such heightened creative artificiality that day can become night. À Propos de Nice is an early and centrally important landmark in Nice’s cinematic history. In attempting to capture the ‘becoming’ of the city the film’s makers managed to capture something of Nice that persists in cinematic memory, intersecting in one way or another with all the films described above. As with other city-portrait films of the period, such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, a City Symphony (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Vigo and Kaufman took an experimental approach to documentary. Citing À Propos de Nice as an example, Bill Nichols has noted that ‘the modernist avant-garde film contributed something quite vital to the appearance of documentary film; it imaginatively reconstructed the look of the world with images, or shots, taken of this world’ (2001: 596). In their imaginative reconstruction of Nice, the filmmakers made full use of the mobility of cinema: shots from an aeroplane, disorienting shifts between high- and low-angle shots and playful editing combine to convey flows of movement that are both textural (water in a boat’s wake, the fabric of costumes) and social (sweepers on the promenade, the high kicks of cancan dancers). Michael Temple observes that the ‘variety of bewildering angles’ in the sequence depicting the palm-trees and grand hotels of the Promenade des Anglais disorient ‘our familiar sense of how this postcardlike scene would normally be perceived’ (2005: 22). Such defamiliarization also occurs in the shift to the poorer areas of the city in the middle of the film, the backstreets shown sullied with rubbish and disease yet also thronging with life and movement. Later on, the dancing, accelerated rhythms of the Carnival, with its bizarre giant-headed, painted figures, alternate with sober images of varying paces: an orderly military parade seen from above, a brisk lateral shot across warships in the Bay of Angels, a comically speededup funeral cortege. Each transition offers new connections and disruptions across city space. Through its constant mobility the short film evokes what Ackbar Abbas calls the ‘complexity’ of cities, by which he means, ‘the tropisms of people, ideas, capital, going together with mutations in perception and affectivity’ (Abbas, 2003: 143–4). For Abbas, ‘it is exactly the instability of the cinematic image that allows it to evoke the city in all its errancy in ways that stable images cannot’ (ibid.: 145).

Memories of Nice: Mimi and À Propos de Nice: la suite I now turn to two contemporary films that engage specifically with the ‘errancy’ of Nice as city space, a virtual memory zone with which its broader cinematic history inevitably intersects. In Mimi we are taken on a journey around Nice that is also a journey into Mimi’s past. A documentary about one

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woman’s memories, the film also engages with Nice as cinematic virtuality. Recalling the lingering shots of Mondo, it dwells on the visual and sonic textures of Nice in a way that evokes its cinematic history (as a Mediterranean location, a place of transit) yet also distances itself from touristic stereotypes and iconic locations. The sense of otherness at the heart of Nice’s identity is instead manifested in the characters and music woven into the film’s trajectory through the city. Puccini’s Tosca on the soundtrack, scenes of Algerian musician Mohammed Mokhtari playing his violin, an Armenian tea-seller on the beach, a sailor (nationality unknown) who imagines being reincarnated as a housewife with Mimi as his sailor husband: such encounters figure Nice as a port and border town, a space of immigration rather than a tourist resort. The 1995 compilation film À Propos de Nice: la suite engages more directly with Nice’s cinematic history and its popular image, yet it too depicts the city as a place where different nationalities collide, and where the social space has been formed, palimpsest-like, through the comings and goings of multiple cultural identities. It is a collection of short segments by up-and-coming directors of the 1990s, each of which responds to and commemorates Vigo’s À Propos de Nice. Abbas Kiarostami’s Repérages, Catherine Breillat’s Aux Niçois qui mal y pensent, Raymond Depardon’s La Prom’, Pavel Lungin’s La Mer de toutes les Russies, Claire Denis’s Nice, Very Nice, CostaGavras’s Les Kankobals and Raoul Ruíz’s Promenade: each segment in its way plays with past visions of the city, and thus with memory. Both Mimi and À Propos de Nice: la suite illustrate cinematically the transitional, unstable character of places as well as memories. They also show that films constitute a resource for negotiating and conceiving of the relation between memory, environment and self. As I have suggested, Nice is a place where the peculiar combination of mobility and stasis common to all cities is particularly evident, since it combines the enduring emblems of its publicity poster image with a reality that is in fact constantly shifting. On a trip there in the summer of 2007 I witnessed the place in the process of transformation as the central avenue was disruptively dug up, its iconic palm trees uprooted in order to integrate a new tramway. A more striking example is the old casino of the Palais des Fêtes, made into a cinematic icon in À Propos de Nice. A bizarre folly in steel and glass with oriental-style minarets rising from a jetty-promenade, it was opened in 1891 but dismantled during the Second World War by the Germans. Today only four pillars poking up above sea level in the bay remain as a ghostly sign of this fantastic construction. All cities exist in a state of flux, the ‘becoming’ of a city sought by Vigo and Kaufman. For Freud this was reason enough to demolish the analogy between city and memory that he constructs at the beginning of Civilisation and its Discontents. Here he imagines the psyche’s preservation of the past through the superimposition of all the past incarnations of the city of Rome, before rejecting the comparison on the grounds that ‘even the most peaceful urban development

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entails the demolition and replacement of buildings, and so for this reason no city can properly be compared with a psychical organism’ (Freud, 2004: 10). However, Freud appears to imagine cities in purely material terms. He forgets the human flux of ‘semantic wanderings’ that are inscribed over the cityscape, leaving ghostly trails to haunt the space in the form of memories and urban narratives, rather like the tracings on Freud’s own mystic writing pad model of memory (Freud, 1991: 11). As inhabited places cities live as much as they are lived in; as with the psyche there is no demolition without a trace. De Certeau comments on this changing nature of cities, locating the very essence of place in its ‘moving layers’: It is striking […] that the places people live in are like the presences of diverse absences. What can be seen designates what is no longer there: ‘you see, here there used to be …,’ but it can no longer be seen. Demonstratives indicate the invisible identities of the visible. (de Certeau, 1984: 108) For Walter Benjamin the practice of flânerie, or city wandering, called forth the virtuality of the city’s moving layers, as the street ‘conducts the flâneur […] into a past that can be all the more spellbinding because it is not his own, not private’ (1999: 416). Allowing oneself to wander aimlessly, outside the constricting systems of labour that structure perception of ordinary city life, favours a condition where, ‘far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape and the present moment’ (ibid.: 419). Cinema, with its capacity for instability and errancy, offers a potential flânerie in which the viewer can be conducted into a past not his or her own. In the film Mimi we are made aware of the presence of absences in a filmic flânerie through city space. As the film’s subject, Mimi Chiola, moves around Nice she recounts her own memories, called forth from architecture, pathways and landscapes, to the camera, and by extension to the spectator. But her memories draw in the memories of absent others, through the familial and social frameworks that have formed her life. Through Mimi’s stories, the absences of her father and mother, of her brother and of past lovers, come to haunt the images of present-day inhabited city space filmed by Simon’s camera. But there are other means by which the film evokes the inscription of Mimi’s memories into a virtual, collective memory of the city. The film’s images and soundtrack open up a gap between perceived and remembered places. It is the filmmaker, Claire Simon, rather than Mimi, who chooses the locations, so there is rarely a simple equivocation between a place and memory of it. Instead there is a more complex circuit of remembering which passes through the fragmented and moving strata of the city. For example, a new sports centre that Mimi has not seen before triggers her memories of the class divide that kept such leisure activities the preserve of a wealthy few. And though steam trains have disappeared, transforming the railway

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bridge beyond recognition, a chance encounter with an eccentric trainspotter allows Mimi to relive the experience of crossing the bridge with her mother, as she listens with him to a tape recording of a steam train passing. It is thus precisely through the changing shape of the city, its collective and transitional quality, that Mimi negotiates her past. The opening panorama that frames the credit sequence is accompanied by the rhythmic, mechanical creaking of a crane, again suggesting the continual rebuilding of the city at the very moment the establishing shot presents Nice as the home of Mimi’s identity. This sequence, a sweeping pan across the bay interrupted by black leader and credits, also visually recalls the famous aerial shots that open Vigo’s À Propos de Nice, situating Mimi in cinematic memory. Nice is therefore represented as home to an individual memory, but also inserted into a collective domain through the medium of cinema. The sound of the crane, however, signals the shifting instabilities of memory and city space, which are evoked therefore in the very relations between sound and image, one film and another film. Perhaps the most emblematic example of Nice as a continually evolving, changing site of memory is another scene near the beginning of the film. A fixed camera shot shows Mimi leading her friend Diego over a motorway bridge in the neon-tinged light of dusk, pointing out the roads below: ‘The collinettes pathway, St. Philippe’s bridge – which wasn’t like that – Châteauneuf Avenue’. Just as in the de Certeau quotation above, her demonstratives ‘indicate the invisible identities of the visible’. She then asks Diego to sing ‘her song’ in a spot near where her house used to be. As she says this she points to a space beyond the frame. In the next shot we see Diego playing the guitar and singing to Mimi, as she has requested. The song, well-known in France thanks to a rendition by Françoise Hardy,6 is called ‘Il Ragazzo della Via Gluck’, originally sung by Adriano Celentano in 1966. The song tells the story of a young man who leaves for the city but who never forgets his childhood home, now itself buried beneath by urban construction. The lyrics describe places, streets and houses known and lost, in a narrative of memory, departure and return. We are not told whether Mimi has lost her childhood home under a concrete strip of road, or whether it has become absorbed by the breeze block buildings across which the camera also pans during the song, but we know her house is no longer where it was. The rhythmic rush of noise as each car goes past becomes a part of the song, overlaying the words and harmonies. This mirrors the way that in the song’s story the city covers what used to be grass: ‘ma dove c’era l’erba, ora c’e una città’ (but where the grass once was there is now a city). The song becomes a commemorative moment, shared between the two friends and the filmmaker, but it is, crucially, a transient and transitory monument-in-motion that expresses the mnemonic and physical movement of urban space. The filmic remembering in Mimi is an intersubjective process on three levels: it arises between Mimi and filmmaker Simon (who

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chooses the route through Nice), between Mimi and her family history, and more broadly between Mimi and the collective past of the city, suggested in the diverse encounters with strangers and musicians incorporated into the film. Like the opening shots of Mimi, the portmanteau film À Propos de Nice: la suite conjures up the ghosts of the 1930 film, signalling the way in which Vigo’s film persists both nostalgically and pertinently in collective cinematic memory as a representation of Nice. It shows the way film becomes a part of our mental topographies. An example of this is Abbas Kiarostami’s contribution, Repérages, which imagines a filmmaker (played by Iranian film director Parviz Kamiavi) arriving for location scouting in Nice. Once again we are presented with a sweep of lateral, aerial shots along the Promenade des Anglais, this time explicitly intercut with the original overhead views. Here Kaufman’s images from À Propos de Nice are accompanied on the soundtrack with an aeroplane announcement, suggesting imminent arrival in the costal town. It is in part simply a witty nod to the opening of the earlier film, which focuses on the arrival of tourists, while here it is the filmmaker himself who is a tourist. But it also creates, between sound and image-track, between the past and present of film and city, a sense of Nice as a place of transit, a place of endless comings and goings – touristic and cinematic. As I suggested above, many of the films evoke the immigration that has always been intermingled with Nice’s touristic history. Pavel Lungin’s segment revives the memory of Nice’s Russian heritage. He juxtaposes sequences of a street band and people dancing to its exuberant music with scenes in an Orthodox church and Russian cemetery, accompanied by a choir singing Russian sacred music. A mobile camera traverses familiar icons such as the Negresco Hotel and the Bay, ev oking Nice’s cinematic history yet re-inscribing it with a Russian past, embodied in the names on gravestones and an elderly Russian woman who believes the date of her death is registered in an office in St Petersburg. Catherine Breillat’s contribution indicts bigoted Niçois folk through a series of conversations riddled with received ideas and self-righteous prejudice. Taking place on a bench by the sea, the discussions alternate with scenes of people walking along the Promenade, recalling similar scenes in Vigo’s film, and the same intermingling of the ethnographic and the comic. No longer a tourist dream, contemporary Nice seems to be inhabited by white middle-aged bourgeois types (the ‘frown-faced poodle ladies’ cited above) who state as self-evident that other ethnicities ‘can’t live among us’ and reassure each other that there are not too many Arabs in Nice. Recalling the collective memory space of music in Mimi, Breillat underpins such statements with an Arab soundtrack, as though to remind us of the other layers of Nice’s inhabited history, rendered invisible by the pervasive image of the Promenade. However, Raymond Depardon’s contribution, La Prom, provides perhaps the most interesting layering of memory, otherness and cinematic city

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space. It is made up of a deceptively simple combination of voiceover and images of the Promenade des Anglais, a combination of fixed shots and slow pans. The voiceover is a monologue by a female Lebanese immigrant, scripted by Le Clézio. She describes her memories of the hours after school spent roaming along the ‘Prom’, her sense of loneliness and the people she was afraid of, such as lecherous men and strange women, recalling Vigo’s eerie sequences devoted to the same location. As in Mimi, the gap between memory-narrative and image opens a collective, intersubjective zone in the moving layers of the city. The film is haunted not only by both its difference from and similarity to earlier cinematic representations, but also by the possibility of infinite numbers of other stories of dislocation from within the city’s continual becoming. In Mimi, Simon avoids using reconstruction or archive footage in favour of filming spaces in the present, juxtaposed with a remembering that takes place in between filmmaker and subject, drawing in strangers implicated in the changing environments they negotiate. In both this and Depardon’s film for À Propos de Nice: la suite, the images of contemporary cities become imbued with the past as virtual layer, evoking not only individuals’ pasts but also those pasts as they intersect with a collective sphere. This points to the ways in which film is able to suggest both a physical and virtual ‘beyond’ of the frame: space beyond the visible. It draws the viewer into an imaginative investment that mediates between past and present, absence and presence. We can see then, that not only the city, but other forms of experience can be conceived in terms of de Certeau’s ‘moving layers’. Memories haunt urban spaces, while the interconnected space of contemporary media forms a part of the intersubjective, mnemonic spaces through which the viewing, and remembering, subject moves. Like the city wanderer moving through inhabited streets and architecture, the subject navigates through the changing landscapes of cinema, memory and the city. As this brief glimpse of Nice’s virtual existence has shown, film is a particularly powerful mode of representation, for it produces virtual spaces that mediate between the shifting layers of our social experience. From touristic cliché to intimate memory map, cinematic Nice offers the viewer a journey through a multiplicity of collective pasts.

Notes 1. For more extended and detailed discussions of this subject see McNeill (2008; 2010: 123–59). 2. De Certeau is citing Jacques Derrida’s notion of an ‘errance du sémantique’ at work in metaphor in Marges de la philosophie (Derrida, 1972: 287). 3. Nice lies some 120 miles to the north-east of Marseille, along the Mediterranean coast. 4. Based on Pagnol’s stage plays Marius and Fanny and adapted by him for the screen, the films Marius (Alexander Korda, 1931), Fanny (Marc Allégret, 1932), and César (Marcel Pagnol, 1936) are set in the famous Old Port area of Marseille.

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5. For further information about the history of the Studios de la Victorine, see Prédal (1980). 6. Her version is called ‘La Maison où j’ai grandi’ (the house I grew up in).

Bibliography Abbas, A. (2003). ‘Cinema, The City, and the Cinematic’, in Linda Krause and Patrice Petro (eds), Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture and Urbanism in a Digital Age (London: Rutgers University Press). Barber, S. (2002). Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (London: Reaktion). Benjamin, W. (1999) [1982]. The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge MA, London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). de Certeau, M. (1984) [1980]. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press). Derrida, J. (1972). Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions Minuit). Deleuze, G. (2009) [1985]. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London and New York: Continuum). Deleuze, G. (1994) [1968]. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press). Donald, J. (1999). Imagining the Modern City (London: Athlone Press). Facaros, D. and Pauls, M. (1994). The South of France: Provence, Côte d’Azur & LanguedocRoussillon, 2nd edn (London: Cadogan). Freud, S. (1991) [1925]. ‘A Note on the Mystic Writing Pad’, in On Metapsychology, ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey, 2nd edn (London: Penguin), pp. 428–34. Freud, S. (2004) [1930]. Civilisation and its Discontents, trans. David McLinktock (London: Penguin). Greene, G. (1982). J’Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice (London: The Bodley Head). Heath, S. (2002). César (London: BFI Publishing). Kanigel, R. (2003). High Season in Nice: How One French Riviera Town has Seduced Travellers for Two Thousand Years (London: Abacus). McNeill, I. (2008). ‘Transitional Spaces: Media, Memory and the City in Contemporary French Film’, in Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, eds. A. Webber and E. Wilson (London: Wallflower Press), pp. 205–15. McNeill, I. (2010). Memory and the Moving Image: French Film in the Digital Era (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Nichols, B. (2001). ‘Documentary Film and the Avant-Garde’, Critical Enquiry, Vol. 27, No. 4, Summer 2001: 580–610. Prédal, R. (1980). 80 ans de cinéma: Nice et le 7è art (Nice: Éditions Serre). Temple, M. (2005). Jean Vigo (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Zilzer, G. (1947–8). ‘Remembrances of Jean Vigo’, in Hollywood Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2, Winter 1947–1948: 125–8.

3 Visions of Community: The Postwar Housing Problem in Sponsored and Amateur Films Ryan Shand

This chapter will compare a group of sponsored municipal films with an amateur film on a similar topic; a process that will attempt to highlight what could be regarded as general features of amateur cinema as a mode of production, by considering an amateur film that is agitational in nature. Let Glasgow Flourish (1952–6) is an unusual film that combines elements from various film traditions; including educational films, social problem dramas and even newsreels. It has been interpreted as a reaction to the overly optimistic sponsored productions that were commissioned by the Glasgow Corporation to explain their extensive house-building programme following the Second World War. From this point of view, Let Glasgow Flourish acts as a corrective, showing how things ‘really’ are for the lower paid residents of the city. Moreover, I want to argue that the film also displays some elements more typical of films produced by filmmakers working as part of the organized network of amateur cinema that was so active in Britain, especially during the 1950s and 1960s. Knowledge of this context goes some way to explaining the aesthetic practices of Let Glasgow Flourish for viewers who have little prior experience of films produced outside mainstream commercial cinema. This film was made by a politically aligned collective whose members, while active in the film society movement, also aimed to present an alternative perspective on matters of public interest; in this way their work can be understood as a counter-cinema to tendencies dominant in other spheres; that is, sponsored and mainstream amateur practices. While collectives such as these were active throughout Britain, I will focus on a Glasgow-based cineclub, the Dawn Cine Group. Attention to historical and political contexts, along with close analysis of the film they produced, will allow us to assess the ‘alternative’ nature of their political engagement and film practice.

From appreciation to action This first section will outline the background of this production and why the members of the cine-club known as The Dawn Cine Group thought 50

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it was a film that had to be made. The Dawn Cine Group was the production wing of the Clydeside Film Society, and their films were nothing if not politically provocative. The name of the cine-club itself suggests a new beginning, a new start. Linked to the Clydeside Film Society, the production base of its operation recruited from and catered to this exhibition outlet. The Clydeside Film Society provided an ‘artistic’ cover for the agitational activities that were mounted and commemorated by its production wing. For a period of around eight years, they produced a small burst of production and exhibition activity that proved unsustainable in the long run. They initially made numerous newsreels of working- class life in Glasgow, mostly focusing on parades and workers weekends/holidays. Films such as Visit to Soviet Union (1959–60) could be made, while the appreciation side of the operation catered to a more politically liberal celebration of classics of world cinema, albeit with a preference for works from the Soviet, Eastern European and South American artistic traditions. For example, the films shown on a Sunday at the Cosmo Cinema on 26 December 1954 consisted of: Council of the Gods (Germany, 1950), The Eagle’s Track (Poland, 1953), Christmas Carol (Czechoslovakia, 1947), Sunday by the Sea (UK, 1953) and It Happened in the North (USSR, 1953). From their prospectus for Fourth Season 1954–1955: The Society is non-political and non-profitmaking and exhibits films from all over the world for the purpose of spreading knowledge of the life, work and culture of all peoples and to promote an atmosphere of understanding and goodwill. The study and appreciation of films is also fostered at special meetings from time to time.1 While advertising themselves as a society that was interested in art not politics, it should be noted that this was one of the requirements to be a member of the Federation of Film Societies: they could not afford to be seen as politically radical. The Clydeside Film Society was one of a handful of workers film societies in Glasgow during the 1950s. They offered a reduced rate of membership for people on low incomes. However, some members of The Clydeside Film Society were not content to simply watch films, and formed The Dawn Cine Group to make agitational films on local subjects. One film in particular, the debut film in fact, has been canonized as representing their most important contribution to postwar amateur filmmaking. As Melissa Stewart (a researcher who was based at the Scottish Screen archive) noted: The most successful Dawn Production was Let Glasgow Flourish (1956) highlighting the overcrowded, unsanitary conditions of Glasgow’s inner city slum. For the first time, this film portrayed the reality of Glasgow’s housing crisis from the perspective of the inhabitants, as opposed to the optimistic propaganda films released by Glasgow Corporation’s Housing Committee.2

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I want to devote the beginning of this chapter to understanding why this film has been seen as so successful, and is probably the most written about amateur film made in Scotland (Allen, 1996; Hogenkamp, 2000: 18–19; Lebas, 2007). Elisabeth Lebas concludes her study of municipal films in Glasgow by noting, ‘Made as a critique of Progress Report 2, and in response to Corporation council house sales, Let Glasgow Flourish (1952), by the Dawn Cine Group, is the only alternative filmic representation to the Corporation’s approach available … but an account … is beyond the remit of this study’ (Lebas, 2007: 50). A cultural value has attached itself to this film due to its apparent subversive credentials, but I will question whether this view of Let Glasgow Flourish employs the most useful interpretive model. As has been previously noted, it is only possible to understand Let Glasgow Flourish if you understand the context of its production and what kind of filmmaking it was seen as reacting against. For these reasons it is appropriate to devote some space to the films on the postwar housing problem in Glasgow that were commissioned by the Corporation.

Selling a vision of the future: Sponsored official film Municipal cinema was thus first and foremost a cinema of social democracy which had a multiplicity of purposes and had to appeal to the widest possible audience in order to fulfil its central political motive, namely to gain consent and consensus. (Lebas, 2005: 28) After the Second World War, Glasgow was facing a housing crisis. On the one hand demand for housing was growing fast, as people from rural areas moved to the city to fill labour gaps in an expanding industrial network of businesses. Glasgow came to be known as the Second City of the Empire and the shipbuilding on the River Clyde became synonymous with its image as a place of major industrial activity. On the other hand, however, many houses had been destroyed during the war and the inner-city tenements were overcrowded and unhealthy to live in. The tension between these two forces: growing industry, yet lack of housing, was one of the most serious problems facing the Glasgow Corporation (Johnstone, 1993). In many cities this problem might have been partially solved by encouraging low-cost housing to be built by the private sector. However, in Glasgow, this burden was taken on almost single-handedly by the state, as part of a huge refinement of the role of government in the years following the Second World War, which included the nationalization of the railways, mines and power companies, as well as the establishment of the National Health Service. The city council, then known as the Corporation of the City of Glasgow, commissioned a report into this situation. Written by Robert Bruce, a city engineer, the resulting document, the Bruce Report of 1945 (Clyde Valley

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Plan) recommended an extensive programme of building many high-rise flats on the outskirts of the city to house the mainly working-class population in desperate need of housing. The Corporation acknowledged that the city would require a minimum of 100,000 new houses to meet the needs of the population. Extensive planning by the state, in the form of a massive intervention into the housing issue, was seen as the best possible solution to the perceived disasters of the unplanned city.3 The reasons behind these policies are outlined with clarity in a film made a year after the Bruce Report. Commissioned by the Corporation of Glasgow Housing Department, Progress Report (1946, 11 mins, b&w/sound) clearly outlines the problems facing Glasgow. Made by Thames and Clyde Film Productions (a Glasgow-based company founded by Stanley Russell, who was a founder member of the Meteor film group which organized the first Scottish Amateur Film Festival in 1933), this film provides an overview of the Corporation’s plans to remedy this situation by building new temporary houses in Knightswood, Cranhill, Pollok and Tollcross.4 This is seen as a practical short-term measure that is necessary while long-term plans are drawn up and implemented. Various maps of Glasgow’s present situation are contrasted with plans for the future. The benefits of prefabricated housing and steel houses are outlined. The optimism that the state can ultimately bring this crisis to an end is palpable. The film concludes with the narrator quoting the city motto: ‘Let Glasgow Flourish!’ he says with conviction. A second film, Progress Report No. 2 (1948, 9.5 mins, b&w/sound) was made two years later by the same company to update the citizens of Glasgow on the progress being made on the situation. What is significant about this ten-minute film is that a contrast is made between the inner-city slums and the new semi-detached houses that had been built in the previous two years. The film also shows the dilapidated buildings and the constant levels of soot that are a feature of living in that area. This is contrasted with the new world of suburban living in the recently built semi-detached council houses in Pollok and Milton. These areas are full of trees and are surrounded by open space and clean air. A family are shown settling into their new home where each bedroom has its own built-in wardrobe. There are also sites reserved for shops, schools and cinemas. The film concludes with shots of architects and planners at work in the council buildings, which are intended to reassure Glaswegians that their future is in good, benevolent hands (Figure 3.1). The contrast between the slum areas and the beautiful new houses that are in the process of being constructed is also featured in Glasgow Today and Tomorrow (1949, 8 mins, b&w/silent). This was the first of a series of films made in 1949, which included Glasgow Our City (1949), Our Homes (1949) and Our City (1949) made to tie in with an exhibition that shared the title Glasgow Today and Tomorrow, which was being held in Kelvin Hall that year (Beaton, 1957). These films were made by various companies: Glasgow Today and Tomorrow was made by London-based Moviegram Films, Glasgow Our City was produced

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Figure 3.1 Still from Progress Report No. 2 (1948). Frame enlargement reproduced courtesy of National Library of Scotland.

by Campbell-Harper Films, while Our Homes and Our City were again Thames and Clyde works. This hiring-out of work to companies which specialized in sponsored film production reflected the short time scale and huge preparation the exhibition required. Tellingly, they all reproduce sequences found in the earlier Progress Report No. 1 and 2. For instance, Glasgow Today and Tomorrow also attempts a contrast between the inner-city slums and the new housing developments pursued by the Corporation. It is evident that this production was working with a higher budget as aerial shots of Glasgow city centre open the film. However, since the purpose here was to illustrate the Corporation of Glasgow’s plans in general, this film more effectively contextualizes the plans for housing development in combination with new motorway inner and outer ring roads and the construction of the Clyde Tunnel, so that industry can bypass the city centre where the main bridges are grouped together. Factories are apparently outmoded and congested, so development of an industrial estate is seen as a necessary step to encourage industrial expansion. On the housing front, a short dramatic reconstruction serves to make the point. This sequence depicts a man and his wife in a tenement, which the commentary states is less

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than ten minutes from the city centre, who live in a small room with their three children. Significantly, the commentary even states that, ‘Schools sided on main roads expose children to traffic dangers’. Like Progress Report, the benefits of living in planned environments away from the city centre are stressed; they provide ‘more breathing space’ and ‘modern planning does more than just provide houses, it builds community areas with schools’. All of this rhetoric is firmly focused on the future. The past is seen as only fit to leave behind. The film concludes with the narrator proclaiming the Corporation’s desire ‘to make Glasgow of today a new and better Glasgow of tomorrow’. The emphasis here is not on remembering, but on forgetting and moving on. The title card ‘The End’ is superimposed over the city logo in which the motto ‘Let Glasgow Flourish’ again is clearly visible. Both Glasgow Our City and Our City, Today and Tomorrow continue in the same vein. All feature architects’ models of plans for the future with tall housing developments that are reminiscent of the city in Metropolis (1927). Our City, Today and Tomorrow warns at the beginning and end of the film that ‘the future of Glasgow is in your hands’, which alludes to the fact that the people who are making these plans are officials, but ironically highlights the real power of the decisionmakers; the future of Glasgow is heavily dependant on official civic institutions in such a highly planned economy as postwar Britain. The film constantly cuts back to shots of a hand turning the pages of the Bruce Report and then cuts to the real effects of these ideas. The power of these words will be considerable. The film Our Homes (1949, 14.5 mins, b&w/silent) more specifically deals with the problems of housing. It begins with footage of a child from a tenement building who has a pet rabbit. An analogy between tenement dwellers and confined animals is made when the narration points out that ‘to be healthy and happy, human beings, just like rabbits, need lots of space, light and air’. The film then moves to the more general level of policy: ‘the housing department is the largest single house-providing agency in Scotland. It owns almost a quarter of the houses in the city’. This is a promotional film for the Corporation of Glasgow as much as it is about plans for housing development. Again, like the other films made that year, Our Homes concludes with the statement, ‘largely as a result of the Housing Department’s activities, Glasgow of tomorrow will be a very different city from Glasgow of to-day’. The planners and the Corporation employ a rhetoric that eerily echoes that of the avant-garde. They want to leave behind the traditional architecture of the past and move towards implementing a modernist architecture of ‘the future’. Postwar architects were heavily influenced by Le Corbusier’s utilitarianism that claimed, ‘a house is a machine for living in’. This meant that aesthetic issues were downplayed in favour of housing that was merely functional. Over time, this style was either attacked as proof of a modernist lack of humanism, or celebrated as an example of the benefits of the postwar welfare state. What is clear from this survey of sponsored municipal films on the housing issue

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is that while these works do display an optimistic vision of the benefits of centralized planning, they also acknowledge the existence of the inner-city slums. The debate around these films is not as clear-cut as it first seemed. Now a consideration of the Dawn Cine Group’s reply to these films is necessary to reach some firm conclusions.

A commemoration of the past: The amateur response In 1951, the Conservative Party won the national elections with a commitment to build 300,000 houses a year, while the Progressive Party (an alliance of Conservatives and Liberals) won control of the Corporation of Glasgow in May. By 1952 the Corporation proposed to sell 622 newly built houses on Merrylee Road, on the south side of the city. No local council in Britain, before this case, had ever suggested the sale of council houses. People on the Corporation waiting list were eligible to apply to buy, but the Labour Party in Glasgow made opposition to this sale a major issue of their campaign. In the run up to the election, many strikes were called by trade unions representing industrial workers and a demonstration was held in George Square on 6 December. Charles Bukelis, a member of the Dawn Cine Group, filmed some of the workers marches with his 16mm camera. The impetus behind the making of Let Glasgow Flourish (1952–6, 16 mins, b&w/silent) was partly as a reaction to the Corporation films made in the 1940s, but it was more immediately inspired by the controversy surrounding the proposed sale of the Merrylee Road houses. The title was either an ironic aside on the optimism of the Glasgow motto or it is suggesting that Glasgow can only truly flourish under leadership from left-wing political parties. The film itself is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction that is typical of avant-garde films of the 1930s such as Peace and Plenty (UK, 1939). The film opens with a title card outlining the circumstances behind the sale of the Merrylee Road houses. Then dramatized scenes involving a family in a tenement flat are played out in the social realist style reminiscent of Chicks Day (1951). This is contrasted through the use of parallel montage with how ‘the other half live’ in the West End of the city. An editing technique common in professional silent film is appropriated in this amateur production. However, the compare and contrast model between the slums and luxury living in another part of the city was also part of the structure of Progress Report No. 2 and Glasgow, Today and Tomorrow; what has changed is the implications drawn from such a contrast. While in the sponsored films, the new housing developments are a source of hope for the future, here the expensive housing is the object of resentment. The way of life of the middle and upper classes was, to many, beyond the aspirations of even the most optimistic socialists. Walks in Kelvingrove Park, which are available to everyone regardless of socio-economic status, are made (through creative editing) to take on connotations of bourgeois privilege. Children playing in

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the park are contrasted with children playing on the road. Here is the crux of the argument being put forward by the film. The film moves on to shots of women out shopping on the South Side of Glasgow while their children play on the streets. An earlier title card has pointed out how many children are injured or killed in road accidents each year, and the film contrasts images of working-class children playing on the streets with images of children in the West End of Glasgow in a nice spacious park. While playing ball games on this road, one youngster from the tenements is hit by a car. This highly emotive (and some might say highly manipulative) dramatized scene illustrates what the Dawn Cine Group members see as the social problem the film is designed to illustrate. Dramatization was also used in Glasgow, Today and Tomorrow, but here the implications are more cutting. Inadequate housing with no nearby leisure facilities effectively means that young innocent children will pay the price with their lives. The offspring of the exploited are helpless in this situation. This predicament is then linked, by sleight of hand, to the sale of council houses in Merrylee Road. The message is underlined not only by showing a young Govan boy on crutches but also a dramatized scene of a woman carrying a young girl back to a crowded flat, presumably the result of another traffic accident (Figure 3.2). The film then intercuts footage of the results of a collision between a tram and a car, what looks like a funeral and political speeches being made on the streets as local people gather round to listen. It is these sections of the film that can be used to suggest that Let Glasgow Flourish is effective filmic propaganda to influence the results of a forthcoming local election in which the Progressive Party were in danger of losing to the Labour Party. From a political perspective the film may highlight these issues, but it merely confirms the concerns of the Corporation films, it does not challenge them. Both the amateur and sponsored films suggest that new housing outside the city centres is the answer; the main difference seems to be about the kinds of people who should be allowed to occupy these houses; the working class or the middle class. Similarly, a sequence of Let Glasgow Flourish features a fictional storyline, which follows a young man who drops his sandwich on the way to work at a building site. At break time he sits reading a newspaper while his fellow workers talk and laugh while enjoying their lunch. One of his fellow workers notices that the young man is not eating, and after a brief discussion he offers him one of his own sandwiches, which the young man gladly accepts. The section of the film highlights the perceived benefits of cooperation among the workforce. Footage shot by Charles Bukelis in 1952 of the trade union protest marches then makes up the rest of the film. This non-fiction documentary record was made to function as the answer to the issue raised above. Political change is what is necessary to remedy the appalling situation of working-class people having to survive in such conditions. The most effective creative choice in this production is arguably what follows. Drawing inspiration from the

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Figure 3.2 Still 1 from Let Glasgow Flourish (1952–6). Frame enlargement reproduced courtesy of National Library of Scotland.

overt symbolism typical of the Soviet montage films of the 1920s, the Dawn Cine Group show the coat hangers for the most senior civil servants in the Corporation of Glasgow as being made up of top hats. This item of clothing functions as a metonym for the council being run by the upper class, who by implication are not interested in the problems of the working poor. The film goes on to show party members trying to persuade the public to vote Labour (Figure 3.3). The conclusion of the drama is a headline from a newspaper announcing the victory, ‘Labour sweeps the polls’, as indeed it did at the Municipal elections on 7 May. Then it cuts back to the coat hanger once again. This time, however, flat caps (the contemporary symbol of the working-class man) replace the top hats of the bourgeois. The didactic quality of Let Glasgow Flourish is highlighted immediately following the opening titles when the camera pans slowly down a blackboard that reads: There are 90,000 people on the waiting list for houses in Glasgow; ten people are killed or injured every day in street accidents … In 1951 the

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Figure 3.3 Still 2 from Let Glasgow Flourish (1952–6). Frame enlargement reproduced courtesy of National Library of Scotland.

Town Council proposed to sell 662 newly-built houses in the Merrylee district. This aroused among the people of Glasgow a storm of protest that swept the council from office at the next election. Our film deals with some of these victims of overcrowded streets and housing and shows how they won the fight against the sale of the Merrylee houses. The film then positions itself as an activist lesson on the powers of political protest, which is very different from using film as a means of promoting a political agenda in the run-up to an election. Let Glasgow Flourish was premiered at an ‘Amateur Night’ organized by the Clydeside Film Society and held at Rowans Smoke Room in Buchanan Street on the 23 January 1957. Also on the bill was ‘Mr J. M. Roy’s A Car For the Old Folk. Made in colour, it deals with welfare work in Milngavie in the form of a story played by a cast of enthusiastic children’.5 Let Glasgow Flourish was in production for four years, a much longer time than any of the other Dawn Cine Group films. This is significant because this film, despite the rhetoric that surrounds it, was not made to influence directly the political

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process in 1952. Therefore the idea that Let Glasgow Flourish was intended to be film propaganda for the 1952 local elections is undermined by the fact that the film did not receive its premiere until a meeting in January of 1957; a full five years after the election in which Labour was indeed re-elected to local office. The sponsored municipal films that were described earlier have subsequently been charged with presenting a misleading view of conditions in the inner-city slums and giving a false image of the benefits of moving to the suburbs. This might sound entirely plausible on paper, but this charge gives a misleading image of these films. As Roger Odin has recently warned about current writing on amateur cinema in general, ‘We must resist mystifying these productions as much as we formerly scorned them’ (Odin, 2008: 267). These sponsored municipal films do in fact acknowledge the problems with overcrowded flats near the city centre of Glasgow, before explaining the solutions that will be provided in new houses located in the suburbs. In effect, these sponsored films are diminished, in order that Let Glasgow Flourish seems to grow in importance. However, this is not necessary. The film is intriguing in and of itself, as I will attempt to explain throughout the remainder of this chapter. That Let Glasgow Flourish was in production for four years, a much longer time than any of the sponsored films or even other Dawn Cine Group films may seem surprising, but when considered within the context of the amateur film scene of the time is much more understandable. In many respects this sporadic film production seems to have been the result of a system of informal volunteering among the members of The Clydeside Film Society. The irregular activity means that participants are not quite taking part in what the sociologist Robert Stebbins has termed ‘serious leisure’; but it still required more commitment than its opposite ‘causal leisure’ (Stebbins, 1982). More recently he has described a variant, which he has called ‘project-based leisure’. Stebbins defines project-based leisure as ‘a short-term, moderately complicated, either one-shot or occasional, though infrequent, creative undertaking carried out in free time’ (Stebbins, 2005: 2). As the most ambitious film The Dawn Cine Group ever made, Let Glasgow Flourish falls into this category much more easily than the other films they attempted over the years. It required more time, money and commitment from the members of the cine-club and therefore ran the risk of becoming less like ‘leisure’ and more like ‘work’ to the people involved. Since people tend to resent their spare time becoming less fun and relaxing and more like unpaid employment, when the costs outweigh the rewards a cine-club starts to lose its membership to other leisure activities. Therefore it is important that a feeling of purpose and community are provided by these social activities. Ultimately the chief power of Let Glasgow Flourish was that it functioned as a process of remembering the political events of 1952 for an audience

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(who were perhaps involved in the struggle) looking back in 1957. Therefore Let Glasgow Flourish essentially functions as a teleological record of political victory. In contrast to the sponsored films on housing, Let Glasgow Flourish looks back to the victories of the past, not ahead to the problems and possible solutions for the future.

Amateur newsreels and cine magazines While the Dawn Cine Group was an activist organization that aimed to produce films of an agitational nature, their films are a lot more formally conventional than many people would expect. As Alan Burton notes: Workers’ cinema in Britain was strongly influenced by the dominant model of social realism exemplified by the documentary film movement, and in particular adopted the form of the newsreel; typically more comfortable in locating ideology in content rather than technique. (Burton, 1997: 139) This observation rings true of Let Glasgow Flourish, which mostly conforms to the conventions of documentaries and newsreels. The main explanation for this surprising lack of ‘good’ technique at this level of organized film production seems to be the short production schedule (news has to be of recent events by definition) and the shortage of funds to invest in expensive cameras and editing facilities. Stylistically, the connection to films made within the ‘home mode’ is also evident in the fact that most of these clubs’ films are silent (Chalfen, 1975). The aims and ambitions of most of these films mean a soundtrack is not entirely necessary to fulfil its function. These seemingly contradictory aspects of amateur films such as these, are well summed up by Andrew Buchanan’s ‘Why Not Make a Screen Magazine?’ In this article, published in Amateur Cine World, Andrew Buchanan notes that ‘For the amateur film producer who does not happen to be surrounded by an active group, equipped with studio facilities, the making of a screen magazine is an admirable pursuit’ (1935: 102). Therefore this generic practice is intended not for club productions, but rather for the lone worker. They could either be part of a cine club or unaffiliated, but for the purposes of producing a cine magazine they would essentially be working on their own. In relation to subject matter, Buchanan was seemingly extremely open to the imaginative use of the filmmaker’s surroundings: ‘Your subject matter depends entirely upon you and as you depend upon your circumstances and your locality I cannot aid you to any great extent’ (ibid.). However, despite this caveat, in line with many writers within Amateur Cine World, on the very next page he is much more directive. As the following list demonstrates,

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Buchanan had some very clear ideas as to what sorts of subjects the amateur filmmaker could build his cine magazine around: Firstly, your type of subject matter: 1. I should make this a busy city sequence, to enable the reel to open boldly on a quick tempo. 2. Someone making something by hand – a vivid reminder of less mechanical days. 3. Preparing a plane for flight. 4. Some babies. 5. Keeping fit. 6. Somewhere that is charming. The above contents are comparatively easy to procure and they should create a nice balance that will sustain the interest throughout. (ibid.: 103) The advice given in this short article did not restrict itself to issues of content, but incorporated questions of amateur film aesthetics. As can be seen here, Buchanan is encouraging amateur filmmaker to follow a different path from the commercial cinema, ‘Assuming you are just such a producer and you feel you would like to make a film magazine, the first piece of advice I would offer you is not to copy the work of professional magazine makers’ (ibid.: 102). In effect, non-fiction film becomes for many lone workers a cinema of an assumed stylistic purity. These uniquely amateur generic practices tend to encourage and praise elements that would not be considered acceptable to the same extent in professional generic practices. Many lone workers would not have the equipment to record sound, but Buchanan does not see this as a creative barrier. Instead they were to work around it, ‘Fortunately for your continuity, you are not making a sound film, so that your dividing titles will account for lapses of time in the process you are going to show’ (ibid.: 104). This kind of ingenuity, shown by so many amateur filmmakers over the years despite their technological limitations, is in full evidence in many films made over the years. The lone workers who produced their own cine magazines, under the umbrella organizations of the Dawn Cine Group, employed similar means to capture the spirit of community life that they were themselves part of.

Symbolic communities and collective identities As can be seen from films such as Let Glasgow Flourish, many amateur filmmakers chose to make films focusing on the aspects of life in their local communities. While offering a visual record of numerous community events, they nonetheless rarely have an accompanying soundtrack to explain what

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is happening on screen. This lack of a soundtrack may frustrate researchers of this material, but, seen in context, it has become clear that informal verbal participation during exhibition was an essential yet ultimately ephemeral activity. The community film tradition explored in this chapter now finds itself divorced from its relationship with contemporary events, but in order to explain this relationship between visual records and verbal ephemera, in this section I will turn to the work of various scholars from quite different disciplinary perspectives. The tendency towards community films has been noted by some observers, but not sufficiently theorized. For example, Jeffrey K. Ruoff, in ‘Home Movies of the Avant-Garde: Jonas Mekas and the New York Art World’, explicitly evokes the comforts of community life in his exploration of the reasons behind Jonas Mekas’s intense involvement in the New York art scene, and his desire to record these events as they unfolded using his own cine camera. Ruoff notes that ‘his home movies are produced by, for, and about the avant-garde community; they document not his domestic or family life but the New York art world’ (Ruoff, 1992: 295). However, if they did not document his domestic or family life, is it still appropriate to label them ‘home movies’? I would suggest that this tendency to refer to films that lack aesthetic polish as ‘home movies’ has been misleading and needs to be corrected. As Richard Chalfen observed: The ‘primitive’ and ‘inexperienced’ qualities of movies made by novice filmmakers provokes a categorical reduction to the ‘home movie’ status. However, social characteristics used to define home mode genres easily distinguish these products from authentic home movies. (1987: 144) While I am not suggesting that Jonas Mekas was a ‘novice’, it is clear that his community films were made with the express intention to be subsequently shown to a certain social network of participants in the designated art scene. This ‘social characteristic’, as Chalfen calls it, was to conserve and celebrate in filmic form the artistic scene that functioned as a community of sorts, in a potentially alienating metropolitan environment. Other film scholars have also noted the popularity of this uniquely amateur film genre around the world. Within the context of Europe, as Bert Hogenkamp and Mieke Lauwers point out, related filmic practices have tended to be labelled ‘inédits’ (1997: 108). This term is synonymous with the English for ‘reportages’, a genre that is more commonly acknowledged by film archivists than film scholars. Indeed, the archivist organization that has done so much to further the debate around amateur film is called the European Association Inédits. This film practice aims not to enlighten a wider audience to remote events, but to reinforce existing social relationships among a relatively enclosed community: an inward looking ambition more suitable to the amateur sector

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than the professional industry. This very specific generic practice has most accurately been captured in a passing comment from Patricia Zimmermann. In an analysis of an American amateur fiction film made by the Wisconsin State Historical Society entitled Study in Reds (1927, b&w/silent), she notes: Following realist narrative conventions derived more from theatrical practice than cinematic language, the film is denotative in its cinematic form, with long takes and not much editing, concentrating on the characters as they operate in groups. This concentration of documentation of group activity surfaces in many amateur films that serve as a record of performances at church groups, schools, country clubs. (2001: 121) Despite the fact that here a fiction film is being analysed as if it were a film of record, the most useful aspect of this paragraph is that it seems to confirm the hypothesis underlining this chapter: namely that the community film was a popular way to represent various groups to others, but more importantly, to themselves. Zimmermann evocatively refers to this as a ‘cinema of collective identity’ (ibid.: 121), capturing the desire to channel social and creative energy into wider forces than was possible only with the lone individual. In a sentence that should echo throughout these concluding remarks, the visual anthropologist Richard Chalfen noted that ‘A film (or group of films) is understood as a symbolic form that is produced and viewed as part of a process of human behavior organized within social and cultural contexts’ (Chalfen, 1975: 87). Rather than seeing these community films as merely reportage or just empirical visual evidence, as has tended to be the case within archivist circles, I suggest that they should be seen as ‘symbolic forms’, shining light on a now defunct system of social organization. In these models of voluntary social interaction and cooperation we glimpse evidence of the ‘closed system of participants’ in this less rigorously planned variant of non-professional film production (Chalfen, 1975: 94); that is, the people in the films are also its eventual intended audience. This process is more clearly evident in the closing sequence of Let Glasgow Flourish. When the film’s fictional narrative is over it progresses onto newsreel footage of political campaigning outside a voting venue, followed by celebrations of victory after the results are finally known (with images stating ‘Labour Sweeps the Polls’ and the aforementioned metonymic changing of the hats) which are intercut with lines and lines of men holding banners urging onlookers to ‘Rebuild Slum Areas’ and ‘Build New Industrial Estates’ (Figure 3.4). The filmmakers make sure the point is strongly conveyed by cutting to close-ups of more banners that read ‘More Children’s Playing Fields’ and ‘More New Houses’. These final two minutes of Let Glasgow Flourish, which are unexpected, as up until this point the film has seemed much more like a conventional propaganda fiction film, have now once again shifted back

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Figure 3.4 Still 3 from Let Glasgow Flourish (1952–6). Frame enlargement reproduced courtesy of National Library of Scotland.

into the non-fictional reportage of historical events. Most significantly, one of the closing shots features a large group of people marching under a banner that supports ‘A Policy to Make Glasgow Flourish’; a version of a slogan that, as we have seen throughout this chapter, has reverberated throughout Glasgow’s history. In contrast to the sponsored films that focused on the architects and urban planners in their offices, this amateur film privileges the activists as they made their voice heard on the streets of the city. An emotional attachment to the ideal of ‘community’ can also be traced in the writing on films of this type. For example, while discussing Jonas Mekas’s community films, Jeffrey K. Ruoff notes, ‘Memory thus restores the possibility of community and inscribes the individual in history, reforming the ties that bind us together’ (1992: 303). Here, the restorative power of the community in bringing meaning and purpose to the individual is evident. Being in such tension with the pressures of so much of modern life, this ideal is extremely fragile and is constantly under threat from various quarters. To guard against such encroachment, the imaginative power of images

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is just one way to preserve a feeling of kinship and commonality among a diverse group of people. The films enable a retrospective look back at what seemed like ordinary everyday events. Writing on home movies, Richard Chalfen pointed out that ‘When analysing latent function, we see that the making and showing of home movies tends to act as a bonding agent creating a specific social structure’ (Chalfen, 1975: 99). Therefore, as symbolic representations, these community films similarly served an important function as bonding agents, working to keep the group together. The final images of Let Glasgow Flourish, with young children playing in newly built houses and quiet roads in the suburbs, show just how much the efforts of both the council and the residents of the inner-city community groups made a difference to the future of lives of the next generation of working-class Glaswegians. As Elizabeth Lebas notes in relation to the Glasgow’s municipal films, ‘the boy in particular continues to play a long-established role as symbol of the city’s future’ (2007: 46–7). Despite concluding on images remarkably similar to those of the sponsored films discussed earlier, the fact that the preceding sequence featured activists rather than architects implies an altogether different understanding of the democratic process in postwar Britain; one than emphasizes the importance of civic commitment, instead of a model of top-down benevolent bureaucracy. In short, rather than being a clearly articulated political message, this film by its conclusion becomes a visual celebration of the benefits of political action for the community.

Conclusion The reconsideration of Let Glasgow Flourish attempted towards the end of this chapter suggests that the Dawn Cine Group should be repositioned within the wider tendencies of amateur cinema, rather than the avant-garde or independent film traditions. While the exhibition side could claim towards being cutting edge, the same could not be said for members of The Dawn Cine Group; they were essentially an anachronism, operating in Glasgow during the 1950s, modelling themselves and referred back to an earlier alliance of political commitment and filmmaking that took place in the city 20 years before. Amateur filmmakers, even more so than their professional counterparts, were especially determined to preserve the past through film. When you first watch it Let Glasgow Flourish seems like an unusual film, but the more that’s understood about the historical and social context of its production, the more it reveals. The film fits into the filmic tradition of the ‘cine-magazine’; a now obsolete genre with roots in both amateur and professional cinemas. The cine-magazine tended to cover five or six unrelated topics in short segments for the information of the audience. Let Glasgow Flourish could then be usefully described as an attempt to use the cine-magazine format to mount a persuasive case for the potential benefits

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of a life of political commitment. Community films such as this one therefore tried to act as ‘glue’, holding disparate individuals together over time. The Dawn Cine Group’s most famous film, Let Glasgow Flourish, educates the viewer about the housing reforms that are an important part of Glasgow’s past, something that is evident from a website dedicated to this issue that can be accessed at: http://www.bestlaidschemes.com. The website was partly funded by Scottish Screen and features a section named ‘Movie Zone’ which outlines the historical context of the Bruce Plan and also allows the general public access to the films discussed in this chapter and many more. This project has the potential to facilitate more public engagement with films that have remained stored away for too many years. While the Dawn Cine Group, like other workers cine-clubs, ultimately had a short burst of film-making activity, Let Glasgow Flourish survives to be viewed and debated into the future.

Acknowledgements My thanks to Janet McBain and staff at the Scottish Screen archive for providing access to both the films and archival documents on which this chapter is based, and to Ian Goode for his valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. This research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Notes 1. From the Dawn Cine Group papers, Scottish Screen Archive. 2. From Scottish Screen biographies of major filmmakers. 3. This was a controversial issue in postwar Britain. F. A Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, took issue with massive state intervention. See especially Chapters 4 and 5, ‘The “Inevitability” of Planning’ and ‘Planning and Democracy’. 4. The Dawn Cine Group also made sponsored films, including a film for the Corporation’s Education Department and one for the Labour Party, Into Action, featuring a young John Smith, future Labour Party leader. 5. From the Dawn Cine Group files, Scottish Screen archive.

Bibliography Allen, D. (1996). ‘Dawn: A New Start for Scottish Workers’ Film?’, AMES Journal, Autumn, pp. 3–5. Beaton, W. G. (1957). Glasgow Our City: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Glasgow: Corporation of Glasgow Education Department). Buchanan, A. (1935). ‘Why Not Make A Screen Magazine?’, Amateur Cine World 2, (3), pp. 102–5. Burton, A. (1997). ‘Amateur Aesthetics and Practices of The British Co-Operative Movement in The 1930s’, in N. Kapstein (1997) (ed.), Jubilee Book: Essays on Amateur Film. (Belgium: Association Europénne Inédits), pp. 131–143.

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Chalfen, R. (1975). ‘Cinema Naïveté: A Study of Home Moviemaking as Visual Communication’, Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 2, (2), pp. 87–103. Chalfen, R. (1987). Snapshot Versions of Life (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press). Hayek, F. A. (1944). The Road to Serfdom (Abingdon: Routledge). Hogenkamp, B. (2000). Film, Television and the Left 1950–1970 (London: Lawrence and Wishart). Hogenkamp, B. and Lauwers, M. (1997). ‘In Pursuit of Happiness? A Search for the Definition of Amateur Film’, in N. Kapstein (1997) (ed.), Jubilee Book: Essays on Amateur Film (Belgium: Association Europénne Inédits), pp. 107–16. Johnstone, C. (1993). ‘Early Post-War Housing Struggles in Glasgow’, Scottish Labour History Society Journal 28, pp. 7–29. Lebas, E. (2005). ‘Sadness and Gladness: The Films of Glasgow Corporation, 1922–1938’, Film Studies 6, Summer, pp. 27–45. Lebas, E. (2007). ‘Glasgow’s Progress: The Films of Glasgow Corporation 1938–1978’, Film Studies 10, Spring, pp. 34–53. Odin, R. (2008). ‘Reflections on the Family Home Movie as Document: A SemioPragmatic Approach’, in K. L. Ishizuka and P. R. Zimmermann (eds), Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (London: University of California Press), pp. 255–71. Ruoff, J. K. (1992). ‘Home Movies of the Avant-Garde: Jonas Mekas and the New York Art World’, in D. E. James (ed) (1992), To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), pp. 294–311. Stebbins, R. (1982). ‘Serious Leisure: A Conceptual Statement’, Pacific Sociological Review 25, (2), pp. 251–72. Stebbins, R. (2005). ‘Project-Based Leisure: Theoretical Neglect of a Common Use of Free Time’, Leisure Studies, 24 (1), pp. 1–11. Zimmerman, P. R. (2001). ‘Morphing History into Histories: From Amateur Film to the Archive of the Future’, The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 1, (1), pp. 108–30.

4 ‘City of Change and Challenge’: The Cine-Societies’ Response to the Redevelopment of Liverpool in the 1960s Julia Hallam The modern experience of memory is, quite simply, a moving representational archive. —(Bruno, 2002: 253) The nature of memory is not chronological. It exists in a single moment. The recalled past is always contemporary. —(Terence Davies quoted by Derek Jarman, 1994)

Looking back: Memoryscapes Commissioned as part of Liverpool’s 800th birthday celebrations in 2007, the British premiere of Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, 2008) in the city’s Philharmonic Hall in 2008 was celebrated as a major European Capital of Culture event. Hailed at Cannes as a distinctly ‘Terence Davies’ film, Of Time and the City is a personal triumph for Davies, returning after an eightyear absence from film making to the place of his birth and the memories that inspired his acclaimed semi-autobiographical films Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992). A bitter-sweet love song to his native city composed of 85 per cent archive footage, most of it shot in Liverpool between the 1940s and the early 1970s, Of Time and the City traces the exterior spaces and places of childhood and adolescence evoked but never seen in these earlier films. In a discussion about the process of making the film with producers Roy Boulter and Sol Papadopoulos, they describe Davies’s method of working as one of reflection and viewing, contemplation and reviewing, selecting the archive footage for its evocation of very specific emotions and memories.1 The visuals are accompanied by a voice-over written and spoken by Davies himself that, drawing on the poetry of T. S. Eliot and lines chosen from Chekhov and Engels among others, runs the gamut of intimate, personal feeling: from the weight of guilt and pain bestowed on him by a strict Catholic upbringing that traumatized 69

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him as a young gay man, to the scepticism he feels about the ‘Betty and Phil show’ at childhood coronation street parties and his coldly dismissive ‘Yeah, Yeah, Yeah’ over footage of the Beatles performing in the early 1960s. Davies rejects the emerging Mersey Sound in favour of a soundtrack featuring American crooners, his trademark musical eclecticism ranging through early American popular music to the classics of Mahler and an extensive repertoire of 1950s songs for which he is so well known. The most apposite of these audio visual juxtapositions (and the one most remarked upon by critics) is the sequence that Davies claims stimulated his interest in revisiting his home territory one last time: the voice of American songstress Peggy Lee singing a 1950s ballad ‘The Folks who Live on the Hill’, cut to sequences of people gazing out from the balconies of their new high-rise flats excised from Nick Broomfield’s documentary about slum clearance in Liverpool Who Cares? (1971). This is an elegiac, bitter-sweet tribute to a city and its people that Davies loved and hated in equal measure; the juxtaposition of music, songs, voices and visuals creates an impression of postwar working-class life as one of quiet dignity and acceptance lived amid the misery of poverty and religious patriarchal control, feelings similarly imbued in the three semi-autobiographical black-and-white films that, together, form The Terence Davies Trilogy (1976–83). In this sequential series of shorts – Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983) – the narrative traces an affecting journey that oscillates between childhood and extreme old age accompanied by the strains of popular American songs of the 1950s. The filmmaker Derek Jarman describes the songs as ‘echoing down the deserted and forlorn streets, underlying the tragedy of this great city, handcuffed … to its past, yearning, with little hope, for a transatlantic Eden’ (Jarman, 1994). Some 30 years after making these films, with the city in the throes of reinventing itself as a European city, a city of culture, a city of the future, the yearning for this lost Liverpool resonates with other members of the city’s diaspora, those who, like Davies, look back with affection and poignancy on memoryscapes from a past – and a city – long left behind.2 Davies left Liverpool to go to drama school in Coventry in the early 1970s when he was 26 years old. The Liverpool of the 1960s that is celebrated and known for its avant-garde visual art, its writing and poetry, its vibrant music scene seems to have evaded him during his teenage years, its cultural pleasures a parallel place of which Davies felt no part. Yet among the mass of footage he viewed so assiduously to reconstruct his visual memories of the city, there are numerous sequences that celebrate this youthful energy. Amateur filmmaker, collector and producer Angus Tilston has compiled two documentaries of the period of Davies’s childhood and youth drawing on archive footage taken by local filmmakers: Liverpool, Echoes of the 1940s and 1950s (Angus Tilston, Pleasures Past, 1994) and Liverpool: The Swinging Sixties (Angus Tilston, Pleasures Past, 1994). Tilston’s memoryscapes present

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another Liverpool, an altogether different place, one in which the devastation and deprivation created by the Second World War and its aftermath are met with a determination to rebuild, reconstruct and make the city a better place for the future. Awarded an MBE for his services to the community in 2010, Tilston’s documentaries effortlessly chime with the official narratives of the city’s history promoted by the Culture Company;3 in his Swinging Sixties compilation the narrating voice-overs spoken by local comedian Ken Dodd and Merseybeat lead singer Tony Crane express pride and pleasure in their memories: the growth of the music scene, the international success of the city’s football teams, the luxurious passenger liners moored at the Pier Head, the busy docks and newly built modern city centre. Similarly to Davies, Tilston draws on footage held in newsreel collections and publicly funded film archives but he makes far more use of amateur material, footage shot by local filmmakers, many of whom were members of local cine societies. Davies’s choice of footage is heavily weighted in favour of professionally made documentaries such as those commissioned by the city’s public relations office, A Day in Liverpool (Anton Dyer, 1929) and Liverpool Sounding (Ken Pople, 1967), an award-winning documentary by the BBC, Morning in the Streets (Denis Mitchell, 1959), and the BFI production board’s Who Cares? (Nick Broomfield, 1971). These are films made with social, economic and public purposes that now form part of an ‘official’ moving image record of these years, serving, in their different ways, the ethos of a government-led public-service agenda that used popular media, particularly television, to communicate the problems faced by postwar Britain to the nation. Davies takes these promotional and public records and uses them to serve personal memory rather than official memory, his lugubrious and sometimes excoriating soliloquy and evocative soundtrack creating an emotive memoryscape of self-loathing and lives lived unfulfilled amid poverty and dereliction. In contrast, Tilston takes the private moving image records of numerous individuals and welds them into an intimate collective nostalgic memory of place that highlights local achievements and celebrates reminiscence as a positive form of local identity affirmation and self-value. Using popular music from Merseyside composed and sung by local bands that are internationally known with resident comedian Ken Dodd’s veteran brand of music hall humour, the lighthearted pleasures of Liverpool: The Swinging Sixties stands in colourful contrast to the sombre tones of Davies’s grandiloquent final farewell. Echoing Giuliana Bruno’s suggestion that our sense of place, ‘which is also our sense of history’, has been ‘mapped hapitically onto the field screen of “moving” images’ (Bruno, 2002: 253), Lisa Sturken argues that ‘cultural and individual memory are constantly produced through, and mediated by, the technologies of memory’ (Sturken, 2008: 75). Davies and Tilston use familiar generic tropes and narratives associated with moving image production and popular music technologies in the UK in the late 1950s and early 1960s to

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furnish their documentary memoryscapes, evoking a sense of time and place not only through the reproduction of particular songs and views of place made at the time that can ‘touch’ the ears and eyes with a sense of emotive recognition and familiarity, but also of the forms of production themselves, which carry their own associative connotations. Made primarily in black and white, with colour used in certain sequences to emphasize emotional affect, Of Time and the City is associated with the celebration of northern working-class identity found in the black and white realism of the films of the British New Wave such as Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959) and American popular music brought to Liverpool in the 1950s by seamen who worked the shipping lines between Liverpool and New York (Cohen, 2007). Tilston’s colourful Swinging Sixties evokes associations with the fashions of ‘swinging London’ and Liverpool’s rich musical heritage, particularly The Beatles, as well as popular television programmes that featured pop music and the Mersey Sound such as Beat City (ITV, 1963) and Ready, Steady Go (ITV, 1963–6). The use of popular cultural forms to create memoryscapes that invoke personal as well as collective associations raises complex issues about the nature of personal memories and whether it is possible to disentangle them from the ‘flow’ of popular media through which collective memories of the past are regularly constructed. Alison Landsberg (2004) has developed the concept of ‘prosthetic memory’ to describe how our own personal memories are increasingly welded with what she terms synthetic memories; direct experience and the memories that originate from it can no longer be separated from the memories that emerge from encounters with a wide range of popular forms. As time passes, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate personal experience from the mediating technologies that have (re)constructed both personal and collective experience of past times; the montage of attractions and associations becomes part of personal memory, melded to feelings and emotions connected to particular experiences. This extended mode of remembering is illustrated, perhaps, by the personal responses to Davies’s film expressed by viewers to the producers of Of Time and the City who claim the film conveys their own experiences and memories of Liverpool at this time.4 Amateur archive footage is becoming increasingly imbricated in these mediated memoryscapes. Incorporated into various forms of contemporary production such as regional history series, for example Those Were the Days (ITV Granada, 2005) and The Way We Were (ITV Granada, 2008), amateur film also contributes to the development of the local heritage industry through the production of documentaries of past times collated from archive footage of which Tilston’s work is an excellent example.5 Heather Norris Nicholson claims that ‘visualizing the past has been central to the popular success of heritage attractions in recent years’ (Norris Nicholson, 1997: 208); visualizations offer readily digested and pre-interpreted sites for evoking personal memories and experiences. Often accompanied by popular

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music of the day, these productions interweave photographs and archive footage with witness memories, press reports and voice-over commentary in what has become a well-established documentary format. The moving image footage on which these ‘memoryscapes’ are frequently draped is rarely given detailed consideration in critical analyses, which tends to focus on various aspects of ‘memory performance’ such as narrational style, participant selection, bodily expressiveness, location and filming conventions (MacDonald, 2006: 327). Yet the amateur archive footage that often informs this type of popular historical documentary has its own locally specific forms of reference about place, reference that is often lost and concealed by the reworking of footage into mediated forms of historical consumption. Perhaps, most significantly, it is the use of amateur footage as a ‘background’ location signifier for ordinary, everyday life in productions that seek to create an ‘authentic’ or ‘believable’ view of places past that creates the most concern among some amateur film historians and commentators. As Heather Norris Nicholson (2007) has noted, amateur footage is increasingly used by artists and filmmakers because it can often be obtained more cheaply than commercially produced work; yet the stripping away of reference that accompanies such usage, its decontextualization from the times and places in which it has been created, has underlying implications for considerations of the ways in which amateur footage can contribute to historical understandings of place. Her concern emphasizes the importance of context in research into archive film, of, as she puts it, ‘[uncovering] the successive layers of meanings within and around the images’ (Norris Nicholson, 2007). For amateur filmmakers living on Merseyside during the 1960s, it was not only the Liverpool music and art scenes that attracted them as subject matter for their productions, but the changing landscape of the city itself. Numerous films created by amateur filmmakers document the changes wrought upon the physical and material fabric of the city by redevelopment; these films offer ‘detailed glimpses along the side streets of history, capturing ordinary people engaged in the rhythms of everyday life in situations overlooked by those who made more official records of historical change’ (Hogenkamp and Lauwers [1997] in Norris Nicholson, 2002: 85). Many of the films in the Tilston collection focus on aspects of everyday life and social activity in this way; as well as this ethnographic dimension, some films reveal how place is constructed not only materially in the form of buildings, streets and architectural sites but also symbolically, through the social use of space.6 With the increases in local economic prosperity and leisure time that accompanied stable employment following the introduction of new industries to Merseyside in the 1950s and 1960s, and an expanding economy in Britain more generally, ownership of cine cameras became more widespread and more people became engaged in amateur film production. What had been the leisure activity of a privileged minority became accessible to many, not least because the expansion and development of local cine societies

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enabled more people to become collectively involved in filmmaking. This local network of clubs often shared their filmmaking activities with each other through guest screenings and social events, as well as helping with and participating in one another’s productions. By examining the ways in which the cine societies developed on Merseyside and contextualizing their ‘city’ films in relation to the redevelopment projects taking place in the city during this period, the contribution of local amateur filmmakers to what I will define as a ‘spatial documentary’ practice can be placed in historical context and perspective.

Merseyside cine-societies Although not among the earliest locations for the cine society movement in Britain, by the 1930s the number of cine clubs on Merseyside was beginning to expand;7 adverts for their activities are found in magazines such as Pathescope Monthly, a review for the 9.5mm cinematographer. In 1932, it is noted that the first Merseyside club, the Electrotone Amateur Film Society, Wallasey, was experimenting with ‘talkies’ after producing two silent comedies, Discord in the Desert and The Last Laugh.8 By July of the same year, the Amateur Film Society of Liverpool had several productions in preparation, while the Electrotone gave the first public performance of amateur films to an audience in Wallasey.9 In December, the newly formed Birkenhead Cine Society published its objectives; ‘to assist amateur cinematographers in making 9.5 mm films, their exhibition and all ground work such as film acting and scenario writing’.10 The following year, Liverpool Amateur Film Society was complaining of apathy among Liverpool cine enthusiasts ‘in their willingness to co-operate to make good pictures’,11 while the new Cine Club in Wallasey announced its impending inaugural meeting in June 1934. Writing in a local society magazine, The Liverpolitan, in 1936, John Broadbent extols the virtues of Wallasey Amateur Cinema Club and the financial and social advantages of making films together, emphasizing the club’s modern facilities including ‘a miniature modern cinema complete with a silver screen, a delightful proscenium, tip up seats and ample projector room with facilities for “talkies”’ (Broadbent, 1936: 39). From these early accounts, it is clear that there were considerable variations in the ways in which clubs shared resources; while some clubs focused on production, hiring local halls to show their work once or twice a year, others had regular screenings in which locally made and produced amateur films would have been only one item on a mixed programme that included feature films and newsreel material.12 Journeys into and around the city form the substance of much of the early amateur work made in and about the city. Films made by the wealthy Preston family in the 1930s, for example, feature day trips to Liverpool with excursions around the docks and to visiting liners, greeting important visitors with local dignitaries,13 while compilations of 1930s amateur material

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by clubs such as Hoylake Movie Makers and collectors such as Tilston feature family days out to New Brighton as well as major civic events such as the opening of the Queensway Tunnel in 1934.14 In the 1930s, magazines and journals such as Amateur Cine World and Pathescope Monthly catered to the local clubs as well as to individuals, encouraging readers to think of projects that would offset the costs involved in purchasing equipment and film stock by becoming valuable investments that would recoup healthy returns in the future. Disappearing customs and the rapidly changing landscapes of Britain’s towns and villages were singled out as particularly important topics for cine club documentaries, enshrining them on celluloid for future generations to enjoy: ‘Old towns, quaint customs, the everyday life of the people, the gradual substitution of new towns for old, the ever changing suburbs, the pageant of the seasons … there is a veritable wealth of opportunities for the man with a Motocamera’ (McKeag, 1934: 5). Although the Second World War interrupted growth, by the early 1950s the amateur film-making sector of the UK’s production ecology had evolved to become a mature cultural practice with nationwide networks of cine-clubs established in England, Scotland and Wales. By the late 1950s there were seven cine-clubs on Merseyside and others in nearby Chester and Deeside. One of the most productive of these, Swan Cine Club, Wirral was formed by Angus Tilston in 1954; it soon had more than 30 members, most of them workplace colleagues. Their first documentary, Bebington Scenes, was shot on the Wirral shortly after. In 1962, Swan Cine Club membership reached 75; eight films were made in 1963, 44 in total during the decade (Tilston, 1991: 5). Tilston’s work as a collector, filmmaker and producer, and his national and international connections with other societies and organizations, have encouraged people to donate their footage to him. Well known in amateur circles for his video productions, contributions from friends and colleagues and footage bequeathed by the partners and heirs of deceased filmmakers have created a personal collection of more than 800 films. ‘Pleasures Past’ productions range from transport and tram films to local historical compilations including six DVDs that feature Liverpool through the decades and a more recent compilation created to celebrate Liverpool’s 800th anniversary in 2007. There are around 200 items featuring the city and its immediate environs in the collection, the majority dated between the early 1950s and the 1980s, the heyday of the amateur film movement and the Merseyside cine societies.15 With the proliferation of the cine-groups in the 1950s and 1960s, the number of films featuring the city as subject matter increased markedly. The ‘City in Film’ project has documented some 40 items featuring the city centre and waterfront made by amateur filmmakers between charter year (1957) and the late 1960s.16 Many of these are raw footage, edited in camera; others are edited to create a record of a typical journey (often embarking on ‘the ferry cross the Mersey’ at Birkenhead for a trip to Liverpool) or leaving the

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city for a day out. By this time, the Royal Liver, Cunard and Port Authority buildings at Liverpool’s Pier Head were attaining the iconic status associated with the ‘Three Graces’ today; most of the footage shot at this time includes images of these buildings. Numerous films record the ferries traversing the Mersey, such as Boat for Businessmen (Norman Couch, 1961) which focuses on the busy commuter river traffic, while other filmmakers created semidramatized films focused on the experience of crossing the Mersey from a particular perspective such as Fair Play (George Gregory, Swan Movie Makers, c. 1963), which depicts a young boy going to New Brighton for a day out.17 Other filmmakers are more historically conscious in their intentions; aware of the rapidly changing topography of the city and its historical value, there is a deliberate attempt to document the changing environment. In 1957 Eric Knowles of Hoylake Cine Group completed an ambitious record of the city’s 750-year history, Charter Year, that includes images of the last tram to run from the Pier Head to the outer suburbs, the demolition of the dockside Liverpool Overhead Railway (fondly nicknamed ‘the docker’s umbrella’) and the beginning of the construction of the Metropolitan Cathedral. Tilston emphasizes the social and creative role of cine clubs as well as their cooperative economic structures that enabled those on low incomes to participate in the productions. The clubs would split into groups, each group had to come up with an idea for a film which the club would fund by providing film stock, equipment and subsidizing film shows. Hardly any of the members had cars so most of the location shooting was achieved using bicycles to transport people and equipment.18 Filmmakers interested in technique and special effects attempted a range of amateur genres including ‘mood’ films, dramas, and various forms of documentary, many of which included location shooting that now provides valuable topographical footage of the city. Constructed, for the most part, without soundtracks on 8mm film stock, the 1960s films offer a rich palette of visual images, mapping the changes in the material environment as familiar landscapes are demolished and rebuilt. Neither straightforwardly ethnographic document nor documentary record, this footage records the details of place with an interest and, in some films, an intensity that implies an emotional attachment to well-known streets and buildings as the familiar urban environment undergoes rapid transformation and change.

Looking around: Local views Interest in recording the changing fabric of Liverpool city centre was stimulated by the city council’s extensive redevelopment programme. In common with many cities in postwar Britain, bomb damage from air raids during the Second World War was the ostensible reason given by the council for extensive demolition of the central area between the Pier Head and Lime Street station. The widespread destruction of large areas of the inner city

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created an opportunity for the city council to draw up plans that aimed to dramatically reshape the historic centre to meet perceived twentieth-century needs with an inner-city motorway network and modernist ‘concrete and glass’ offices with integrated shopping precincts and amenities popular with architects and planners. The programme was enabled by a government initiative that encouraged local authorities to prepare a new type of plan called a town centre map. Liverpool was one of the first cities to appoint a planning consultant, becoming the first city in England to enact the new government guidelines by commissioning a systematic evaluation of land use and transport systems in the central area surrounding the Pier Head and the waterfront. Following the creation of the City Planning Department in 1962, a series of reports on all aspects of the city’s central area was published, summarized in the Liverpool City Centre Plan (1965). The plan included the building of an inner-city motorway network with a second tunnel under the Mersey, and became a controversial blueprint for new development that took place during the decade. It also aimed to rationalize the use of inner-city space, a feasible aim in Liverpool because of the council’s extensive ownership of land and property in and around the central area. The council’s argument was that without modern transport networks to move goods to and from the city’s extensive docklands, the port and its industrial hinterland would become less competitive both nationally and internationally. With roads, railways and canals historically radiating into the hinterland from the port, the principle concern was to make the city and its surrounding area an attractive prospect for industrial investment in a city where unemployment was twice the national average (2.6% in June 1965 compared with the Great Britain figure of 1.3% [City Centre Planning Group, 1965: 5]). In spite of warnings from the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company that impending modernization of outdated practices and the introduction of new technologies would shrink the dock estate and reduce the workforce accordingly, in the mid-1960s the City Council was still anticipating growth in the north docks. The result was a controversial blueprint for remodelling the central area that provided 7.5m sq.ft of office space within 20 years, accompanied by a series of American-style shopping arcades, new parks and a civic centre. The plan also advocated closing and relocating the city’s wholesale and retail fish, fruit, vegetable and flower markets from their historic home in St John’s Market on Great Charlotte Street, where they had operated from 1822, to a new site on the periphery. In 1960 the city council had reached agreement with Ravenseft Properties Ltd to redevelop the area bounded by Lime Street, Elliot Street, Houghton Street and Roe Street as a pedestrian shopping precinct on several levels with a multi-story car park, hotel and ballroom as well as a new retail market to replace the existing St John’s Market. Under the banner of ‘City of Change and Challenge’, the city council forged ahead with their plans, clearing land and leaving vast tracts of the city as derelict, empty spaces.

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Throughout these years the process of redevelopment was captured by local filmmakers, many of them members of the burgeoning amateur cine club movement. While films commissioned by the city council such as Liverpool Sounding and Turn of the Tide (1967) emphasize the cultural life of the city and its thriving manufacturing sector in order to attract new businesses and investment to the area, amateur filmmakers recorded city centre streets and buildings, mapping ‘time as it was being lived’ (Bruno, 2002: 259) in the everyday public spaces of the city’s central shopping and market areas. Amateur filmmakers, no less than professional moving-image producers, inhabit the imaginative, material and symbolic spaces through which their visions are articulated in the contexts of their own codes of practice. Shand has described this as ‘a homogenous and parallel film practice … existing not necessarily to challenge the mainstream but in dialogue with it’ (Shand, 2009: 160). By the late 1950s, the documentary film had become an established mode of amateur production, integrated into the activities of the independent sector through the activities of groups such as Unit Five Seven’s engagement with the Free Cinema movement. The amateur sector was encouraged to engage in constructing a distinctively British aesthetic, developing the ‘native subject’ depicted by the documentary movement of the 1930s and its contemporary heirs.19 Articles in Amateur Cine World in the 1950s encourage a more professional approach to production; the differences between making experimental ‘art’ films, for example, and engaging in the idealized family representational practices of the ‘home mode’ (Chalfen, 1987) are clearly spelt out, with members encouraged to be scornful of ‘baby on the lawn’ films (a subject often regarded as typical of home movie making) and to be more ambitious, particularly in documentary production.20 A lack of any detailed explanation of the various projects, groups and organizations such as the Free Cinema movement discussed by these authors implies they are addressing a knowledgeable readership already familiar with these ideals and aspirations. I have discussed previously how some 1960s films made by Merseyside cine club members attempted to achieve these aspirations; for example, Queen Square Market, made by Frank Pyett in 1962 in 16mm colour, documents the outdoor fruit, vegetable and flower market before its closure. Pyett’s documentary has strong resemblances to municipal promotional films of the time in its use of expositional camerawork, structural attention to the detail of editing, use of voice-over narration and non-synchronous sound track. Designed to entertain as well as inform, the simple narration (recounted by a child) tells the story of a day in the life of the market from the perspective of a local resident, Tiddles the cat. The images, drawing on popular constructions of street market imagery complete with ‘cheeky chappie’ barrel boys and doughty stallholders, are similar to other documentary accounts of the time such as Lindsay Anderson’s awardwinning Free Cinema documentary of London’s Covent Garden market: Every Day Except Christmas (1957) (Hallam, 2007: 278). While Pyett’s film

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provides an entertaining and informative depiction of the market in its heyday, here I will focus on what I have termed ‘spatial documentaries’, footage shot by amateur filmmakers recording everyday spaces and places without accompanying music or voice-over narration. The footage appears ‘raw’ in that it seems to have been edited in camera or subsequently edited without the addition of any further embellishments. These spatial documentaries, because of their unembellished character, are examples of what we might think of as an embodied film practice, where the act of filming parallels the filmmaker’s perceptual processes; there is little that comes between observing a scene and recording it. Because of this, the films have some similarities with early actuality films, discussed in more detail below. Foucault observed that ‘a whole history remains to be written of spaces … which would at the same time be the history of powers … from the great strategies of geo-politics to the little tactics of the habitat’ (Foucault, 1980: 149). Spatial documentaries can help to reveal the ‘little tactics of the habitat’; as Ryan Shand has argued, ‘amateur filmmakers have perhaps been most active in the exploration of both actual and imagined local worlds, enjoying a particular intimacy with geographies close to home, and a characteristic sensitivity to often highly nuanced aspects of localised social practice’ (Shand, 2009: 57). Using historical maps and planning documents to contextualize the images within a material and social history of the urban landscape, embodied spatial documentaries can be used in fruitful tension with modern memoryscapes and documentaries made by professional filmmakers of the day, bringing to the foreground contested spaces and revealing emotional attachments and attitudes to place. The films chosen for analysis were taken by two filmmakers with ostensibly similar purposes: to record the topographical changes to a landscape that they were very familiar with, yet the results are very different, their views inescapably coloured by their opinions on the controversial redevelopment scheme. The first, Old St John’s Market & Town Scenes (Jim Gonzales/Liver Cine Group, c. 1960), like many amateur films, records a visit to the city through the structure of a journey; the subsequent films are a series of sequences shot between 1963 and 1966 by the same filmmaker, George Cregeen of Rosemore Films: Liverpool: City of Change; Liverpool: The Pace Quickens; Liverpool: The Shapes of the Future and The Changing Face of Liverpool. The latter films are undated, although their content has been analysed to indicate probable shooting dates. Each title contains material from various periods, suggesting that rather than presenting a historical trajectory, the films were edited after shooting around the four themes of the titles. Jim Gonzales’s early 1960s footage is constructed in the form of a walking tour; arriving at the Pier Head, edit in camera sequences track his movements through the business area of the city to Queen Square, St George’s Hall and Lime Street station, where he spends some time recording the streets and buildings. Using 16mm black-and-white film stock and a hand-held camera,

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he initially films the iconic buildings that populate the waterfront, taking time to carefully frame a mid shot of the Liver birds with a pigeon perching in the foreground, then walking up past the former shipping offices, pausing on the frontage of the historic Georgian town hall before plunging into the network of streets and back alleyways that surrounds the old business area, the camera pausing again to focus on the architectural details of buildings and street name plaques. Arriving in the market area in and around Queen Square, the pace of the film slows markedly as the camera spends more time noting the details of building exteriors, moving slowly and repeatedly through the same cobbled streets (Figure 4.1, movements 1–13). Particular emphasis is given to the market gateways, to street names, to building frontages, the repetitive camerawork changing the forward trajectory of the journey into a form of reverie or contemplation. The whole area is strangely deserted with no other person in sight, creating an air of ghostly melancholy. The slow pace and repetitive camerawork seems determined to emphasize the materiality of the streets

Figure 4.1 Walking around St John’s Market: Jim Gonzales’s film tour early 1960s. Image courtesy of Les Roberts. (© Crown Copyright and Landmark Information Group Limited (2010). All rights reserved (1955).)

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and buildings, as if the act of filming in itself could guarantee a permanent memory of place.21 This ‘memorializing’ gaze moves to a high vantage point on St George’s Plateau (near map point 13) from where the camera pans the facades of the nineteenth-century buildings on St George’s Place, pausing on the fine detail of an early steel-framed brick and glass building before moving on to the nineteenth-century frontage of hotels and shops with their bright neon advertising signs that greeted travellers arriving in Liverpool by rail. Returning to Queen Square via a slow tracking shot of the front of the Great Northern Hotel on Lime Street (Lime Street Chambers on the map in Figure 4.1), the absence of the busy outdoor fruit and vegetable market, moved to a new site on the periphery of the city, emphasizes the shabbiness, dereliction and decay of the once grand Georgian square. The repetitive camerawork ends by casting a last long(ing) look at the buildings, including the facade of the market building on Roe Street (Figure 4.2) before a final gaze takes in the details of the soon to be demolished historic Queen Square area.22 Gonzales’s film is a detailed tour of one of the principal areas of the historic centre affected by the redevelopment plans. George Cregeen’s

Figure 4.2 St John’s Market, Roe Street looking towards St George’s Hall. Jim Gonzales, courtesy of Angus Tilston.

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Rosemore Films are, by way of contrast, wide-ranging in their scope, ranging across the city to the suburbs and neighbouring country towns such as Southport. In contrast to the somewhat gloomy, melancholic pace of Gonzales’s black-and-white film, these films are in colour and have a more upbeat, enthusiastic take on the redevelopment process. The 88 minutes of footage in the four films projects an unprecedented moving-image record of a city in transition. Rather than the linear trajectory journey of Gonzales’s walk through the city, Cregeen prefers to find and situate himself at a vantage point with a good view and record the surrounding vista in a series of panning shots. The shooting process seems analogous to what Tom Gunning has described as the ‘view aesthetic’ in his analysis of early travelogues, where: ‘the “view” tends to carry the claim that the view preexisted the act of filming (a landscape, a social custom, a method of work) or would have taken place even if the camera had not been there’ (Gunning, 1997: 14 cited in Fullerton and King, 2005: 67). Siting his camera solely for the purpose of framing these views of urban change, Cregeen captures images of cubical concrete and glass buildings emerging from the terraced streets, and glimpses of steel frameworks appearing in the gaps between the nineteenth-century offices. In their discussion of early Mexican actuality films of the 1920s, John Fullerton and Elaine King discuss how the notion of the ‘view aesthetic’ ‘highlights the manner in which early actuality films were structured around presenting something visually, preserving a look or vantage point’ (ibid.: 67). Similarly, Les Roberts, in a discussion of films of the Liverpool waterfront, has argued that amateur films such as Ships at Liverpool (c. 1950, John Nolan) create a ‘view aesthetic’ comprised primarily of short, mostly static shots of typically no more than a couple of seconds, indicating a mobile, touristic gaze ‘informed by the fleeting nature of the viewer’s perspective’ (Roberts, 2010: 61). Cregeen’s films are notably fragmented in this way, the images a disconnected assemblage of short shots and longer panning panoramas that create a series of juxtapositions and jumps between the (often carefully) framed ‘views’. In the early films, the shots are mostly static and steady, implying the use of a tripod, although some experimentation is apparent. Liverpool: City of Change opens with an image of a street parade, the floats and carriages passing in front of a stationary camera; a poster on a float dates some of the footage as 1963, a street sign situates the place as Kilburn Street, Bootle.23 The following shots travel across discontinuous material spaces and places: a new shopping precinct (possibly New Strand, Bootle), St John’s Gardens in the city centre, the Empire theatre, cranes looming over the construction site of the new market. Shots of derelict houses and tenements are cut against images of a television screen featuring the historic landing of the first man on the moon, followed by images of a circular tower under construction rising high above the central shopping area. A landscape shot takes in traffic around the tunnel area, which cuts to images of the Liver birds, cars parked in front

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of St George’s Hall, the Pier Head, the floating roadway, ships on the river, views of docks and warehouses, shots of the Liverpool/Birkenhead ferry, a look back at the waterfront. The montage implies a journey from the outer suburbs (Bootle) to the centre and onwards across the Mersey, but this impression is contradicted by the following series of shots taken around the development of the new road network behind the Walker Art Gallery, which culminates in a trip across the flyover, the car travelling through an empty landscape cleared to make way for new buildings and public spaces. The journey then follows a route in the opposite direction, out of the city to leafy Sefton Park in the Aigburth suburbs, abruptly cutting to a glass arcade with tearooms and a sign for a clairvoyant, possibly in the neighbouring seaside resort of Southport. In Liverpool: the Shapes of the Future, the filmmaker is more ambitious: opening shots from a biplane depict the nearly completed St John’s Tower, surrounded by the new market building now in progress. Spectacular panoramic panning shots of the city and the waterfront taken from the incomplete platform at the top of the new tower emphasize the extent and scale of the new building in the central area around the Three Graces at the Pier Head: from the half-built ‘wigwam’ of the Metropolitan Cathedral to the south and the completed high-rise offices for the John Moore’s Littlewoods catalogue shopping company to the north. The ‘view aesthetic’ points to the contrasts of old and new, framing the new high-rise blocks amid a patchwork of old terraced streets, the new buildings rising from the dilapidated fabric of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century city around them to create a modernist vision of the ‘new Jerusalem’. Amateur actuality films are embodied instances of localized filmic practice; in marked contrast to Gonzales’s (implied) arrival by ferry at the Pier Head and walk up the hill through the city to the market, the distances between places juxtaposed in George Cregeen’s film are indicative of moving in and around the city by car, and then flying over it by plane. Ranging across urban space from the outer suburbs to the inner city through an assemblage of street views, vistas, panoramic perspectives and aerial shots, Rosemore Films present Liverpool in the 1960s as a modern city ‘on the move’, the speed of transport from one space and time to another embodied in the dynamic fragmentation of the filmic record. In contrast, Gonzales’s film projects a deserted city, a static city, the hand-held camera emphasizing the embodied gaze of the filmmaker as he walks through the empty streets. These ‘mobile gazes’ are socially and spatially embedded in, and informed by what Roberts (2010) has argued is a ‘panoramic perception’ of the waterfront and its immediate environs as a working, lived-in, everyday social reality. Framed for viewing by local audiences familiar with the topography of the city and its modes of visual representation but not necessarily with the symbols, sights, and signs of modernism and urban redevelopment, the filmic journeys undertaken by Cregeen emphasize the modernist dynamics of this embodied relationship, his journeys by car and plane symbolizing

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the activities of the modern citizen and the development of the city of the future. By the 1960s, most cine club members lived in the suburbs, either on the leafy periphery to the south of the city or across the Mersey on the Wirral peninsula. In comparison to the subjects of Morning in the Streets or Broomfield’s Who Cares?, these filmmakers were members of a privileged middle class with access to the means to represent themselves and their view of the world and to share it with others. For today’s viewer, the mini ‘city symphonies’ created by these filmmakers reveal some of the contrasting emotions felt by people working and living in Liverpool during a time when major redevelopment of the historic centre’s housing, offices, central amenities and roadways changed the face of the city. The films are part of what Roberts and Koeck (2007) have termed a ‘cinematic repository’ of urban memory through which viewers and audiences today, whether familiar or not with Liverpool’s material and physical landscape, can navigate the virtual and lived spaces of the postwar city. These virtual journeys in the cities of the past create, as Giuliana Bruno suggests, a space for wandering about and perusal: ‘attracted to the vistas, the spectator turns into a visitor … a tourist’ (1997: 17). Whether guided by Jim Gonzales’s hand-held tour, driven by George Cregeen to the city’s best vantage points to enjoy a sweeping panorama, entertained by Ken Dodd’s lighthearted capers or moved by the lugubrious tones of Terence Davies, these visits to past times furnish an emotional sense of place, nourishing our prosthetic, real and imagined memories of belonging.

Acknowledgements With thanks to Angus Tilston for his contribution to this research, Dr Les Roberts, and to the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the City in Film project.

Notes 1. The producers in discussion with Les Roberts, Of Time and the City screening, University of Liverpool, April 2009. 2. Screenings of Of Time and the City have proved particularly popular among expats and other members of the Liverpool diaspora; the producers in discussion with Les Roberts (ibid.). 3. The Liverpool Culture Company was set up by the city council to deliver the cultural programme in the run-up to 2008 and beyond. 4. The producers in discussion with Les Roberts (ibid.). 5. Tilston’s archive montage productions of Liverpool history include Victorian Liverpool (Angus Tilston, Pleasures Past, 1995), Liverpool, Memories of a Vibrant City: the 1920s and 1930s (Angus Tilston, Pleasures Past, 1993), Liverpool, Echoes of the 1940s and 1950s (Angus Tilston, Pleasures Past, 1994), Liverpool: the Swinging Sixties (Angus Tilston, Pleasures Past, 1994), Liverpool in the 70s, 80s and 90s

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(Angus Tilston, Pleasures Past, 2002), Liverpool 1907–2007: A Look at the Last 100 Years (Angus Tilston, Pleasures Past, 2008). 6. Of the 82 amateur films made in the 1960s listed on the ‘City in Film’ catalogue, 14 feature reconstruction scenes of the city centre. See http://www.liv.ac.uk/lsa/ cityinfilm/catalogue.html. 7. The Newcastle and District Amateur Cine Club, now under a different name, is considered the oldest established cine club in Britain, although early journals suggest that clubs were being formed as early as 1923; see Mike and Jo Coad (undated: 7). 8. Pathescope Monthly, February 1932, p. 10. 9. Pathescope Monthly, June/July 1932, p. 11. 10. Pathescope Monthly, December 1932, p. 16. 11. Pathescope Monthly, April/May 1933, p. 12. 12. Clive Garner, an amateur enthusiast and collector based in Wirral and former Radio Merseyside broadcaster, continues to run a local ‘cinema’ of this kind in his garage, drawing on a personal collection of film and music from the 1930s. 13. See, for example, Views of Liners ‘Cedric’ and ‘Britannic’ (Preston Family, 1930), North West Film Archive. 14. See, for example, The Mersey Tunnels: 60 years 1934–94 (Angus Tilston Pleasures Past). 15. For details of films in Tilston’s collection, see http://www.liv.ac.uk/lsa/cityinfilm/ catalogue.html. 16. The ‘City in Film’ project 2006-08, ‘Mapping the City in Film’ 2008–10, see http:// www.liv.ac.uk/lsa/cityinfilm/. 17. Most of the amateur ferry films predate the more famous feature Ferry Cross the Mersey (Summers 1965), starring Gerry and the Pacemakers. 18. Interview with Angus Tilston, 20 October 2006. 19. For a more detailed account of this influence on Liverpool amateur filmmaker Frank Pyett and his film The Queen Square Market (1962), see Hallam (2007). 20. See, for example, Smith (1959). 21. Annette Kuhn suggests that memory texts of all types in all media share certain formal attributes, one of which is the distinctive organization of time in which ‘events are repetitive or cyclical’ (Kuhn, 2000: 189). 22. The market was demolished in 1964 and incorporated into the new St John’s precinct development. 23. Bootle is officially outside the Liverpool city boundary, although often incorporated within the city’s stories, sea songs, images and mythologies. For a discussion of the city’s contested boundaries in relation to amateur film practices see Hallam and Roberts (2009).

Bibliography Broadbent, J. (1936), ‘The Fascination of Amateur Cine Photography: The Activities of the Wallasey Amateur Cine Club’, The Liverpolitan, January: 39. Bruno, G. (1997), ‘Site-Seeing: Architecture and the Moving Image’, Wide Angle, 19(4): 8–24. Bruno, G. (2002), Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso). Coad, M. and Coad, J. (undated), IAC The Film and Video Institute: A History of the First 50 Years 1932–1982 (Surrey: Institute of Amateur Cinematographers).

86 City of Change and Challenge Cohen, S. (2007), Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: Beyond the Beatles (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate). Chalfen, R. (1987), Snapshot Versions of Life, Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. City Centre Planning Group (1965), Liverpool City Centre Plan (City and County Borough of Liverpool). Couch, C. (2003). City of Change and Challenge: Urban Planning and Regeneration in Liverpool (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate). Foucault, M. (1980). ‘The Eye of Power’, in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 by Michel Foucault (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf), pp. 146–65. Fullerton, J. and King, E. (2005), ‘Local Views, Distant Scenes: Registering Affect in Surviving Mexican Actuality Films of the 1920s’, Film History, 17: 766–87. Gunning, T. (1997), ‘Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Film and the “view” Aesthetic’, in D. Hertogs and N. de Klerk (eds), Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum), pp. 9–24. Hallam, J. (2007), ‘Mapping City Space: Independent Filmmakers as Urban Gazetteers’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 4(2): 272–84. Hallam, J. and Roberts, L. (2009), ‘Projecting Place: Mapping the City in Film’, Geospatial Computing for the Arts, Humanities and Cultural Heritage, 10 December, IEEE workshop papers, University of Oxford. Hogenkamp, B. and Lauwers, M. (1997), ‘In Pursuit of Happiness? A Search for the Definition of Amateur Film’, in N. Kapstein (ed.), Jubilee Book. Essays on Amateur Film (Charleroi, Association Europénne Inédits), pp. 107–16. Jarman, D. (1994), ‘A Different Kind of British Cinema’, The Terence Davies Trilogy VHS publicity release, reprinted in the Terence Davies Collection (UK 2008) (London, BFI). Kuhn, A. (2000), ‘A Journey through Memory’, in S. Radstone (ed.), Memory and Methodology (Oxford and New York: Berg), pp. 179–96. Landsberg, A. (2004), Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remeberance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press). MacDonald, M. (2006), ‘Performing Memory on Television: Documentary and the 1960s’, Screen 47(3): 327–45. McKeag, E. L. (1934), ‘Making a Documentary Film’, Pathescope Monthly, March: 5. Norris, Nicholson H. (1997), ‘In Amateur Hands: Framing Time and Space in Homemovies’, History Workshop Journal, 43: 199–212. Norris, Nicholson H. (2002), ‘Picturing the Past: Archival Film and Historical Landscape Change’, Landscapes, 1: 81–100. Norris Nicholson, H. (2007), ‘Virtuous or Virtual Histories?: Changing Ways of Working with Archival Film Footage’, presented at Future Histories of the Moving Image, University of Sunderland. Roberts, L. (2010), ‘Dis/embedded Geographies of Film: Virtual Panoramas and the Touristic Consumption of Liverpool Waterfront’, Space and Culture 13(1): 54–74. Roberts, L. and Koeck, R. (2007), ‘The Archive City: Reading Liverpool’s Urban Landscape Through Film’, in C. Grunenberg and R. Knifton (eds), Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), pp. 82–93. Shand, R. (2009), ‘Amateur Cinema Re-Located: Localism in Fact and Fiction’, in I. Craven (ed.), Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema (Newcastle upon Tynne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing), pp. 156–81.

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Shankland, G. (1962), City and County Borough of Liverpool Planning Consultants Report No. 7, Central Area Roads: Inner Motorway System (Liverpool: Liverpool City Council). Smith, J. (1959), ‘The Most Exciting Film Making’, Amateur Cine World 22 (12): 1230–2. Sturken, M. (2008), ‘Memory, Consumerism and Media: Reflections on the Emergence of the Field’, Memory Studies 1(1): 73–8. Tilston, A. (1991), ‘Forty Years in Amateur Filmmaking’, Tripod News North West, 67: 5–6.

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Part II Of Time and the City: Landscapes of Memory and Absence

Introduction With a nod to Terence Davies’s 2008 Liverpool documentary – or ‘visual poem’ as the filmmaker describes it – the title of this section refers to the ways in which film and filmmakers confront issues of absence, disappearance and memory, and, by extension, the ways these reconfigure ideas of place, landscape and urban form. Weaving together up a range of interconnected threads, the authors chart spatial and temporal geographies that invite oblique reflections on the layered nature of urban space as a repository of contested narratives, temporalities and memories. Exploring a range of urban settings, including London, Berlin, Detroit and Dachau, this section considers the role of film as mode of urban spatial practice in which absence – whether geographic (empty spaces, diasporic spaces, and non-places) or temporal (spaces of memory, loss and disappearance) – serves as a trope to chart some of modernity’s more dislocated geographies of place, space and urban narrative. Charlotte Brunsdon’s chapter maps the empty spaces that define the cinematic geography of a selection of feature films set in London from 1945 to the present day. The types of location and urban spaces that draw Brunsdon’s critical attention include bombsites, building and demolition sites, temporary car parks, parklands, and industrial spaces of dereliction, such as warehouses and docks. Noting that these liminal landscapes are attractive to filmmakers, not least because of their unregulated and logistically uncomplicated qualities, Brunsdon goes on to explore the interplay between empty spaces as fictional setting and as traces of other narratives, arguing that empty spaces in British cinema are ‘transitional sites in which different narratives and epistemologies collide’. Moving from London to Berlin, in Tara McDowell’s chapter on the work of the British-born artist and filmmaker Tacita Dean, she discusses two films which Dean shot in different locations in the city. The titles of the films, Fernsehturm (2001) and Palast (2004) refer explicitly to architectural structures that are deeply embedded in the history and consciousness of Berlin

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and the nation. The first film is located within the interior of the revolving restaurant that is situated in the sphere of the Fernsehturm, or Television Tower, which opened in 1969 in the centre of Alexanderplatz in the former German Democratic Republic. The second film focuses on the nearby Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic) which served as the seat of the East German parliament. Conducting a close reading of the optical moves and theories of vision operative in the two films, McDowell argues that Dean offers a model of sensing focused on the momentary, the fragment, and the material. McDowell suggests that the Fernsehturm and Palast not only reflect Dean’s career-long engagement with anachronism (most notably in relation to her unequivocal commitment to the medium of film) but are also chosen specifically to engage with the historicity of Berlin. The idea of the ‘disappearing city’ is one which has appeared frequently in the work of, for example, Patrick Keiller and Iain Sinclair, both of whom have been closely associated with poetics, politics and practices of psychogeography. The disappearing city is the focus of Ian Robinson’s chapter in which he provides a critical reading of a selection of recent city films, including Keiller’s London (1994), Jem Cohen’s Chain (2004), and Michael Chanan and George Steinmetz’s Detroit, Ruin of a City (2006). Robinson explores the ways in which the city in cinema is invoked by means of its absence. While noting that there are significant aesthetic differences between the three films, his analysis pulls together the common strands running through the films insofar as each is concerned with the theme of the contemporary city’s disappearance. Whether the result of rapid suburban growth, impoverishment, urban decay, abandonment, and economic restructuring, for Robinson the cities that form the subject of the three films under discussion highlight a ‘perceived crisis of urbanity’. The films of Cohen, Keiller, Chanan and Steinmetz are presented as exemplars of a cinematic mode of critical urban engagement which challenge dominant experiences of specific urban spaces and project alternative representations or mappings. Restoring temporality, memory and history, these films attempt to counteract the spaces of erasure and absence that have become increasingly pervasive in contemporary urban landscapes. Alan Marcus’s chapter evokes an altogether different space of memory, a landscape haunted by death, trauma and genocide. Based on his film In Place of Death (2008, 30 mins), Marcus explores the ways in which the weight and burden of history reconfigure a sense of place. The film uses an observational cinematic style to explore the relationship between the site of the infamous concentration camp and the picturesque Bavarian town that has now grown around it. Eschewing archival footage or photographs, the film focuses on the present as it observes streams of visitors to the Dachau camp, which is now a popular tourist attraction, with 800,000 people visiting the site annually. Prompted by the issues raised in In Place of Death, Marcus reflects on the layering of space and memory in Dachau, and the way the ‘ARBEIT MACHT FREI’ entrance gate and the crematoria serve as memento mori, anchoring the film and the visitor’s and viewer’s experience.

5 Towards a History of Empty Spaces Charlotte Brunsdon

This paper explores space and place in British cinema through an analysis of certain empty spaces in London-set feature films since 1945. I became interested in empty spaces when researching a book about London in the cinema, when I had to think about the relationships between the muchimaged, historical city of London and the Londons of the many different films set there. Cinematic empty spaces are, I want to suggest, places of both narrative and analytic possibility, where the challenges of simultaneously thinking aesthetically, historically and geographically about cinema can be articulated. These spaces are often the site of what we might call a ‘hesitation’ in the cinematic image, when it can be read either within the fictional world of the narrative, or as part of extra-filmic narratives about the history of the material city, or, more formally as a self-reflexive moment of urban landscape. Any attempt to give an account of these locations and spaces, which include bombsites, demolition and building sites, parks, temporary car-parks, derelict warehouses and docks, brings together a diverse group of films from different genres and requires attention both to the theorization of the nature of the cinematic image and to the interplay of narration, genre, and geography. It also presses at some of the disciplinary boundaries of film studies, for one of the ways in which film scholars have, historically, tended to differentiate themselves from scholars in other disciplines and ordinary – naïve – viewers is by not reading films for what they reveal about their settings. This type of setting is attractive to filmmakers because of its often un-regulated, liminal quality. It is usually easy to film in these locations, and the space can often be dressed without restriction, sometimes so that its original qualities disappear completely. The repeated citing of the transformation of the disused East London Beckton gas works into Saigon for Full Metal Jacket (1987) indicates both the cinematic magic that is possible, and the continued pleasure that fans with this knowledge get from revealing it (Pendreigh, 1995: 26–7). These spaces are often used as settings for 91

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location shooting, but are themselves often unidentifiable and transitory. Nevertheless, within many film narratives, these spaces sometimes retain a certain recalcitrance of the real, which speaks to other stories than those being told by the film set there. It is this interplay between the empty space as fictional setting and the empty space as a trace of other stories that this paper will explore. I am interested in these empty spaces of British cinema as transitional sites in which different narratives and epistemologies collide. My examples here will be limited to a discussion of bombsites and a South London brownfield site, Nine Elms. However there are a large number of other types of empty spaces in London-set films, which include the spaces of office building found in 1960s films such as Victim (1961) (made within the period of the first postwar property boom), and residential redevelopment in the East London set Sparrows Can’t Sing (1962), the West London Smashing Time (1967) and the South London Up the Junction (1965 and 1967). There are the uncanny empty Londons of Seven Days to Noon (1950) and 28 Days Later (2002), in which emptiness refigures the city. Michelangelo Antonioni’s London excursion, Blow-Up (1966), famously concerns itself with the meaning of images of a deserted London park in a manner which explicitly explores questions about the nature of the photographic image and the cinematic empty space. Analysis of The Long Good Friday (1979/81), a key referent in discussion of London in the cinema, usually alludes to the London Docks settings, recognizing that much of the film’s power comes from its self-conscious use of what can now be read as pre-Docklands dereliction. Urban wastelands recur in different generic contexts in films from the 1970s and 1980s like Pressure (1974/6), Black Joy (1977), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) and The Last of England (1987), each of which, in different ways, can be seen to include a meditation on empty spaces as signifiers of the end of Empire. My implicit argument, of which this is a first formulation, is that consideration of some of the very different cinematic appearances of this type of setting can provide contours for a history of postwar cinematic London which is attentive to filmic specificity and the histories of both postwar London and postwar British film.

Cinema – space – place The existence of this themed journal issue, alongside others such as an edition of New Formations entitled ‘The Spatial Imaginary’ (no. 57, 2005–6), or the repeated citation of the work of cultural geographers such as Edward Soja (1989) and Doreen Massey (1994) by humanities scholars, testifies to what has sometimes been called ‘the spatial turn’. This ‘spatial turn’ has particular implications for the cinema, a medium which can be seen as constituted through the articulation of different kinds of spaces in time, and which seems so readily to render up real spaces for contemplation. In this

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section, I want to sketch some preliminaries to thinking about space and place in the cinema in relation to London-set films. That is, my interest is with ideas of space and place in relation to a particular cinematic city, rather than with the juxtaposition of ‘cinema and the city’ which has proved so generative, particularly in relation to the understanding of modernity.1 In a suggestive conversation between the television scholar Karen Lury and the geographer Doreen Massey at the beginning of the 1999 special issue of Screen on ‘Space/place, city and film’, Lury refers to her disappointment at some student work which explores ‘space and place’ in relation to specific film texts which she characterizes as ‘sometimes little more than re-descriptions, where crudely drawn “maps” of the social world are shown to fit the topography of the film in question’ (237). This labour of ‘redescription’ is often accompanied by another tendency. This is a referential geographical literalism. In this, the setting of a film is discussed in terms of where it was shot, often in a way which suggests that a perfect cinema would be one of absolute geographical veracity. This ‘discourse of geographical literalism’ has both commonsense and academic variants, in each of which there can be a flaunting of ‘insider’ geographical familiarity with the film’s referential location, as if it would be obvious to all viewers that, for example, if a character turns out of this street, they would not be in that park. One strand of this discourse, much manifest in location guides to the cinema, concerns itself with the question of where scenes were ‘really shot’, as it is often written, as if, in all the fiction-making and acting that constitutes cinema, locations have a greater responsibility than, say, actors, to only play themselves.2 And it is partly against this location buffery and commonsense that film scholarship has distinguished itself, instead insisting on the fictiveness of cinematic worlds, just as there is an insistence on using character, rather than actor, names. Common sense, though, has something going for it. Obvious contempt for, or ignorance of, plausible geographies can interfere with belief in the fictional world of the film. In the 1980s, I read many Scottish student examination papers chiding the producers of Local Hero (1983) for attempting to pass off the east coast of Scotland for the west coast. In this case, the distinctiveness of the coastal settlements of east and west coast villages ruptured the plausibility of the film for these viewers, a rupture which was augmented by the suspicion that the film-makers did not care much about the small Scottish audience which would know the difference, as opposed to the large US audience which would not. Similarly, reviews of Woody Allen’s London film, Matchpoint (2006), drew attention to the contrast between his insider New York films and this rather clichéd, geographically incoherent London. The real intervenes in the fiction – at least for some audiences. However, in another way, the editing together of the spatially distinct is the essence of cinema, as we see in any cut on movement as a character goes through a door, or, less classically, in the use of location shot footage from three different cities to produce the

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modern Soviet city of Man with the Movie Camera (1929). To reduce cinema to mapping the real is to deny the imaginative potential of the medium – but sometimes, to ignore the place of the real can seem perverse. Place in cinema is made through the editing together of different spaces which may or may not have any pro-filmic proximity, and which may or may not involve a coincidence between location and nominated setting. Just as it can be made in different ways, place in cinema can also be read in different ways. To attend location-shot Turkish films during the Turkish film festival at the Rio Cinema in Dalston in North East London in recent years is to be surrounded by an audience remembering and commenting on images of their homeland. The large and growing Turkish and Kurdish communities of the area can sustain this festival in which many of the films are consumed in an excited and voluble engagement with memory, change and exile. Here the pleasures of the cinema are perhaps more substantially derived from seeing, for example, Istanbul, rather than seeing any particular story set there. The coincidence of the traveller’s gaze and the cinema-goer’s gaze has a long history. It is an aspect of the panoramic origins of cinema, the mobilization of a virtual gaze which permits the viewer to visit distant and exotic places, or, as this example shows, having made these journeys, to remember the familiar.3 These cinematic sights have always included the banal as well as the exotic. In 1980, I watched the Tony Garnett film Prostitute in the Birmingham Odeon not far from where it was filmed, and the auditorium there too was full of the whispers of recognition. Sometimes these recognitions will contrast strongly with the way in which a film is using a location, or, as in that case, implicate people and locations in activities with which they were not always comfortable. The use of location shooting can work in different ways simultaneously, eliciting recognition of a cinematically rendered real, guaranteeing the authenticity of a story and disrupting the coherence of the imagined cinematic world. Consideration of space and place in the cinema can thus never be a matter of singular relations or correspondences. We may be able to distinguish usefully between ways of thinking about cinema as a mobile ‘technology of vision’, which can bring the distant, the exotic, and the familiar, to the screen, and cinema as a ‘technology of place’, which emphasizes its capacity for ‘place-making’, through its constitutive labour of camera movement, framing and editing. This distinction between different emphases in thinking about the relationship between the cinema and place does not, however, translate into a cinema which shows places and a cinema which makes places. For film must make places to show them; what we see on the screen is always a view. It can, however be considered alongside a distinction made by Peter Wollen between the static, architectural spaces made by the set and production designers, and the dynamic spaces of the cinematographer and editor (2002: 202). It is all these different kinds of spaces and places, with their different regimes of coherence, truth and reality, which are in play in most films. I am

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interested in whether it is possible to look at a London-set film in a way which is attentive both to the way in which films make places up, and to the places it shows. This is a concern with both the trace and the narration of place. Here it might be helpful to cite an account of anthropological place given by Marc Augé as a way of thinking about relationships between place in cinema and what we might call place in the world. Augé describes place as follows: ‘place – anthropological place – is a principle of meaning for the people who live in it, and also a principle of intelligibility for the person who observes it.’ (1995: 52). He continues, ‘These places have at least three characteristics in common. They want to be – people want them to be – places of identity, of relations and of history’ (ibid.: 52). This notion of place as ‘meaningful’ is the principal way in which it is distinguished from space in much discussion, as the editors of New Formations do when their question ‘How then does space become place?’ is answered, ‘Place is space to which meaning has been ascribed.’(Carter et al. 1993: xii). Augé’s notion of place as a ‘principle of intelligibility for the person who observes it’ is a more useful way of thinking about the relationships between cinematic place and place in the world than the pursuit of a cinema of geographical veracity, for it inscribes point of view into the definition, and it is this that I will explore in the analyses below. For place in the cinema is always place observed. But this notion of a ‘principle of intelligibility’ must, I think, be held with the possibility that, as Nowell-Smith (2001) argues, some location shot films do indeed render up ‘a sense of place’ as a result of the coincidence between location and nominated setting. These are the axes within which I want to begin to think about the empty spaces of some London-set films, and in what follows, I will be using ‘place’ in these two slightly different senses. On the one hand, I will loosely follow Augé with a distinction between ‘place’, as opposed to space, as socially meaningful, historical and cultural. On the other, I will use ‘place’ in the way NowellSmith does when talking about location shooting, and the way in which in some – just some films – location shooting does ‘render up a sense of place’. By this, I understand him to mean a sense of a ‘there-ness’ which pre-existed the film, but which the film through its use of the photographic medium – however one theorizes this – makes present. What this might entail can be indicated in relation to Anthony Simmons’s 1973 film The Optimists of Nine Elms which has wonderful location shot footage of wastelands bordering the River Thames in the Battersea and Chelsea areas. Much of the wasteland footage was shot in what is now Chelsea Harbour,4 on the north bank of the Thames, opposite the south London ‘Nine Elms’ of the title. Location shooting here renders something of early 1970s London riverside – there is a real here, and a strong sense of the riverside – even if it’s not quite the real promised by the title. Quite where on the River this was shot is irrelevant to the film: what is significant is the sense of abandoned space where ordinary rules do not quite apply.

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It is the lure of this space out of time which, in the diegetic world of the film, attracts the young brother and sister who make friends with an elderly busker (Peter Sellers) who lives there. But watching the film in the twentyfirst century there is a changed valency to the relation between story and setting, and the desolate, now-vanished London riverscape grows in significance. It is the subsequent disappearance of the film’s setting, as well as its narrative presence, which demands attention. In the words of Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, who was discussing the ruined Rome of neo-realist cinema, the film shows ‘this is how things were’ (2001: 105). The empty spaces of this film document longer narratives than those of its characters, but narratives of which these characters, with their yearning for a new council flat, are a part. Stories of a London in transition, where the old riverside trades and light industries are in decline, but where Battersea Power Station is still working, pumping out the electricity for the city from river-borne coal. Made just before the 1973 oil crisis, the dreams of modernity – new tower blocks – are consciously juxtaposed with Victorian entertainments, buskers and tame pet birds. Thirty or so years later, the film’s conscious exploration of old and new Londons is itself transformed by a transformed London in which Battersea Power Station is now derelict, Chelsea Harbour has been created, and the City’s colonization of the south bank of the Thames with ‘stunning apartments’ and offices continues apace.

Bombsites: The empty spaces of possibility The most obvious empty spaces of post-Second World War British cinema are bombsites: cleared ground, ruined houses, debris – a rich symbolic terrain. The contrast between what is left standing and what has been destroyed offer many possibilities for distinctive visual compositions which proved attractive to filmmakers all over Europe. Bombsites and war damage provide imagery for disruptions in the social fabric which is both material and metaphoric. The question here is how the symbolic possibilities of this imagery are mobilized. Although British cinema is, of course, not alone in the use of bombsite settings in the postwar period (the work of Roberto Rossellini is an obvious comparison), it is noticeable that in British cinema bombsites are principally, in this period, spaces of possibility. The memorializing potential of bombsites, the inscription of destruction and death, or the arduousness of survivors’ lives, are not the stuff of British cinema. More common is the attitude expressed by Dr Montgomery (Alastair Sim) at the end of Waterloo Road (1945). The film is framed by the doctor’s visit to the house of the Coulter family in a partially wrecked terrace, standing in empty ground by Waterloo Station, and he acts as a voice of authority and narrator. After advising the baby’s mother not to indulge him if he is to be a good citizen, the doctor gazes at the surrounding devastation, concluding, with optimism: ‘Well, Jimmy my boy, you’ve got the future, it’s all yours’.

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One of the more fondly remembered empty spaces of British cinema is the bombsite at the end of the 1947 Ealing film, Hue and Cry.5 Despite Charles Barr’s comment that the charms of this film largely escape him (1977: 94), the shots of the gang of boys running together at the film’s climax to foil the criminals have been seen to represent the freedom and excitement of postwar Britain, just as it is on and through a bombsite that the limited fantasy of Passport to Pimlico (1949) is played out. Annette Kuhn has commented on the symbolic role of the bombsite in Alexander Mackendrick’s 1952 film Mandy about the education of a little deaf girl.6 In an essay which argues for the importance of attending to memory in critical practice, Kuhn shows how significant is the wasteland in this film, noting that the bombsite is ‘an object of desire for us as much as for Mandy’, and arguing that the ‘mise-en-scene of the bombsite speaks a preoccupation that, unspoken yet insistent, pervades the entire film: the relation between past and future’ (1995: 37). Kuhn’s analysis enacts something of the ‘hesitation’ in which I am interested, as she discusses the film through three different historical viewings of her own, as a child, as a film teacher influenced by structuralism in 1980 and as the current author, whose later reflection on these earlier readings is more attentive to both personal and cultural memory and historical context. To know the bombsite beyond the garden at the back of Mandy’s grandparents’ house with the child’s knowledge in the film, as a place which is simultaneously wide-open and forbidden, attractive and frightening, is a quite different knowledge to that brought by the film critic with an understanding of the historical moment of a postwar film made in 1951. While the child Kuhn could see only the little girl’s struggles, and the structuralist scholar Kuhn did not attend to the sociocultural context of the film, the later critic-as-memory scholar can see both the diegetic and the broader socio-historical and symbolic resonances of the wasteland. She reads the empty spaces of the bombsite as both a narrative and a material space.

Villain and the end of the 1960s The 1971 film, Villain, scripted by Dick Clements and Ian La Frenais, is widely seen as based on the Kray Twins.7 Richard Burton plays Vic Dakin, a London gangster who lives with his mother and lusts after Wolfie (Ian McShane), a 1960s, class-mobile criminal fixer who procures call-girls, dabbles in drug dealing, orchestrates blackmail and accepts Dakin’s sadistic homosexual advances. While Performance, with its aura of sex and drugs and rock and roll, has been greeted as the definitive Krays/end of the 1960s movie, Michael Tuchner’s seedier story repays further investigation. Robert Murphy groups Villain and Performance with The Strange Affair (1968), The Reckoning (1970), and Get Carter (1971) as films set in ‘a post-swinging Britain where permissiveness has curdled into pornography and violence’

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(1999: 124). Leon Hunt (1999) points to continuities between Villain and the British television crime series The Sweeney, as well as the spin-off feature films, Sweeney! (1977) and Sweeney 2 (1978), and cites the recurrence of ‘the anomic urban wasteland’ in these fictions.8 The film has a memorable ‘empty space’ finale, set partly under disused railway arches in South London. Before discussing this scene, which offers a rather more banal and materially grounded end to the 1960s than the hallucinogenic London of Performance, I wish to look at an earlier setting in the film, the location of the factory outside which the film’s central narrative event, a wages hold-up, takes place. The factory is built in an out-of-town greenfield site, approached by new, motorway-style roads with access roads and bridges. There is a building site next to the factory, where a much higher, systems-built block is being built, but there is little else there: fields, some trees, a telephone box. ‘Fancy living here’ speculates Dakin when they reconnoitre the site, ‘telly all the week, screw the wife on Saturday’. This is the film’s other empty space, the greenfield site which matches the finale’s brownfield site. Here, the 1960s seem, at first glance to be continuing: cleaner, newer workplaces, modern buildings, girls in miniskirts. A modernity built on the mobility of the car and a suburbanization of Britain on the US model. This is a cleaner, greener, post-urban Britain, a dream of a life in which Britain becomes modern and will escape the grubbiness of the city and people like Dakin. It is this virgin site which both appals Dakin and attracts him for the easy takings of a wages grab. In the film’s final section, Dakin is searching for the money from this botched wages raid. Having kidnapped from hospital the accomplice who has hidden the money, Dakin forces him to disclose its whereabouts in a scene set in a partially disused factory site. The money must be retrieved from under a railway arch in an extensive South London urban wasteland. This was filmed in South London, at Nine Elms, on a site which was later redeveloped for the New Covent Garden Market. In the first of these scenes, the dereliction and scale of the factory is accentuated by the pyjamas – the indoor, private garments – of the sick man (Joss Ackland). In the second, the long approach to the railway viaduct, filmed in long shot, gives the scale of the empty land, while the sculptural shapes of the railways arches are used to frame the action, and, as the scene proceeds, to suggest that, whichever way he turns, Dakin is unlikely to escape. The light at the end of an arch seems to promise an escape, but the wasteland is too empty and too bright. The strong contrasts between light and shade permitted by the arches are given texture through the close-ups on the dark bricks, in parts glistening with dripping water, so that these last frantic moments render a vivid sense of the detailed materiality of ‘the anomic urban wasteland’. This detail is realized most precisely in the rendition of Wolfie’s decision to abandon Vic Dakin. He sits down just inside one of the arches, where the sun catches the brickwork, and raises his face to the sun, rather than to Vic.

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The police pursuit of Dakin fills the foreground of the wasteland with cars and people: law is being brought to this space on the edges of the social. But to do this convincingly, to make the contest between Dakin and the police more than just a duel between men, the film recruits ‘the public’ in a significant spatial move. The isolation of the wasteland, filmed mainly in long shot, is now countered by three swift edited medium shots of onlookers: women on a council block balcony, men on a building site and more tenants on another block. It is the editing and the direction of the actors’ gazes, rather than any pre-existing proximity, which creates the location of these onlookers. Motionless figures staring at the denouement, they in some ways represent the audience, also caught in the unravelling of Vic Dakin’s world. But they are also part of this denouement, for in their presence, they reorder the empty space: they give social borders to the wasteland. The degree of close-up and the editing make them seem quite close. What had seemed to be an empty space turns out to be a place. The wasteland cannot be as big as it seems. It is not completely outside the social world. The police officer (Nigel Davenport) draws attention to these ‘witnesses’, and the sequence of shots, slightly different, is repeated; the film ends on Vic Dakin shouting ‘What are you looking at?’ Proximate onlookers and cinema audience are challenged together as we stare at Vic’s humiliation: we are the witnesses who testify to existence of the social. Here we see the narrative articulation of an empty space, through editing, into a place. So the allure of the empty urban space for those thinking about the cinema and the city lies partly in the question of what these spaces are empty of. More than one thing, must be the short answer. At the level of the fictional world of the film, these spaces, when they first appear on the screen, are empty of narrative. They are immanent: spaces in which something might happen. Something might be found, someone might hide. Read within the longer narratives of the city, these spaces are often not so much ‘empty’ spaces as ‘emptied’ spaces, bearing traces of earlier settlement, labour or industry. The passage of time renders this vision too one of immanence: this is what was there before. These spaces are also often empty of the characteristics of the social: order, government, control. These are spaces, not places. However, the film’s narrative can render them place-like, just as property development (like filming) can make them both disappear and re-emerge. It is this doubled immanence that enables us to understand what I have proposed as the hesitation which characterizes these cinematic spaces. For it is as we look, considering what might happen, that we must also pay attention to the detail of the image, its lineaments and shading: its qualities as image.

Coda: The architectural model To conclude, I want to draw attention to the use of the architectural model in British cinema. This is because models can be seen to represent the

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opposite of the empty space in the cinema. While the empty space has an immanence which can be imagined and realized in quite different ways, the architectural model works rather differently. Obviously symbolic in films ranging from The Long Good Friday (1979/81) to Close My Eyes (1991) and Breaking and Entering (2006), the architectural model offers a precisely imagined future possibility. The empty space and the architectural model can also be seen to embody the classical contrast between two different ways of film making: one which demands a long take, shots in which not everything can be controlled, and the other epitomizing the minutely controlled environment of studio production. While not as common as empty spaces, architectural models make some significant cinematic appearances, and the role of the architect in cinema has attracted scholars interested in the relationships between cinema and the built environment.9 Peter Wollen comments, in a discussion of Dietrich Neumann’s book, Film Architecture (1999), that in the cinema, the architectural profession often represents ‘criminal lunacy, pathetic farce or untrammelled despotism’ (2002: 209). The architect’s model often functions as a metonym for architecture and the architect, but in British cinema, rather than mad and bad, architects, particularly when connected to planning, can be liberal and conscientious; worried professionals who want to make life better, like the Clive Owen character in Close My Eyes and the Jude Law character in Breaking and Entering. In this context, a significant model is that made by the shopkeeper Mr Pemberton (Stanley Holloway) in the 1949 Ealing film Passport to Pimlico. Mr Pemberton is no architect, and the film specifies that he has made his model of ‘somewhere for the kiddies’ in his spare time. However, his plan for the redevelopment of the bombsite is made to a high standard, with features recognizable as partaking of the look of British modernism shortly to be realized most fully in the 1951 Festival of Britain. Charles Barr gives a convincing analysis of Mr Pemberton’s model, arguing that the disputed plans for the future of the site condense not only the key conflict of the film, but also that of reconstructing Britain and the relative attention due to communal projects and individual enterprise (1977: 80–1, 100). In Passport to Pimlico, Mr Pemberton loses the vote at the Council meeting, and his main antagonist, Mr Wix (Raymond Huntley), flicks cigarette ash onto his playground model. However, the rest of the film explores the conflict between these different valuations of community, and by the end, we know that Mr Pemberton’s recreation ground will be built, even though, outside Ealing, Mr Wix could be seen to have his way with the election of the 1951 Conservative government. The model in Passport to Pimlico returns us to the postwar bombsites with which I started. Barr encourages us to read this model as symbolic of both postwar possibilities and retreats. The symbolic weight of the architectural model is also apparent in a London-set film made more than 50 years after Passport, Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering. However, here, the

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social terrain and aspirations of the model are much less readable and, perhaps, rather contradictory. The model in Breaking and Entering is of the redevelopment not of a bombsite, but of a notoriously, and historically, poor area which includes King’s Cross station, the railway yards and buildings behind it and the Grand Union Canal which runs through the area. Just as Passport to Pimlico was made when there was considerable debate about how postwar London should be shaped, Minghella’s film was released while the King’s Cross area was still in the travails of the redevelopment attendant on the relocation of the Channel Tunnel terminal. The film’s geography is focused on the new office, a converted nineteenth-century building – in King’s Cross – of a small, liberal company specializing in landscape architecture. This office, in the words of Ray Winstone’s policeman, is ‘a fabulous building in a hostile community: crack village with a load of Somalis walking around with machetes’. The film could be seen to, ambitiously, bring together the distinct cinematic Londons of Notting Hill (1999) and Dirty Pretty Things (2002) in a tale of the frontier gentrification of King’s Cross. The liberal professional middle classes with the pale interiors of their remodelled nineteenth-century houses and refurbished former industrial buildings are juxtaposed with the street characters of King’s Cross: prostitutes, illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, thieves and racketeers who live and work in holes and corners of a dirty, disintegrating city. It is a London which is both Dickensian – boys used for audacious ‘free-running’ break-ins – and melodramatic in its shading of character and narrative development.10 And there is, at the centre of the film, rather like a Russian doll within the refurbished office, an architectural model of the redevelopment of the area. Like the model in Passport to Pimlico this model too bears symbolic weight within the film. Although regarded with enthusiasm within the fiction, the model suggests another view of the area. For the simplicity of the yellow-bricked double arch of King’s Cross Station and its surroundings is rendered in mattblack, obliterating all the features and distinctions of the area. There are some little models of isolated individuals placed on the model. The dream of ‘writing with the water of the canal’ expounded by the Law character evidently makes it impossible for the new planned spaces to be used to get anywhere, or to be multi-functional in the classic historical manner of the city street. The new vision of the area is one in which everything that preceded it, including the untidy local businesses and the unruly poor – the mess of deprivation and exploitation – are obliterated. Mr Pemberton’s model imagined the transformation of the empty space of the bombsite into a place that was socially shared. Sixty years later, the imagination represented by the architect’s model on the demolished empty space behind King’s Cross, is of somewhere from which the people have been evacuated. It looks as if it’s going to be a place: but in fact it lacks the social patterning and use – the meaning – which makes a place and instead it is only a model of a place, a space in disguise.

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So in the postwar bombsite films, the empty spaces offer opportunities for social debate and the imagining of the future: what kinds of places will be made, what kinds of citizens will these children grow up to be? In Villain, a derelict empty space is edited into society, but there is a kind of desperation in this textual move which is in some ways analogous with Vic Dakin’s angry despair. And the dereliction of this site, which is identified through the looming chimneys of Battersea Power Station, has persisted, even though it is partly redeveloped, because the power station itself is now derelict, caught in property speculation and the increase in inner London land values. ‘It’s a cock-up’, as Wolfie observes, but one which will prove very profitable for some. But the fate of King’s Cross is still in contestation: will the redevelopment of the Railway Lands behind the station permit the types of local residence, businesses and labour which underpin place making,11 or will the renovated King’s Cross behind the refurbished St Pancras Midland Hotel turn out to be as fake a place as it is in the movie?

Note This article was first published, with illustrations, in Journal of British Cinema and Television (Vol. 4, no. 2, 2007), and is reprinted here with the kind permission of Edinburgh University Press (www.eupjournals.com/jbctv), who retain copyright.

Notes 1. See, for example, Charney and Schwartz (1995). 2. Thom Andersen’s film Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) offers an extended, historically specific exploration of this argument. 3. See, for example, Giuliana Bruno’s analysis of cinematic Naples (1993) and Anne Friedberg’s account of ‘the virtual window’ (2006). 4. Anthony Simmons, Q&A session, National Film Theatre, 10 April 2007. 5. Hue and Cry is the first film extracted in Alan Parker’s A Turnip Head’s Guide to the Cinema (Ch. 4, 12/3/86), and he observes, ‘The bombsites of Hue and Cry were the same secretive world we inhabited as kids’. 6. See also Cook (1986), who also argues for the significance of Mandy venturing out to play, although she does not mention the bombsite as such. 7. For example, Chibnall and Murphy refer to ‘its Ronnie Kray-like protagonist’ (1999: 4), Reeves refers to ‘a thinly disguised portrait of gay London gangster Ronnie Kray’ (2003: 70). 8. Hunt is quoting Dennington and Tulloch (1976), who do not discuss the setting further. 9. See, for example, essays in François Penz and Maureen Thomas (eds) Cinema and Architecture (London: BFI, 1997) and Mark Lamster, Architecture and Film (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000). 10. On a return to a ‘Dickensian’ London, see Orr (2002). 11. See King’s Cross Railway Lands Group (KXRLG) website for documentation of this struggle: http://www.kxrlg.org.uk.

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Bibliography Adams, M. (2003). Location London (London: New Holland Publishers). AlSayyad, N. (2006). Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Real to Reel (New York: Routledge, 2006). Augé, M. (1995[1992]). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Super-Modernity, translated by John Howe (London: Verso). Barr, C. (1977). Ealing Studios (London: Cameron and Tayleur in association with David and Charles). Bruno, G. (1993). Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Carter, E., Donald, J. and Squires, J. (1993). ‘Introduction’ to Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location (London: Lawrence and Wishart). Charney, L. and Schwartz, V. R. (1995). Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). Chibnall, S. and Murphy, R. (eds) (1999). British Crime Cinema (London: Routledge). Cook, P. (1986). ‘Mandy: Daughter of Transition’, in C. Barr (ed.). All Our Yesterdays (London: BFI), pp. 355–61. Dennington, M. and Tulloch, J. (1976). ‘Cops, Consensus and Ideology’. Screen Education 20: 37–46. Friedberg, F. (2006). The Virtual Window (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Hunt, L. (1999). ‘Dog Eat Dog: The Squeeze and the Sweeney Films’, in S. Chibnall and R. Murphy (eds). British Crime Cinema (London: Routledge). Kuhn, A. (1995). ‘The Little Girl Wants to be Heard’, in Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London: Verso). Lury, K. and Massey, D. (eds) (1999). ‘Making Connections’, Screen 40.3: 229–38. Lamster, M. (ed.) (2000). Architecture and Film (New York: Princeton Architectural Press). Massey, D. (1994). Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press). Murphy, R. (1999). ‘A Revenger’s Tragedy: Get Carter’, in S. Chibnall and R. Murphy (eds), British Crime Cinema (London: Routledge). Neumann, D. (1999). Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner (Munich: Preston Verlag). Nowell-Smith, G. (2001). ‘Cities Real and Imagined’, in M. Shiel and T. Fitzmaurice (eds), Cinema and the City (Oxford: Blackwell). Orr, J. (2002). ‘Traducing Realisms: Naked and Nil By Mouth’, Journal of Popular British Cinema, 5: 104–13. Pendreigh, B. (1995). On Location: A Film Fan’s Guide to Britain and Ireland (Edinburgh and London: Mainstream Publishing). Penz, F. and Thomas, M. (eds) (1997). Cinema and Architecture (London: British Film Institute). Reeves, T. (2003). The Worldwide Guide to Movie Location Presents London (London: Titan Publishing). Soja, E. (1989). Postmodern Geographies (London: Verso). Wollen, P. (2002). Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (London: Verso).

6 Tacita Dean’s Optics of Refusal Tara McDowell

In recent years Tacita Dean has made two films in which she trains her camera on sites in Berlin, where the British-born artist now makes her home.1 The titles of the films explicitly name their subjects, both of which are architectural structures deeply embedded in the history and consciousness of Berlin and the nation: Fernsehturm and Palast. The Fernsehturm, or Television Tower, stands nearly 400 metres tall in the centre of Alexanderplatz, the political nexus of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) and a still vital urban hub. For the second film Dean takes as her subject the Palast der Republik, or Palace of the Republic, which was located not much more than a stone’s throw away, across the Marx-Engels-Forum and on an axis with the tower. Also a building project of the GDR, the Palast served as the seat of the East German parliament, but also as a site of enforced culture containing restaurants, theatres, and a bowling alley. Dean’s focus on these two sites is hardly accidental. Indeed, they are chosen to engage with the still-fraught historicity of this city. Each structure, in its own way, has ceded its originary function in the post-Wall era: the television tower has been transformed from a spectacle of the state to one of global capital and its bedfellow, tourism, while the Palast has suffered a more ignominious, and certainly more contentious, fate, as its slow and methodical demolition is now complete. The two portraits of place Dean has made can easily be read as memorializations of these sites – each film condenses a day passing into night, after all, with the optics of a setting sun displayed to full effect. But beyond these initial observations lie further questions. What propositions do these two films put forward about how the city can be seen? What image of Berlin emerges when the films are read – as they have yet to be – as pendents? With what theories of vision are Dean’s optics in accord? What do her optics refuse? For on view in these elegiac films is another form of memorialization, one aligned with certain theories of how the city is perceived in modernity from Baudelaire to Benjamin. This is the logic of the partial view, the glimpse or glance that is the embodied, sited view of the city. And yet, as Benjamin knew full well, this is vision haunted 104

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at every turn by the totality: the dream of the total image, the panorama, and the disembodied and disinterested gaze of the flâneur. Dean knows, too, that these two images of the city always go hand-in-hand, and brings their dialectical relationship to bear on the peculiar struggle of appearance and disappearance that marks the visuality of post-Wall Berlin. Dean’s film Fernsehturm (2001) takes place within the restaurant located in the sphere of the television tower, some 200 metres above ground (Figure 6.1). It begins with a static shot of empty tables covered with white tablecloths, flanked by sturdy and functional navy chairs, and adorned with modern metal lamps which recede into the distance with a serial precision matched by the regularity of the vertical windows enclosing the space. A waitress winds her way around the tables, placing silverware and adjusting chairs just so, impervious to the gaze of the camera and – it takes a moment to register this – that the setting is in motion. It seems the building travels towards us, but moments later the opposite becomes apparent: the circular floor of the restaurant, upon which the camera is placed, rotates in a clockwise direction. The camera’s fixity – it is always stationary, without recourse to zooming or panning shots – subtly frames this steady, understated movement as it occurs, often in real time. Soon the restaurant’s patrons arrive, their conversations captured off-camera as a din of noise before they enter the scene. They are shadowy figures who pause to take in the main attraction, the view, and gesture towards it to their dining companions. And yet this view is purposefully withheld from us. Nearly impossible to make out through the windows, it remains kept at a remove, a hazy abstraction. There is a tension here, already put into play in these first few minutes of the film, between the extreme partialness, or incompleteness, of the vision we are offered by the camera – literally emphasized by the patrons’ gestures towards a view withheld from the viewer – and

Figure 6.1 Tacita Dean, Fernsehturm, 2001. Film still, 16 mm colour anamorphic, optical sound, 44 min. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Firth Street Gallery, London.

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the expansive, unhurried time devoted to the scene Dean films. This is a form of film making that takes its cues from that of its employed medium: the camera as frame and the linearity of film fed through its apparatus. This structure is borne out through the whole of the film, whose visual field is rigorously restricted even while the sense of time is languorous, a day and night passing.2 As the sun sets, the camera takes up other positions: we see the diners from the stationary centre of the restaurant, the hands of the keyboardist who begins to play old standards, a lamp that turns on as it passes before the screen. Night deepens, the restaurant empties out and the overhead lights are turned on, obscuring any exterior view. The waitress returns to clear the tables and the film ends much as it began, a completed cycle. The limited visuality referred to above results from the camera’s refusal to present the total image the structure is intended to allow: not only that of the television tower’s iconic exterior, but also the panoramic view of the city below which the ploy of the revolving restaurant would afford us. These very refusals lay bare our expectations of what the camera should offer us: that, for example, we expect to be sited within the restaurant by being shown the tower. Instead the parameters of vision are fixed, held to a minimum of careful, and carefully framed shots that comprise the film, as if an almost forcible concentration on this place – a claustrophobically close and studied view – will preserve it in this moment in time. We might say that this very lack of total visibility is emphasized, its absence made palpable, by the generosity of both time and sound Dean is at pains to provide. Dean writes short essays on each film which she calls ‘asides’, from the Shakespearean device of relaying information to the audience unheard by the actors on stage. In her essay about the television tower she writes, among other things, that the Fernsehturm was visionary in its time and yet has become out of date. It is, for her, ‘the perfect anachronism’ (Dean, 2005: 30). The restaurant, too, is a holdover, a modernist relic which, in Dean’s hands, reveals no markers of the contemporary: no cell phones ring, no brand-name t-shirts come into view, and the keyboardist plays ‘The Blue Danube’. Dean has remarked on the impending obsolescence of analogue processes, another soon-to-be anachronism: ‘I cannot be seduced by the seamlessness of digital time, like digital silence, it has a deadness. I like the time you can hear passing: the prickled silence of mute magnetic tape or the static on a record’ (Dean, 2002: 58). Embedded in the model of perception she offers is an attention, whenever possible, to the sensorium. Silence you can hear, vision you can touch, memories you can smell; this last phrase derives from Dean’s recounting of a trip to Berlin in 1987, and her memory of ‘that particularly indefinable smell of the East: of brown coal mixed with cheap tobacco, soap, and something else’ as well as the ‘cloying smell’ of the cakes sold in the tower restaurant (Eugenides, 2006: 37). With the fall of the East German state, the length of the restaurant’s rotation, which formerly occurred in exactly

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one hour, the amount of time customers were allowed to dine, was cut to 30 minutes (Dean, 2005: 30).3 Perhaps, then, it is not by chance that Dean’s film comes in at 44 minutes, almost caught between past and present. ‘The Tower’, the Fernsehturm website tells us, ‘has not lost any of its charm since the 1990 reunification of Germany’.4 This is an odd choice of words, but it is a choice that reflects the current ideology of the tower well. The tower, formerly an omnipresent if propagandistic symbol of the might and technological prowess of the former East German state (despite being built by Western engineers), is now consciously positioned as a tourist attraction.5 Perhaps this new status is unsurprising given its place in the new order of global capital’s information and image regime. The Deutsche Telekom purchased the tower after reunification, and while the corporation’s presence is shadowy at best – its name is nowhere to be found on the tower’s website – it made a dramatic appearance not long ago. For the 2006 FIFA World Cup, a truly global media event, the sphere of the television tower was decorated in silver and magenta foils to resemble a massive soccer ball; these are, of course, the colours of Deutsche Telekom, one of the main corporate sponsors of the event. This spectacular image highlights rather pointedly what Dean does not show us: the tower is never wholly disclosed in her film, but is figured instead as a succession of fragments, all shot from the restaurant’s interior. She has put into motion an icon whose image is usually frozen. Duration, then, or temporality, takes pride of place over any whole image. And what of the tower’s other visual promise, the panorama? Dean’s refusals become strikingly clear when set against the 360-degree panorama of the city available for viewing and downloading on the tower’s website. Here we have an absurd and hyperbolic, not to mention deterritorialized, image of wholeness, the city laid at one’s feet, knowable, mappable, and entirely visible from the comfort of one’s own home. This is what Michel de Certeau would call the fiction of the ‘panorama-city’, a fiction of mastery bound up with a desire for exteriority (de Certeau, 1984: 92). In Fernsehturm the sweeping panorama is not only nearly invisible, but is sliced up, interrupted with jarring regularity by the window frames circling the room. This architecture echoes the frames of the filmstrip – an effect amplified by Dean’s use of an anamorphic lens.6 Yet the elongated shape of the film, which is projected onto a 14 feet-wide screen in the gallery, recalls the panorama even as that image is withheld from us. We tend to forget that Benjamin’s flâneur, seeking refuge in the crowd, and for whom vision operates at the level of the flash and the snapshot, the fleeting and ephemeral, initially encounters the city as if in a diorama, as, remarkably, the ‘city dilates to become landscape’ (Benjamin, 1978: 150). The total image is always and already desired and imagined, and it is precisely this tension Dean perceives and memorializes, by offering vision strictly delimited and yet presented in the very format – the panorama format – which it would seemingly deny.

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Dean made Palast (2004) in Berlin just a few years later, although the two films have yet to be read together in any significant way. Why the Palast, after Fernsehturm? Why these two sites above all others? And what do we make of Dean’s reversal here of certain terms of the earlier film? In Palast, in contrast to Fernsehturm, the camera feels so close to its subject that we can almost reach out and touch its surface (Figure 6.2). The film begins with a tightly framed shot of the Palast, but what is seen is a deep blue sky reflected in the windows. Soon the film cuts to another section of the building, and a different reflection appears. And then another cut to another fragment, and so on, the camera lingering at times for up to a minute. Sounds from the street creep in – cars drive past, their engines fading as they move out of earshot, and voices are overheard as pedestrians walk by, absorbed in their conversations. As the film progresses, the format remains the same – stationary shots of the façade, almost claustrophobically close – but some things change. The sky turns orange as the sun sets, and the windows now reflect more recognizable structures, such as the dome of the nearby Berlin Cathedral, whose globed spire conjures the nearby television tower. Certain fundamental inversions occur between the two pendent films that perform the tensions of modern urban visuality: moves from interior to exterior, from sky-high to ground level, from wide-angle to close-up, from motion to stillness, from a position at the threshold of the scene to a forcible – albeit impenetrable – intimacy, from relic to absence in the making.

Figure 6.2 Tacita Dean, Palast, 2004. Film still, 16 mm colour, optical sound, 10 min. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Firth Street Gallery, London.

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By moving the camera so close to the Palast’s surface and composing the film as a series of still shots, the building complicitly performs the work of the film as photography.7 The grid of windows, too, frames the reflected image as photography as much as film. This is made all the more clear by comparison with Fernsehturm, which enlists the revolving restaurant and its slanted, vertical windows to allow the building’s architecture to perform the optics of film while the camera remains motionless. Both works, then, employ a process of filmmaking aligned with the optics embedded in the very structures the artist chooses to film. Yet just as Fernsehturm refuses to represent the tower as we might expect, our view of the Palast is frustrated at all times by the building’s numerous reflections, and disrupted by the network of rusted window frames and exposed wooden support beams. Unlike Fernsehturm, which in its unedited form consists of seven hours of film and required three cameras and a crew, for Palast Dean shot at most double the amount of film used for the ten-minute final edit and filmed the building alone.8 Palast is displayed differently as well: it is projected at a much smaller scale – roughly eighteen inches by two feet – and high on the gallery wall. At its debut at the 2005 Venice Biennale, visitors viewed the film in a small room while seated on a bench, giving the sensation of looking up at a fragment of the building such that the gallery wall, shrouded in darkness, became both an extension of the building and a physical reminder of what was not shown – the whole of the Palast. The total image, then, is a ghostly presence conjured, but inadequately so, by the form the film’s presentation takes. As a primary symbol of the former GDR, the Palast is marked by a contentious history whose erosive effects were physically manifest when Dean preserved the structure on film. That moment, in 2004, caught the Palast in transition, stripped to its exterior shell, pockmarked with graffiti, and awaiting the implementation of the verdict on its future. The vision of former party leader Erich Honecker, this Zentrale Gebäude was designed as exemplar of period architecture and built on Museum Island on the site of the Berliner Stadtschloss, or City Palace, which had been razed after occupying the site for five centuries. The Palast opened in 1976 clad in a bronze-coloured façade and covered with a white marble mantle, the panoptical implications of a central state structure with leave to observe without being observed hardly lost on Berliners. In 1990, in accordance with one of the final edicts of the GDR and in the midst of reunification, the Palast was closed for extensive – and expensive – asbestos removal. It reopened in 2003, its marble casing dismantled and its interior gutted, as a temporary exhibition site. Only temporary, however, as the Federal Parliament had voted resoundingly to demolish the Palast and erect in its place a facsimile of the former Stadtschloss, christened the Humboldt Forum, that would function as an arts and science centre.9 When Dean made her film in 2004, the Palast stood decrepit and resigned, for many an eyesore in the centre of the city, while last-ditch attempts by

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some of the most internationally renowned Berlin-based artists to preserve it as a contemporary art centre failed. An excruciating demolition in the reverse order in which the structure was built began in February 2005, and could, astonishingly, be watched on any given day via webcam provided by Berlin’s Senate Department of Urban Development. This, on top of the many years the building stood abandoned, marks an erasure of historical and cultural memory that occurred at a snail’s pace. It inflects, too, Dean’s preoccupation with duration in these two filmic portraits. The distanced placement of the webcam works to similar ends as the panorama of the television tower; both provide positions of exteriority that allow a withdrawal from the lived experience of the city and the attendant imbrications of its most problematic sites. Dean’s intent focus on this place, in this moment, is set against this real-time historical unbuilding; it is an opposition not unlike her insistence on movement and duration in Fernsehturm upsetting the fixity of that icon. One final aspect of the demolition of the Palast deserves mention. Just outside the Palast, the city installed a temporary Schaustelle (display site), a platform from which the progress of dismantling the building could be observed. The Schaustellen, a widespread phenomenon in Berlin, physically manifest what has been called the ‘spectacularization of the building process’ in Berlin (Lehrer, 2000: 210). The city has been the site of copious amounts of construction over the past 20 years, from the millions of square yards of still empty office space to the confluence of capital at Potsdamer Platz, the city centre through which the Berlin Wall cut prior to reunification.10 The Schaustelle at Potsdamer Platz, the highly visible bright red ‘Info-Box’, offered its 5000 daily visitors multimedia viewing stations, virtual tours, and a panoramic view of the construction site from an open-air terrace.11 What is being constructed in Berlin, then, is the city as image, and the Schaustellen, we might say, are privileged, selected sites from which to view this image. Indeed, the collapse between the image of the city and the city as image was especially noticeable in Schaustelle Berlin (Display Site Berlin), an ongoing city-sponsored advertising campaign of summertime tours and events promoting the building sites from 1995–2005 (Ward, 2004: 248). But what image do we view at the Palast Schaustelle? Here Berlin is being deconstructed rather than constructed. If Berlin’s Schaustellen fall prey to a spectacularization of the building process, the Schaustelle at the Palast might be said to have accomplished something quite different, to present a spectacularized image of forgetting, hour by hour. Rather than put forth another Schaustelle from which to view the Palast, Dean’s film takes up a thematics of appearance and disappearance that figures in Fernsehturm as well: her gaze is partial and fragmented, her ear attuned to the noise on the street, and her camera set close to the building itself in such a way that what is imaged is a reflection. Or perhaps better, what is imaged is the building as reflector, as camera itself. Dean begins her

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‘aside’ for Palast this way: ‘It is the building that always catches and holds the sun in the grey centre of the city: its regime-orange reflective glass mirroring the setting sun perfectly, as it moves from panel to panel along its chequered surface’ (Dean, 2006: 133). Her lingering shots of the Palast coalesce into an incomplete mapping of that structure, a mapping of close and fragmented views that mimics the imperfection of memory rather than any whole image of Palast that her camera may have provided. Dean’s effort has the feel of preservation, of memorialization, the film an attempt to make a portrait of something about to disappear: a building and a history, true enough, but an optics of how the city is perceived, too. ‘The passages’, T. J. Clark writes, and here he means the Parisian shopping arcades which so consumed Benjamin, ‘were a vision of the city as one great threshold – between public and private, outside and inside, past and present, stultifying dreariness (the reign of the commodity) and final Dionysian rout (Paris as fun house, Paris as Commune, Paris as diorama burning down). Already in the early twentieth century this vision had become old-fashioned’ (Clark, 2003: 37). ‘We have grown very poor in threshold experiences’, he concludes, quoting Benjamin. The threshold position of the interloper, the immigrant, the woman with a movie camera, the filmmaker watching her medium recede into the historical horizon as she trains it on structures doing similar disappearing acts: these are the positions Dean takes, and to which her steadiness – her claustrophobic close views, her unhurried tempo – would stake a recalcitrant claim. It may come as something of a surprise at this point that Dean has made a film called Totality (2000). The film’s subject is a full solar eclipse that occurred on 11 August 1999, and which Dean and her crew filmed on a Cornish farm. Though the camera was positioned to look directly at the sun, which it magnified 30 times, and was equipped with a motion-tracking device to follow its subject faithfully, the heavily overcast sky obscured the event such that the film shows nothing but an even field of abstract colour (Groenenboom, 2000: 93). The atmosphere changes only imperceptibly over 11 minutes from light to dark (this is the moment of the eclipse) and back again. The film also – and this is significant – stands alone in Dean’s oeuvre as being without sound. Unlike the partial vision attuned to the sensorium offered in Fernsehturm and Palast, here we have an image of vision withheld and frustrated, despite its heightened attempt (heightened by not only the use of a camera, but a camera enhanced by magnification and motiontracking) to acquire the image of the event. The totality, it would seem, shows us nothing much at all.

Notes 1. Dean arrived in 2000 on a DAAD Fellowship with the Berlin Artist-in-Residence Programme.

112 Tacita Dean’s Optics of Refusal 2. The film was shot in 16 mm over a period of six hours, from sunset to early morning, on 12 October 2000. It includes 34 shots ranging from a few seconds to over eight minutes in length (Jenkins, 2003: npg; Meschede, 2001: 54). 3. Patrons are now allowed to remain at the restaurant beyond one rotation. See also http://www.berlinerfernsehturm.de/en/historie_en.asp?site=historie. 4. http://www.berlinerfernsehturm.de/en/historie_en.asp?site=historie 5. The strategy is successful: the television tower now boasts over a million visitors per year. This is not to say that the tower never functioned as a tourist destination in its former lives; the point is rather that this is now the only role it is supposed to play. 6. Some of Dean’s critics have observed this as well (e.g. Meschede, 2001). Dean notes that the anamorphic lens is unique to the Cinemascope format, which is wider still than conventional widescreen and rarer (Groenenboom, 2000: 103). 7. George Baker has claimed Dean’s ‘frozen films’ as examples, among many others, of an expanded field of photography (Baker, 2005: 134). 8. Dean writes, ‘We had three cameras when we filmed, almost continuously. We must have filmed six or seven hours of film for the final edit of 44 minutes. Whereas Palast … was about 10 minutes, and I must have filmed at most double that. The smaller films which are not anamorphic, I film myself. Then the degree of unused material is smaller’ (Eugenides, 2006: 36). 9. This summary of the history of the Palast is derived from the official website of Berlin’s Senate Department of Urban Development: http://www. stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/bauen/palast_rueckbau/en/dismantling.shtml. 10. The new Potsdamer Platz, spearheaded by Daimler-Benz and Sony, is widely considered to be the symbol of Berlin’s failed ambitions to become a global city on a par with London and Paris (Huyssen, 1997: 57–81; Ward, 2004: 239–56). Of Berlin’s failed building boom, Ward writes: ‘In 2001, the Berlin Senate for Urban Development (Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung) reported that in terms of the 20 million square yards of office space that it offers, post-Wall Berlin is now third in line next to Europe’s two “alpha” globals, Paris and London (with their respective 37⫹ and 32⫹ million square yards of office space). In other words, Berlin has literally constructed for itself, in terms of commercial architecture, the shape of a European world city – but Europe and the world have yet to respond to the invitation’ (Ward, 2004: 245). 11. Built by the Frankfurt-based architects Schneider ⫹ Schumacher, the Info-Box was dismantled in January 2001.

Bibliography Baker, G. (2005). ‘Photography’s Expanded Field’, October 114: 120–40. Benjamin, W. (1978). ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in Edmund Jephcott (trans.), Reflections (New York: Schocken Books), pp. 146–62. Clark, T. J. (2003). ‘Should Benjamin Have Read Marx?’, boundary 2 30: 31–49. Dean, T. (2002). ‘Artist Questionnaire: 21 Responses’, October 100: 26–7. Dean, T. (2005). ‘Fernsehturm (backwards into the future)’, in Tacita Dean: Berlin Works, exh. cat. (Cornwall, England: Tate St Ives). Dean, T. (2006), ‘Palast’, in Tacita Dean (London: Phaidon Press Ltd). de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press). Eugenides, J. (2006). ‘Tacita Dean Interviewed by Jeffrey Eugenides’, Bomb 95: 32–7.

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Groenenboom, R. (2000). ‘A Conversation with Tacita Dean’, in Tacita Dean, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and Actar). Huyssen, A. (1997). ‘The Voids of Berlin’, Critical Inquiry 24: 57–81. Jenkins, B. (2003). ‘Fernsehturm’, in Image Stream, exh. cat. (Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts). Lehrer, U. (2000). ‘Zitadelle Innenstadt: Bilderproduktion und Potsdamer Platz’, in Albert Scharenberg (ed.), Berlin: Global City oder Konkursmasse? Eine Zwischenbilanz zehn Jahre nach dem Mauerfall (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag). Meschede, F. (2001). ‘Fernsehturm’, in Tacita Dean: Recent Films and Other Works, exh. cat. (London: Tate Britain). Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel (2000). Tacita Dean: Selected Works from 1994–2000, exh. cat. (Basel: Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel). Ward, J. (2004), ‘Berlin, the Virtual Global City’, Journal of Visual Culture 3 (2): 239–56.

7 Searching for the City: Cinema and the Critique of Urban Space in the Films of Keiller, Cohen, and Steinmetz and Chanan Ian Robinson Cinema, critique and urban space In this chapter I am interested in exploring how the city is invoked in cinema by means of its absence. I examine three films which in different ways study the city – its spaces, lived experiences and representations – by looking at examples of its social, cultural and physical decline, disappearance and general absence. In their critiques of this lost sense of the city, Patrick Keiller’s London (1994), Jem Cohen’s Chain (2004) and George Steinmetz and Michael Chanan’s Detroit, Ruin of a City (2006) call attention to the disappearance of particular urban forms and particular ways of living, including the disempowerment of local governance, economic disinvestment and physical abandonment of space, a loss of local identity and the sprawling growth of non-place, as well as changes in the affective relations of everyday life to urban space. In different ways, these recent films draw attention to a perceived crisis of urbanity. In different spatial and temporal contexts, and through the use of various narrative forms and formal techniques, each of these films raises the potential spectre that ‘the city’ as a form of dwelling and mode of sociality, is no longer to be found. In exposing and responding to such apparent crises of decline, sprawl, emptiness and the disappearance of a symbolic dimension to urban life, the films of Keiller, Cohen and Steinmetz and Chanan might prove to exemplify a speculative turn in the long tradition of cinematic cities. Confronted with its absence, the films broach the question of what constitutes the city as an object and how it might be studied. A central question with which the films engage is therefore not only why the city has disappeared and how our relation as citizens to our spatial environments have been transformed as a result of its decline, but rather, how one can articulate a coherent and meaningful critique of the city when the object of analysis appears fragmented, ungraspable in its totality by any single attempt to define it. Following Henri Lefebvre’s suggestion in The Urban Revolution, an approach echoed by Keiller’s fictional character Robinson, the city, or moreover the 114

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urban, requires a radical interdisciplinary methodology for its analysis (Lefebvre, 2003: 58). Rather than pursuing knowledge of it through any specialized disciplines, the urban must be treated as a problematic, an object of knowledge in itself. The methodological problem here is that the complexities of the urban cannot be reduced to quantifiable observation or even endless qualitative description. According to Lefebvre, the urban should not be confused with particular cities, which exist at particular times and in particular places. Rather the urban is most usefully conceived as a virtual object, a phenomenon which exists in a very real manner but which does not enter the realm of the concrete (Lefebvre, 2003: 16–17; Shields, 2006). Lefebvre writes: The urban is a highly complex field of tensions, a virtuality, a possibleimpossible that attracts the accomplished, an ever-renewed and always demanding presence-absence. Blindness consists in the fact that we cannot see the shape of the urban, the vectors and tensions inherent in this field, its logic and dialectic movement, its immanent demands. We see only things, operations, objects. (Lefebvre, 2003: 40, quoted in Shields, 2006: 4) The problem is that we do not know how to represent the urban. Furthermore, attempts to define its essential characteristics (as in the specialized disciplines of urban planning much criticized by Lefebvre) lead only to an understanding of its parts, detracting from a view of it as an interconnected yet ‘differential field’ (Lefebvre, 2003: 53). For these filmmakers, the crisis facing the city is thus twofold. On the one hand, many of the traditional markers of urban life appear to be disappearing, most acutely observable in the abandonment and decay of modern cityscapes. On the other hand, the contemplation of such decline leads to a realization that the urban phenomenon remains obscure. It is not just that the city as a built and lived environment seems to have disappeared; knowledge of what constitutes the urban as a unified field of contradictory parts remains hidden from view. The ‘problem of the city’ for the filmmakers, to paraphrase Keiller’s Robinson, requires a self-reflexive methodology which brings together various spatial and textual strategies in a critique of contemporary urban space while at the same time exploring the essential virtuality of the urban as an object, with the goal of reclaiming it anew. My approach to the question of how to critique urban space and its potential reconstruction in film thus draws upon Lefebvre’s work on spatiality and everyday life. Everyday life is characterized in Lefebvre’s analysis by banal repetition and recurrence, a product of the abstract social time and space of twentieth-century capitalism. However, analysed dialectically, the alienated everyday contains the seeds for its rehabilitation. His ‘critique’ therefore involves a dual reading of the everyday that both rejects the culture produced by a technocratic capitalist rationality and attempts to unearth those opaque

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and ephemeral human characteristics which elude the instrumental logic of modernity (Lefebvre, 1991a). For Lefebvre the ‘richness’ (1991a: 87) of everyday life creates the very possibility of critique whereby the everyday might be transformed into a work of art. In this context we might question to what extent the cinema can be utilized as a methodology for the critique of the everyday urban environment. I suggest that the point where the two practices meet is in their commitment to scrutinizing those spaces which on the surface appear banal in order to reveal their hidden political and affective qualities. By focusing its critique on such quotidian spaces of the city, we can consider how filmmakers use the medium for an active re-appropriation of lived space and everyday life, in order to foreground what Lefebvre calls ‘human nature in its concreteness’ (Lefebvre, 1991a: 97). Specifically, it is the indefinable lived quality of the city, by which a sense of place and identity are created, that these films attempt to reclaim, re-appropriate and resituate within a fragmented urban landscape. Instead of starting out with a fixed definition of the city as a measurable or legal entity, the city is understood as the collective product of what Henri Lefebvre refers to as ‘inhabiting’; it is a practice, a place of encounter and of play, and it includes a relation to time, history, memory and the imaginary which transcends abstract definition. The city is also the creative product of its lived social relations, or in Lefebvre’s words, it is the perpetual ‘oeuvre’ of its inhabitants (Lefebvre, 1996: 79–81; 100–3; 147–59). The fate of the city and everyday life is generalized in terms of the fate of social space in Lefebvre’s theoretical opus The Production of Space (1991b). Here he expounds how the ‘modernist trio’ of ‘readability-visibility-intelligibility’ (Lefebvre, 1991b: 96) has not only sought to eliminate local differences and flatten the contradictory elements that make space liveable but has, in effect, worked to conceal our knowledge of the social and ideological relations through which all space is produced and by which space affects the relations of production. He writes: With the advent of modernity time has vanished from our social space. It is recorded solely on measuring instruments, on clocks, that are as isolated and functionally specialized as this time itself. Lived time loses its form and its social interest – with the exception, that is, of time spent working. Economic space subordinates time to itself; political space expels it as threatening and dangerous to power … Our time, then, this most essential part of lived experience, this greatest good of all goods, is no longer visible to us, no longer intelligible … it is concealed in space. (Lefebvre, 1991b: 95) For Lefebvre, space is continuously produced as a multiplicity of lived social relations at the same time that it is perceived as a concrete ‘already finished’ product and conceived in terms of a measurable geometric order (Lefevbre,

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1991b). As he writes in Everyday Life in the Modern World, ‘production is not merely the making of products: the term signifies on the one hand “spiritual” production, that is to say creations (including time and space), and on the other material production or the making of things’ (Lefebvre, 1971: 30). Lefebvre therefore makes the distinction between the product and the work, or oeuvre. While the product is replicable, has a prescribed use and functions as a commodity, the oeuvre resembles a work of art; it is unique and achieves its value through appropriation and use. The crucial category of the lived, for Lefebvre, allows for a theorization in which space acquires personal and collective meanings, associations and symbolism, and through which history and tradition inform the present. His work suggests that a transformative critique of space should emphasize the lived and often overlooked realities of everyday life. In Lefebvre’s terms, the question regarding urban space, and by extension its filmic critique, is then not how it is structured to provide ‘habitat’ but to what extent it is actively ‘inhabited’ and how to reassert the right of ‘inhabiting’ in contemporary conditions of urban space (for the distinction between habitat and inhabiting, see Lefebvre, 1996). While Lefebvre’s writing provides a methodological framework for the critique of urban space, we must turn elsewhere for a specifically cinematic theory of reappropriation. I draw upon Siegfried Kracauer’s contribution to critical theory in his writings on cinema and the urban quotidian. For Kracauer, as John Allen has recently recognized, critique consists of analysis of surface phenomena with the aim of revealing the cultural truths of a particular era and its space (Allen, 2007: 22–4). Through its affinities with the contingent, the indeterminate and the everyday flow of life, filmic representation according to Kracauer has the potential to foreground surfaces of everyday life which go unseen due to their very familiarity. The cinema, according to Kracauer, provides a means to destabilize and defamiliarize our awareness of space, the city, as a differential field. For Kracauer, such critical perceptions of our surroundings are all too often lost to the homogenizing forces of routine. Intimate faces, streets we walk day by day, the house we live in – all these things are part of us like our skin, and because we know them by heart we do not know them with the eye. Once integrated into our existence, they cease to be objects of perception. (Kracauer, 1997: 55) Crucially for Kracauer, the cinema performs a kind of critique of the material world by teaching its viewers once more how to see. The potential of the film medium for Kracauer is its capacity to cut through the abstractness which characterizes the modern world. In this sense, as Graeme Gilloch notes, ‘film provides for a new and vivid aestheticisation or (re)enchantment of the everyday’ (Gilloch, 2007: 124). Furthermore, as Kracauer expounds in his Theory of Film, ‘films help us not only to appreciate our given material

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environment but to extend it in all directions’ (Kracauer, 1997: 304, quoted in Gilloch, 2007: 124). While Kracauer’s early writings on metropolitan life invoke Lukacs’s notion of ‘transcendental homelessness’ pervasive of modernity (Levin in Kracauer, 1995: 13), his writings on cinema suggest a critical pathway towards a renewed connection to place and understanding of space – or the urban – as a differential field. For Kracauer, ‘films virtually make the world our home’ (Kracauer, 1997: 304). For Kracauer, the re-appropriation of the fragmented and disappearing city in London, Chain and Detroit, Ruin of a City therefore requires the representation of the surfaces of everyday urban reality in order to defamiliarize it. As in Lefebvre’s approach to critique, Kracauer’s cinematic method to examining the city in ruins suggests that it must begin with the exploration of its taken-forgranted surfaces. Only by exposing and unsettling the superficiality of the urban forms, processes and lives can the film image forge a renewed link between city and citizen, creating a new mode of inhabiting the urban.

Disappearance and the non-places of the city In different ways, the films of Keiller, Cohen, and Steinmetz, and Chanan all present a vision of the city in which a sense of place is under siege. In the new urban landscape, increasingly defined by the spatial and aesthetic homogeneity of transnational capital, a sense of place or, to borrow Doreen Massey’s phrase, a ‘place called home’, appears increasingly unavailable (Massey, 1994: 157–75). The spatial problematic in these films revolves around a sense of transience and homelessness in landscapes that are in a near constant process of construction, decay, abandonment and demolition. Furthermore, what appears to be missing is a sense of ‘inhabiting’: the collective project of creating the city as a place of encounter, sociability and play. And yet a sense of home is precisely what the films attempt to rediscover, even if it is among the bleak landscapes of de-industrialized and disempowered London (Keiller), the abandoned ruins of Detroit (Steinmetz and Chanan) or the endless frontiers of suburbia (Cohen). In different ways these films confront the existence of Marc Augé’s non-place (Augé, 1995). The ubiquity of shopping malls, hotels, banks, fast food restaurants and freeways throughout the films reflects an urban landscape made up of transitory spaces, places in which identity and meaning are replaced by ephemerality, banality and ambivalence, and the sociality of the collective is reduced to suspicion and surveillance. In these spaces one is never at home but always in a state of passing through. In London, Keiller’s character Robinson diagnoses ‘the problem of London’ as the lack of a sense of place and home. Keiller’s narrator recalls Robinson observing how London is obscured to its own inhabitants: Too thinly spread, too private for anyone to know, its social life invisible, its government abolished, its institutions at the discretion of either

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monarchy or state or the City … The true identity of London, he said is in its absence. As a city it no longer exists … London was the first metropolis to disappear. (Keiller, 1994) London, according to Robinson, has become dominated by this ‘civic void’ of non-place. Robinson’s search for the city thus involves an attempt to rediscover the existence of the past in the present. Yet evidence of such attachments to place, history and memory have all but disappeared in contemporary London. The landscape is now replete with chain stores and fast food outlets. As is often the case, the hotel stands as the exemplary non-place of the city. Robinson and the narrator visit the Savoy hotel and look out of the window from which Monet famously painted. However, the famous hotel and view overlooking the Thames presents only disappointment for the nostalgic visitor longing for a connection to the past. A shot of the outside of the Savoy reveals a large advertisement for the Chippendales. The view from Monet’s window itself reveals another loss, the disempowered County Hall (the former seat of London’s metropolitan government) now in the process of being sold to a Japanese hotel consortium. In Chain, the interweaving stories of Amanda and Tamiko juxtapose two very different experiences of urban placelessness. As a representative of a nameless steel company which has recently taken an interest in theme park resorts, Tamiko’s travels around America consist of extended stays in nondescript suburban hotels, meetings in office blocks and visits to Disneystyle amusement parks. Throughout her travels among the non-places of America, Tamiko never reaches what we would recognize as a city and yet, unlike Robinson and his companion, she is not looking for one. The city is physically absent in this film, even though the film takes place entirely within various municipal boundaries. In the second narrative, Amanda has run away from her family home and finds herself literally homeless, living in abandoned buildings and spending her days trying to elude the gaze of security at the nearby mall. The mall becomes the new geographic and affective centre of her everyday life. Between hotel, mall and freeway there is no mention of a city in either story. And while both characters display a sense of loneliness and boredom, unlike Robinson they express no conscious awareness that anything is missing. Rather, the city in Chain is marked by a curious absence throughout; it is only expressed negatively in the characters’ banal resignation to their situations and in the fragmented polyrhythmic visual montage of non-places, evoking both loneliness and boredom in a nameless urban landscape. Cohen reiterates this message at the end of the film by including a list of shooting locations. Here it is revealed that what has been presented as a more or less seamless articulation of narrative space and American space is in fact made up of a patchwork of spaces from around the world – what the audience assumes are the nameless suburbs of America

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are perhaps the nameless suburbs of Paris, Warsaw and Berlin. In a dystopian representation of global homogeneous non-place, shopping malls, hotels, freeways and offices from around the world are interchangeable. Finally, Steinmetz and Chanan’s film Detroit: Ruin of a City presents a similar discomforting sense of non-place in Detroit. Whereas in Keiller’s London the city’s disappearance is presented as a crisis in the articulation of local collective memory and global political economy, and in Chain the city’s absence represents the spatial expression of neoliberal global capital (as well as a complete lack of local governance), in Detroit: Ruin of a City the disappearance is marked primarily by the concrete abandonment of the city by its populace and industry in the second half of the twentieth century. In Detroit: Ruin of a City, the filmmakers document and investigate the history of a city which has come to include both a homeless and poverty-stricken populace and a landscape of uninhabited homes and unused workplaces. Much of the urban landscape of Detroit is seen from the window of a moving car. When the filmmakers reach the city centre, they are struck by its absence. Here abandoned buildings sit adjacent to a newly developed sports complex, while ornamented historic buildings have been abandoned and left to decay. As in Chain, the disappearance of the city in Detroit: Ruin of a City is presented as a result of economic disinvestment compounded by a history of racial exclusions and oppression. However, in Detroit: Ruin of a City, the city is also presented as a highly contested discursive construction. If one is challenged to find a sense of place in Detroit it is also due to the historical construction of images of the city. Place is produced discursively in the realm of representation as much as it is a result of spatial configuration. In the history of Detroit’s filmic representation found in archival films produced by Ford and the labour unions as well as in the dominant urban tropes of Hollywood cinema, the filmmakers trace the loss of the city as a reflection of its contested representation.

Towards a re-appropriation of the city While non-place and homelessness characterize the city films of Cohen, Keiller, and Steinmetz and Chanan, I would like to focus on how these films operate as critical practices which engage in attempts to reclaim the city as a lived and liveable place. The films can be read as not simply responding to the perceived problems of urban decline, abandonment, homogenization, and a loss of local identity, but as intervening in an argument about where the city is situated and how it should be represented. Explicitly blurring the boundaries between traditional documentary, avant-garde city symphony and fictional narrative approaches to filmmaking, these films attempt to grapple with ‘the problem of the city’ – to borrow Robinson’s phrase from London – as a lived phenomenon. In defamiliarizing the topographies of

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everyday urban life, the critique of banal urban decline and non-place gives way to the reclamation of the city among its fragmentation and dispersal. That is, in their emphasis on mundane, obscure and ambivalent spaces, the films actually subvert the logic of non-place and reinscribe these everyday spaces with a degree of meaning and identity. Moreover, their surface approach to disconnected and abandoned urban spaces raises the question of what constitutes the city as an object while suggesting the need to re-evaluate critical approaches to urbanism. The city is thereby strategically rearticulated where it appears most absent; it is reactualized in the local and particular stories of place. Here the films of Keiller, Cohen, and Steinmetz and Chanan provide sites to consider the textual strategies of documenting and defamiliarizing urban reality in the filmic reclamation of place. In this vein, much of the critique of London in Keiller’s film consists of an attempt to defamiliarize some of the everyday spaces of the city. The journeys across London taken by the narrator and his companion Robinson highlight less the iconic tourist sites and more the mundane, taken-for-granted spaces passed over by residents in everyday life. Here, Kracauer’s insights regarding film’s capacity to grasp the contingent and ephemeral aspects of everyday life and the indeterminacy of meaning of found objects are especially relevant. In its visual representation, film, according to Kracauer, alerts us to things which are normally unseen, sometimes simply because they have become overly familiar. In Theory of Film, Kracauer writes that ‘film renders visible what we did not, or even could not, see before its advent. It effectively assists us in discovering the material world with its psychophysical correspondences. We literally redeem this world from its dormant state, its state of virtual non-existence, by endeavouring to experience it through the camera’ (Kracauer, 1997: 300). In London, Robinson proposes a similar method for deciphering the urban landscape which resonates to some extent through all of the films under consideration. According to Keiller’s narrator, ‘Robinson believed that if he looked at it hard enough he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events’. The defamiliarization of London’s topography involves the allusion to Robinson’s interest in history and poetics, efforts to invoke an alternative collective memory of the city and rediscover and renew a sense of place among the urban homogenization and banality he finds in contemporary London. Keiller’s interweaving of documentary and fictional modes is crucial in the film’s attempt to reassemble the city and critique its disappearance at the same time. The still camera’s medium shots of unstaged London scenes accompany the narration of a speaker who remains unseen. The shots of London are loosely associated with the point of view of the narrator, reinforcing the message that the city and its qualities of place, if they are to be found, exist in the hidden and labyrinthine surfaces of everyday life. It is Robinson’s and the narrator’s (and Keiller’s) spatial practices – their acts of looking at and documenting the manifold surfaces of London – that hold the key to the re-appropriation

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of the city. Crucially, it is the film’s narrative that weaves together Keiller’s discrete images of London, suggesting that our knowledge of the city, or ‘the urban’, is always incomplete. It consists of a complex interplay between documents and stories, each opening up onto the other mode of representation, and sometimes blurring the difference between them. While Keiller’s London blurs the territory of documentary and fiction filmmaking by its unconventional use of narration, and its montage of actuality shots and mix of essayistic and poetic discourse, Cohen’s Chain engages in a similar process of defamiliarization of overly familiar spaces by combining documentary and fictional modes of address (for a typology of modes of address in documentary cinema see Nichols, 2001: 99–138). In Chain, the spaces of the mall, freeway, hotel, fast-food restaurant and office tower are generic spaces. Our familiarity with them is due to a shared experience and knowledge of the spatial and practical conventions which govern them and not due to any previous sight or face-to-face experience of any one of them in particular. Cohen presents this world of non-place in the form of a poetic observational documentary following the lives of two women as they negotiate the corporate decentred landscape of urban America. However, unlike London, the narration rarely coincides with a subjective image and the film asserts the presence of an absent (and silent) interlocutor. Moreover, this documentary style is blurred by the obviously fictional stories of the two women. The force of the critique and the beginning of the reclamation of the city in Chain revolves around the insertion of fictional stories into an overlooked and overly familiar generic landscape. By emphasizing the hotel and mall as lived places, the film suggests a need to reconsider the possibilities of reconstructing place, and a sense of identity and inhabiting in an otherwise placeless landscape. Such an emphasis brings forward an argument about the possibility of articulating ‘a place called home’ in a homogenized and decentred urban space. This possibility is expressed in both the aesthetic and formal aspects of Chain, two of which I would briefly like to call attention to. The first is Amanda’s discovery of a lost video camera which she uses to record her thoughts and potentially communicate to her estranged family as well as analyse her surroundings. At her most desperate and homeless point, the camera becomes a device of empowerment. Cut off from any form of sociality, she begins to reflexively construct place, a project which in some ways parallels Cohen’s own use of the camera in constructing Chain. The second aspect comes at the end of the film, when the long list of shooting locations from around the world is presented. Here, Cohen further reveals the reflexivity and performativity inherent in the film’s claim to document the generic spaces of urban life. Such a move works to increase their strangeness by provoking the viewer to confront assumptions about local specificity and generic spaces of modern capitalism. By calling attention to the constructed nature of the film’s landscape and the fictional stories of Amanda and

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Tamiko, Chain provokes a direct confrontation with the urban problematic. Reflecting on the methodological problems or representing the urban, Chain puts forth its own experimental attempt to produce an image of the city by embracing its virtuality and questioning its status as a knowable object. Finally, Steinmetz and Chanan’s city film Detroit: Ruin of a City also involves an attempt to reassemble the city through a critique of its decline. While this film differs from the other two in that it more closely resembles a traditional documentary – employing expository, reflexive and poetic approaches to its object – Detroit: Ruin of a City similarly involves an attempt to call into question the grounds on which the city is usually perceived. It seeks to defamiliarize the abandoned houses which line residential streets, the boarded-up historic buildings in the city centre and the omnipresent car culture of Detroit by employing strategies such as a reflexive use of archival footage, including scenes in which the filmmakers discuss the construction of the very film they are making as they sort through archival footage. The shots of the screen within the screen displace the possibility of any single objective representation of Detroit. As the filmmakers conduct their research into the city’s decline, they travel and document most of their research by car. The shots taken from the car window further defamiliarize the urban landscape while suggesting, as in London and Chain, that any attempt to grasp the problem of the city, and therefore any attempt to engage in a critical reclamation of place, should begin from the vantage point of that which appears lost. All three of these films engage in a critique of the present crisis of urban space as reflected in the apparent disappearance of the city as a lived place and an ongoing project of inhabiting. In each film, the city as a place of encounter, sociability, creativity, unpredictability and history, in short a place with a lived sense of home and identity, appears to be missing. The critique of this apparent void in London, Chain and Detroit: Ruin of a City involves an attempt to reclaim the city by reconfiguring the lens through which we look at contemporary urban space. The stability of the city as an object is cast in doubt; reclamation of the city begins from the marginalized and abandoned non-places of contemporary urbanism, reinscribing the city with forgotten histories and discarded stories. Using different textual strategies of documenting the topographies of urban space, and utilizing fictional and reflexive narrative forms to defamiliarize the decentred landscapes of non-place, these films suggest new ways in which the city might be re-imagined and conceptually redefined.

Bibliography Allen, J. (2007). ‘The Cultural Spaces of Siegfried Kracauer: The Many Surfaces of Berlin’, New Formations, 61 (Summer 2007): 20–34. Augé, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso).

124 Searching for the City Gilloch, G. (2007). ‘Urban Optics: Film, Phantasmagoria and the City in Benjamin and Kracauer’, New Formations, 61 (Summer 2007): 115–31. Kracauer, S. (1995). The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Kracauer, S. (1997). Theory of Film: the Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Lefebvre, H. (1971). Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (New York: Harper & Row). Lefebvre, H. (1991a). Critique of Everyday Life Vol.1, trans. John Moore (London: Verso). Lefebvre, H. (1991b). The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell). Lefebvre, H. (1996). ‘Right to the City’, in Writings on Cities, ed. and trans. Koffman and E. Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 61–181. Lefebvre, H. (2003). The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Massey, D. (1994). Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press). Nichols, B. (2001). Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Shields, R. (2006), ‘The Virtuality of Urban Culture: Blanks, Dark Moments and Blind Fields’, available at http://spaceandculturereadinggroup.googlepages.com/ edmonton_pics, accessed 17 December.

Filmography London, Dir. Patrick Keiller. UK, 1994. Chain, Dir. Jem Cohen. US, 2004. Detroit: Ruin of a City, Dir. George Steinmetz and Michael Chanan. UK, 2006.

8 A Tale of Two Cities: Dachau and KZ Munich Alan Marcus

A stream. A clubhouse. A witness. Theodore Pais never crossed a stream called the Wurm canal to play a round of golf, or enjoy the local Bavarian cuisine available to members and their guests in the dining room of Golfclub Dachau. A temporal demarcation and physical border separated him from what is now the club’s par four, fourth hole. The Wurm canal is a line, a thread that links a paradigmatic site of death and brutality with the boundary of a site of leisure. The quiet waters of the Wurm canal pass birch trees on one side and barbed wire on the other. Crossing it marks the threshold for 800,000 visitors and tourists who traverse the canal to enter the Nazis’ first state concentration camp. On the other side of the camp lies another border. Alte Römerstrasse is a busy road that runs the length of the camp’s walled, barbed wire perimeter, punctuated by guard towers. Thousands of motorists and lorry drivers follow this boundary every day as they make their way into the city of Dachau. Facing the camp is a large industrial site with modern factories and warehouses, featuring local companies such as LK-Kunststofftechnik (2009), which specializes in protective coatings for industrial surfaces, offering ‘the complete floor solution’. The former concentration camp, which was complicit in ‘the Final Solution’, is never more visible to the public and the city’s 39,000 inhabitants than it is today. Once separated by agricultural land from the 1200-year-old town of Dachau, it is now fully incorporated within the city’s postwar built environment. Emblems of modernity adjoin and overlay a traumatic palimpsest. A site that symbolized genocide is now tightly embalmed by the banal and its consequences. The film In Place of Death (2008)1 raises issues about the conflicting roles of personal and public memory, and debates centred on how society should engage with sites of significance and the survivor’s testimony. Theodore Pais was 90-years old when featured as the sole interviewee in the film (Figure 8.1). Recording the interview in his room in a Jewish geriatric care facility in San Francisco, the survivor’s account he is able to give is memorable for its cryptic delivery. Due to a stroke suffered the previous year, Mr Pais takes considerable 125

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Figure 8.1

Theodore Pais, In Place of Death (2008), dir. Alan Marcus.

time to respond to the interviewer’s questions, and then does so haltingly with only a few words. His long-term memory is intact; however, the stroke has reduced his level of elucidation. When asked at the outset of the film, ‘How did you survive?’ he struggles to answer and a minute later responds with the words, ‘That’s a good question!’ In the fragments of speech that follow, the narrative emerges of a man who lost his wife and son during the Holocaust, but who managed to survive the liquidation of the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania and incarceration at Dachau and its Kaufering sub-camp. Theodore Pais’s role in the film and his absence of articulation ultimately operates as a systemic filmic metaphor for the voiceless victims who perished, and those who represent an ever dwindling number of first-hand witnesses to the Holocaust. His testimony is juxtaposed with contemporary observational images of the camp, the town of Dachau and the city of Munich, of which it is a suburb. Without the aid of narration, conventional interviews or archival footage, the viewer is presented with a series of visual engagements that seek to suture the past and present. Scenes of downtown Munich, which is connected by the road, Dachauer Strasse, that serves as an umbilical cord to its infamous northern suburb 16 kms away, repositions the way we view a place called Dachau. On 20 March 1933, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, as Munich’s Acting Chief of Police, used a press conference to announce the opening of KZ Dachau. On the second

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day under SS (Schutzstaffel) administration, four Jewish prisoners were led out of the camp and shot ‘while trying to escape’ (Distel, 2005: 63). If Konzentrationslager (KZ) Dachau were referred to as Konzentrationslager (KZ) München, we would arguably think of cosmopolitan Munich in different terms today. Postwar Munich and its enlarged suburbs form a massive architectural palimpsest, covering over remnants of some 120 sub-camps of KZ Dachau, which were operated throughout the city and its environs. In addition to its SS-controlled concentration camp for prisoners, the physical footprint of the compound encompassed a much larger area, comprising one of the main administrative headquarters for Himmler’s SS in the Third Reich, and serving as an SS training academy. The concentration camp took up less than one-tenth of the overall SS site, though much of the locale is still off-limits as, since 1972, it has served as an operating base for the Bavarian riot police, the Bereitschaftspolizei, and the rest of the former SS grounds are now a golf club. Dachau is a place where inhumane SS ‘medical experiments’ were conducted and tens of thousands of human beings put to death and many more tortured, beaten and starved. It is on one level a place out of sight. Yet, because of its proximity to the heavily touristed city of Munich, it is easily accessible for a half-day trip on a list of ‘top sights’ while visiting the Bavarian capital. The catalyst for making the video installation, Beautiful Dachau (2006),2 which the film In Place of Death grew out of, was a tourist poster seen on a bus shelter outside the entrance to the former concentration camp, which announced: ‘Beautiful Dachau: things to see and do’. A similarly upbeat announcement by a local tour company assures prospective clients that ‘each Dachau tour we give outshines the last!’ (The Dachau Tour, 2009). The slogan encapsulates a city’s challenge of attempting to rebrand itself.

Where tourists gaze Munich’s motto until 2005 was Weltstadt mit Herz (‘Cosmopolitan city with a heart’). With its contemporary reputation for culture, stately architecture and the annual Oktoberfest, Munich has been transformed in the postwar years from a provincial capital into a tourist Mecca that aspires to be cosmopolitan. On the city of Dachau’s official website is depicted a concert orchestra performing in front of an audience, and below is a schedule of concerts and public events (Dachau, 2009). On the English language version of the city website is depicted a large image of the palace Schloss Dachau (ibid.). Below is the banner: ‘Dachau: much more than you would expect!’ The text follows: ‘The Concentration Camp Memorial Site makes Dachau Europe’s central place of learning and remembrance’. The placing of Dachau and Europe side by side in the sentence, and stressing the centrality of the town’s role within the European project, suggests an overt effort to champion its status as a European site while coupling the notion of remembrance to that of edification. The ‘heart’ in Munich’s former motto, which is echoed in its

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current version, München mag Dich (‘Munich loves you’), finds an artery to Dachau’s city website, where the motif of a chocolate heart is prominently displayed on the front page of its English site. The heart contains the phrase: Dahoam is Dahoam (Bavarian dialect meaning ‘at home is at home’) – the title of a popular television series which, the web page informs the reader, is produced in Dachau. The site’s text explains that Dachau ‘is also the ideal starting point from which to discover the region’s charming countryside’. It affirms that the city merits more than a single visit to the concentration camp, ‘thanks to an impressive program of cultural events – ranging from the Dachau Palace Concerts to the Dachau Music Summer and the Traditional Dachau Folk Festival’. Accompanying the text are three images in a row featuring the concentration camp, a concert and the palace. The distinctive Renaissance wooden ceiling in the Schloss banqueting hall, reputedly one of the finest ceilings in southern Germany from the period, and the city’s postwar urban and cultural renaissance reflect a common theme. Dachau’s effort to reposition its image as a European centre for culture, learning and remembrance is cogently foregrounded on its website and supplementary brochures and posters. Dachau als Künstlerstadt (‘Dachau as City of Artists’) is a framing device increasingly used to promote and recontextualize public perceptions of the town (Dupuis-Panther, 2010). Across the road from KZ Dachau, the SS created an extensive area of cultivated fields and greenhouses, known as ‘The Plantation’, in which thousands of prisoners worked and died. Heinrich Himmler’s scheme was to make Germany independent of imported spices, and to grow herbs and medicinal plants at the Plantation. Since the war, the city has used this section of land as an industrial zone for various commercial enterprises. In 1997, the fast food chain McDonald’s opened a restaurant there. The company soon attracted controversy by reportedly placing flyers in the windscreens of visitors’ cars parked at KZ Dachau. The leaflets read ‘Welcome to Dachau and welcome to McDonald’s’, and provided a diagram showing the restaurant’s proximity to the camp (Schlosser, 2001: 233). In 1972, the first Olympics to be staged in Germany since Berlin 1936 were held in the city of Munich. McDonald’s selected Munich as the location for opening its second European outlet in 1971 to capitalize on the influx of tourists coming to the city for the summer games (the first McDonald’s in Europe was opened three months earlier in the Netherlands). McDonald’s now has 32 outlets in Munich and two in Dachau – strategically sited for tourist access across from the train station and close to the concentration camp. A new form of witnessing takes place in KZ Dachau today. Few photographs taken at the time of the camp’s operation, from 1933 to 1945, are in common use. Archival photos available on the web consist primarily of images of the stacks of corpses lying in boxcars outside the camp and in the crematorium, and scenes of liberated prisoners. As the film In Place of Death

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shows, today’s witnesses to the site take photos prodigiously (Figure 8.2), smiling in front of the iconic front gate of the Jourhaus entrance, with its slogan, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (freedom through work), or posing in front of the crematorium’s ovens. The new digital age, with its cost-free image creation, has increased the number of photos being taken. In a walk through the camp one is constantly reminded of tourists’ aspiration to digitally document, to record, to remember. The film reaffirms that in a place of death, a place which served as a prototype for the other concentration camps which were to be constructed throughout the Reich, some people now stroll with a picnic basket, others walk their dog, many take photos, and some visitors silently ponder what it might have been like to have been held prisoner there. Because of the camp’s spartan appearance – the barracks having been removed in the early-1960s and other buildings, such as the Commandant’s villa, later – there is a magnified sense of absence. What is this visible absence? Is it the absence of the urban activity present on the other side of the wall? Or, is it the absence of the site’s victims? The space is so vacuous that, even with thousands of visitors a day, there is a palpable void: an emptiness, accompanied by a great silence. As the film reveals, the constant crunch of the crowds’ rhythmic walking up the gravel path alongside the quietly flowing Wurm canal evokes a collective invented memory of the sound of the SS guards’ jackboots, or of the prisoners in a work party entering the

Figure 8.2

Main gate at Dachau, In Place of Death (2008), dir. Alan Marcus.

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camp. At key nodes – the main gate and inside the crematorium, many visitors – often youths in school or college groups led by a teacher – jostle and joke with each other. The tempo is one of an outing, an adventure. Just as the ancient town of Dachau in recent years has attempted to capitalize on the large number of tourists who visit the former concentration camp, extolling its place as ‘a town of culture’ and ‘a place of learning and remembrance’, so too do tour firms which explain that in the Altstadt (Old Town) ‘you may enjoy a quick coffee and some of the best baked goods Dachau has to offer’ (Johns Bavarian Tours, 2009). The principal challenge for the city is not that after visiting the concentration camp tourists may not wish to avail themselves of the city’s trendy cafes and bakeries, but that the main part of town is not easily visible. When exiting the train station and either setting out on the newly signposted ‘path of remembrance’, or taking a special city bus directly to the camp, tourists are confronted with the non-intentional border of Fruhlingstrasse and a tributary of the River Amper. The Altstadt, rising up on a hill, is around the corner, just out of view. By one city official’s estimate, only 1 per cent of the visitors to the camp actually visit the town centre (Schneider, 2006). Because this is for many a first and only visit, and they have no collective memory of a historic, picturesque town and former artists’ colony called Dachau, there is little awareness of it. In the public memory, Dachau represents one thing – a place of imprisonment and death. Crowning the hilltop and its Altstadt of colourful, neat houses and civic buildings, sits Schloss Dachau, the summer palace of the Wittelsbach family who ruled Bavaria from 1180 to 1918. From its balconies one obtains a commanding view of the surrounding city, Munich itself and the nearby countryside. From the train station, where many of the visitors alight, and from the camp, which is located in East Dachau, the Schloss is not readily visible. What it represents as a former seat of aristocratic power, as an elegant Baroque palace in bright yellow hues, and as a tourism venue today for dining and attending summer concerts, stands in sharp contrast to the function of the concrete prison camp. Because the camp is sublimated by the urban fabric, obscured by taller buildings and trees, it too is difficult to see from the palace. The two main built structures in Dachau each serve as symbols of omnipotence. One has been transformed into a site of cultural display. The other has become ‘a site of learning’. Viewing In Place of Death, our sight of both is interwoven. The splash of the palace fountains in their graceful formal gardens is intercut with the River Amper flowing through the town, leading to the Wurm canal by the camp. A meandering natural line is traced and constituent parts of the Dachau urban mosaic assembled by montage. In drawing upon film’s art of juxtaposition, acute comparisons are presented when Theodore Pais recalls that on the train to Dachau people were ‘treated like cattle’, as the film cuts to the interior of a modern train proceeding down the same track; or when he utters ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’

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when remembering how he entered the gate, as we see a crowd of youths push in their eagerness to make contact with the same icon and cross the threshold into the camp. In a moment, we witness the unequal differences of engagement with the same sites. When Mr Pais attempts to explain what happened to his wife and son, only being able to stutter, ‘they didn’t make it’, we watch as crowds descend upon the crematorium to snap photos and gaze upon a gruesome past. The power of the moving image is such that it only takes a few words to trigger the viewer’s temporal transgression. Bringing to the film a memory bank of traumatic scenes from archival stills, documentary footage, and popular films such as Schindler’s List (1993), the viewer of In Place of Death makes the uncomfortable association that despite the wealth of information about the Holocaust and the large number of recorded testimonies, gaps of awareness may frustrate the public memory. The frailty of the survivor witness also underscores the tenuous link between the individualization of memory and its role in making more immediate the enormity of the crime against humanity.

Urban palimpsests and signposting meaning On 15 November 1933, months after KZ Dachau was established, Dachau’s historic status as a market town was officially upgraded to that of a city. The decision to rename Dachau’s main street in the Altstadt as Konrad-Adenauer Strasse (formerly Freisinger Strasse) in 1967, which the city hall and other civic buildings, restaurants and hotels are situated on, could be interpreted as an attempt by the city to distance itself from its symbolic involvement with Nazi persecutions and thereby demonstrate its embrace of the country’s new democratic ideals. Adenauer (1876–1967), who studied law and politics in Munich, served as Mayor of Cologne, 1917–33, when he was ousted from power. Twice imprisoned by the Nazis in 1934 and 1944, Konrad Adenauer went on to become the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1949 to 1963. In the 1949 election, Adenauer narrowly beat his opponent, Kurt Schumacher (1895–1952), leader of the Social Democratic Party, who was imprisoned for most of the period 1933–45, including at KZ Dachau. A similar action was later taken in the naming of the street that leads to the entrance of the massive SS compound. In 1965, it was given the name Theodor-Heuss Strasse, after the first President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Theodor Heuss (1884–1963), who held office from 1949 to 1959 and who received his doctorate in Munich in 1905 and was a leader of the Free Democratic Party. Another street abutting the SS camp has been named John F. Kennedy Platz, which overlays its palimpsest identity as the former ReichsschatzministerSchwarz-Platz, named for the National Treasurer of the Nazi Party, SS-Oberstgruppenführer Franz Xaver Schwarz, who was from Bavaria. It was Schwarz, one of the earliest members of the party, holding membership

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No. 6, who arranged the purchase of the building designated for the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich in 1930, Braunes Haus (‘Brown House’, named after the colour of the uniforms) on Brienner Strasse, just a block away from Dachauer Strasse. John F. Kennedy Platz runs in parallel with the street that follows the perimeter of the SS compound, formerly called Strasse der SS (‘Street of the SS’), which still has a row of eight SS residential villas and has since been renamed Strasse der KZ-Opfer (‘Street of the KZ Victims’). Also joining this road are streets named after Johann Neumeyer and Julius Kohn, Jewish residents of Dachau who were driven out of their homes on Kristallnacht and who were murdered at Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. Another connecting road is Pastor-Niemöller-Weg. Rev. Martin Niemöller (1892–1984), a former submarine commander in the First World War who was awarded the Iron Cross, later became an anti-Nazi theologian and prominent Lutheran pastor, and was imprisoned at Sachsenhausen and Dachau from 1938 to 1945. Other streets named after Catholic priests imprisoned at Dachau include Pater-Roth Strasse and Bischof-Neuhäusler-Weg. Neuhäusler (1888–1973) was born near Dachau, received his theological training in Munich, and was Canon of the Munich Catholic Cathedral Fathers when the National Socialists came to power in 1933. A street is also named after him in Munich. A number of clergymen who spoke out against the new regime were arrested and brought to Dachau, where they were brutally treated. Some 2771 clergymen, mostly Catholics, were incarcerated at the camp during its operation, of whom at least 1034 died. Curiously, the street named for Father Roth connects with another street named for a communist detainee at the camp, Karl Riemer, on which new apartment buildings have been built which overlook the camp’s perimeter fence and ‘the bunker’, which was a special prison within the prison. With such steps of naming key city streets after leading figures of the new democratic Germany and other personages associated with democracy and notable victims of Nazism, the town has sought to map over and reorient the public’s perception of its political heritage. Particular spatial attention has been directed towards place names in the city’s political centre and in the vicinity of the SS camp and compound. Reworking a well-worn proverb, a recent city brochure declares that: ‘Many roads lead to Rome. Even more lead to Dachau’ (Stadt Dachau, c. 2008). A town whose concentration camp was the destination for incarceration of a broad spectrum of political opponents and others from across the Third Reich and its occupied territories is now being positioned as a cultural and economic hub. The same close urban association that made its proximity to Munich a convenient location for establishing the camp is promoted as a virtue for economic opportunities. One street that has retained its Third Reich associations is a main boulevard, Sudetenlandstrasse, that runs near the camp through East Dachau. The street was named to commemorate Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudentenland under the Munich Agreement in 1938 and

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Hitler’s policy of Heim ins Reich (‘Home into the Empire’). Controversies over the way the town should embrace the camp’s history have gone through various postwar permutations and complexities. In the 1933 election, 44 per cent nationally voted for the National Socialist German Workers’ Union (NSDAP), while they received only 24 per cent of the vote from the citizens of Dachau. Hitler’s NSDAP actually came third in the Dachau vote after the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDP). One week after the Nazis took control of the Dachau town council, Hans Zauner (1885–1973), who was a member of the Nazi Party, was installed as second vice mayor, a post he held from 1933 to 1945. He was one of the local Nazi officials forced by the US Army, who liberated Dachau, to tour the camp with its piles of corpses (USHMC, 1945; Marcuse, 2001: 80). Yet, in 1952, he was elected by a majority of the populace to serve as head mayor of Dachau, a post he held until 1960. One of the roads in the town is named after him, Bürgermeister-Zauner-Ring. Some authorities’ objections to retaining the camp’s physical structures and its various components as a lasting reminder and memorial site may have created an environment of conservative resistance and complacency. Without a visible reminder, public memory is placed in jeopardy. Tensions were such that there were efforts to have the crematoria dismantled in the mid-1950s following debates on the subject in the city council (Marcuse, 2001: 184). The prisoners’ barracks were torn down in 1965 and it was not until 1974 that the Dachau Memorial Site was designated as a protected monument. However, that did not prevent the town from demolishing the Commandant’s villa in 1987 and authorizing the controversial construction of the ‘Roman Grove’ apartment complex a few metres from the camp’s perimeter fence. One of KZ Dachau’s most sadistic camp commandants from 1939 to 1941, SS-Sturmbannführer and Schutzhaftlagerführer Egon Zill, who went on to become commandant at KZ Natzweiler-Struthof and KZ Flossenburg, was sentenced in 1955 at the district court in Munich to life in prison. At Dachau, Zill had carried on in the ruthless tradition established by Theodor Eicke. After having his term reduced to 15 years in 1961, Egon Zill was released on probation in 1963 after serving just eight years. Zill found sufficient support locally that he chose the town of Dachau as a place of retirement, where he lived until his death in 1974. A brochure prepared by Dachau’s Economic Development Department, aimed at the international business community (the brochure is published in English), stresses the city’s homogenous population, noting that ‘according to research carried out by experts at the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, “the local population is incredibly stable” … In other words: people living in Dachau tomorrow can expect the same types of neighbours and same living conditions they are enjoying today’ (Stadt Dachau, c. 2008). As if to underscore the point, the text is accompanied by images of 23 individuals representing local people from Dachau. Fourteen of

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them have blonde hair, and all six of the children in the pictures are blonde, evoking the former societal goal of Volksgemeinschaft. A place name that was synonymous with death is now trumpeted as a homogenous place of rebirth, with the brochure noting that between 1996 and 2006 the city experienced a population growth of 9.5 per cent (ibid.). The brochure’s authors make the implication that this growth is not due to an influx of foreigners, but rather to the continued presence of individuals of a similar ethnic and cultural background.

Witnessing and the visuo-haptic memory response In what may be one of the final Nazi war crime trials, John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born member of the SS, appeared before a court in Munich on 30 November 2009 to face charges of complicity in the deaths of 28,000 Jews while working as a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland. The accused is 89 years old and was wheeled into the courtroom by medics, strapped to a stretcher and surrounded by police and photojournalists. There are reportedly now no living witnesses to identify him, though two camp survivors will testify about the conditions at Sobibor. As with Theodore Pais, what happens to our understanding of past traumatic events when there are no more witnesses to offer their accounts? Will prosecuting an old man in Munich – the birthplace of the Nazi Party and a symbolic city whose sub-camps operated under the umbrella of KZ Dachau – stimulate a rejuvenated public memory of the atrocities committed under the Third Reich? Demjanjuk’s appearance provides an instant reminder that the past is not the past, but a feature of the present. That bridging of time is a key objective of the film In Time of Place, in its attempts to use signifiers through manipulation of sound, shot selection and juxtaposition to convey the historical resonance and relevance of past traumatic events. When the visitor walks with others along the prescribed gravel path beside the Wurm canal to the entrance of the Dachau camp and hears the sound of crunching footsteps in unison, it may serve to trigger and reinvent the received public memory of prisoners or SS guards making the same sound on the same path years earlier. As the spectator views this scene in the film In Place of Death, the act may also trigger a similar mimetic memory. The film’s methodology features a fixed camera frame, with no pans or tilts. Most of the shots are firmly hand held, with barely perceptible movement, as if to suggest the spectator’s own breathing presence viewing a scene. Long takes are used, straight cuts and no special effects wipes, and a lack of music and narration. Taken collectively, these stylistics give the impression of reduced intervention, thereby augmenting, emphasizing and validating the spectator’s visuo-haptic response to the scene. The documentation of repetitious actions through montage further imprints the received memory and its temporal significance. Generating a visuo-haptic memory response throughout

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the film is critical to the work’s reception. The term visuo-haptic memory is applied in neurophysiology to describe learned behaviour associated with object recognition and usage. Visuo-haptic perception is also used to refer to the integration between visual and tactile signals and their reception. In film, extensive discussion of cinema’s haptic sensory properties has been presented in studies such as Burch (1990), Lant (1995), and Marks (2000; 2002), and the haptic relationship explored between film and architecture in texts such as Bruno’s key work Atlas of Emotion (2002). There was much controversy when the original ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ sign above the gate at Auschwitz was stolen on 18 December 2009 (BBC, 2009). At Dachau, the most direct haptic engagement visitors have with the camp is when they take the decision to either grasp and push open the heavy, iron ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ entrance gate in the Jourhaus, or avoid touching it. In a single gesture they initiate their association with a profound collective public memory. In the act, time is transgressed and a bond forged to the received memory of a series of historical traumatic events that characterized the imprisonment, torture and death of millions of human beings. Though the camp was responsible for the death of some 30,000–50,000 individuals, because it was the Nazis’ first concentration camp and its name widely known and publicized, the camp’s iconic gate serves as an international emblem of Nazi terror and genocide. Documenting the diversity of visitor activity at the gate is a running motif in the film. Incarceration versus liberation, played out again and again. The repetition reaffirms the stature of the gate as the camp’s primary orifice, and its associated stature. The visitor’s freedom of movement reinforces the contemporary context of undisputed liberty. No guard or curator is on hand to document the visitor’s access or departure. Once having stepped across the threshold, the visitor and spectator enter a liminal space, made explicit by the lack of delineated paths across the massive Appelplatz, the prisoners’ roll call square covered in gravel, which extends on the other side of the gate. Voices dissipate and the crowds are minimized by the vast scale of the camp’s vacuous expanse. The role of diegetic sound in the film plays an important function in stimulating a haptic response. In particular, the repetitious use of sound, whether the ubiquitous clicking of tourists’ digital cameras or the sound of walking on gravel up to and across the camp, produces an echoic memory, whereby an auditory mental echo is briefly maintained. The echoic affect bridges shots and through its repetitious application also inflects a blurring of temporal contexts. The filmmaker’s intention is to accentuate cinematic properties of the visuo-haptic memory response to firmly situate the spectator within the scene and enhance the permeability of the fourth wall, in order to both fix and transgress time. This relationship is given additional breadth through the interventions of the survivor’s tale, characterized by its few spoken words, prefaced and given stature by a lengthy pause where speech is not forthcoming. The sense of expectation and anticipation creates

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a dynamic in which the spectator fills the auditory void with their own imagined response. When the survivor’s short answer does finally come, it either confirms the participant-spectator’s intuitive response, or provides an element of surprise and shock. In each case, the words suture and descriptively link the next scene. KZ Dachau is a traumatized space. Its terror iconography of barbed wire, guard towers, walls, cells and crematoria reinforce its former function and legacy. By avoiding the use of overt informative and emotional guides and signposts, such as narration and music, the film foregrounds a sense of absence. In the physical absence of victims and perpetrators, the spectator is left with other tangible reminders. KZ Dachau has a ‘clean camp’ appearance, where the barracks are missing and only gravel and stone foundations indicate where the prisoners slept in overcrowded conditions and where SS doctors conducted their experiments on hapless victims. Throughout the film, visitors are seen wandering across the camp’s open spaces in search of explanation. Their meandering gait is reflected in the film’s stochastic montage, its anti or non-narrative structure placing the viewer on an unpredictable path offering a palette of options. The jarring visual and aural components, which juxtapose town traffic noise with the calm of the Wurm canal’s waters, the sound of a fly investigating a flower, and the explosive shouts of students at the camp’s entrance, or camera sounds in the crematorium, displace the viewer’s initial attempts to decipher cogent meaning from the scenes. In the 30-minute classic documentary film on the Nazis’ concentration camp system and the Final Solution Nuit et Brouillard (1955), directed by Alain Resnais, Jean Cayrol’s poetic and explicit script, Michel Bouquet’s delivery of the narration and Hanns Eisler’s nimble and provocative music underscore the film’s display of irony and tragedy. Contemporary shots of the physical remnants of Auschwitz-Birkenau, aided by the use of archival footage, is given explosive and directed meaning through its juxtaposition with the narration and music. There is rarely a moment in the film when the spectator is left unsure of how to interpret the narrative presentation. In contrast, with the absence of music and verbal explanation in In Place of Death, the spectator is systemically encouraged to rely more heavily on their multi-modal sensory acuity. As with many of the tourists seen in the film visiting KZ Dachau, who rely on visuo-haptic responses to the camp’s iconography to form their impressions, so too do the film’s viewers. Applying the proposed theory of cinematic visuo-haptic memory response to the film’s methodology gives expression to its diversity of meaning and the means for situating the spectator’s responses. Film’s unique ability to foster this form of experience was indicated by Walter Benjamin (1968: 236), who observed that cinema could ‘reveal entirely new structural formations of the subject’. Given that most of today’s visitors to the site and spectators of the film have no first-hand experience of the historical period in which Dachau was

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operational as a concentration camp, what is the nature of the memory triggered by the visuo-haptic experiential response? Landsberg (2004: 2) utilizes the term ‘prosthetic memory’ to describe the ‘interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past’, in which the subject does not just ‘apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live’. A similar approach, though without the use of a survivor’s testimony, has been employed in three other films of identical length treating sites of significance associated with the Holocaust and Diaspora, including: The Ghetto (2009), set in Venice; The Cemetery (2010), made in the former Jewish quarter in Prague; and The Memorial (2010), filmed in Boston at the New England Holocaust Memorial site. The films comprise the In Time of Place research project (Marcus, 2010). In The Ghetto, the narrative adopts an even greater stochastic approach to that employed in the Dachau film. Underlying scenes of banal interactions in a familiar and colourful setting presents substrata of absence, trauma and death, which are only revealed as the film ends. As in dramatic films, documentaries tend to present ‘a linear and moral story’, aiming to ‘give us direct access to history’ (Rosenstone, 2006: 17). The rationale and justification for these goals are clear. Mainstream documentary follows similar and long-standing dramatic narrative conventions and tropes of heroes and victims, conflict and resolution, in an effort to establish a persuasive point of view and to create an emotional bond with the viewer. The challenge is that following such accepted practice limits the flexibility of viewer response and interpretation. Film at its most effective is a form of manipulation – the question is one of transparency and intent. When director Leni Riefenstahl was asked by the author who were the influences behind her approach to making her classic documentary Triumph des Willens (1935), which features an inventive use of montage, she responded that she had none (Marcus, 2004: 81). When asked if the opening sequence in which Adolf Hitler’s plane emerges from the clouds to land at the Nuremberg airport was an effort to deify the Führer as a saviour figure, she objected strongly to the interpretation and went on to explain that the film was simply a ‘record of reality’ (ibid.: 79, 82). Yet, this film, through its widespread dissemination and continued use on film and history courses, demonstrates the potency of its presentation of a new political movement by employing a highly refined form of artistry and filmic construction. By using selective framing and dramatic narrative structure, few aspects of the film are left to ‘reality’. The film In Place of Death attempts to convey a set of ideas in a more subtle manner. By using observational techniques, long takes and eschewing conventions on use of music, narration or narrative form and casting, the film sets itself in opposition to documentary norms associated with historical film. It seeks to offer the viewer a less overtly signposted scenario in order that they might find traces of the past and their contemporary contextualization even more revelatory and pertinent when subjected to analysis.

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Acknowledgements The author would like to acknowledge funding received from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland in support of the In Time of Place research project.

Notes 1. In Place of Death is one of a series of films made within the In Time of Place research project which looks at sites associated with Jewish identity and the Holocaust. Invited screenings of In Place of Death (2008, 30 minutes, directed by Alan Marcus) include: Edinburgh College of Art Symposium (March, 2008), City in Film conference, Liverpool University (March, 2008), Cinema and Architecture Symposium, Haifa, Israel (June, 2008), Cultural Memory conference, University of Kent, Canterbury (September, 2008), Narrascape workshop, University of Cambridge (September, 2008), Visible Memories conference, Syracuse University, NY (October, 2008), Manchester Architectural Research Centre (November, 2008), University of Derby (November, 2008), University of Manchester (November, 2008), The Irish Film Institute, Dublin (March, 2009), three screenings at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, the School of Architecture and the School of Divinity at the University of Cambridge (March, 2010). Available at: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/timeofplace/. 2. Invited screenings of Beautiful Dachau (2006, 30 minutes, directed by Alan Marcus) include: TRANS exhibition and conference, University of Wisconsin, Madison (October, 2006), University of Manchester (October, 2006), Constructions of Conflict conference, University of Wales, Swansea (October, 2007), Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania (November, 2007), Brown University, Rhode Island (November, 2007), Princeton University (November, 2007), and Harvard University (November, 2007). Available at: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/timeofplace/video_installation.php.

Bibliography BBC News. (2009). ‘Auschwitz death camp sign stolen’. Available at: http://news.bbc. co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8420053.stm, accessed 19 December. Benjamin, W. (1968). Illuminations, trans. by H. Zohn (New York: Schocken Books). Bruno, G. (2002). Atlas of Emotion (New York: Verso). Burch, N. (1990). Life to those Shadows (Berkeley: University of California Press). Dachau (2009). City of Dachau official website. Available at: http://www.dachau.de/, accessed 12 September. Dachau Tour, The (2009). Available at: http://www.dachautour.com, accessed 29 November. Distel, B., G. Hammermann, S. Zámecnik, J. Zarusky and Z. Zofka (eds) (2005). The Dachau Concentration Camp, 1933 to 1945 (Dachau: Comité International de Dachau). Dupuis-Panther, F. (2010). ‘Dachau Gemäldegalerie Dachau’, Schwarzaufweiss Das Reisemagazin. Available at: http://www.schwarzaufweiss.de/deutschland/dachau/ gemaeldegalerie.htm#sammlung, accessed 2 March. Johns Bavarian Tours (2009). Available at: http://www.johns-bavarian-tours.com/, accessed 29 November.

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Landsberg, A. (2004). Prosthetic Memory (New York: Columbia University Press). Lant, A. (1995). ‘Haptical Cinema’, October, 74 (Fall): 45–73. LK-Kunststofftechnik GmbH (2009). Available at: http://www.lk-kunststofftechnik.de, accessed 29 November. Marcus, A. (2004). ‘Reappraising Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will’, Film Studies, 4 (Summer): 75–86. Marcus, A. (2010). In Time of Place research project web site. Available at: http://www. abdn.ac.uk/timeofplace/, accessed 1 March. Marcuse, H. (2001). Legacies of Dachau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Marks, L. (2000). The Skin of the Film (Durham: Duke University Press). Marks, L. (2002). Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Rosenstone, R. (2006). History on Film, Film on History (London: Pearson). Schlosser, E. (2001). Fast Food Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin). Schneider, T. (2006). Personal communication with the author, 18 April. Stadt Dachau (c. 2008). Here. Now. Dachau (Dachau, Stadt Dachau Economic Development Department). Available at: http://www.dachau.com/en/data/image/ image-broschure-dachau-en.pdf, accessed 4 November. USHMC (United States Holocaust Museum Collection) (1945). ‘Photograph of Pile of Deceased Prisoners in the Dachau Concentration Camp’, 30 April 1945. Available at: http://resources.ushmm.org/inquery/uia_doc.php/photos/12396?hr=null, accessed 7 March.

Filmography Beautiful Dachau (2006). Directed by Alan Marcus (UK: Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester). In Place of Death (2008). Directed by Alan Marcus (UK: In Time of Place). Nuit et Brouillard (1955). Directed by Alain Resnais (France: Argos Films). Schindler’s List (1993). Directed by Steven Spielberg (US: Universal Pictures). The Cemetery (2010). Directed by Alan Marcus (UK: In Time of Place). The Ghetto (2009). Directed by Alan Marcus (UK: In Time of Place). The Memorial (2010). Directed by Alan Marcus (UK: In Time of Place). Triumph des Willens (1935). Directed by Leni Riefenstahl (Germany: Leni Riefenstahl Produktions.

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Part III Cinematic Cartography: Film, Mapping and Urban Topography

Introduction The chapters in this section examine a different form of urban projection, one which has closer association with practices of mapping and cartography. The terms ‘cinematic cartography’ and ‘cinematic geography’ have appeared with increasing frequency in recent years, reflecting a diverse range of interests and critical perspectives. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, accompanying these trends has been a rapid growth in the use of digital mapping technologies, from Google Earth and other web mapping services, to Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and locational media, offering exciting and challenging new opportunities for filmmakers, viewers and scholars alike. As forms of spatial practice both cinema and cartography provide a means of positionality which, whether framing epistemological, ideological, aesthetic or perceptual modes of urban engagement, has nevertheless meant that the cinematographic and cartographic have remained more closely linked than has been otherwise acknowledged in studies to date. One of the principal factors that has doubtless inhibited theoretical and empirical developments in this area has been the disciplinary conservatism (or indeed parochialism, to use a geographic term) that has left critically barren the ‘blind fields’ (Lefebvre, 2003) which block channels of cross-disciplinary exchange between different practitioners and theorists of space. Positioning cinema within a wider history and theory of cartography, Teresa Castro explores the ways in which a ‘mapping impulse’ – a cognitive and experiential response to the human landscape and environment, one which has arguably pre-dated the production of what we would now call ‘maps’ – has more been an instrumental factor in shaping the landscapes and topography of the moving image. Noting that ‘the coupling of eye and instrument that distinguishes cartography’s observation of space is not so distant from the one that determines cinema’s careful coding and scaling of the world’, Castro identifies three formal strategies that distinguish

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cinema’s visual mapping of urban space: topophilia, description, and surveying. She draws on a range of examples, from Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Robert Flaherty’s Twenty-Four Dollar Island, to the psychogeographic film work of Guy Debord, and demonstrates how each of these formal strategies defines specific modes of perceptual and cognitive engagement with city spaces. Stressing that these strategies and taxonomic forms of visual mapping cannot and should not be taken in isolation, Castro argues that they represent interrelated strands of cinematic cartography in which the moving image is both producer and product of the wider processes structuring the way we understand, navigate and imagine the urban. Picking up Castro’s discussion of psychogeography and Situationistinspired modes of critical spatial practice, Paul Newland discusses the work of the London-based artist Emily Richardson and that of writer and filmmaker Iain Sinclair, with whom Richardson collaborated on the installation projects Transit (2006) and Memo Mori (2009). Proceeding from Sinclair’s observation that the future cinema in London is a ‘cinema of surveillance’, Newland discusses how Richardson and Sinclair’s cinematic mapping of urban landscapes around the site of the London 2012 Olympic Games in east London attempts to reclaim the histories, memories and lived spaces that have historically defined these landscapes. Projected onto three screens, with three simultaneous commentaries by Sinclair creating a dissonant or dislocated soundscape to accompany the visuals, Transit, Newland argues, reveals ‘the enduring, intensely discursive power of east London’ and celebrates its enduring status as a repository of narratives, memory and myth. Mourning the passing of Lefebvrean ‘inhabited’ space, for Newland Transit and Memo Mori offer a ‘psychogeographical riposte’ to the plans of the Olympic developers, mapping, in the process, what Sinclair has elsewhere described as a ‘cartography of absence’. Staying with London, Maurizio Cinquegrani’s chapter discusses early archive films that documented the capital’s iconic spaces of empire, such as exhibitions, museums, zoological gardens and docks. Cinquegrani argues that these early films of London provide a ‘selective form of cinematic cartography rooted in imperial culture’. In the same way that museums and exhibition spaces helped legitimize and reinforce Britain’s imperial imaginary, actuality and non-fiction films also played an important role in promoting and celebrating the power of the British Empire. Providing a detailed exposition of a selection of early films of London, Cinquegrani suggests that these filmic documents anticipated later developments in British documentary film such as the establishment of the Empire Marketing Board and Crown Film Unit, and films such as Humphrey Jennings’s Family Portrait, produced as part of the celebrations of the 1951 Festival of Britain. The last chapter in this section examines a different development in cinematic cartography: the production of ‘movie maps’ as marketing tools to promote cities as sites of tourist attraction and consumption. Les Roberts takes

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as his main focus of discussion the co-extensive geographies of the film and tourism industries, exemplified in no small part by the production of print and web-based maps of film and television location sites, as well as a growing number of film tourism guidebooks, podcasts and other media promoting and facilitating the consumption of film and television-related tourism. Basing his analysis on empirical and ethnographic research conducted in Merseyside, Roberts explores the increasingly synergistic relationship between, on the one hand, film offices and screen commissions, and on the other, local, regional and national tourism organizations. As Iain Sinclair and Emily Richardson suggest in relation to London, the more that all-pervasive technologies and cultures of surveillance image the city the more correspondingly the city disappears. Similarly, for Roberts, the disembedding of place and memory which is the paradoxical by-product of the growth in ‘cinematographic tourism’ inhibits rather than promotes authentic forms of engagement with the lived spaces of the city. He concludes by considering alternative cartographies of film and outlining a methodological framework by which to critically navigate cinematic geographies of urban representation.

References Lefebvre, H. (2003). The Urban Revolution, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

9 Mapping the City through Film: From ‘Topophilia’ to Urban Mapscapes Teresa Castro

In recent years, the idea of ‘mapping’ has become the object of much critical attention, gradually turning into a fashionable notion that found its way well beyond the field of cartography. Responding to a widely acknowledged ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences and the humanities, this interest has both focused on the map as a meaningful artefact and on the process of mapping itself. The latter is understood to cover much more than the conventional techniques and operations deployed in order to produce traditional cartographic objects. In this new critical context, mapping refers to a multitude of processes, from the cognitive operations implied in the structuring of any kind of spatial knowledge to the discursive implications of a particular visual regime. Following this general ‘spatial turn’, as well as some recent works looking into film’s cartographic dimensions (Bruno, 2002; Conley, 2007), I would like to examine the idea that cinema’s exploration of urban space is sometimes akin to a form of visual mapping. In an earlier study (Castro, 2009), I have argued that cinema is traversed by what could be called a mapping impulse, an expression I retain both from art historian Svetlana Alpers (1983) and the late John Brian Harley, a renowned historian of cartography. In her book The Art of Describing, Alpers suggests that seventeenth-century Dutch painting, with its emphasis on description and on the image’s flat surface, cannot be understood without taking cartographic techniques into account. Here would lie Dutch painting’s ‘mapping impulse’, a drive capable of turning it into an accomplished art of describing the world (in contrast to Italian painting, an art of narrative imagery according to Alpers). Harley’s take on the notion is considerably different: wider and more anthropological in scope, it turns ‘mapping’ into a practice and a form of thought permeating the history of mankind. As he writes in the Introduction to an important History of Cartography: There has probably always been a mapping impulse in human consciousness, and the mapping experience – involving the cognitive mapping of space – undoubtedly existed long before the physical artefacts we now 144

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call maps. For many centuries maps have been employed as literary metaphors and tools in analogical thinking. There is thus also a wider history of how concepts and facts about space have been communicated, and the history of the map itself – the physical artefact – is but one small part of this general history of communication about space. (Harley and Woodward, 1987: 1) Seen in this light, the ‘mapping impulse’ relates to a particular mode of thought, covering a number of strategies for representing the real that cannot be limited to the ‘physical artefacts’ known as maps. Discussing the mapping impulse in film – or in any other form of visual expression – is therefore not about the (albeit significant or symptomatic) presence of maps in the filmic landscape, but more about the processes that underlie the very conception of images. To quote Harley again, if we understand maps to be ‘graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world’ (Harley and Woodward, 1987: xvi), our focus shifts from maps as objects to mapping as a function. Within this context, it can be argued that the coupling of eye and instrument that distinguishes cartography’s observation of space is not so distant from the one that determines cinema’s careful coding and scaling of the world. Using very different examples from distinct periods in film history, I will try to identify and briefly discuss three of the formal strategies that distinguish cinema’s visual mapping of urban space. The first is linked to a certain topographic fascination, if not a real topophilia, in the sense of ‘love of place’. In this sense, the notion of mapping refers less to a disciplinary instrument of visual domination than to a means of self-discovery. Understood in such a way, ‘topophilia’ covers a vast array of manifestations, related to the politics and/or to the poetics of space. Such a topographic appeal often goes hand in hand with a second formal procedure, concerning the seemingly descriptive motivation of the images in question, made evident by such camera movements as the panning shot or the travelling shot. In this second case, the notion of mapping evoked is certainly more conventional, since mapping as a cultural technology often worked as a way of cataloguing the important features of the earth’s surface. Moreover, this strategy can be linked to the ancient practice of ‘chorography’, the description of the visible features of single parts of the earth, as if cinematographic urban portraits (such as the 1920s ‘city-symphonies’, for example) perpetuated and inflected the older tradition of pictorial town portraits. Finally, a third formal strategy would be surveying, either by means of walking – a pre-eminent spatial practice – or by looking from above. In themselves two very different tactics, walking and looking from above are often complementary mapping procedures, in particular when it comes to mapping the city through films. Both tactics can also assume different forms and cover various agendas, such as

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(post-) Situationist wanderings or disciplinary, surveillance methods. Finally, it should be pointed out that the three strategies I have evoked – ‘topophilia’, describing and surveying – are not necessarily autonomous: as a matter of fact, they often combine in surprising and even contradictory ways.

‘Topophilia’, or the love of place It is perhaps a commonplace to start a study on cities and film with an evocation of Woody Allen, New York’s quintessential filmmaker. The famous opening sequence of his 1979 film Manhattan in particular has been commented on countless times. Remaining one of the filmmaker’s most accomplished declarations of love to his home city, the cliché provides us with an interesting starting point with regards to the idea of ‘topophilia’, as a short description of the sequence attests. As a black screen cuts to a series of shots of the city’s unique skyline, we hear Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’. More Manhattan shots follow: the skyline at dawn, the Empire State Building, parking lots, crowded streets, Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park in the snow, etc. We start hearing Ike’s voice (Woody Allen), as if reading aloud: ‘Chapter One. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion’. Ike goes on reading, hesitating about the way to go about what clearly sounds like the beginning of a book, his book. As he goes on reciting, we see more of the island of Manhattan: shots of women strolling down Fifth Avenue, of men drilling the streets, of ferries approaching the port. The images respond to Ike’s words, not because they illustrate them, but because they allude to the same heartfelt attachment to place at the origin of Ike’s writing/Allen’s filming. As we listen to Ike saying ‘New York was his town. And it would always be’, Gershwin’s song loudly returns to fill the screen. The sequence ends with a postcard view of the Manhattan skyline at night, firecrackers flashing against the dark sky. Watching Allen’s Manhattan one is struck by his discreet sensibility to the natural and artificial features of the island. The initial sequence of the film constitutes an inventory of some of these features, an extremely personal cinematic topography of Manhattan providing the cue for the affective, filmic mapping that ensues. Such a posture brings to mind the notion of ‘topophilia’. Coined by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his book Poétique de l’espace (1957), the notion was picked by the Situationist International (SI) in 1960 and made popular by Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in his 1974 study of environmental perception. According to Tuan, the term addresses ‘all of the human being’s affective ties with the material environment’, which, as the geographer himself explains, can be very different in nature and intensity (Tuan, 1974: 93). Cultural theorist Giuliana Bruno has recently used the term in her Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film, giving it a new, significant twist. The notion, which is central to the author’s argument, is used in order ‘to describe that

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form of cinematic discourse that exposes the labour of intimate geography’; Bruno further argues that ‘such work is driven by a passion for mapping that is itself topophilically routed’ (Bruno, 2002: 354). Woody Allen’s Manhattan – as with many of his other New York films – corresponds in many ways to this labour of an intimate geography. Closely articulated to the narrative development, the filmmaker’s amorous geography of his hometown, as well as his ‘feeling of place’, work in the film as major commanding principles. Observing that such heartfelt attachments to place constitute a distinctive trait of many ‘city films’ is certainly not an original claim. However, the consideration of urban filmscapes in terms of mental geographies and emotional mappings allows us to reconsider the complex relations between cinema and place. Patrick Keiller’s first full-length film, London (1994), provides us with a thought-provoking example. A portrait of the British metropolis through the eyes of an anonymous narrator and his mysterious friend Robinson, the film charts, through a series of static shots, three exploratory excursions around London. The first journey takes Robinson (a part-time lecturer in art and architecture) and his former lover (a cruise ship’s photographer) from the house where Horace Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto in Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, to Robinson’s home in Vauxhall. The second journey crosses London Bridge and the City, leading the two characters from Stockwell (where Guillaume Apollinaire is said to once have gone in search of a former lover) to Stoke Newington (where Edgar Allen Poe attended school). Finally, the third journey follows the River Brent to the north-west suburbs of the city. The expeditions are part of Robinson’s investigations on London and its alternative histories. The itineraries and the narrator’s observations provide us with an insightful commentary on London’s urban fabric and its peculiar history. The notion of ‘topophilia’ seems particularly relevant to address Keiller’s film, in particular if we keep in mind the SI appropriation of the term. In an article dated December 1960, the SI proclaimed that they would ‘play upon topophobia’ in order to ‘create a topophilia’. Such a programmatic passage from the ‘fear of place(s)’ to the ‘love of place(s)’ is obviously related to the practice of psychogeography: ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviours of individuals’ (Debord, 1955: 5). If Keiller’s work is unquestionably associated with the British tradition of ‘psychogeography’ – London being the classic psychogeographical film about the capital – I would like to put an emphasis on the strictly topographic dimension of his approach. Writing about the everyday landscapes of British cinema, the author affirms: If film-making is the construction of other worlds, then film-making on location offers the possibility of the transformation of the world we

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live in – a reconstruction through poetry or fiction, through photogenie; a fictional politics, a fictional solidarity (Renoir; Jennings). The impulse to search for these locations is irresistible. (Keiller, 1994: 35) This imaginative transformation of the bland surroundings of everyday life – in particular through the use of ‘photogenic’ static shots – is at the core of London. As a matter of fact, Robinson and his friend give life to the Situationist project of transforming ‘topophobia’ into ‘topophilia’. Theirs is an affective mapping contributing, among others, to the sketching of Robinson’s portrait (Keiller’s self-portrait?). But, and perhaps more importantly, theirs is also a form of cognitive mapping, as Fredric Jameson would put it: a way of reappropriating the alienated city and of reconquering a sense of place in the midst of the violent, capitalistic urban totality in which they find themselves. In this sense, Keiller reactualizes the Situationist project, attempting with his filmic map of London to ‘again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion’ (Jameson, 1984: 92). Moreover, it is also curious to note that if walking as a strategy is also relevant to the film’s mapping discourse (Robinson and his friend being contemporary flâneurs, unacknowledged psychogeographers), the almost exclusive use of static shots sets aside the spectacle of motion per se, putting the emphasis on place and on vision instead. If the term ‘topophilia’ does not cover all the implications of film’s topographic fascination, it can nonetheless offer a way of addressing cinema’s fascination and sustained commitment to exploring the specificities of place. One can only hope that further theoretical investigations are able to turn the term ‘topophilia’ into a fully operative notion, allowing us to address such different examples as early-cinema travelogues or contemporary art objects.

Cinematographic urban portraits: From the art of describing to urban atlases During the 1920s, the same city to which Woody Allen was later to pay a poignant tribute was already a thriving metropolis, attracting millions of African-Americans and immigrants from all over the world. Lured by its flourishing economy, many of them were to find employment in the construction industry: New York’s skyline in particular was changing quickly, high-rise buildings competing with one another for the title of tallest skyscraper in town. A significant number of short documentary films recorded the transformations taking place, while simultaneously portraying the hectic life of a modern metropolis. Such is the case of Twenty-Four Dollar

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Island, shot in 1926 by American filmmaker Robert Flaherty. The film’s title alludes to the Dutch purchase of Manhattan in 1624, beginning with several shots of old maps, one of which, depicting the new-founded colony of New Amsterdam, will dissolve into a modern aerial view of the island. In Flaherty’s own words, Twenty-Four Dollar Island is ‘a picture story of the most dynamic city the world has ever seen’ (Flaherty, 1927). In his effort to depict New York, Flaherty chose high vantage points and a long-focus lens, assembling many extraordinary views from the countless ongoing construction works. We see the city’s busy docks, Brooklyn Bridge, clouds of smoke and jutting skyscrapers. In Flaherty’s words, this is a film ‘in which New York is the central character – not a picture in which individuals are portrayed’ (ibid.). Neither a conventional travelogue, nor a truly programmatic avant-garde experiment, Flaherty’s picture lies somewhere in between, conforming nonetheless to a recognizable structure, typical of what could best be defined as a form of cinematographic urban portrait. Among such filmic portrayals of urban space one can include a wide variety of works, ranging from the archival-like compilation of picturesque city views – tourist films remaining the best example of this accumulation of views – to the calculated experiments aiming to recreate the wealth of urban sensorial experiences, best illustrated by the so-called city symphonies, such as Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a City (1927) or Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), to quote two of the most famous examples. The trait common to these extremely different films is their will to portray the city as an autonomous and recognizable entity. Seen in this light, their different visual and rhetorical strategies should not put us off their primary objective. The notion of ‘portrait’ as a description of something – in this case, urban places – is particularly interesting, especially since it highlights description’s visual dimension. If ‘describing’ usually refers to a linguistic construction, it should be pointed out that even a strictly literary conception of the term claims to render objects ‘visible’, as the classic definition of the eighteenthcentury Encyclopaedia confirms: Description is a figure of thought by development, which, instead of simply indicating an object, renders it somehow visible, by the vivid and animated exposition of its most interesting properties and circumstances. (quoted in Hamon, 1991: 211) In the present context, I use ‘description’ in order to refer to the presentation of objects, processes or events in a straightforward manner, revealing sometimes a real love of enumeration, illustrated in many films – in particular travelogues – by a succession of shots of emblematic places in a city. This goes well beyond the simple capture of reality facilitated by the automatism and indexicality of the filmic medium: description, in cinema

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as elsewhere, involves taking a position with regards to reality, resulting in the selection and arrangement of different elements. Such a process results in the construction of ‘descriptive series’ evincing specific intentions, such as the construction of knowledge or the creation of a ‘reality effect’. Early travelogues, touring and presenting famous urban locations, illustrate this latter point well. They constitute filmic portraits; that is, descriptions based on space and place, presented as a series of views depicting cities in a seemingly linear manner. By putting an emphasis on description, the notion of cinematographic urban portraits allows us to inscribe what looks like a heterogeneous production of films, ranging from early travelogues to avant-garde city-symphonies, in the distant continuity of a particular visual tradition: sixteenth-century pictorial town portraits. As a matter of course, the idea of ‘portrait’ refers to an old geographical and figurative problem: how to describe by visual means the scene of the world? During the Renaissance, and following the discovery of Ptolemy’s geographical texts, painted town portraits were associated to chorography; that is, the study of regional geography. Chorography refers both to a problem of scale and to an image problem: as Italian art historian Lucia Nuti has observed, chorography was the work of painters, not geographers, a matter of ‘pictorial and sensual knowledge’ (Nuti, 1999: 91). Furthermore, town portraits of the time evince the ambition to achieve a total view of the city. In their quest for a totalizing vision of the town, ‘a film-style iconography was developed … by combining different techniques of observation from life’ (ibid.: 102), among which Nuti counts panoramas and the assemblage of ‘photogrammatic shots’. In the long history of communication about urban space, chorographic painting is certainly an interesting entry point for the consideration of the city in film, namely with regards to early urban travelogues. The ‘chorographic’ tradition of city portraits seems to have been updated by these early films. With their straightforward descriptive style of filming, they present places to the spectator, while simultaneously putting an emphasis on the act of observing, illustrating therefore what Tom Gunning has called the ‘view aesthetic’ (Gunning, 1997: 14–15). If Flaherty’s Twenty-Four Dollar Island can be reassessed as a twentiethcentury relative of chorographic town portraits, a somewhat more surprising example is that of the films of experimental American filmmaker James Benning. One example is his film One Way Boogie Woogie (OWBW), shot by the filmmaker in his native Milwaukee in 1977. Made of 60 static shots during lasting one minute each, the film depicts the landscape of the valley’s industrial city. Dominated by its many factories, Benning’s Milwaukee is a city of warehouses and workshops, crisscrossed by railroads, its skyline punctuated by silos and water towers. The film’s title refers to a famous painting by Piet Mondrian: Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–3). The mathematical precision with which Benning’s shots succeed one another replaces

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the Modernist grid of the Dutch painter with an equally rigid structure, made of carefully composed and colour-saturated images. Twenty-seven years later, Benning returned to Milwaukee and remade OWBW shot by shot, placing his camera in the exact location where he had set it nearly three decades earlier. From this gesture resulted 27 Years Later (27YL), a film haunted by the memories of OWBW (the soundtrack of the first film was used on the second film). Unlike the panels of a diptych, which can be looked at simultaneously, OWBW/27YL are projected one after the other, constituting a strange and demanding exercise for the viewer. One of the main issues raised by the film is precisely the work of memory, be it the viewer’s personal memory or the creation of an audiovisual archive – if not a cinematographic atlas – of the town of Milwaukee. It can also be argued that Benning’s filmic diptych illustrates a form of visual mapping. The idea is dear to the filmmaker who has used the term to discuss some of his films (see MacDonald, 2005: 12). In his recent work (roughly from the 1990s onwards), filming actually resembles a process of ‘territorialization’ whereby the filmmaker appropriates places by giving them meaning and identity. Looking at some of Benning’s films – such as Deseret, for instance – one can talk about a ‘geostrategics’ of the act of looking, as if the gaze of the camera were able to penetrate opaque landscapes, digging them as if they were archaeological sites, delving into their forgotten memories. If this is true of OWBW/27YL, the two films also evoke the aforementioned idea of ‘chorography’, sharing with early urban travelogues a number of striking formal similarities, including the immobility of the camera, the frontality of the shots, the succession of views and the emphasis put both on the composition of the image and on the act of observing. Benning himself has mentioned the Lumière Brothers’ films as particularly inspiring visual exercises (ibid., 2005: 10), and while the descriptive mode of his films is much more complex than the one evinced by early urban travelogues, they seem to share a rather large ‘chorographic’ agenda. Moreover, as a filmic diptych, OWBW/27YL resembles a visual archive, if not a cinematographic atlas of the city of Milwaukee. Constituting a visual apparatus characterized by the filmic motion of its spatial arrangements (Jacob, 1992), the atlas is both a means of deploying geographical imagination and a way of thinking about and with images.

City mapscapes: Urban strollers and aerial views The modern practice of flânerie is now well recognized as being related to cinema and to its constitution of a mobilized gaze (Friedberg, 1993). While I am not so concerned here with the historical figures of the flâneur and of the flâneuse and with its manifold filmic incarnations, the link between this typically urban phenomenon and the filmic city should not be forgotten. But instead of focusing on flânerie, I would rather explore another

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historical example of walking as a means of bodily mapping urban space: the Situationist dérive. According to the definitions issued by the SI in 1958, dérive is ‘an experimental mode of behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique for hastily passing through varied environments’. The practice is based on the aforementioned notion of ‘psychogeography’, the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. As Guy Debord further notes in his ‘Theory of the dérive’, the exercise is ‘quite different from the classic notions of journey and stroll’ (Debord, 1958: 53) – as it is from flânerie (McDonough, 1994). Dérive-driven psychogeography provides us with a compelling illustration of walking as an urban-oriented artistic and political practice. As recent critical readings have made clear, the dérive and the original conception of space that ensues extensively draw on the French geographic tradition and on the project of a ‘renovated cartography’ (McDonough, 1994; Vidler, 2006). As Debord writes in his ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’: The production of psychogeographic maps, or even the introduction of alterations such as more or less arbitrarily transposing maps of two different regions, can contribute to clarifying certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but complete insubordination to habitual influences (influences generally categorized as tourism that popular drug as repugnant as sports or buying on credit). (Debord, 1955: 7) Guy Debord’s last film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), takes on many of these issues. Combining static images and various movie clips with an autobiographical text, a significant part of the film consists of a poignant meditation by Debord on his own life and times. After an initial section where the author criticizes and condemns ‘traditional cinema’, Debord goes on to evoke his early years in Saint-Germain-des-Près, saying that the city of Paris was at that time ‘so beautiful that many people preferred to be poor there rather than rich anywhere else’. He adds, as the camera pans across aerial photographs of the city: ‘Who, now that nothing of it remains, will be able to understand this, apart from those who remember its glory? Who else could know the pleasures and exhaustions we experienced in these neighbourhoods where everything has now become so dismal?’ Bearing this particular sequence in mind, I would like to focus on Debord’s choice of aerial views as a means of penetrating and surveying the urban environment. This choice seems to be linked to the Situationist practice of dérive and to the mapping of urban space necessarily entailed by psychogeography. Why did Debord choose aerial images? To look from above was for many centuries the prerogative of gods and monarchs; during the twentieth

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century, and partly because of the simultaneous development of both image and flight technologies, aerial imagery came to epitomize the abstract, documentary look of cartography. Obviously, bird’s-eye views and aerial photographs are not, strictly speaking, conventional maps. Nonetheless, they share with them a number of important traits. Because aerial photography was a mechanical image meant to be exact, it was from its beginnings quickly envisaged as a new means to represent the earth. After its development during the First World War, when it was meant to provide coverage and detail, aerial imagery was cherished by the different avant-gardes as a means to disrupt and renew one’s vision of the world. The role of aerial images in twentieth-century visual culture is both complex and paradoxical: to someone of Debord’s generation, they certainly evoke the war experience and the vision of aerial bombers. But Debord was also an attentive reader of Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, a French geographer, sociologist and ethnologist who equalled aerial vision to the vision of modernity (McDonough, 1994). Chombart de Lauwe advocated the use of aerial photography and believed to have found in it the means for accessing a certain knowledge about urban-social space. According to the author, urban aerial views are the only way of developing a synthetic vision of a city’s social space. In Debord’s film, the frequent aerial views constitute ‘still lives of a city suspended in time’ (Vidler, 2006: 29). But they also participate in a visual and conceptual strategy that addresses within the film the multiple issues entailed by the Situationist questioning of urban environment and the city. The overview appears in the film as the cinematic counterpart of the dérive, suggesting a dialectics between the act of seeing and surveying the earth from above – intensified by the camera movements across the image – and that of experiencing it by walking. This dialectics is certainly evocative of cartographic methods: surveying the earth from above, with the eyes, and scanning it and measuring it by field walking, with the body. In In girum imus nocte, the panned shots of aerial views coexist with filmed maps, both topographic and collaged, as well as with personal photographs and news shots of demonstrations. All these documents are part of a scaling strategy, constantly moving from the vertical, synoptic view of the aerial image to fragmented details of bodily vision. Its final goal is to map its object: the elusive city of Paris. The coexistence in numerous city films of aerial views with walking or promenade sequences is symptomatic of a form of visual mapping that goes well beyond the Situationist agenda. In his remarkable discussion of film noir, Edward Dimendberg notes how that particular and essentially urban genre is characterized by some pervasive spatial figures, such as the aerial shot and the strolls of characters (Dimendberg, 2004). In these films, one is faced with a changing set of scales, ranging from the synoptic views of the metropolis to its fragments. In other words, we go from a static, optical view to a mobile, peripatetic view.

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Conclusion As a way of concluding, I would like to return to Harley’s comment on the ‘mapping impulse’. According to the author, the physical artefact we now call map is but a small part of a wider history, that of mapping; that is, communicating about space. Harley’s hypothesis is far-reaching, in particular if we think about mapping as a particular mode of thought, related to a series of processes and formal strategies. Taking the debate to the cinematographic field, and thinking in particular about urban ‘screenscapes’, one can wonder about the cinematic methods for addressing the city, its space and its places, and the way they are related to a form of visual mapping. Far from covering the whole range of possibilities, the three strategies mentioned above – ‘topophilia’, description and surveying – should therefore be understood as interrelated means of cinematic mapping, producing urban views and urban identities, structuring and transforming our geographical imagination and affecting the ways in which we have come to understand cities and act upon them.

Bibliography Alpers, S. (1983). The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Bachelard, G. (1957). La Poétique de l’espace (Paris: PUF). Bruno, G. (2002). Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso). Castro, T. (2009). ‘Cinema’s Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture’, in The Cartographic Journal, vol. 46, no. 1, February, pp. 9–15. Chombart de Lauwe, P.-H. (1948). La Découverte aérienne du monde (Paris: Horizons de France). Conley, T. (2007). Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). De Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press). Debord, G. (1955). ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, in K. Knabb (ed.), The Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets), pp. 5–8. Debord, G. (1958). ‘Theory of the Dérive’, in K. Knabb (ed.), The Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets), pp. 50–4. Dimendberg, E. (2004). Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press). Flaherty, R. (1927). ‘Producer of Nanook Joins Metro-Goldwyn’, in The New York Times, 26 June, Section 8, p. 2. Friedberg, A. (1993). Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley and London: University of California Press). Gunning, T. (1997), ‘Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the “View Aesthetic”’, in D. Hertogs, N. de Klerk (eds), Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Films (Amsterdam: Nederlands Filmmuseum), pp. 9–24. Hamon, Ph. (1991). La description littéraire. Anthologie de textes théoriques et critiques (Paris: Macula).

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Harley, J. B. and Woodward, D. (1987). ‘Preface’, The History of Cartography, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Chicago: Chicago University Press), vol. I, p. XVI. Jacob, Ch. (1992). L’Empire des cartes. Approche théorique de la cartographie à travers l’histoire (Paris: Albin Michel). Jameson, F. (1984). ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, no. 146. Keiller, P. (1994). ‘The Visible Surface’, Sight and Sound, November, p. 35. MacDonald, S. (2005). ‘Exploring the New West: An Interview with James Benning’, Film Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 3, Spring, University of California Press. McDonough, T. (1994). ‘Situationist Space’, October, vol. 67, Winter, pp. 58–77. Nuti, L. (1999). ‘Mapping Places: Chorography and Vision in the Renaissance’, in D. Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings (London: Reaktion Books), pp. 90–108. Tuan, Y.-F. (1974). Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values (New Jersey: Prentice Hall). Vidler, A. (2006), ‘Terres Inconnues: Cartographies of a Landscape to be Invented’, October 115, Winter, pp. 13–30.

10 Towards (East) London 2012: Emily Richardson’s Transit (2006) and Memo Mori (2009), and the Work of Iain Sinclair Paul Newland

As far as filming London is concerned, ‘There’s no longer time for the laying of tracks, the crane, the cherry-picker’. It seems that the ‘only cinema appropriate to its spiritual aridity is a cinema of surveillance. Let the city shoot its own suicide: unedited, mute, a procession of silent traffic, headlights like torches’. These are the views of the writer and filmmaker Iain Sinclair, as set out in his book Lights Out for the Territory (1997: 306–9). Sinclair notices that the contemporary city has effectively come to film itself; that there is a real danger that soon there might be no authentic, uncontrolled space left in London for the camera of the filmmaker to capture. He has evidently come to the conclusion that one way in which an artist might now film London is to mimic the aesthetics of surveillance; a view shared by the British experimental filmmaker Emily Richardson. Working together on Transit (2006) and again on Memo Mori (2009), Richardson and Sinclair have tried to regain control of the Vertovian mechanical eye in a part of the city which has become increasingly controlled by images. Together, these films seek to document what is in danger of being lost to parts of the eastern side of the city as it is radically redeveloped in time for the controversial 2012 Olympic Games. This area will become an example of what Henri Lefebvre called a ‘representation of space’. It will be remodelled as ‘conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 38). Transit and Memo Mori instead choose to celebrate this zone’s status as a Lefebvrian ‘representational space’ or ‘space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols’; but also as a ‘passively experienced’ space ‘which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate’ (ibid.: 39). While Transit and Memo Mori both focus on the destruction of seemingly deserted and desolate parts of east London as the construction of the Olympic Park gathers pace, and both share many aesthetic approaches to the city, Richardson also adopts noticeably different strategies in each film in 156

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order to try to represent and resist this process of urban change and renewal. In this chapter I will consider the key ways in which both films engage with (and indeed enter into) what appears to be nothing less than the battle for the cultural ownership of a particular urban space, and how these films thus come to celebrate this part of the city as a zone which has long exemplified what Lefebvre has termed the process of ‘inhabiting’. This has traditionally been a territory of encounters; a space essentially defined by the lived experiences of its inhabitants, their memories, hopes and dreams (Lefebvre, 1996). These films, then, examine what happens as a specific urban space becomes threatened with a loss of local identity; when history and tradition are in danger of being erased. But these films about east London are finely poised between offering a savage critique of the ideology of regeneration and indulging in melancholic nostalgia. After all, both films mourn the passing of Lefebvrian ‘inhabited’ space, while at the same time attempting to lay bare the folly of the type of Augé-esque ‘non-places’ which are being designed to supersede them. But while these films engage in acts of remembrance and celebrate the disappearing real world of east London, they also often seem to suggest that the cultural or discursive history of east London remains a very powerful force; a force which might well endure, even as this quarter of the material city is going through the process of being changed beyond all recognition. As such, the dense web of discourse surrounding the East End of London is in effect employed here as a weapon against urban change imposed from above. We are reminded by both films that the East End of London has an extremely rich and enduring cultural history. Dozens of films have been located within a broadly understood spatial idea of what the East End might be. These include, for example, Broken Blossoms (D. W. Griffith, 1919), Piccadilly (E. A. Dupont, 1929), A Kid for Two Farthings (Carol Reed, 1954), Sparrows Can’t Sing ( Joan Greenwood, 1962), The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1979), The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980), From Hell (Albert and Allen Hughes, 2001) and Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, 2007). One discursive function of these films and many, many others (as well as countless novels and newspaper articles) has been to facilitate the construction of a cultural space which more often than not suggests a dangerous, nebulous force which might actively resist any attempts to change it. After all, this part of London was described by the nineteenth-century novelist Arthur Morrison as a ‘howling sea of human wreckage’ (Morrison, 1982: 164), and Jack London’s 1903 book about the area was titled The People of the Abyss (Newland, 2008). Countless cultural texts have thus constructed the East End, (and all who reside therein) as dangerous, threatening, and deadly. The Olympic development in east London will no doubt shift elements of this discourse in fascinating ways, as new stories are told about this territory. But, as Richardson and Sinclair seem to be suggesting, the histories and myths that have been developed within this space (and have been assigned to this

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space) perhaps have the power to outlive and even eclipse the impressive new stadia; to haunt them, if you will. In Transit and Memo Mori, then, the medium of film thus becomes an imaginative tool with which to counter the material redevelopment of part of the city.

Chroniclers of the contemporary East End Emily Richardson studied Fine Art at Middlesex University and went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute between 1994 and 1996 with the filmmaker Ernie Gehr. Other influences include John Smith, Guy Sherwin (especially his Short Film Series, 1976–), Jane and Louise Wilson, and the experimental landscape work of Tacita Dean.1 When viewing Transit, Derek Jarman’s multi-projection three-screen film work springs to mind, as does Malcolm Le Grice’s London Filmmaker’s Co-op work of the 1970s, with its interest in colour and repetition (O’Pray, 1996: 14). Indeed, Richardson has made a number of films that operate as studies of landscape, rhythms, and patterns of light and shade. These include Redshift (2001) – a film that clearly recalls Chris Welsby’s Seven Days (1974) and Estuary (1980) in its innovative utilization of time-lapse photography. Richardson has also developed a key interest in the filmic properties and nature of architecture and urban space. As such, her work falls within a tradition of film making exemplified by other British artists such as Patrick Keiller and William Raban. Memo Mori, especially, owes much to Keiller’s London, but also to Raban’s Sundial (1992), A13 (1994) and Island Race (1995) – specifically in the ways in which it defamiliarizes parts of the city. Indeed, like Memo Mori, Raban’s three films were largely filmed in peripheral east London spaces. Richardson, like Raban and Keiller, appears to share the impulse of the 1930s ‘advanced guard’ to make poetic films which are ‘married to the desire to document the world’ (O’Pray, 2003: 113). One of her works, Nocturne (2002) (a five-minute, 16mm film featuring soundscapes by Benedict Drew) brings the deserted nighttime backstreets of east London to life by employing time-lapse photography. Richardson regards these films as ‘portraits of places’, and decides to film specific spaces because she wants to ‘really experience those places fully’.2 Indeed, her 2005 film Block is a 12-minute study of the life of a brutalist tower block in which cameras reveal its hidden rhythms and energies, and its status as a space of light and dark, day and night, life and death. This London film echoes John Smith’s 14-minute Blight (1996) (a film about the demolition of terraced houses in order to make way for the M11 link road through Leytonstone) in its Lefebvrian, ‘rhythmanalytical’ approach to east London.3 Iain Sinclair, born in Wales (but, like Emily Richardson, long resident in Hackney, east London) has for many years been undertaking an immense cultural excavation of the city. He has been publishing work on London since the early 1970s (Brooker, 2002: 96–119).4 This project has fuelled ‘an obsessive

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focus on the repressed history of the contemporary landscape’ (Mengham, 2002: 56). Key books to date include Lud Heat (1975), White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), Downriver (1991), Lights Out for the Territory (1997) and London Orbital (2002). Sinclair has often utilized film alongside prose, poetry and travelogue as a tool with which to re-imagine the city. So he brings to Transit a highly developed way of seeing London (and east London in particular). Principally known as a writer, Sinclair has also worked as an experimental filmmaker, and the aesthetics of film and a broad knowledge of cinema history inform his written work. Indeed, he spent some time at the London School of Film Technique, once worked with the legendary British filmmaker Michael Reeves, and has continued to make films with the director Chris Petit that have largely focused on the symbolic power of east London. These include The Cardinal and the Corpse (or a funny night out) (1992), and Asylum (2000).5 In pursuit of London, Sinclair has often collaborated with writers, artists and filmmakers including Dave McKean (on Slow Chocolate Autopsy [1997]), Rachel Lichtenstein (on Rodinsky’s Room [1999]) and Marc Atkins on Liquid City (1999). He readily accepted Emily Richardson’s invitation to collaborate on Transit and Memo Mori. It seems that contemporary London is too unwieldy to experience and document alone. In terms of form and content, Transit distinctly echoes Sinclair and Petit’s The Cardinal and the Corpse (or a funny night out) (1992) and Asylum (2000) in its exploration of the dark histories and narratives of labyrinthine east London. The Cardinal and the Corpse functions as a post-documentary, and also features split-screen work. This film brings together an amalgamation of Sinclair’s interests: the careers of his literary, artistic and underground friends and colleagues, and (often related) east London myths and legends. As we follow a series of quests (a search for David Litvinoff’s journals, copies of texts by Sexton Blake and the like) we see shots of a number of buildings around Shoreditch. Other shots of east London and Hackney were taken from a moving car. Brick Lane and the area around Christ Church, Spitalfields also feature heavily, and the Blind Beggar pub on the Whitechapel Road (an important site in the enduring mythology of the Kray twins alluded to in the film) is clearly seen. Other scenes are shot in little-known or forgotten east London zones. Asylum (2000) also features shots taken from a moving car, and voiceovers by Susan Stenger, Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair. This film revisits sites in the East End in order to explore the problem of cultural memory, exile and madness. Its aesthetics are clearly avant-garde, but the film also recalls aspects of the British documentary tradition, and spectators get to see shots of places such as White’s Row, Spitalfields; Christ Church, and Gun Street.

Transit Emily Richardson’s Transit was commissioned by the Measure Arts project, as part of the London Architecture Biennale. It first exhibited beneath

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London’s historic Smithfield market in June 2006. The seven-minute-long video installation, split across three screens, captures images of liminal London spaces such as Ridley Road, Hackney; Waterden Road, Hackney Wick, and Carpenter’s Road, Bow (running parallel with the River Lea). Shots were taken using cameras mounted on all four sides of a slow-moving car. These images appear noticeably different to many other contemporary, popular, mainstream visions of London.6 We see lonely, litter-strewn backstreets, walls covered with graffiti, and industrial sites gone to seed (Figure 10.1). We see very few people in these spaces. Occasionally figures move slowly into the frame, but they remain nothing more than spectral presences. While Richardson’s cameras emphasize what on the surface appears to be the apparent emptiness of these seemingly derelict spaces, they also suggest their downbeat, barely perceptible, but highly complex rhythms. Meanwhile, the soundtrack works to fill these spaces with ulterior life. It features three simultaneous commentaries by Sinclair. These dislocated voices together evoke the myriad spatialized textures of an unbounded urban palimpsest. Accompanying Richardson’s slow-moving images, they work to highlight

Figure 10.1 Transit (2006).

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how far these undervalued east London spaces are actually alive with semantic possibilities. Revealing facts about the lost histories and myths of this ‘low’ area of the city often become discernable as they emerge from this one-man hubbub. These narratives serve to counter the future regeneration of the area, and to remind us (and ensure) that this territory is already inhabited by discourse. Sinclair’s voices suggest that the earth below (and the air above) the Olympic stadium will be haunted. These voices thus work to ensure that east London, often seen thus far as an uncontrollable space of the people, might retain the power to resist any change imposed upon it from above. So, the complexities of the shifting cultural memories and narratives encompassed by (and assigned to) east London are evoked by Sinclair’s three merged narrations in Transit. They are specifically re-evaluated in Sinclair’s ‘Screen One’ narration. Although the coming together of these three narratives into a confused sonic landscape makes some of his points barely discernible, what is said is invariably illuminating and important. Here he speaks of ‘underground myth’ which becomes ‘a ritual enacted in the streets, a pantomime based on themes that are dark and subterranean’. He remarks that he is interested in the ‘essential nature’ of place, which is ‘human spirit in conversation with itself’. In his ‘Screen Two’ narration, Sinclair begins by saying that ‘I think that the nature of London itself is that you simply do not penetrate, and when you do penetrate in one area it only leads you into another and another and another, a whole series of mirrors and cellars. It goes back to the original myths of the founding of London’. And in his ‘Screen Three’ narration Sinclair speaks of the potential loss of east London as a space in which your imagination can ‘move’. He mourns, then, the potential passing of this ‘mysterious and grungy corridor’, and the peripheral activities that this territory might encourage. But this outpouring of melancholy is tempered with an avant-garde spirit in the truest sense of this term. And the battle for ownership of the ‘meaning’ of this urban space is effectively being taken to the Olympic developers through the medium of experimental film. In this sense, Transit can be read as an example of filmic psychogeography. This film installation, after all, uncovers what Phil Baker has termed the ‘emotional and behavioural effects of the environment, and its ambience’ (Baker, 2003: 323). Through the melding of Sinclair’s spoken narratives and Richardson’s camerawork, the film evokes unseen forces acting on east London; spectral presences of forgotten lives, ancient myths; treasure that lies buried or hidden. While Sinclair’s triple-narration remains centrally concerned with the importance of these endangered spaces, Richardson’s cameras have the uncanny, spidery eyes of a furtive police camera van. Her images draw us slowly into a dense urban web. But as they do so they discover, through the process of photogénie, a disturbing beauty in what might otherwise appear to be cultural and architectural detritus. Photogénie was an aesthetic strategy of avant-garde film theory of the 1920s which emerged as an alternative to montage as a principle of the language

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of cinema.7 Jean Epstein, the filmmaker and theorist, announced in 1921 that ‘[t]he cinema is essentially supernatural. Everything is transformed … The universe is on edge’ (Abel, 1988: 246). Epstein posited the concept of photogénie as ‘the purest concept of cinema’, noticing how seeing something in a film, or through filmic representation, can feel like re-seeing it for the first time. For Epstein, a process of defamiliarization can occur when the object captured by the camera appears to change form under the steady gaze of the spectator of the film. He argues that it is during this process that the object ‘reveals anew its moral character, its human and living expression’ (Epstein, 1978: 29). Indeed, James Donald has suggested that photogénie demonstrates the power of the camera to ‘reveal the strangeness of familiar objects’ (1999: 185), and he goes on to point out that the ‘unyielding gaze of the camera gradually hollows out the doxa, the conventional meanings, from its landscapes (pure space)’ (ibid.).8 But Transit alerts us to the fact that there might soon be fewer and fewer such ‘pure’ landscapes in London. Indeed, it could be argued that almost all London spaces might eventually be filmed, colonized, and controlled by the authorities, or by private companies in the service of capital. In the face of these developments, Transit reveals, then, the enduring, intensely discursive power of east London, and celebrates its ongoing status as a repository of narratives. The film once again mobilizes the East End as a territory of memory and myth in a city, moving towards the Olympics, which is becoming increasingly sanitized, regulated and controlled. Giuliana Bruno advocates that ‘[t]he film “viewer” is a practitioner of viewing space – a tourist’ (1997: 17). In Transit, Richardson’s cameras effectively take us on a tour of what is made to appear a distant, exotic landscape. Interestingly, her camerawork here recalls some of the images projected in early moving picture entertainments such as the ‘phantom rides’ of the Hales Tours in the US (seen from 1904), in which scenic views from a moving train were developed into a popular attraction (Hansen, 1991: 32). And the configuration of the three screens in Transit (when installed as it was in Smithfield) also echoes the wide variety of panoramic images of cities which flourished before the advent of cinema. It seems, then, that contemporary filmmakers like Richardson are now, faced with a city which is becoming increasingly saturated with images, choosing to draw on and develop the aesthetics of pre-cinema alongside contemporary surveillance footage in order to try to show us aspects of highly complex and shifting urban spaces anew.

Memo Mori Memo Mori (2009) sees Richardson and Sinclair returning to the site of the Olympic redevelopment in east London in order to capture on film specific sites which will be lost as the bulldozers move in. A 23-minute film designed for screening rather than installation, Memo Mori features further shots of east London spaces on the verge of significant material change.9

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This time Iain Sinclair narrates again, but his voice is effectively more that of a documentary-style narrator. In other words, his voice is evidently clear in this film, and thus has been designed to be paid attention to, unlike the three separate but parallel narratives of Transit. In Memo Mori he reads from his book Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report (2009), while also commenting on Richardson’s haunting images. Memo Mori begins with a shot of a lost stretch of the River Lea near Hackney Wick, where it disappears into a dark tunnel. Richardson’s camera bobs gently on a boat, capturing images of reeds bursting out of the muddy banks of the river, and graffiti-covered brick walls. We see waste zones and fenced-off no-man’s-land. But we also see architecturally generic, uninspiring new flats rising up near the new Olympic site. Sinclair’s voice narrates. He speaks of the ‘false promise of the future’ that the Olympic development stands for. Memo Mori then builds into a coruscating attack on this venture. Much emphasis is placed in the film on one specific site, the Manor Gardens allotments. Here Richardson films (with an almost still, hand-held camera) the many huts and overgrown plots which until recently remained on this site. As we see a number of shots of small, deserted, dilapidated constructions with

Figure 10.2 Memo Mori (2009).

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rusty wire fences surrounding them and electricity pylons looming tall in the background, Sinclair speaks of the overwhelming melancholia of these little buildings, which were evidently made with salvaged bits of wood, old doors and sheets of metal, and other objects ‘scrambled together from bits of detritus’ (Figure 10.2). Saluting their rustic and perhaps even Arcadian charm, he says: ‘It was heartbreaking to see the huts on the Manor Gardens allotments, because there was such human enterprise and individuality. It was like a series of wonderful sculptures and self portraits’. He notices how, even though there are now no people allowed on the site, these huts retain essentially human characteristics. They tend to look more like little individual, rickety houses (or very modest country cottages), complete with doors, windows, and flowers. For Sinclair, these buildings, always on a human scale and built and rebuilt with bare hands, evoke a ‘tremendous human reservoir’ which is being ‘blasted away’ in the name of what the Olympic developers term ‘legacy’. Sinclair argues that ‘the huts are exemplary in their form of architecture, which is they are totally improvised. They obviously grow up from random materials. They are the absolute opposite of the computer-generated architecture, the generic architecture of the areas that surround them’. This, then, is ‘survivalist architecture with a rustic charm’. But Richardson’s camera work also strongly suggests that this is now an abandoned city-within-a-city, a location which was freely constructed by people for people, unplanned and unregulated, as opposed to the Olympic village, which will in effect operate as the apotheosis of Government-sponsored urban planning in London. The next sequence of Memo Mori furtively captures a journey taken on a tourist bus around the perimeter of the construction site. Richardson’s camera had to remain hidden, as no images of this zone were permitted to be taken. As we see snatched filmic representations of this post-industrial wasteland on the verge of transition, Sinclair, narrating, notices the voice of the unseen tour guide, spouting endless facts and figures about the scale of the development. As Sinclair remarks, we can see ‘massive worlds disappearing, all broken down into flowcharts, statistics and logistics’. This is borne out by the regimented voice of the tour guide, which speaks of awe-inspiring things to come, such as the 262,000 loaves of bread which will be eaten over the two weeks of the Olympic Games. Richardson has explained that she would probably not make any more films about the site before the Olympics in 2012, purely because access to these particular zones has now become all but impossible.10 This of course says much about the ways in which this urban territory is being increasingly controlled. The irony that a filmmaker is finding it increasingly difficult to capture images of this part of east London because she herself is in danger of being captured by CCTV cameras and apprehended has not been lost on Richardson. But Richardson intends to return in 2013 to see what kind of new space has been created, and how far this space remembers or completely disavows what went before.

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Conclusion Emily Richardson’s Transit and Memo Mori, then, offer a psychogeographical riposte to the plans of the Olympic developers. The cognitive remapping of this territory facilitated by Richardson’s images (but also, importantly, by Sinclair’s narration) actively resists the rational mapping, privatization and control of this urban space. In this sense, then, these films can be read as subversive. In his hugely influential book, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992), Fredric Jameson reads Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960) as a seminal text on cognitive mapping that demonstrates its political possibilities as critical praxis. For Jameson, the act of dis-alienation in the traditional city or the practical reconquest of the sense of place can be problematical, but it remains rich with possibilities. Reading Lynch through Althusser’s Lacanian redefinition of ideology as ‘the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence’, Jameson argues that a cognitive map can be called upon to ‘enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole’ (Jameson, 1992: 51). He recognizes that ‘we all necessarily also cognitively map our individual social relationship to local, national, and international class realities’ (ibid.: 52). But he also outlines the theoretical difficulties inherent in cognitive mapping: ‘An aesthetic of cognitive mapping – a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system – will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representational dialectic and invent radically new forms in order to do it justice’ (ibid.: 54). Jameson argues that cognitive mapping might be employed as a tool of resistance: [T]he new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object – the world space of multinational capital – at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale. (Jameson, 1992: 54) Thus we should read Transit and Memo Mori as film texts which draw upon the rich tradition of cognitive mapping in order to articulate a means of resistance to the rational remodelling and colonization of east London in preparation for the 2012 Olympic Games.

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Moreover, in another highly influential and much cited text, The Practice of Everyday Life (1988), Michel de Certeau suggested that a totalizing view of the city from above, in the form of the view from the top of the (now destroyed) World Trade Center in New York, produces a fictional understanding of the city that obscures quotidian, lived experience through a controlling gaze. Critiquing this view of space (held by many urban planners and those in authority running the city), he asks: ‘Is the immense texturology spread out before one’s eyes anything other than a representation, an optical artefact?’ (1984: 92). De Certeau points to two methods of imagining the city. The first is the ‘concept city’ of rational urban discourse – the view of those who wish to hold power over the city’s inhabitants, defined through the ‘production of its own space (un espace propre): rational organization must thus repress all the physical, mental and political pollutions that would compromise it’ (ibid.: 94, emphasis in original). This is the view of east London that has primarily been adopted by the planners of the 2012 Olympics. But for de Certeau, the second, potentially subversive method of imagining the city is the dreamlike approach to spatial practices adopted by those on the streets who, through what he terms ‘pedestrian speech acts’, can reclaim urban space: In short, space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs. (ibid.: 117, emphasis in original) He elaborates further: ‘Stories thus carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places’ (ibid.: 118). If the city, then, is to be understood as a palimpsest, its rewriting can be facilitated by de Certeau’s conceptual Wandersmänner, ‘whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it’ (ibid.: 93). Wandersmänner perform phatic acts. They walk and write the city. Richardson’s Transit and Memo Mori encourage us to engage with east London not as walkers, per se, but certainly at the level of the ‘phatic’. These are films, after all, which recognize the importance of the acts of writing or performing on the construction of an urban text, and the central importance of the quotidian stories which come to define urban spaces such as east London. But these films also speak of the need to resist any attempts by redevelopers to write the city from above; to empty the city of history, memory and authenticity, and to replace these things with planned, organized, governed and controlled space. In both Transit and Memo Mori, then, Sinclair and Richardson develop some of the themes from their earlier work, but their mission is more clearly defined. In the shadow of the 2012 redevelopment of the area, they utilize film to bear witness to spatial flux; to transform the landscape before it itself can be transformed by what they evidently see as an ill-thought-through, utopian

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regenerative project. By combining images of real urban locales with voice-overs which evoke images of other locales (both imaginatively present and absent), Transit and Memo Mori demonstrate how far urban spaces in east London retain traces of narratives from elsewhere; narratives from earlier times; narratives that we should become more aware of if we are to know a city more fully.

Notes 1. Emily Richardson interviewed by the author, 8 August 2007. 2. Emily Richardson interviewed by the author, 8 August 2007. 3. Ben Highmore’s book Cityscapes develops Lefebvre’s understanding of rhythmanalysis as ‘a description of the contrapuntal rhythms that articulate an experience of the city’ (2005: 150). 4. For more on Sinclair’s interest in space and place (and London in particular) see Cunningham (2007). For more on Sinclair’s work as a filmmaker see Dave (2006), Leslie (2006, 2007). 5. For more on Sinclair’s development as a filmmaker see Sinclair (1997: 271–321). For connection between Sinclair, Chris Petit and Patrick Keiller see Smith (2000: 148–55) 6. For a useful discussion of some of these images see Brunsdon (2007). 7. When interviewed by David Martin-Jones (2002: 127), Patrick Keiller made the connection between his work and photogénie. 8. For a detailed discussion of photogénie see Charney (1995: 285–7). 9. Memo Mori was displayed at the Danielle Arnaud Gallery in London, and set up on a loop in a space so spectators could wander in and out. 10. Richardson made this point to me in an email.

Bibliography Abel, Richard (ed.) (1988), French Film Theory and Criticism, I: 1907–1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Baker, Phil (2003), ‘Secret City: Psychogeography and the End of London’, in Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson (eds), London From Punk to Blair (London: Reaktion), pp. 323–33. Brooker, Peter (2002), Modernity and Metropolis: Writing, Film and Urban Formations (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Bruno, Giuliana (1997), ‘Site-Seeing: Architecture and the Moving Image’, Wide Angle 19 (4), pp. 8–24. Brunsdon, Charlotte (2007), London in Cinema: The Cinematic City Since 1945 (London: British Film Institute). Charney, Leo (1995), ‘In a Moment: Film and the Philosophy of Modernity’, in L. Charney and V. R. Schwartz (eds), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley and London: University of California Press), pp. 285–7. Cunningham, David (2007), ‘Re-Placing the Novel: Sinclair, Ballard and the Spaces of Literature’, in Robert Bon and Jenny Bavidge (eds), City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), pp. 134–46. Dave, Paul (2006), Visions of England: Class and Culture in Contemporary Cinema (Oxford and New York: Berg). de Certeau, Michel (1988 [1984]), The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press).

168 Towards (East) London 2012 Donald, James (1999), Imagining the Modern City (London: The Athlone Press). Epstein, Jean (1978), ‘For a New Avant-Garde’, in P. Adams Sitney (ed.), The AvantGarde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: New York University Press), pp. 26–30. Hansen, Miriam (1991), Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press). Highmore, Ben (2005), Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Jameson, Fredric (1992 [1991]), Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso). Lefebvre, Henri (1991 [1974]), The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell). Lefebvre, Henri (1996), ‘Right to the City’, in E. Koffmen and E. Lebas (eds), Writings on Cities (Oxford: Blackwell). Leslie, Esther (2006), ‘Documents of Revolution, Incompetence and Resistance: Rubbish Images of Film, Television, Video and Surveillance in Recent Documentaries’, Film International 2 (10). Leslie, Esther (2007), ‘Image Refusal in Iain Sinclair’s Refuse Aesthetics: London Orbital, the Film’, in Robert Bond and Jenny Bavidge (eds), City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), pp. 90–9. Lynch, Kevin (1960), The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Martin-Jones, David (2002), ‘Patrick Keiller Interview’, Journal of Popular British Cinema 5, pp. 123–32. Mengham, Rod (2002), ‘The Writing of Iain Sinclair: Our Narrative Starts Everywhere’, in Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew (eds), Contemporary British Fiction (Cambridge: Polity), pp. 56–67. Morrison, Arthur (1982 [1896]), A Child of the Jago (Woodbridge: Boydell). Newland, Paul (2008), The Cultural Construction of London’s East End: Urban Iconography, Modernity and the Spatialisation of Englishness (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi). O’Pray, Michael (1996), The British Avant-Garde Film 1926 to 1995 (Luton: University of Luton Press). O’Pray, Michael (2003), Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions (London: Wallflower). Sinclair, Iain (1997), Lights Out for the Territory: Nine Excursions in the Secret History of London (London: Granta). Sinclair, Iain (2009), Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report (London, Hamish Hamilton). Sinclair, Iain and Marc Atkins (1999), Liquid City (London: Reaktion Books). Sinclair, Iain and Rachel Lichtenstein (1999), Rodinsky’s Room (London: Granta). Sinclair, Iain and Dave McKean (1997), Slow Chocolate Autopsy: incidents from the notorious career of Norton, Prisoner of London (London: Phoenix House). Smith, Claire (2000), ‘Travelling Light: New Art Cinema in the 90s’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), British Cinema of the 90s (London: British Film Institute), pp. 145–55.

11 The Cinematic Production of Iconic Space in Early Films of London (1895–1914) Maurizio Cinquegrani

I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is. In this quote from Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, Count Dracula tells Jonathan Harker about his intention to move to London (Stoker, 1993: 31). Dracula, one of a large number of nineteenth-century novels to address urban life in London, was published in 1897 when cinematography was just two years old. At the turn of the twentieth century, Victorian culture’s long-lasting fascination with London migrated into early non-fiction films revealing aspects of urban life at the heart of the British Empire (Figure 11.1). Indeed, cinematography emerged during the era defined by Eric Hobsbawm (Hobsbawm, 2006) as the ‘Age of Empire’. According to Hobsbawm, between 1875 and 1914 the capitalist core of the world economy contributed to the creation of a world of empire where less-advanced people were dominated by technologically and industrially advanced societies. During those years, mass market and technological progress contributed to the spread of the imperial message and, Hobsbawm argues, revolutionized arts appealing to common people (Hobsbawm 2006: 337–8). Cultures of imperialism also shaped the experience of social space in London and, between 1895 and 1914, were reflected in the cinematic representation of modern urban life. The social space of a city, as Henri Lefebvre suggests, is produced and reproduced in connection with forces of production defined by the mediation of factors ‘within knowledge, within ideology or within the domain of representation’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 77). The mediation of factors within knowledge was also central to the project of empire because it entailed taking the measure of the world, observing its phenomena and making its data accessible to others. Early films helped reveal the social space of London by disseminating visual information and exhibiting a dramatized space bound to an imperial archive of knowledge which was both scientific and popular. 169

170 Iconic Space in Early Films of London (1895–1914)

Figure 11.1 View of London from The Illustrated London News, No. 3034, Vol. CX, Saturday, 12 June, 1897.

Pioneer filmmakers recorded everyday life in London, events such as parades and processions, and places such as exhibitions, museums, the zoo and the docks. Films of London can be seen as a vehicle of imperial culture revealing an image of the city in which the experiences of the empire and of modern urban life constantly intersect. Imperial iconography embodied in images of exhibitions, monumental and ceremonial spaces defined cinematic London as the nexus of the British Empire. Iconography can be defined by both the narrow identification of conventional and consciously inscribed symbols and by an intrinsic deep meaning revealing the basic attitudes of the nation, the group or the ideology which produced the icon (Panofsky, 1939: 14–15). Films of London reveal imperial iconography both in the narrower sense of the word and its deeper stratum of meaning: the imperial iconic landmarks of the city, including monuments and exhibitions, can be seen as symbols consciously inscribed on a cinematic map revealing the basic attitudes of the ideology which produced them. Yet, early cinema’s most conscious act of submission to an imperial vision of urban life lies in its omissions. Cinema signifies by its exclusions as well as by its inclusions; the selection of themes and the emphasis put on imperial narratives mean as much as the structured absence of the poor and the districts they inhabited. Earlier shocking accounts of life in the slums by Charles Booth (1891) and Henry Mayhew (1861) can hardly be associated with the wealthy and orderly urban space represented in non-fiction films. Films of London thus provide a selective form of cinematic cartography rooted in imperial culture. As Said has suggested, aesthetics, politics and even epistemology were in the closing years of the nineteenth century inevitably and unavoidably

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rooted in the culture of the empire (Said, 1994: 24). Early non-fiction films can thus be assessed in relation to the development of imperial and colonial displays during the heyday of British imperialism and to their role in the process of mapping the space of the city. The engagement of films with imperial urban landscapes gave shape to a form of cinematic cartography revealing a cityscape characterized by different types of exhibitions. ‘This is the age of exhibitions’, proclaimed an article published in 1862 in the Illustrated Weekly News; just over 30 years later films of exhibitions had become increasingly popular.1 These films provide the central focus of enquiry in this chapter.

Exhibitions on film: Displaying the Empire in London The political stakes of visual culture, as Michel Foucault argued (Foucault, 1981, 1994), emerge from all its forms, including those that claim supposed neutrality. Foucault investigated the hierarchical classification systems in Western natural history, arguing that museums and exhibitions construct master narratives by imposing a system of beliefs as the dominant cultural manifestation of a given era. At the turn of the twentieth century, London was the heart of a colonial empire whose master narrative could be both traced in urban exhibitions and discerned from their cinematic representation. Early cinematic representations of London were defined by the encounter with colonized cultures in exhibitions forging Western spatial imagination or in the form of colonial troops marching on the streets of the city during events such as Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (Cinquegrani, 2009). Denis Cosgrove argued that during the final years of the nineteenth century, the global imagination of many Europeans was dominated by a pervasive sense that spatial limits had been reached because, over the course of the century, technological inventions brought geographically distant regions into regular contact. The conception of the world as exhibition, Cosgrove suggested, found its expression in the colonial exhibition or World’s Fair, and became fundamental to a modern Western geographical imagination (Cosgrove, 2001: 220–4). In this chapter, I explore this theme by investigating the relationship between films and exhibitions in London, including newly built museums, the Crystal Palace and the London Zoo. In particular, I discuss the emergence of exotic or colonial subjects and themes, and the display of technological novelties. In the nineteenth century, a binary opposition between modernity and tradition defined the geographical imagination of the Victorians. The categories of the modern were perceived as belonging to Britain and its colonial explorers, who brought into the country the ‘others’, in form of people, objects, photographs and moving pictures. In contrast, the colonized people were perceived as non-modern, ancient, primitive, traditional and superstitious. As Thomas Richards suggests, the ruling class in late Victorian Britain accumulated knowledge in cultural and scientific fields which were enlisted into the service of the empire and led to the consolidation of a corpus of global

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knowledge and power (Richards, 1993: 73–7). The public display was a fundamental part of imperial knowledge as it aimed at containing the world as exhibition. Cinematography contributed to this project by containing exhibition spaces in an artificially confined mass-public viewing environment. Nevertheless, as Said suggests, histories of European modernism often leave out the great influences of non-European cultures on the Western metropolis (Said, 1994: 292). Timothy Mitchell and Felix Driver have tried to fill in this gap, and their work can be used in order to understand the representational strategies of early cinema. Mitchell argues that modern ways of seeing the world were exemplified by the growth of museums and exhibitions throughout the nineteenth century, and by a political exploitation of these sites which was aimed at displaying national, cultural and racial differences. Exhibitions, Mitchell continues, were strictly bound to ideas of improvement and progress, and a reflection and a production of that sense of scientific and political certainty which rendered ‘history, progress, culture and empire in objective form’ (Mitchell, 1991: 2–19). Exhibitions enabled Europeans to apprehend and ‘colonize’ reality by offering an orderly and organized experience of the world as though it was a picture. Travel photography and painting, catalogues and guidebooks all contributed to the definition of a picture of domesticated otherness. Films representing exhibitions achieved the same result. Victorian Britain saw the emergence of a modern culture of exploration which, as Driver suggests, was related to empirical and geographical knowledge and required a wide range of material and imaginative resources. The display of newly ‘discovered’ worlds in London’s exhibitions and museums contributed, as Driver argues, to the development of an imperial scientific project, and provided a great volume of information to the metropolitan experience of the empire by representing the identities of the colonized and the colonizer and the boundaries which defined them (Driver, 2001: 1–48). The work of pioneer filmmakers also reflected the emergence of an imperial culture of exploration and resulted in a visual map of London which revealed the impact of colonialism and technological progress on the urban space. The visual power of exhibitions in London led several companies to film these places, and to offer a cinematic representation of spaces which was itself a representation of colonized cultures and technological development. Filmmakers were induced by the popularity of these places to exploit their image and offer it to those who were unable to visit them in person, and to those who had visited the exhibitions and wanted to experience their attractions again. In 1911, a film company called New Agency produced the film entitled The Crystal Palace and a Glimpse of the Zoo. The two spaces represented in this film were among the most popular exhibitions in London and had been filmed several times in the previous 15 years. Films of the Zoo and the Crystal Palace reveal an imaginative landscape of urban culture and the interaction between display and colonial imperialism. They are the main subjects of enquiry in the following sections.

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A cinematic imperial showcase: The London Zoological Gardens Opened in 1828 and situated at the northern edge of Regent’s Park, the location of the Zoological Gardens was particularly meaningful. Created by the architect John Nash at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the project of Regent’s Park was based, as Richard Sennett suggests, ‘on the principle of park-as-lung, but adapted to a city where greater speed was possible’. Sennett has explained how Nash’s plan worked against a socially connected use of the park by creating a rapidly moving busy road around the park aimed at discouraging the organization of groups in its open space (Sennett, 1994: 325–9). The construction of Regent’s Park embodied the development of urban modernization by enabling the movement of a great number of individuals and disabling the movements of groups understood as an agglomeration of men and women presenting very different characteristics from those of the individuals composing the crowd. Nineteenth-century development of zoological gardens in Europe has been convincingly discussed in terms of imperial showcase created by the ruling class ostensibly to display their colonial empires (Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier, 2003). The opening of the London Zoo at Regent’s Park thus brought the park into an even more straightforward ideological territory for Nash’s original plan acquired a space where, as Jonathan Schneer argues, a Londoner’s identity as resident of an imperial metropolis was fully confirmed. The Zoological Society’s project to list and classify all species of animals was inherently imperialist. Capturing and caging wild beasts from every corner of the Empire and displaying them in London, Schneer suggests, was an ultimate figuration of Britain’s imperial enterprise (Schneer, 1999: 97–8). Until 1846, entrance to the gardens was restricted to an elite membership, but at the turn of the twentieth century the Zoo became a much-loved form of popular recreation. Imperial culture, as it was expressed in the Zoo and London’s museums and exhibitions, was underpinned by scientific progress and it also attracted popular interest. Books, articles, music-hall songs were devoted to the animals kept in captivity in Regent’s Park: ‘Birth of Kangaroo at the Zoological Gardens’ titled The Illustrated London News in July 1896.2 The song Walking in the Zoo is the OK Thing to Do was written by Alfred Vance in 1867 and at the turn of the century was still sung in London’s music halls (Mullan and Marvin, 1999: 110). The most beautiful and popular subjects of the animal kingdom, such as elephants and tigers, represented the colonized territories. Films representing these animals were a further reminder of the submission of vast territories to the British Empire. When Lumière cameraman Alexandre Promio arrived in London in 1896, he not only filmed architectural landmarks like Tower Bridge, the Houses of Parliament and a number of street scenes, but also made three short films in the London Zoological Gardens: Lions, Pelicans, and Tigers. Promio was probably the first filmmaker to film the beasts of the London Zoo. During the following 15 years many

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British film companies sent their cameramen to Regent’s Park in order to film the attraction offered by exotic animals. The result is a group of films documenting life in the zoo, and focusing on its attractions and, occasionally, its visitors. London: Zoological Gardens was produced by Chard & Co. in 1897, and included the scenes ‘Feeding the Pelicans’ and ‘Polar Bears’. The Warwick Trading Company produced Feeding the Tigers in 1899, and Charles Urban made A Ramble around the Zoo one year later. The Walturdaw Company produced The Zoo Series and A Peep at the Zoo in 1905, and five years later released A Peep round the Zoo. British Pathé produced At the Zoological Gardens in 1909, and Gaumont made A Visit to the Zoological Gardens in the same year. In 1911, Gaumont filmed Who’s Who at the Zoo, and one year later it released A Visit to the Zoological Gardens: the Ruminants. Other productions around this time included Snapshots of the Zoo (Kineto, 1912), At the London Zoo (H&B, 1913), and A Visit to the London Zoo (Wardour, 1915). Most of these films are now considered lost. Among the few which have survived, Scenes at the London Zoo is arguably the most remarkable for editing, variety of shots and length. Filmed by Cecil Hepworth for the Warwick Trading Company in 1898, it offers a series of shots representing a man playing with snakes, a big bear, a llama, a camel, a dromedary, several flamingos, pelicans, a lion, parrots, and toucans. Most strikingly, Hepworth’s Scenes at the London Zoo shows, in its two longest sequences, children and adults riding an Indian elephant along the Zoo’s alleyways. Elephants were very popular with the public and the subject of another film produced by Mutoscope and Biograph and filmed by William Dickson in 1898: Elephants at the Zoo. The elephant symbolizes Asia in one of the allegorical sculpture groups at the four corners of the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens. Elephants at the London Zoo had the same purpose: elephants were the most imposing animal in the Regent’s Park Zoo, and best represented the most exotic territories of the British Empire. The docile elephant was devoted to the amusement of children and adults, and well exemplified the Indian subordination to Britain. Similarly, Hepworth filmed Royal Bengal Tigers at the London Zoo, another symbol of the submission of India to Britain. The cinematic image of these symbols of submission served to spread the imperial message all over the country, for the benefit of people who were unable to visit London and its attractions. As I shall demonstrate in the next section, the same purpose was pursued by films of the Crystal Palace.

Colonial encounters and modernity: From the Crystal Palace to South Kensington and Earls Court The Crystal Palace in Sydenham was also very popular with filmmakers and audiences. Nicky Levell has argued that the image of oriental otherness displayed at the Crystal Palace was constructed in relational opposition to the West, and was central to the constitution of the self as the dominant

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culture. The development in transport and media in Victorian Britain, Levell continues, enabled the masses to travel to urban exhibition sites and observe other cultures through the medium of display (Levell, 2000: 10–12). Cinematography, on the other hand, offered the chief attractions of the Palace to those who could not visit the place in person. Originally erected in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, in 1854 the Crystal Palace was moved to Sydenham where, as Gyan Prakash explains, it continued to promote the significant role of classification and naming, and their link to imperial culture (Prakash, 1999: 22–3). In these premises, the display of exotic civilizations contributed to offering a self-congratulatory image of Victorian Britain of which the Crystal Palace became a symbol (Hassam, 2003: 180). Marshall Berman defined the Crystal Palace as ‘the most visionary and adventurous building of the whole nineteenth century’, and described it as a key architectural landmark in the topography of London: No building in modern times, up to that point, seems to have had the Crystal Palace’s capacity to excite people. As for foreigners, the Palace, more than anything else in London, became the sight they wanted to see first. Contemporary journalists reported that it was London’s most cosmopolitan zone, crowded at any given time with Americans, Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, even Chinese and Japanese. (Berman, 1988: 237–8) Berman identifies the Crystal Palace as one of those modern environments ‘that promises adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world’ (Berman, 1988: 15). A place like Crystal Palace, and the attraction that it offered, fitted perfectly the kind of visual material sought by early film companies. The Palace offered a cosmopolitan space, rich in innovation and signs of modernity, and films inevitably depicted its attractions on several occasions. In 1896 Alexandre Promio filmed Javanese performers in the park grounds of the Crystal Palace: Danse Javanaise represents a group of Javanese dancers and musicians performing in traditional costumes. In Jongleur Javanais a Javanese man performs a series of juggling routines with a ball, which he kicks up and balances on his shoulders and feet. Javanese musicians seated on the ground accompany his performance. The same group of Javanese performers appears in Lutteurs Javanais, where two men wrestle, while the juggler performs accompanied by the musicians seen in the other films. In 1898 the ascent of a gas balloon at the Crystal Palace was filmed by a cameraman of a company called Interchangeable Ltd.3 In 1899 a Warwick Trading Company cameramen filmed Horse Parade at Crystal Palace. In 1900, George A. Smith made for the Warwick Trading Company a number of films at the Crystal Palace documenting its attractions: horse parades, bicycle races, and the series of sculptures of

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dinosaurs and extinct mammals located in the park.4 In 1903 H. M. Lomas filmed for Charles Urban Crystal Palace Panoramas, Looping the Loop, Shooting the Chutes and Panorama of Palm Green, a series of views of the Palace, its park and terraces. In 1906, Smith went back to the Crystal Palace and filmed for Charles Urban Togo’s Heroes at the Crystal Palace and International Cycling Race at Crystal Palace. In 1911, both Will Barker and John Y. Brown filmed the Crystal Palace during Pageant of the Empire, held in London to celebrate the coronation of George V.5 The Pageant told the history of London in 40 staged scenes depicting the city as the capital of the empire and, as Deborah Ryan suggests, was both an expression of imperial might and of civic pride (Ryan, 2003: 117–25). The filming of this event and its attractions offered the pleasures of the Crystal Palace to people unable to visit the place, and gave them an image of London which was saturated with signs and sight of the opulence and greatness of the imperial metropolis, centre of a worldwide empire and of the history of Britain. In 1902 the Crystal Palace Company organized an exhibition of motorcars, motor-cycles and accessories, and offered a number of awards to exhibitors.6 The Lancaster Engine Company, based in Armourer Mills near Birmingham, gave a demonstration of its motorcars climbing steps in the park of the Crystal Palace. At least two films documenting the event have survived: Lanchester Car Test on Steps at Crystal Palace and Motor Car Climbing Contest at the Crystal Palace.7 In the late 1890s, an automobile craze swept London and several performers used motorcars during their shows on the streets and even in music halls. As Andrew Horrall suggests, automobiles brought together ‘utilitarian transportation and dandified public spectacle’ (Horrall, 2001: 67). Motorcars became a popular attraction which did not fail to attract filmmakers: in 1901 Cecil Hepworth made Explosion of a Motor Car, one of the earliest motorcar films. Films of automobiles made at the Crystal Palace, like William Dickson’s Motor Car Race in Regent’s Park (1900), document the popular enthusiasm surrounding the technological progress embodied by the motorcar, and contributed to what Richards described as the transformation of collective and private life into a space for the spectacular exhibition of commodities (Richards, 1990: 72). Film and car industries were the result of nineteenth-century technological developments, and they grew together in the twentieth century. From the very early years of cinematography, cars were both the subject of films and were also used, along with electric and horse-drawn trams, to film the streets of the city from a moving point of view in the so-called phantom rides. The Zoo and the Crystal Palace were two of many exhibitions and museums explored by pioneer filmmakers. The function of early non-fiction films and other forms of display often intersected. Museums, as Barbara Black suggests, helped to legitimize the power of Britain across the vast empire by housing the spoils of the colonial project (Black, 2000: 11). Both films of distant parts of the empire and films of exhibitions in London revealed

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a significant contribution to the accumulation of knowledge in the Age of Empire. Relevant examples of displays which became the subject of films are offered by the South Kensington Museum – which was established in 1852 following the success of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and displayed examples of the arts and scientific achievements – and the exhibitions held at Earls Court at the turn of the century. These exhibitions were also the subject of a number of actuality films and contributed to reinforcing the scientific message of imperialism in popular venues. On 17 May 1900, Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone to the left of the main entrance of the new Aston Webb building at the South Kensington Museum, and it was during this ceremony that the name of the museum was changed from the South Kensington Museum to the Victoria and Albert Museum. This event, which was destined to be Queen Victoria’s last official public appearance, was filmed by both the Warwick Trading Company and Biograph Syndicate.8 In 1909, the opening of the new museum was filmed by Charles Urban in London’s New Museum. As Tony Bennett has argued, the central message of the Victoria and Albert Museum was to materialize the power of the ruling classes in the interest of promoting a general acceptance of ruling-class cultural authority: To visit institutions like the Victoria and Albert is, accordingly, to experience and witness the power of the ruling culture, a power which manifests itself precisely through its ability to exclude everything which, through its exclusion, is defined as other and subordinate. (Bennett, 1995: 109) Museums played a significant function in the formation of imperial knowledge, and as a vehicle for the fulfilment of the empire’s educative and moral rule (ibid.). Furthermore, as Barringer suggests, the museum aimed to open up economic and cultural possibilities of empire to the public, the inhabitants of the largest British cities (Barringer, 1998: 15). Non-fiction films were also aimed at the fulfilment of the imperial message, and the association between film and permanent or temporary exhibitions was embodied in the imperial educative rule. Cinema equally opened up the cultural possibilities of the empire to the public in Britain and in the colonies. The inauguration of the 1898 Universal Exhibition at Earl’s Court was filmed by Chard’s Vitagraph in Opening Ceremony at International Universal Exhibition. In 1907, two actualities representing the South African Exhibition were produced by the Warwick Trading Company and Walturdaw: Opening of the South African Exhibition and South African Products Exhibition. These films, which had been made five years after the end of the second Boer War, offered images of South African artefacts and emphasized the submission of the Republic of the Orange Free State and the South African Republic to Britain. They promoted the imperial message as much as actuality films shot

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in the war zone itself or by fiction Boer War films, and served the purpose of celebrating the power of the British Empire. Ultimately, the impact of imperialism and colonial representations on London’s urban landscape emerges from the modern subjects of these films and, as Driver and Gilbert put it, ‘it encourages us to consider the ways in which the experience of modernity in Europe reflected or represented the European encounter with the world beyond’ (Driver and Gilbert, 1998: 13).

A fragmented experience: From imperial spectacle to mosaic of urban lives A lower middle-class man born in London on Queen Victoria’s coronation day on 20 June 1837 could have been lucky enough to visit the Zoo in Regent’s Park on his tenth birthday after the opening to the public in 1847. He could also have visited the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park or James Wyld’s Globe in Leicester Square in his early teens. As he turned 20 he would have read about the Sepoy Mutiny in India, perhaps in one of those illustrated magazines which often devoted their pages to events taking place in the colonies. Later he could have read serialized novels by Charles Dickens in All Year Around or Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories in The Strand while sitting on a train boarded in one of the 14 major railway stations which opened in London during his lifetime. Cheap fares and government intervention had made rail travel more affordable: the train could have taken him on a short holiday to a seaside resort like Brighton or Blackpool, or visiting relatives in Manchester, Glasgow or Liverpool. Unless he had joined the army or the civil service and travelled to more distant destinations, his knowledge of the colonies would have come from shows, exhibitions, books, postcards, and magazines. At the age of 60, he would hardly have been able to dissimulate his wonder in front of the first exhibitions of moving pictures in his local music hall. Perhaps too tired to travel to central London or unwilling to face the great crowd, he would have watched the Diamond Jubilee procession on film. He might later become more familiar with the new technology, as he would realize that the subjects of films were not so new: exhibitions, street life, parades, crowded streets and representations of distant and exotic places had long been part of his experience of urban life in Victorian Britain. The focus on city life in early cinema, as Stanley Corkin suggests, is the result of the nineteenth-century relationship between positivist worldview, modernity and urbanization. Corkin argued that early American filmmakers aimed at the ‘naturalization of their class-based perspective as reality’ and, by displaying the modernity of American cityscapes, their films sought to appeal to the common desire to be aligned with the dominant culture (Corkin, 1996: 64). For example, Thomas Edison’s New York Street Scenes (1896–8), which included views of the Lower Manhattan skyline filmed from the Hudson, focused on the spectacle of urban modernity by including

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views of quintessentially modern icons in New York. Similarly, films of technological displays at the Crystal Palace are a record of urban modernity in London. Yet, the architecture of London at the turn of the century also revealed hesitations about modernity expressed, for example, by the design of Tower Bridge. As David Gilbert and Fiona Henderson suggest, Tower Bridge rapidly came to be a powerful symbol of London throughout the world and, yet, it consisted of a ‘state-of-the art hydraulic machinery clothed in a Gothic shell-suit of stone’ (Gilbert and Henderson, 2002: 127). The uneven modernization of London was thus reflected in several films of nineteenth-century buildings that suggested a reluctance to embrace modernity, revealed by styles that drew upon Western classical architecture, such as Marble Arch or the Bank of England, or sought to revive medieval forms, such as the Royal Courts of Justice, the Houses of Parliament or Tower Bridge. The result is a cinematic image less unambiguously modern than that of a city like New York, with its new tall buildings dominating the skyline. As I have argued in this chapter, the specificity and meaning of early cinematic London is to be found elsewhere: in the imperial identity evoked by its buildings and its exhibitions. The study of late-Victorian and Edwardian London reveals the map of a vanished cultural landscape expressed by the social space of the city and its representations. This map, made of exhibitions and displays, generates a cinematic city which can be investigated within that system of streets defined by Walter Benjamin as ‘a vascular network of imagination’ (Benjamin, 1999: 901). In this chapter I have tried to contribute to the understanding of this system by mapping the parallel tracks followed by films and exhibitions during the heyday of British imperialism. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, filmmakers have narrated the city in a wide variety of non-fiction films which have contributed to designing the ways in which urban space is perceived. Cinema has produced diverse and personal views of the city in films which have tried to undermine the association between film and dominant ideology. This uneven process of emancipation saw the use of non-fiction cinematography as both a propaganda weapon and as an independent form of expression. The first propaganda films made in Britain were distributed by the British Topical Committee for War Films and included Charles Urban’s Britain Prepared (1915) and Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell’s The Battle of the Somme (1916). In the 1920s, propaganda documentary films became a powerful tool for the ruling class in a more direct and state-managed form than the one expressed by early actuality films. The Empire Marketing Board (EMB) was established in 1926 and its film unit, led by John Grierson, produced over 100 films to promote and support Britain’s imperial adventure during the interwar years. On the other hand, the interwar period also saw documentaries such as Arthur Elton’s Housing Problems (1935), which revealed a cinematic way of tackling urban concerns, such as life in the slums, which was more problematic than

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that emerging from earlier films. In the 1940s, the Crown Film Unit, formerly EMB, produced several propaganda films during the war, including Humphrey Jennings’s London Can Take It (1940) and Battle of London (1941). These films covered the German Blitz on London, its effect on ordinary people, and thus helped create an image of a brave city at war. After the war, non-fiction film making came to represent a more independent form of film making. From the mid 1950s, documentaries such as Karel Reisz’s We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959) or Lindsay Anderson’s Everyday Except Christmas (1957) revealed new ways of exploring urban life with a poetic authenticity in the typical fashion of Free Cinema. While cinema turned into a more complex and mature medium, imperial cities turned into post-imperial spaces. Early films of London embodied and dramatized the imperial theme as a collective mirror of the society whose consensus its built environment expressed. The same sites, when not wiped out by German bombs or urban redevelopment, have survived the decay of the cultural matrix of imperialism and now contain a memory of past imperial might. Films such as Humphrey Jennings’s Family Portrait, which was released in 1951 as part of the celebration for the Festival of Britain, aimed at assuring people of Britain’s place in a new world order which saw the power of Britain fading away. The Festival of Britain, which took place exactly 100 years after the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the first Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, was itself the subject of a number of amateur films representing an event aimed at raising the nation’s spirits after the war and years of austerity. The festival offered a memory of past exhibitions and past affluence to the people of Britain. Films of this event recorded an image of a city experiencing the dissolution of its empire. They also recorded a picture of Labour’s 1945 unrealized dream of a socialist Commonwealth built on planning and risk-taking. Cinematic urban spaces have thus been depicted in a variety of ways engaging private and public history and the memory of the city. The social space of London emerged from non-fiction films recording the ways in which this space is lived through images and symbols associated with urban life. On the other hand, an in-depth investigation of London in nonfiction films throughout the twentieth century would reveal both a kaleidoscopic mosaic of urban experiences and a way to designate a new approach to the history of documentary film. This field of research prompts an investigation of the ways in which non-fiction cinema has emancipated itself from a state of servitude to the ruling ideology, and turned into a striving record of life in the city by merging and juxtaposing urban narratives of racial, class and sexual diversity. For example, documentary films such as Horace Ové’s Reggae (1971), which focused on black youths on their way to a reggae festival at Wembley Stadium, or Adam Clapham’s Consenting Adults (1967), which tackled the lives of gay men and women in London just prior to the enactment of the Sexual Offences Bill, reveal diverse narratives of the city. Much as early films of London generated tailor-made narratives for discourses of

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imperialism, later non-fiction films revealed the city as a practised place with contested narratives converging on the same site. Non-fiction cinema has thus developed from an expression of the dominant narrative of its time to a diverse mosaic of urban experiences. Parallel narratives of a journey across the space of the city have shaped our understanding of the urban experience and should designate non-fiction cinema as a privileged spatial discourse for the exploration of everyday life in the city.

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Sally Parrott, Mark Shiel and David Green for their help and encouragement. I would also like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for supporting my research.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

Illustrated Weekly News (12 October 1862): 2. The Illustrated London News, Vol. CIX, No. 2985 (Saturday, 4 July 1896): 345. Title: Balloon Ascent at Crystal Palace. These are the titles: Panorama View of Crystal Palace Terraces, Panorama of Crystal Palace Lake, the Swings at the Crystal Palace, The Prehistoric Monsters at Crystal Palace and Bicycle Race at the Crystal Palace. Titles: The Pageant of the Empire and The Pageant of London. Both films are now lost. The Times (Saturday, 15 February 1902): 14. There are no credits available for these films. Titles: Her Majesty the Queen Arriving at South Kensington on the Occasion of the Laying of The Foundation Stone of The Victoria And Albert Museum and Laying of The Foundation Stone of The Victoria And Albert Museum.

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182 Iconic Space in Early Films of London (1895–1914) Corkin, S. (1996). Realism and the Birth of the Modern United States (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press). Cosgrove, D. (2001). Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press). Driver, F. (2001). Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell). Driver, F. and Gilbert, D. (1998). ‘Heart of Empire? Landscape, Space and Performance in Imperial London’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 16 (1), pp. 11–28. Foucault, M. (1981). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon). Foucault, M. (1994). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (New York: Vintage). Gilbert, D. and Henderson, F. (2002). ‘London and the Tourist Imagination’, in Pamela K. Gilbert (ed.), Imagined Londons (New York: State University of New York Press), pp. 121–36. Hassam, A. (2003). ‘Portable Iron Structures and Uncertain Colonial Spaces at the Sydenham Crystal Palace’, in F. Driver and D. Gilbert (eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2nd edn), pp. 174–93. Hobsbawm, E. (2006). The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (London: Abacus, 5th edn). Horrall, A. (2001). Popular Culture in London c. 1890–1918: The Transformation of Entertainment (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press). Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell; trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith and first published as La production de I’espace in 1974). Levell, N. (2000). Oriental Visions: Exhibitions, Travel, and Collecting in the Victorian Age (London: Horniman Museum and Gardens). Mayhew, H. (1861). London Labour and the London Poor: the Condition and Earnings of Those that Will Work, Cannot Work, and Will Not Work (London: C. Griffin). Mitchell, T. (1991). Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press). Mullan, B. and Marvin, G. (1999). Zoo Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press). Panofsky, E. (1939). Studies in Iconography: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press). Prakash, G. (1999). Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Richards, T. (1990). The Commodity Culture of Victorian England (Chicago and London: Stanford University Press). Richards, T. (1993). The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London and New York: Verso). Ryan, D. (2003). ‘Staging the Imperial City: The Pageant of London, 1911’, in F. Driver and D. Gilbert (eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2nd edn), pp. 117–35. Said, E. (1994). Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage). Schneer, J. (1999). London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). Sennett, R. (1994). Flesh and Stone: The Body of the City in Western Civilization (London and Boston, MA: Faber and Faber). Stoker, B. (1993). Dracula (London: Penguin; first published in 1897).

12 Projecting Place: Location Mapping, Consumption, and Cinematographic Tourism Les Roberts

Introduction: Projecting the gaze The non-place is not only a space: it is virtually present in the gaze, which, too accustomed as it is to images, cannot see reality any more. (Augé, 1996: 179) In his essay ‘Paris and the Ethnography of the Contemporary World’ the anthropologist Marc Augé describes, in quite withering terms, the bateauxmouches, or ‘fly-boats’, which operate site-seeing cruises along the River Seine. In the evening trips or ‘shows’, the boats, which are equipped with huge floodlights, illuminate key landmark buildings and riverside monuments: ‘irradiating them’, as Augé observes, ‘with a somewhat obscene glare’ (1996: 179).1 Augé cites this example to illustrate the ways in which urban landscapes are increasingly transformed into images, shows, or lifesized stage sets for consumption by tourists and others: their gaze directed towards illuminated emblems of, for example, a ‘Metonymic Paris’ (ibid.). This very theatrical urban mise-en-scène – the cityscape as a son et lumière backdrop or screen – is premised on a fundamentally passive and disembodied mode of spatio-visual engagement. Like the prisoners shackled in Plato’s cave, the voyager-voyeur is confronted with shadows and simulacra of a city that is otherwise held in abeyance, its lived, embodied spaces of performance, historicity and sociality ‘irradiated’ by the virtualizing gaze of the siteseer (Crang, 1994; Roberts, 2010a; Urry, 2002). With its attendant trope of projection, the spectacular space of consumption which the tourists inhabit is one that plays host to an urban topography that has been cinematically rendered. The city’s landmarks and monuments are pressed into service of an unfolding visual narrative: a virtual diorama – inscribed in quotidian space – in which the mobilities of the viewer rather than those of the tableau imagery ‘on screen’ create the emotional (Bruno, 2002) architectures of urban narrative space. Mapping a virtual, fetishized geography of the city, the projected gaze of the site-seer, 183

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like that of the cinema spectator, defines a landscape whose primary function, economically at least, is to be seen. It is these imbricated geographies of the virtual and material – and the increasing cinematization of postmodern urban space more generally – that I am concerned with in this chapter. More specifically, in a social and economic context of hyper-consumption, tourism and culture-led urban regeneration, this chapter will critically explore the role of film location sites in the mapping and marketing of the postmodern urban imaginary. Drawing on examples of post-industrial consumerscapes in cities such as Liverpool, I consider some of the ways in which filmic or cinematic renderings of space and place have become geographically embedded in discourses of consumption, heritage and urban place-making. The increasingly co-extensive geographies of tourism and film, as illustrated, for example, by the production of ‘movie maps’ as marketing tools for urban and rural tourism, is indicative of a growing synergy between the two industries. As I argue, this prompts critical reflection on the commodification and consumption of urban landscapes, prompting in turn a renewed focus on the political economy of film location sites (Swann, 2001), as well as a consideration of alternative cartographies of film, place and memory, which I outline by way of conclusion.

Cinematographic tourism One of the oft-cited characteristics of a putative ‘postmodern condition’ is that of the critical redundance of ideas of the ‘authentic’ in an increasingly mediated and image-saturated world (Harvey, 1989). Despite, or because of this evacuation of ‘the real’ (perhaps in response to the perceived encroachment of a ‘reel’ cultural and geographical imaginary – see AlSayyad 2006), a spatial politics of authenticity, as evidenced, for example, by groups reflecting a more psychogeographic sensitivity to urban space, has continued to underpin many of the debates and practices surrounding the construction of place, space and identity in the geographical imagination (Gregory, 1994) of cities and other urban centres. In a recent article examining the parallels between tourism and film, Mazierska and Walton note that the discussion of authenticity in tourism has its counterpart in debates on realism in film studies (2006: 8). For the traveller in hyperreality, that a landscape or destination might be merely the ‘inauthentic’ product of its own simulation is to miss the point: it is precisely the capacity of a place to match up to its film or television persona(s) that affirms its authentic credentials. This represents a strikingly different perspective from those advancing a more realist aesthetic or ontology of ‘travel’ (virtual or otherwise). For a good illustration of this we need look no further than a recent marketing campaign aimed at overseas visitors to the US, a country where, for Baudrillard, ‘the materiality of things is, of course, their cinematography’

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(1988: 85). The tagline of Saatchi’s ‘See America’ campaign, which featured iconic landscape scenery culled from famous Hollywood films, was ‘You’ve seen the film, now visit the set’.2 Similarly, in Britain the 2006 Beatrix Potter biopic Miss Potter has played a central role in the recent marketing of the Lake District as an international tourist attraction. The campaign by Cumbria Tourism, which includes a movie map of key locations in the film, invites tourists to ‘Visit Miss Potter’: an imagined geography that fuses map, movie, and territory into a single, undifferentiated entity.3 In a similar vein, the Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s film Australia, released in 2008, was supported by a marketing campaign by Tourism Australia, the national statutory authority in Australia tasked with the promotion of the country as an international tourism destination. The campaign included the publication of a ‘Tourism Toolkit’ for use by tourism offices and marketing organizations, the rationale of which was to provide ‘the movie resources and guidelines to use in your own marketing activities’ (‘Tourism Toolkit – Australia the Movie’, Tourism Australia, November 2008).4 What is particularly notable about the Australia campaign is the central contribution played by Twentieth Century Fox studios which provided Tourism Australia with all the artwork and approved templates, featuring location stills, thus performing an integral role in the promotion of not only the film itself, but also of the related marketing products centred around the consumption of Australia as an international tourist destination. A further example which may also be cited here is that of a marketing campaign organized around the film 2012, released in November 2009. To tie in with the film’s release, the leading international travel agency Flight Centre, in conjunction with Sony Pictures, ran a competition in which the prize was a round-the-world flight to various destinations featured in the film. For a disaster movie that plays on anxieties concerning the impacts of global warming, it is hard to think of a more inappropriate means of film promotion. What such examples demonstrate are the increasingly co-extensive and economically contingent geographies of tourism and film, as well as a growing interpenetration of the two industries in the way film locations are being promoted and consumed as sites of spectacle and attraction. The growth in what has been dubbed ‘film or movie-induced tourism’ has given rise to a number of recent studies examining the economic impacts or potential of this form of destination marketing (Beeton, 2005; Busby and Klug, 2001; Graml, 2004; Hudson and Ritchie, 2006a, 2006b; Kim and Richardson, 2003; Riley, Baker and Doren 1998; Tooke and Baker, 1996). Alongside these more industry-based perspectives there have been few if any critical or spatial examinations of film-induced tourism or, more specifically, of ‘movie mapping’. Moreover, studies have also tended to focus on rural rather than urban destinations. A notable exception is Schofield’s (1996) discussion of alternative heritage tourism in Manchester (based on

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the ‘Hollywood of the North’ tour of the city). Embracing the potential of what he terms the postmodern or post-tourist heritage market, Schofield argues that film and television images of a city represent an intangible ‘heritage of ideas or images’, which, in contrast to a ‘heritage of objects’ (such as architecture), provides the foundation for a newly emerging niche market: that of the ‘cinematographic tourist’ (ibid.: 336). For Schofield, ‘[the Manchester cinematographic history tour] epitomizes a new product development in a “new tourism” environment … and represent[s] the coming of age of urban heritage tourism as a postmodern media image experience of place’ (ibid.: 339). I will return to these arguments shortly when considering the example of Liverpool, which, like Manchester, is a post-industrial city (and rival ‘Hollywood of the North’) that has also sought to exploit its more intangible – and cinematographic – urban heritage. Despite the burgeoning academic literature addressing the subject of film and television-related tourism, few studies to date have sought to critically engage with questions of spatiality, consumption and the disembedding of place and cultural memory (Edensor, 2005: 831–2; Roberts, 2010a) prompted by developments in what many authors have chosen to refer to as ‘movieinduced tourism’ (Busby and Klug 2001; Riley, 1994; Riley, Baker and Doren, 1998) or ‘film-induced tourism’ (Beeton, 2005). A critical focus on filmrelated tourism practices brings with it an increased awareness that images of film locations are part of a complex and multi-layered social imaginary of place, and that cultural mappings of film geographies are themselves implicated in the wider social and cultural production of space (Lefebvre, 1991). In this regard, studies which privilege the economic impacts of filmrelated tourism, or which are designed to enhance the overall effectiveness of place-marketing strategies based around film and television productions, are by their very nature limited in what they can tell us about the production, consumption and circulation of film geographies. Indeed, among the aforementioned scholars (all of whom broadly approach the subject from the perspective of the tourism industry and marketing practices), the use of the term ‘film or movie-induced tourism’ in and of itself carries with it implications of a direct causal correspondence between the referent (the film location image) and the consumer (the tourist visiting the actual location) who is induced (or seduced) to travel by the virtual ‘pull factor’ (Riley and Doren, 1992) of film. While much of the analysis certainly has some currency in terms of the instrumental application of film tourism as a tool of destination marketing, what has been less developed critically in this area has been a holistic assessment of (a) the relationships and institutional alliances being forged in the development of film-related tourism (i.e. the discursive and industrial contexts of production); (b) the ways in which ideas of place, identity and cultural memory are shaped by and negotiated through the promotion of cinematic geographies (i.e. the reception and consumption of place and locality through film); and (c) the constitutive spatialities which the

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practice of movie-mapping (i.e. the production of navigational/geographical media plotting film geographies and the navigation/consumption of actual location sites by tourists) instil and cement in the geographical imaginary of specific places. This latter point has particular bearing within a historical and economic context of post-industrial and culture-led regeneration in which the uptake of ‘cinematographic tourism’ (Schofield, 1996) is increasingly regarded as a viable means of brand promotion and place recognition. In the UK, a report published in 2007 by the consultants Olsberg/SPI on behalf of the UK Film Council and various regional screen agencies and destination marketing organizations (DMOs)5 highlights the extent to which film-related tourism is beginning to attract more widespread attention across different institutions and sectors. Strongly illustrative of the neoliberal rationale driving current cultural policy agendas in the UK and elsewhere, the report’s overall remit appears to have been very narrow: its findings address exclusively economic factors such as the marketing potential in exploiting film-related tourism strategies; the extent to which film and television images might reinforce an overall brand for the UK internationally; and the ways in which what they describe as ‘emotionally resonant productions’ – those creating a strong connection between characters and places – offer particularly successful products which the report recommends as ideal vehicles for stimulating the ‘tourist effect’ (UK Film Council/Olsberg-SPI, 2007: 4). If questions that address the social and cultural impacts or significance of film-related tourism fall outside the purview of reports such as Stately Attraction, then the report published by the UK Film Council in June 2009 provides at least some compensation. Stories We Tell Ourselves: The Cultural Impact of UK Film 1946–20066 examines a selection of postwar British films to assess how these have shaped ideas of Britishness and reflected and articulated values, identities and social issues in some way expressive of the nation and its postwar history. However, what the report significantly does not address is the impact of British films on local, regional or national ideas of place. Readings and perceptions of landscape, location, or what more broadly may be defined as a ‘sense of place’ are given scant attention, despite the striking and often iconic choices of location depicted in many of the films under discussion in the report, and the very obvious inroads being made in relation to filmrelated tourism initiatives such as those being developed in the capital by Film London and Visit London, and, as is increasingly the case, in the regions. As indicated above, one of the key indicators of the industrial convergence between tourism and film geographies in recent years has been the production and practice of ‘movie mapping’.

The (movie) map is not the territory Although movie mapping is a relatively recent development in tourism, it is by no means without precedent. In 1904 the Swedish Tourist Association

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produced a map of the city of Härnösand which featured nodal points indicating positions where site-seers could obtain familiar (‘touristic’) views of the city contained in postcards, guidebooks or film. The ‘filmic nodes’ consisted of arrows representing shooting positions in Bilder fran Härnösand (Images of Härnösand), the earliest known moving images of the city (Snickars and Björkin, 2002: 279). As Patrick Keiller has shown in his ‘navigable’ installation City of the Future, much of early film was essentially topographic in form (see also Rohdie, 2001: 10). Arranged on a series of screens and historical maps, Keiller’s exhibit is comprised of actuality footage of urban landscapes, filmed between 1896 and 1909, showing street scenes and ‘phantom ride’ views shot from moving vehicles such as trams and trains. Insofar as these early actualities exemplify a ‘view aesthetic’ – for Gunning (1997), one of the defining characteristics of early non-fiction film – they map a space of representation homologous to that framed by the tourist or site-seer. While these nascent modes of ‘cinematic cartography’ (Roberts, 2010b) displayed a fascination with the topographies, rhythms and materiality of the modern city, their postmodern variants map a landscape whose topographic referents are the product of a markedly different tourist geography. In recent years film-related tourism has developed into something of a global phenomenon, prompting the publication not only of movie maps of cities and regions (often, as I have noted, as tie-ins to major film releases), but also of a string of travel guides, most notably Tony Reeve’s The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations (first published in 2001), the success of which, as with its London counterpart (Reeve, 2003), has spawned many similar publications. The British Tourism Authority’s (BTA, now Visit Britain) Movie Map of Britain was the first national campaign that sought to capitalize on the economic potential of film-related tourism. First published in 1990, the map became BTA’s most successful printed product. Marketed largely at overseas visitors, the aim of the map, according to Visit Britain’s campaign manager, ‘was to achieve a seasonal spread of visitors to heritage locations, city destinations and other areas of Britain’s countryside’ (Busby and Klug, 2001: 324). The organization has since gone on to produce a series of movie-maps and is a global player in the film tourism market. Working with film production and distribution companies, Visit Britain now has dedicated film tourism offices in Los Angeles and Mumbai, and typically plans with movie studios at least 12 months in advance of the date of a major film release (Visit Britain Press Release, 24 October 20077; Hudson and Brent Ritchie, 2006a: 259). As Beeton observes, ‘the publication of movie maps, both in hard copy and on the Internet, has become a significant marketing tool in the arsenal of many DMOs’ (2005: 63). This is clearly demonstrable in the case of Britain, with the success of the national model prompting many local and regional authorities to exploit the marketing potential of movie mapping. In 2003, for example, the Wales Screen Commission collaborated with the Tourism Partnership North Wales to publish the first ‘Movie Map North Wales’

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which formed part of an integrated marketing campaign aimed at boosting tourist interest in North Wales and raising awareness of the region’s film locations to the wider film industry. Of the handful of movie maps published in the UK to date, Movie Map North Wales provides the most detailed and extensive mapping of regional film and television productions. As well as the printed tourist map, the campaign also includes a dedicated website (www. moviemapnorthwales.co.uk), featuring additional information about each of the titles included on the map. In addition, and in this respect the example is unique, the map is complemented by a series of film heritage plaques marking the locations of a selected number of productions. Funded by the devolved Welsh Assembly Government, the plaques provide a site-specific point of focus for film tourism and heritage in North Wales, with the unveiling of each plaque enabling both screen and tourism agencies to generate additional publicity by inviting local and national media to cover the event.8 In the capital, the organizations Film London and Visit London have produced a number of tourist maps of films that have featured prominent and iconic London landmarks, including Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003), Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (Beeban Kidron, 2004), Thunderbirds (Jonathan Frakes, 2004), and Woody Allen’s Match Point (2005). Tourists and cineasetes in London can also follow a ‘South Bank Movie Trail’ along the River Thames, and download movie maps and podcasts featuring accompanying audio commentary from Film London’s website. Replete with what Shonfield calls the ‘tourist hardware’ of a cinematic London (in Brunsdon, 2007: 33), the locations mapped in many of these films proclaim, in no uncertain terms: ‘This is London’; serving both to anchor the diegesis within an immediately recognizable or ‘legible’ (Lynch, 1960) landscape, as well as branding the (extra-diegetic) site a space of touristic consumption. Citing the work of Pierre Sorlin, Brunsdon notes that the use of ‘typical’ landmark iconography in films, such as views found in postcards, guidebooks and other tourist media, establishes a visual citation of place that more often than not has the effect of ‘blocking’ viewers’ engagement with these landscapes, rather than ‘inciting’ responses designed to draw out the embedded narratives and histories attached to a given location (2007: 26–8).9 Eschewing otherwise open, oblique or counter narratives of place (the defamiliarized image of the Tower of London in Patrick Keiller’s film London [1994] provides a good example of incitement), the London movie maps produced by Visit London/Film London are designed less to incite a keenly felt sense of place than a form of urban heritage tourism in which the city’s landmarks and locations function primarily as product placements (for consumption of both movie and ‘set’). In their assessment of the effect of film and television productions on visitor numbers at location sites, Tooke and Baker conclude by recommending the introduction of a subsidy to encourage film companies ‘to choose locations which display attractive national landscapes or urban vistas’ (1996: 94).

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Leaving aside the question of what might constitute an ‘attractive’ urban vista, this appeal to policymakers on behalf of the tourism industry signals an emerging politics and aesthetics of location that is underpinned by a neoliberal model of economic instrumentalism. As a tool for the regeneration of cities, the increasingly important role of film (or rather film locations) in the economic revival of post-industrial urban landscapes is the result of a growing synergy between local film offices and screen agencies on the one hand, and DMOs on the other. The production of tourist maps of film locations represents a materialization of this relationship. As I illustrate in the next section, in a critical spatial analysis of film, tourism and movie mapping it is the operational similarities between the two industries that invite particular scrutiny: both are economically premised on a semiotics of attraction; and both are key agents in the transformation of urban landscapes into postmodern spaces of spectacular consumption.

Location, location, location: The case of Liverpool I came looking for a beach and they sold me the whole city. International concert halls, Moscow hotels, Parisian apartments, golden synagogues, civic buildings, sand dunes and stately homes. (Andy Patterson, producer of Hilary and Jackie, quoted in ‘Boomtown! Liverpool Movie and Television Map’, 2002) In the case of the London films cited above, the city that is ‘mapped’ (both cartographically and figuratively) is one in which London, for the most part, ‘plays itself’ (or at least a version of itself); that is, the landmarks and locations depicted in the films draw on an imaginary of place that is in some way expressive of the actual city. In instances where the production costs of shooting in the capital demand the search for more affordable ‘stand-in’ locations, it is increasingly likely to be Liverpool that producers turn to: a city whose landscape and architecture offer a ready-to-hand simulacrum of London as well as many other cities, past and present. After London, Liverpool is the most filmed city in the UK, yet in the case of the vast majority of film and television productions based in the city, Liverpool all too rarely plays itself. Less the ‘star’ than ‘body double’ (Brown, 1995: 10), Liverpool has served as a stand-in for, among others, Cannes, Vienna, Moscow, St Petersburg, Dublin, Amsterdam, Rome, New York, Chicago, Paris, war-time Germany, as well as London (ibid.: 9; Liverpool Movie and Television, Map 2002). Published in 2002 by Liverpool City Council’s tourism unit and the Liverpool Film Office, ‘Boomtown! Liverpool Movie and Television Map’ was part of a wider marketing campaign aimed at promoting the city’s locations as a desirable destination for both tourists and filmmakers alike. Indeed, the above quote from the producer of the Jacqueline du Pré biopic Hilary and

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Jackie (Anand Tucker, 1998) would not look out of place in a tour operator brochure. As a site of consumption Liverpool’s cinematic geographies reflect a heterotopic configuration of urban space in which markers of place denote a fragmentary and increasingly de-localized topography defined by style and genre rather than local urban specificity. Promising a ‘world in one city’ (which would later become the tag-line for Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture 2008 bid campaign – see Roberts, 2010c), these post-industrial consumerscapes were in part forged from initiatives begun in the late 1980s which sought to build on the city’s new-found role as a film set: When the Victorian and Edwardian merchant princes laid the cornerstones of Liverpool’s imperialistic heyday, little did they know that they were building some of the best film sets of the late twentieth century. Focus a camera on the architecture, landscape or seascape of this city, and you can still be anywhere from pre-revolutionary France to post-revolutionary Romania. (‘Hollywood on the Mersey’, Liverpool Echo, 21 February 1991: 6–7) Buoyed by the unexpected success of Letter to Brezhnev (Chris Bernard, 1985), in 1989 the city council set up the Liverpool Film Office (LFO), which was the UK’s first city film commission. The overall remit of the LFO has been to provide a film liaison service to the film and television industry and to stimulate demand for local production skills (Hallam, 2000: 264), thereby attracting much needed investment to the region. More recently its remit has extended to film tourism, and in its capacity as a film location and liaison service has found itself well equipped to exploit the potential of the city’s urban landscape and rich architectural heritage to raise brand awareness of Liverpool as both a film location and a destination for film and television-related tourism. Recent LFO production coups, including the latest in the immensely popular Harry Potter series of films and the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy (Sam Taylor-Wood, 2009), are expected to further enhance the city’s appeal to tourists, fans and cineastes alike. As Lynn Saunders, manager of the LFO, has pointed out, the marketing of Liverpool and Merseyside as a site of film tourism is recognized by council leaders as an increasingly important part of the wider promotional strategies focused around the Liverpool ‘brand’.10 The development of movie maps, both in printed form and as part of on-line marketing campaigns, has been at the forefront of ongoing initiatives surrounding film-related tourism in Merseyside. The earlier movie map published in 2002 was less far-reaching in its scope as a marketing tool, and as a consequence met with limited success. This was prior to the spotlight that was soon to be cast on the city, however. The designation of European Capital of Culture status which was to follow a year later was instrumental in positioning the Liverpool brand within a more global consumer marketplace.

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The establishment of the LFO in the late 1980s coincided with a number of other initiatives aimed at promoting Liverpool as a leading centre for location filming. These included the ‘Moving Image Development Agency’ (MIDA), established by Roger Shannon in 1992, the aim of which was ‘to put Liverpool “behind the camera” as much as it is renowned for being in front of it’ (Channon [sic], 1996: 179). The early success of MIDA laid the foundations for schemes such as the Merseyside Producers’ Development Initiative: a partnership involving regional and national television broadcasters (Channel 4, Granada, BBC) and MIDA, and which was in part financed by the new monies for media industries emerging from Merseyside’s Objective One status in Europe (ibid.: 181). As well as its capacity to look like somewhere else, the desirability of Liverpool as a film location was based on its cheapness and accessibility (Brown, 1995: 10), not to mention, in comparison to cities such as London, its relatively traffic and crowd-free streets. A consequence of years of depopulation and economic decline, this somewhat down-at-heel urban situation (which the LFO initiatives were designed to address) was, ironically, one of the key selling points for attracting prospective filmmakers to the city. In addition to the obvious economic benefits, it was also felt that Liverpool’s increased screen presence would have a positive psychological impact on the city. As Paul Mingard, the LRO’s first film liaison officer suggests, ‘Imagine – you see your city, this derided place, up there on the screen, again and again, and it tells you that Liverpool is special … It tells you that faith in this city is justified’ (Gilbey, 1995; Brown, 1995: 7). However, how much of itself Liverpool does in fact see up there on the screen is a moot point. While in Letter to Brezhnev Liverpool was uncharacteristically (and unflinchingly) ‘playing itself’, the industry it helped spawn is one in which, typically, locations count only insofar as they are able to enhance another city’s screen presence, or to sustain the production of ‘generic spaces’ serving mostly grafted-on (or dis-located) narratives. There is, as Paul Swann has observed, ‘a postmodern inexorability in valuing cities as images rather than as sites of production’ (2001: 96). Following the example of North American cities such as Philadelphia, Liverpool’s transition from industrial to image-based economy – from ‘workshop to backlot’ as Swann puts it (ibid.) – has been aided by the establishment of organizations such as MIDA to develop and promote the region’s moving image industries (Brown, 1995: 44). In 2002 MIDA was absorbed into North West Vision and Media (NWVM), the strategic film development agency for the North West of England which, through a network of local film offices, promotes the region’s locations and production facilities. As is now standard practice among film offices and screen agencies, NWVM’s website hosts a location database and image gallery where filmmakers can sift through a broad array of location and spatial categories and images, many without any geographical contextualization. Much like that of an estate or travel agent,

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the role of the screen agent is to market the attributes of a given location or destination and thus to match one image (the sought-after cinematic topography) with another (the locations still): We guarantee you’ll be impressed with our stunning mix of eclectic, contemporary buildings and beautifully preserved industrial architecture. Then there are tranquil lakes, quaint stone villages, rolling mountains and miles of spectacular coastline. (from NWVM’s Locations Database – see www.northwestvision.co.uk, emphasis added) If the particularities of this form of destination/location marketing – here lifted from NWVM’s Locations Database website – appear little different from those of tourist marketing (Figure 12.1), then reports of location scouts bypassing the screen agencies altogether and enquiring direct with tourism information offices (as studies based on the use of Dorset as a film location have shown) are not altogether that surprising.11 While the apparent propensity of filmmakers to circumvent the screen agencies does not necessarily signal a more direct, authentic or serendipitous engagement with place and location (the mediating function of the screen agent being merely replaced by that of the tourist agent), it nevertheless does not rule out the possibility of an eventual connection with the actual landscape digitally captured in indexes and databases of location sites held by these mediating bodies. This observation holds up less successfully, however, when applied to the more widespread propensity of filmmakers to circumvent the location site altogether, remaining in virtual environments throughout the production process. Access to blueprints of buildings, or measurements and dimensions of a specific architectural space allow the possibility for the filmmaker to digitally recreate the specific landscape, room or building in question without the inconvenience (and cost) of filming in the actual location. Not surprisingly, the use of computer-generated imagery to virtually render the one commodity upon which screen agencies are dependent – location – is a practice that is looked upon rather less favourably by those local authorities, businesses and communities which have benefited from income generated from productions based in real geographies and real spaces.12 That said, insofar as place-specific geographies of film can capture or evoke a certain ‘sense of place’, the ‘authenticity’ or veracity of the location and mise-en-scène is to a large extent immaterial in terms of projected tourism mobilities.13 As examples such as Braveheart (1995) have shown14, the capacity for a film to conjure an imaginary of place and history often outweighs any concerns surrounding the ‘inaccurate’ or deceptive nature of its geography, although this remains an area of research that would benefit from closer examination.

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Figure 12.1 Images from North West Vision and Media’s Location Database (Courtesy of Dave Wood/Liverpool Pictorial and Liverpool Film Office).

As I have argued, the increasingly synergistic relationship between the film and tourism industries has refined a very particular semiotics of place. While geographically embedded in actual landscapes, the visual commodification of the location site in the form of the movie map and other film-related tourism media does little to put the ‘real’ city on the map. In the case of Liverpool, the movie map signals the emergence of what Schofield describes as postmodern urban heritage tourism: a ‘new, differentiated heritage [product]’ (1996: 339) which is economically sustained by the production and consumption of urban-architectural simulacra. As Brown observes: the pic ‘n’ mix selection offered by Liverpool makes it a form of ultimate post-modern city … It is full of visual spectacle but increasingly unable to articulate its own identity. A significant tension in the fictionalisation of Liverpool comes from this schizophrenic self-image. It is hardly a mirror of itself on screen, more a hall of mirrors. (1995: 11–12) As a strategic tool for destination marketing, the movie map epitomizes a niche form of urban heritage tourism. While stimulating more oblique ways of engaging with the history and geography of cities (for example,

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introducing visitors to areas they might otherwise miss as part of a conventional tourist itinerary, or invoking spaces of memory that infuse the urban landscape with a more refined poetics of space and place: a spectral invocation of present-absence), the movie map at the same time raises questions as to the ways in which filmic images of cities might sustain a more socially and spatially embedded geography of place, and how these in turn might shape alternative cartographies of urban memory. In the next and concluding section I argue for a critical application of cinematic cartography as a methodological and analytical tool of geo-historical urban enquiry. Drawing on research into archive film of Liverpool and Merseyside, I suggest that, far from ‘blocking’ engagement with the lived, anthropological spaces of cities, film geographies can incite and reclaim a far richer, more textured sense of place, locality and urban heritage.

Playing with cinematic geographies: A critical methodology Landscape is the story, memory and meaning. You begin there. (Sinclair, 2002: 34) Commenting on the city locations portrayed in Italian neorealist cinema, Nowell-Smith notes that ‘[t]hey are there before they signify, and they signify because they are there; they are not there merely in order to be bearers of signification’ (2001: 107 emphasis added). As we have seen, while Liverpool’s more prominent cinematic geographies can often be seen to function as little more than semiotic shorthand, conjuring, in an instant, another place and time (whether Edwardian London or 1980s Moscow, for example), there exists a far more extensive corpus of Liverpool films in which the city not only ‘plays itself’, but also plays a more prominent part in the recultivation of an urban habitus: the symbolic structures that bind people and place. If this distinction appears subtle, it is not without some significance. While – insofar as they may be categorized as ‘city films’ – genres such as actualities, newsreels, amateur films, documentaries, travelogues, and municipal or promotional films are more likely to capture the vernacular, everyday landscapes and narratives of a particular city (as indeed do many features), the degree to which that city can then be said to be ‘playing itself’ is perhaps not quite as straightforward as it might otherwise appear. Cities, of course, do not ‘play themselves’. Cities play people and people play cities, but to suggest that architecture, topography and location are in some way a priori bearers of signification, independent of the socio-spatial relations and symbolic processes that inscribe urban landscapes with meaning, is to deny the historically contingent nature of urban spatial formations. Cities are enmeshed in complex webs of signification where meanings are negotiated and contested, and where narratives are multiple and at times dissonant. Given this, in its capacity as a mode of critical urban enquiry, how and in

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what ways might the practice of cinematic cartography bring into play the multivalent spatial narratives and structures of feeling that are articulated in different moving image genres and practices? As a critical methodology, the ‘play’ of urban cinematic geographies is at its most instructive when the associative product of (a) quantitative (b) qualitative and (c) archaeological modes of cine-spatial enquiry. Taking each in turn: the availability of a comprehensive collection of archival film data, featuring production details, genre, date, synopsis, as well as information on the spaces, architecture and locations represented in a broad selection of film material, lends itself productively to detailed empirical and quantitative analyses of a city and its cinematic geographies from which new theoretical frameworks may be advanced. In this regard, a reappraisal of the role of the database as both symbolic form (Manovich, 1999) and practical research tool has facilitated the development of critical modes of analysis defined less in terms of a linear diachrony of urban spatio-narrative form, than of a spatial and synchronic ordering of film data in which the governing metaphors of ‘navigation’, ‘mapping’, ‘sorting’, and ‘searching’ signal an epistemological shift in the way the city in film is both theorized and practised. Examples here include Patrick Keiller’s aforementioned installation City of the Future, which draws from a database of approximately 2000 early actuality films held by the BFI National Film and Television Archive. A selection of 68 items from the database were viewable or navigable across a number of screens on which historical maps were also projected. Organized spatially and geographically, the footage could be accessed by clicking on points on the maps, allowing users to move back and forth between cartographic and cinematographic renderings of the same landscapes and topography. To cite a further example, one more pertinent to the present discussion, in 2006 the University of Liverpool’s ‘City in Film’ project initiated a comprehensive survey of Liverpool’s filmic heritage, ranging from 1897 to the 1980s. This resulted in the compilation of an online database of over 1700 filmic items searchable by a number of variables, including genre, date, as well as building and location, spatial function (the architectural characterization of landscapes in each film) and spatial use (the ethnographic and social forms of engagement with the city’s spaces).15 As I discuss below, the compilation of spatial data drawn from an extensive archival trawl of images of the city lends itself to explicitly cartographic modes of analysis and representation, utilizing Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to geo-reference historical films of the city within a digital mapping platform. The second key methodological tenet underpinning a critical cartography of the city in film is the hermeneutic and ethnographic ‘mapping’ of urban representational spaces. To reiterate the point made above: cities and their representations are enmeshed in complex webs of signification. In order to ‘unpack’ the meanings attached to cinematic geographies it is therefore incumbent on researchers to venture beyond the diegetic spaces of the

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medium to gather qualitative sources of information in the form of oral histories, interview data and other ethnographic material relating to both the production and consumption of place and landscape in film. Research conducted into amateur and independent film-making activity in Merseyside has yielded a rich repository of contextual information and ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) that opens up new layers of interpretation and critical understanding surrounding film, space and place in the region. By way of illustration, an amateur production from 1974 called Pleasures Past depicts a run-down and decrepit seaside resort on the northern tip of the Wirral peninsula. In its heyday, New Brighton had been a bustling and lively playground for day-tripping Liverpudlians, who in the summer months would arrive in their thousands by ferry from Pier Head on the other side of the River Mersey. As an archival record of a period that marked the beginning of the resort’s rapid slide into dereliction, the film is a poignant, elegiac memorial to a place haunted by ghosts of happier times. Infused with a sense of absence – the camera appearing to probe the empty landscapes for any lingering trace or affect of its ‘past pleasures’ – the film appears to unequivocally present itself as a tribute to and evocation of place. A film, in other words, about New Brighton. Yet in interview with Graham Kay, one of the filmmakers involved in the production of Pleasures Past, it quickly became apparent that the film was never intended to be a film about New Brighton or its history, but rather a poetic study of decline and decay more generally. However, given its obvious choice of location (the resort perceived to be ‘playing itself’), the film had by all accounts prompted some negative reactions among local audiences, who, responding to the film’s material rather than emotional geographies, felt uncomfortable with its raw depiction of New Brighton as it was at the time. They regarded the film, according to Kay, as ‘a denigration of the whole idea of New Brighton’. From the perspective of the film’s contemporary critics, what were deemed to be acceptable filmic representations of the resort were those which documented moments from its history when it was a thriving leisure zone, not those which witnessed the spectacle of boarded up shops, deserted streets and (sub)urban entropy. As one had been heard to comment: ‘I wonder what Wallasey Corporation [the local council authority] would say about this’. Conversely, critics not familiar with the local geography had received the film in a more favourable light, picking up on the fact that Pleasures Past was intended to be what in amateur film circles is known as a ‘mood film’: a film whose geography was there to prompt an emotional response that in this instance was never intended to be specific to the history and identity of the location site.16 To consider one further layer of interpretation, from the vantage point of today the place-specific nature of Pleasures Past, and the fact that – albeit unwittingly – the filmmakers captured for posterity New Brighton as it was in the early 1970s, has meant that recent interest in the film has been

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directed towards its historical geography, and a poetics of place that is firmly rooted in the symbolic landscapes of the famous resort.17 At a screening of Pleasures Past held at the University of Liverpool in October 2009, responses from audience members were overwhelmingly positive, the film appearing to function as a form of ‘focused gathering’ (Geertz, 1973: 424), facilitating wider discussion on the history and geography of the resort, as well as reflections on the social, cultural and environmental issues confronting New Brighton and its inhabitants today. What this example serves to demonstrate are the shifting and nuanced layers of interpretation attached to film geographies. Ethnographic and other qualitative methods of cine-spatial contextualization can thus provide fine-grained insights into the spatial semiotics of urban film cultures and practices. The third and final methodological underpinning to a critical cinematic cartography is what might be described as an archaeology of the city in film. This takes as its guiding metaphor the layering of urban cinematic geographies: that is, the city’s landscapes conceived in terms of a spatial palimpsest; constantly inscribed and reinscribed by multiple, imbricated forms of urban spatial practice (architectural, socio-political, cultural and aesthetic, psychoanalytical, environmental, planning and developmental, etc.). The recognition that the physical urban fabric constitutes no less an urban archive than its representational and cinematic analogues is highlighted in Roberts and Koeck’s discussion of what they term the ‘archive city’. Writing on representations of Liverpool’s urban landscape on film, they argue: Reading Liverpool as an archive-city – a cinematic repository of iconic, forgotten, or half-remembered glimpses – demands not only a process of rendering present the spaces and moments of the city’s past, but also, and more crucially, of plotting their absence, palimpsestically, within the multi-layered textures of the city’s present. (Roberts and Koeck, 2007: 84) While conceptually the neologism of the archive-city might provide a suggestive frame of reference for a critical excavation of the ‘material and symbolic’ (Highmore, 2005) accretions of place, space and urban memory, the practical and methodological challenges it poses are rather less tractable. In response to these challenges, work developed as part of the University of Liverpool’s ‘Mapping the City in Film’ project has begun to explore ways in which the geo-referencing of urban film geographies (the spatial positioning of location data using precise geographical coordinates) can open up virtual interactive ‘pathways’ through the archive-city of Liverpool. The availability of an existing data set that includes location and geographical data fields (the aforementioned database index of Liverpool films) has meant that, in geo-referenced form, this information has served as the building blocks of a

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spatial database: a digitally ‘navigable’ palimpsest of the city in film in which the cartographic layering of Liverpool’s spaces of memory provides opportunities for new forms of dialogue between the city’s cinematic geographies and the architectural, geographic and ethnographic spaces within which they have been historically embedded (Figures 12.2 and 12.3).18 The use of GIS as both a spatial database to analyse quantitative data drawn from extensive archival research into Liverpool on film, and – as an organizational and spatial template to ‘anchor’ qualitative data in the form of oral histories, filmed interviews, digitized film footage and other contextual material – has enabled the development of a more holistic framework of enquiry into film and urban space. Offering the potential for an alternative form of ‘movie mapping’, GIS allows us to rethink and reformulate some of the questions critically addressing the ‘place’ of urban cinematic

Figure 12.2 GIS map of Liverpool and Merseyside ‘City in Film’ locations (full extent).

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Figure 12.3 GIS map showing locations featured in Us and Them, an amateur film shot in the Vauxhall area of Liverpool in 1969–70. The map shows the part of a proposed (and subsequently abandoned) elevated motorway scheme planned for the city in the 1960s. The map also shows the ArcGIS identify tool box from which users can access a video of the film, interviews and other contextual materials linked to the specific locations queried. For a discussion of this film and the impact of road developments in the Vauxhall area, see Roberts (2010d).

geographies and the role they continue to play in cultural processes of consumption, regeneration and urban heritage. Although at a nascent stage of development, cinematic cartography is already emerging as a productive analytical tool for research into film, space and memory in an urban context. The relationship between cartography, space and the moving image has also been the focus of a number of recent studies in which the trope of ‘mapping’ (if not always the practice) has been notably prominent (Bruno, 2002; Caquard and Taylor, 2009; Conley, 2007). However, in terms of what may be described as a critical cartography of film and spatiality – focused on the production and consumption of film geographies and the growing convergence of cinematic and cartographic modes of urban representation – there remains little in the way of substantive research developed in this area. The aim of this chapter has been to move forward debates in the field of cinematic cartography by considering the role of movie mapping in a wider context of consumption, heritage tourism and urban place-making. In addition, as

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outlined in this final section, I have sought to propose a methodological framework for the critical navigation of these filmic spaces of urban representation. The example of Liverpool has shown that, while the commodification and consumption of its cinematic geographies brings in much needed investment to the city, the downside is that this can further promote the disembedding of place, identity and cultural memory. The spatio-cultural rendering of a city as merely the sum of its semiotic parts contributes towards what Abbas refers to as the ‘cinematization of space’, where direct observation and lived space give way to the authority and primacy of the media image (1997: 41). By contrast, place-based initiatives aimed at tapping into a broader and more locally defined geography of film can place an otherwise neglected filmic, social and urban-architectural heritage back ‘on the map’ of official city narratives.

Acknowledgements I am much indebted to everyone who agreed to be interviewed during the course of this research. Thanks also to delegates at the various conferences where earlier versions of this article were presented for their helpful comments; my colleagues on the City in Film and Mapping the City in Film projects at the University of Liverpool; and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the research from which this chapter evolved.

Notes 1. On a site-seeing cruise on the River Seine in the summer of 2009 I witnessed first-hand some local reactions to the intrusive gaze of the bateaux-mouches. In once instance a man urinated on tourists seated on the deck of the boat as it passed underneath the bridge on which the pisseur was perched. On two other occasions – their privacy interrupted by the sudden glare of the floodlights – a couple and a group of friends socializing by the river held up their hands to shield their eyes, followed quickly by a gesture that conveyed in no uncertain terms their resentment at becoming the subjects of unsolicited tourist spectacle. 2. On a blog commenting on one of the images used in the campaign, which featured an aerial view of New York taken from Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong (2005), the commentator wryly observed that ‘This year, I’ll be taking my holiday in a computer generated reproduction of 1930s New York, created in New Zealand’ (www.ovenall.com/diary/2006/01/the-clock – accessed 22/01/2010). 3. See www.visitmisspotter.com. Accessed 15 January 2010. 4. See www.tourism.australia.com/Marketing.asp?sub=0451&al=3034 (accessed 29/ 01/2010). The involvement of Twentieth Century Fox in the location marketing campaign surrounding the release of Australia was a result of the production going over budget, necessitating other sources of revenue. I am grateful to Deb Verhoeven for drawing this to my attention. 5. Stately Attraction: How Film and Television Programmes Promote Tourism in the UK (UK Film Council/Olsberg-SPI 2007) – see www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/10299. Accessed 5 November 2009. 6. See www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/culturalimpact. Accessed 5 November 2009.

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7. www.visitbritain.com/en/press/press-releases/golden_age.aspx. Accessed 31 January 2010. 8. Interviews with Carole Startin, Marketing and Events Manager of Tourism Partnership North Wales, and Arwyn Williams, Film Officer, Wales Screen Commission (North Wales). Both interviews were conducted by the author in November 2009. 9. Similarly, in his classic study The Tourist, Dean MacCannell argues that tourist ‘markers’ (i.e. information and media relating to attractions) function as a means of site recognition, displacing or obliterating the actual site by processes of its own signification (1976: 109–33). 10. Interviews with Lynn Saunders conducted by the author, June and November 2009. 11. www.south-central-media.co.uk/report. Accessed 23 May 2007. 12. Interview with Lynn Saunders, manager of Liverpool Film Office, November 2009. 13. Bruno argues along similar lines, noting that ‘[a] sense of place is actively produced by a constellation of imaginings, which includes films, both those shot on location as well as those that fabricate their mise-en-scène’ (2002: 27–8). 14. Much of the location work for this Scottish historical epic was based in Ireland (see www.imdb.com/title/tt0112573/locations). Accessed 24 January 2010. 15. www.liv.ac.uk/lsa/cityinfilm/catalogue. 16. Interview with Graham Kay conducted by the author and Ryan Shand, January 2010. Accessed 31 January 2010. 17. See also Hallam’s chapter in this volume for discussion of the memorialization of other historical landscapes in Liverpool and Merseyside by amateur filmmakers, and Hallam (2007). 18. For a more detailed outline of this research, see Hallam and Roberts (2009) and www.liv.ac.uk/lsa/cityinfilm. Accessed 31 January 2010.

Bibliography Abbas, A. (2003). ‘Cinema, the City and the Cinematic’, in L. Krause and P. Petro (eds), Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age (London: Rutgers University Press). AlSayyad, N. (2006). Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real (New York: Routledge). Augé, M. (1996). ‘Paris and the Ethnography of the Contemporary World’, in M. Sheringham (ed.), Parisian Fields (London: Reaktion Books). Baudrillard, J. (1988). America (London: Verso). Beeton, S. (2005). Film-Induced Tourism (Clevedon: Channel View Publications). Brown, T. (1995). ‘Everytown, Nowhere City: Location Filming and the British City’, Unpublished MA dissertation, Birkbeck College, University of London. Brunsdon, C. (2007). London in Cinema: The Cinematic City Since 1945 (London: BFI). Bruno, G. (2002). Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso). Busby, G. and J. Klug (2001). ‘Movie-Induced Tourism: The Challenge of Measurement and Other Issues’, Journal of Vacation Marketing, 7 (4): 316–32. Caquard, S. and D. R. F. Taylor (eds) (2009). ‘Cinematic Cartography’, Special Issue of The Cartographic Journal, 46 (1). Channon [Shannon], R. (1996). ‘Moving Image Development Agency in Liverpool’, Local Economy, 11 (2): 179–81. Conley, T. (2007). Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

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Crang, M. (1994). ‘On the Heritage Trail: Maps of and Journeys to Olde Englande’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 12 (3): 341–55. Edensor, T. (2005). ‘The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins: Ordering and Disordering Memory in Excessive Space’, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23 (6): 829–49. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books). Gilbey, R. (1995). ‘Cut and Print: Tales of the Celluloid City’, The Independent, 19 April. www.independent.co.uk/dayinapage/1995/April/19/, accessed 6 June 2007. Graml, G. (2004). ‘(Re)mapping the Nation: Sound of Music Tourism and National Identity in Austria’, Tourism Studies, 4(1): 137–59. Gregory, D. (1994). Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell). Gunning, T. (1997). ‘Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the “View” Aesthetic’, in D. Hertogs and N. de Klerk (eds), Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film (Amsterdam: Nederlands Filmmuseum). Hallam, J. (2000). ‘Film, Class and National Identity: Re-Imagining Communities in the Age of Devolution’, in J. Ashby and A. Higson (eds), British Cinema, Past and Present (London: Routledge). Hallam, J. (2007). ‘Mapping City Space: Independent Filmmakers as Urban Gazetteers’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 4(2): 272–84. Hallam, J. and L. Roberts (2009). ‘Projecting Place: Mapping the City in Film’, IEEE e-Science 2009 Conference Proceedings, Geospatial Computing for the Arts, Humanities and Cultural Heritage workshop, University of Oxford, 9–11 December. Harvey, D. (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell). Highmore, B. (2005). Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Hudson, S. and J. R. Brent Richie (2006a). ‘Film Tourism and Destination Marketing: The Case of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’, Journal of Vacation Marketing 12 (3): 256–68. Hudson, S and J. R. Brent Richie (2006b). ‘Promoting Destinations via Film Tourism: An Empirical Identification of Supporting Marketing Initiatives’, Journal of Travel Research, 44: 387–96. Kim, H. and S. Richardson (2003). ‘Motion Picture Impacts on Destination Images’, Annals of Tourism Research 30 (1): 216–37. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell). Liverpool Movie and Television Map (2002). Liverpool City Council Tourism Unit and Liverpool Film Office. Lynch, K. (1960). The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press). MacCannell, D. (1976). The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (London: Macmillan). Manovich, L. (1999). ‘Database as Symbolic Form’, Convergence 5: 80–99. Mazierska, E. and J. K. Walton (2006). ‘Tourism and the Moving Image’, Tourist Studies 6 (1): 5–11. Nowell-Smith, G. (2001). ‘Cities: Real and Imagined’, in M. Shiel and T. Fitzmaurice (eds), Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Reeve, T. (2001). The Worldwide Guide To Movie Locations (London: Titan Books). Reeve, T. (2003). The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations Presents London (London: Titan Books). Riley, R. W. (1994). ‘Movie Induced Tourism’, in A. V. Seaton (ed.), Tourism State of the Art (Chichester: Wiley).

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Riley, R., and C. S. V. Doren (1992). ‘Movies as Tourism Promotion: A “Pull” Factor in a “Push” Location’, in Tourism Management 13 (3): 267–74. Riley, R., D. Baker and C. S. V. Doren (1998). ‘Movie Induced Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 25 (4): 919–35. Roberts, L. (2010a). ‘Dis/embedded Geographies of Film: Virtual Panoramas and the Touristic Construction of Liverpool Waterfront’, Space and Culture, 13 (1): 54–74. Roberts, L. (2010b). ‘Cinematic Cartography: Towards a Spatial Anthropology of the Moving Image’, unpublished conference paper presented at Mapping, Memory and the City, International Conference, University of Liverpool, 24–26 February. Roberts, L. (2010c). ‘World in One City: Surrealist Geography and Time-space Compression in Alex Cox’s Liverpool’, in P. Burns and J. Lester (eds), Tourism and Visual Culture Volume 1: Theories and Concepts (Wallingford: CABI). Roberts, L. (2010d), ‘Regeneration, Mobility and Contested Space: Cultural Reflections on a City in Transition’, in J. Harris and R. Williams (eds), Regenerating Culture and Society: Art, Architecture and Urban Style within the Global Politics of City-Branding (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). Roberts, L. and R. Koeck (2007). ‘The Archive City: Reading Liverpool’s Urban Landscape Through Film’, in C. Grunenberg and R. Knifton (eds), Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). Rohdie, S. (2001). Promised Lands: Cinema, Geography, Modernism (London: BFI Publishing). Schofield, P. (1996). ‘Cinematographic Images of a City: Alternative Heritage Tourism in Manchester’, Tourism Management 17 (5): 333–40. Sinclair, I. (2002). ‘Heartsnatch Hotel’, Sight and Sound 12 (12): 32–4. Snickars, P. and M. Björkin (2002). ‘Early Swedish (Non-fiction) Cinema and Cartography’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22 (3): 275–90. Swann, P. (2001). ‘From Workshop to Backlot: the Greater Philadelphia Film Office’, in M. Shiel and T. Fitzmaurice (eds), Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Tooke, N. and M. Baker (1996). ‘Seeing is Believing: The Effect of Film on Visitor Numbers to Screened Locations’, Tourism Management 17 (2): 87–94. UK Film Council/Olsberg-SPI (2007) Stately Attraction: How Film and Television Programmes Promote Tourism in the UK. Available at www.ukfilmcouncil.org. uk/10299, accessed 5 November 2009. UK Film Council/Narval Media/Birkbeck College/Media Consulting Group Stories We Tell Ourselves: The Cultural Impact of UK Film 1946–2006. Available at www. ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/culturalimpact, accessed 5 November 2009. Urry, J. (2002). The Tourist Gaze, 2nd edn (London: Sage).

Part IV Cine-Tecture: Film, Architecture and Narrativity

Introduction The title of this last section of the book, cine-tecture – a neologism that is inspired by Helmut Weihsmann, who, fittingly, is also one of the contributors to this section – makes reference to the symbiotic relationship between ‘cinema’ and ‘architecture’ and addresses issues of the cinematics of architecture (exemplified by Koeck and Kronenburg) and the spatiality of film (demonstrated by Penz and Weihsmann). What unites these authors is the fact that all are architecturally trained and have a longstanding knowledge of and relationship to architectural practice. They also share an appreciation for the importance of narrative elements in their study; narratives either inscribed in the fabric of the city or in the depiction of architecture on the screen. As a result, the essays presented here offer distinctive views of how film content as well as film language is relevant to the study of historical and contemporary characteristics of architecture and cities. The themes explored in this section are not limited to the representational quality of architecture in film, a hitherto more common focus of analysis, but also extend into theoretical and methodological terrain that has remained comparatively unexplored in studies to date. Ultimately then, the aim of this section is to illuminate understandings of the ways in which architecture can inform the practice and theory of film and, by extension, how film and moving image cultures can inform architecture and urban design. Richard Koeck’s chapter retraces the oft-cited relationship between architecture and film in the context of 1920s and 1930s modernity, one in which the architect had influence on the production of films; and follows on to questions about whether this relationship can initiate reverse processes visà-vis critical engagement with the contemporary city. Arguing that the linear and sequential ways of perceiving the city were brought to our attention by the work of Cullen (2005 [1961]), Alexander (1977), Rowe (1984 [1978]) and others, he concludes that such investigations of urban space can be seen as a proto-cinematic system of engaging with the city. At the core of his text

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lies a discourse on the cinematic engagement with urban space that is based on theories and works by Eisenstein, Vertov, Barthes, Merleau-Ponty and others. In so doing, Koeck introduces the reader to a method of studying a ‘screen language of cities’, in which explorations of a city’s continuity/ montage qualities, the presence of urban cuts and dissolves, and other components form the basis for a ‘filmic reading and writing’ of urban space. Robert Kronenburg investigates the potential for using historic films, which he describes as a visual resource with unique properties, as a means to engage with the spatial characteristics of architectural and urban space. He argues that seeing films from an architectural point of view – particularly those made by early film pioneers and amateur filmmakers recording practices of everyday life – has the potential of shaping future architectural practices. In other words, film is ideally placed to be exploited as a means of communication of potentially valuable design parameters that are of use to contemporary decisionmakers in design disciplines. While Kronenburg questions the evidential quality and veracity of the medium, he sees new methods to be applied which make use of film in architecture as a means to improve the physical quality of urban environments. Kronenburg supports his argument by his recognition that architects and filmmakers have distinctive, yet related ways of viewing spatial environments, since both groups of practitioners engage with the creation of space, place and architectural form. François Penz’s chapter makes the case for a more focused and rigorous reading of the city in film. He roots his argument in the development of a rational and applied spatial method – one not unlike that of an architect’s study of an urban site (site analysis) – which, informed by the study of French New Wave cinema, aims to inform spatial practices of the future. Penz’s analytical approach comprises four main categories – general context, identification, manipulation and interpretation – which are then further divided into subcategories. He begins by outlining his theory in general terms, drawing on a number of filmic examples, before then applying it to a specific film: Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (Jeunet, 2001). Proposing a form of ‘cinematic urban archaeology’, Penz invites the reader to take part in the systematic deconstruction and reassembly of the city in film using a ‘city-centric’ system that is designed to make visible – and thereby exposed to critical scrutiny – the mechanism by which a city is constructed in film. The closing chapter of this book is provided by an established expert in the field, Helmut Weihsmann, who, in his singularly familiar style, offers an indepth account of how architectural history has coincided with and informed film practice in the formative years of the twentieth century. Weihsmann argues that the work of the film designer, art director and film decorator does not receive the critical or aesthetic attention it deserves and pleas for a deeper and more scientific approach into the study of the creative synergy between architecture and cinema. With a nod to Thom Anderson film on Los Angeles, Weihsmann’s chapter ‘Let Architecture “Play” itself’ gives a

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forensic account of Man Ray’s surrealist and experimental film poem Les Mystères Du Château Du Dé (1928/29), which is set in the hill residence Villa de Noailles (1923–8) located in Southern France. The villa is designed by the renowned architect Robert Mallet-Stevens who, together with Le Corbusier, is regarded as one of the most important protagonists of emerging French modern architecture. Weihsmann’s chapter offers a tour de force account of various contextualizations of Man Ray’s film relating to, for instance, the Viennese Secessionists, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Frank Lloyd Wright and others, and is rich in historical, architectural and, typically for Weihsmann, idiosyncratic detail.

13 Cine-Montage: The Spatial Editing of Cities Richard Koeck

Context As historians such as Albrecht (2000), Weihsmann (1988, 1995), Neumann (1996) and others have repeatedly claimed, the number of prominent architects, particularly in Germany and France, who have engaged with film productions from the 1920s onwards suggests a longstanding ‘applied’ reciprocity between the disciplines of architecture and film. Examples include the German architect, Hans Poelzig, who built the set for Carl Boese’s and Paul Wegener’s expressionist film classic, Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920). Robert Mallet-Stevens, one of the pioneers of French architectural modernism, claimed that although film has a distinct influence on modern architecture, it also shares filmic properties since both essentially consist of ‘images in movement’ (Mallet-Stevens, 1925: 96).1 Mallet-Stevens was also involved in the production of films, working on both the set design for Marcel L’Herbier’s film, L’Inhumaine (1924), and featuring his architecture in Man Ray’s surrealist film Les Mystères du Château de Dé (1929). Le Corbusier, influenced by the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, who insisted in 1928 that only film (rather than photography) could intelligibly capture the essence of the Franco-Swiss architectural work (Giedion, 1995: 176), collaborated with Pierre Chenal on the documentary film L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui (1929). In this instance, the medium of film was not only used to solve the problems of visual representation, such as that presented by the so-called multi-perspectival character of modern architecture, but was also a means of promoting the architect and his work. Another protagonist of the 1920s avant-garde, Bauhaus Master László Moholy-Nagy, in 1921 drafted a typo-photo script for a film that, although never produced, intended to capture dynamic aspects of the Berlin metropolis. Moholy-Nagy also used film to capture his experimental work (for instance in Lightplay: BlackWhite-Grey, 1932), to produce a record of important events in the development of modern architecture (for instance his film shot during CIAM [International Congress of Architecture] in August, 1933), and to document 208

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various aspects of urban life (as in Marseille Vieux Port, 1929). Later on in his career, Moholy-Nagy participated in a commercial feature film production, Alexander Korda’s film Things to Come (1936), for which he made a special effects sequence. To his disappointment, only about nine seconds survived in the final cut of the film (Frayling, 1995: 71–3).2 While these notable examples appear, at first glance, to demonstrate an intense engagement between architects and film production in the early twentieth century, it is worth remembering that the group mentioned above forms an exception to the rule. The majority of their forward-looking contemporaries were more sceptical towards narrative film and did not consider it to be an expedient medium for their practice. Many considered that narrative film, as a genre, was too derivative of stage arts and, as such, could not be considered an art in its own right. Therefore, it is debatable whether any of the filmic products mentioned above actually informed the architectural practices of those architects involved. However, they may have informed the architectural practices of other architects, especially if one accepts the idea that, for example, Mallet-Stevens’s and Le Corbusier’s portrayal of ultramodern architecture in film promoted a short-lived but triumphal phase of architectural modernism in Europe. The question remains, therefore, as to whether the work of those architects involved in the medium of film shows any visual, narrative or conceptual traces from their engagement with moving images. Perhaps, in this search for the reciprocity between architecture and film the question has been posed the wrong way around. Instead we should be questioning the kind of knowledge that a filmmaker could bring into ‘architectural practice’ and how s/he could engage with spatio-urban formations through his/her comprehension of film narration and editing. Arguably, this unconventional approach would provide a new meaning to Gideon’s quote from 1928: ‘only film can make the new architecture intelligible’ (Giedion, 1995: 176). During La Nouvelle Vague period of French film-making practices in the late 1950s and 1960s, celebrated figures, such as Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol and Rivette drew attention to a type of film-making practice that, after a long period of studio productions, took the camera onto the streets of Paris and other cities. Perhaps it is no coincidence that this transition from studio to street was shortly followed by a series of architectural writings that considered both the fragmented and disjointed, as well as the linear and sequential nature of the city, and, as such, conceived of urban space as an almost proto-cinematic entity. For example, Gordon Cullen’s The Concise Townscape (1961) developed the concept of ‘serial vision’. Similar to those methods employed by storyboard artists, he undertook a shotby-shot analysis while travelling at equal pace through a series of urban spaces. Likewise, Christopher Alexander’s work A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (1977), which is derived from a study of medieval cities, scientifically dissects architectural design into a grammar of discrete units. Depending on the particular situation and by making use of his rules

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and regulations, these units can be reassembled (edited) and applied to any scheme, so that the result, once again, produces a harmonious environment. In his book Collage City (first published in 1978), written in association with Fred Koetter, Colin Rowe argues that since the seventeenth century, cities, being a ‘didactic instrument’, have consisted of ‘ambiguous and composite buildings’ (Rowe and Koetter, 1984: 121, 168). As such, they are disintegrated and fragmented, and call for an enlightened, pluralistic design strategy in which historical references reside – collage-like – alongside and within contemporary architectural articulations. The aforementioned term ‘practice’ does not, of course, limit itself to a one-directional form of knowledge transfer, but includes the production of architecture and urban space, as well as its consumption. The public on the streets of a typical city is, in most cases, surrounded by the products of architects and planners. Most people who use these spaces are not trained in a planning discipline, but have grown up in a culture in which, since the early years of childhood, they have been exposed to an active and passive consumption (or reading) of moving images. It does not, therefore, seem too far-fetched to hypothesize that concepts surrounding film production, such as the way a film is edited, could inform the consumption of architecture in an urban context. Central to this investigation lies the realization that film and architecture share a number of properties of which ‘narration’ is arguably one of the most important agents in the transfer of spatially-embedded information. As many film practitioners will be able to confirm, any film narrative, no matter how well it is put together, will fail without a decent plot.3 The same could perhaps be applied to cities. Cities that have no coherent spatio-narrative structure tend to be places that have little lasting impression on our memory. The plot, which an experienced video editor normally assembles on the timeline from a multitude of small visual fragments (shots), seems to be missing in many contemporary cities today.

Embodied narrative: The art of walking through urban spaces Like films, architecture and entire cities can have linear, non-linear and multi-narrative qualities. Unlike film, this narrative quality is linked in architecture to our bodily movement through space and our engagement with the social practices occurring in those spaces. In this model, our body is, to use Merleau-Ponty’s analogy, not simply a passive object in space or time, but ‘inhabits space and time’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 139). Due to the corporality of our consciousness, the body has the power to generate space itself (ibid.: 387). Merleau-Ponty further explores this non-dualist ontology between the overlapping of the body and the world that surrounds it in The Visible and the Invisible, in which he argues that ‘things pass into us, as well as we into the things’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 123). In the context of an

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Liverpool city centre (author’s photo).

embodied filmic reading of architectural space, this could be interpreted as how our movements through, and activities within, urban space influence the way in which that space is ‘edited’ and, therefore, its narrative. Michel de Certeau compares the act of pedestrians walking through a city with linguistic formations, such as writing, whereby the individual becomes an active part in the creation of an urban reality (Figure 13.1): ‘Walking, which alternately follows a path and has followers, creates a mobile organicity in the environment, a sequence of phatic topoi’ (de Certeau. 1984: 99). Such linguistic qualities are further explored by Roland Barthes, in Semiology and Urbanism. He names Victor Hugo as being the first to have recognized the signifying nature of urban space. Barthes notes that ‘the city is a writing (Barthes, 1997: 167).4 ‘He who moves about the city, e.g. the user of the city (what we all are), is a kind of reader who, following his obligations and his movements, appropriates fragments of the utterance in order to actualize them in secret’ (ibid.: 170). It is clear from these and other phenomenological examinations of cities that our urban centres are more than just a static formation made from bricks and mortar. Cities are kinetic constructs, a physical manifestation of a ‘strategy’ (de Certeau, 1984: 35), places which can have more than ‘one’ identity, and whose meanings and interpretations depend on physical engagement with the space. In raising questions about the practice of moving through

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space, de Certeau talks about a ‘temporal articulation of places’ and criticizes its often insufficient representation in a ‘spatial sequence of points’ (ibid.: 35). Rather than a direct link between the city and the medium of film (for example, a 35mm film strip), this description of everyday urban practices and the embodied consumption of space suggests another link to be made between a city and a linear sequence of interchangeable moving image fragments on a digital timeline with which many film and video editors work today. In this thought model, the professions of architect and planner are akin to that of the filmmaker and editor who create moving images of the city that are produced and assembled spatially for public consumption. This is not to say that the architect or planner can claim the status of an auteur who produces a particular reading of urban space. It is rather that s/he contributes to the spatial dispositif with which ‘the walker transforms each spatial signifier into something else’ (ibid.: 98), thereby making the act of writing at least as important as the act of reading urban space. Arguably, architectural practice shows that the acts of reading and writing urban space are interconnected in that the design of urban settings can influence the way they are used; or at least this is what architects want to believe. Georg Simmel described the nineteenth-century metropolis thus: ‘[w]ith each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life’ (Simmel, 2003: 133). Simmel contends that living in big cities can lead to ‘the intensification of nervous stimulation’, resulting from the ‘swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli’ (ibid.: 132). When Simmel published this point of view in 1903, the ‘rapid crowding of changing images’ (ibid.: 133) – which aside from those elements of urban life that he criticizes also provided the spatial grandeur and visual splendour of cities such as Berlin, Paris and London – was an appropriate framework for his argument. Faced with the bleak urban architectural reality of many postwar, post-industrial cities and the changes in our perception of cities, architects and planners perhaps now look back to Simmel’s argument with a mixture of nostalgia and antagonism. Today, many of the urban centres that we inhabit suffer from an architectural identity (or rather a homogenous lack of identity) that is tied either to a multinational corporate uniform of retailers, or to a postmodern pastiche architecture (paradoxically, not unlike that described in Rowe and Koetter’s book, Collage City) that tries to avoid any dialogue (or conflict) with the context in which it is situated. Cities that are in the arguably fortunate position of having preserved historical buildings following both the Second World War and the atrocities of the 1960s’ urban regeneration projects, still seem to have problems integrating contemporary architecture into their fabric. What starts out as an opportunity, the Baulücke (the gap between buildings) – a re- or undeveloped open plot of land within a dense urban

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fabric – often attracts the kind of architecture that tries to avoid contrariety and difference at all costs, often becoming meaningless in the process. More than any other urban activity, the act of walking mindfully through such ‘re-generated’ areas reveals the full depth of this self-inflicted misery. Even those projects that have considered the immediate adjoining flanks of existing architecture, but have failed to engage with the wider narratives (with which every city is equipped and which consists of one or more storylines), risk contributing to a spatio-narrative incoherency that is indicative of cities whose ‘plot’ has begun to fail.

A cinematic engagement with urban space The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it. (Barthes, 1997: 169) This chapter intends to offer a form of ‘filmic’ reading of urban space which draws on Roland Barthes’s hypothesis that the urban space we inhabit in our everyday life stands in constant dialogue with its inhabitants. However, unlike Barthes’s approach to urban semiology, the interpretation of urban space I am proposing does not consider the city to have a particular language, author and reader. The urban ‘cinemantics’ (a term that I have derived from the word semantics) discussed here can be understood without a precise linguistic knowledge of units, syntax and grammar. It considers the city as a layered, multifaceted system that is open to interpretation, a poststructuralist sphere that is shaped and understood by more than just functional programme, economic constraints, environmental concerns and social impacts (the measures that lie at the fingertips of architects and planners when considering urban interventions). The standard methods of measuring urban situations, which are discussed in the following sections, rely not only on the signifying nature of the city, but also on social forms of engagement with this urban setting. In the context of shifting and cultural diverse postmodern cities, multiple perspectives do of course apply. Yet, not unlike Dziga Vertov’s ambition to harness the potential universality of filmic language through montage, the ‘cine-tectural’ reading of, or perhaps more appropriately engagement with, cities requires relatively little prerequisite knowledge. As this chapter is written with a reader from a (non-filmic) architectural or design-related discipline in mind, and in order to discern our knowledge about film language so that it can be applied to architecture in an urban setting, the following will discuss the most basic principles of ‘continuity’ and ‘montage’ film editing strategies, and of ‘cut’ and ‘dissolve’ editing techniques.

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Urban continuity The classical editing technique applied to most mainstream narrative films (often associated with Hollywood films) is called ‘continuity editing’. The principle goal of this editing technique is to sustain ‘a sense of uninterrupted and continuous narrative action within each scene’ that maintains ‘the illusion of reality for the spectator’ (Blandford, Grant and Hiller, 2001: 56). This is normally achieved by assembling the shots – the individual fragments of the film consisting, for instance, of wide-shots, mid-shots and closeups – in a chronologically and spatially consistent order by the means of ‘motivated cuts’ (when an actor looks in one direction and the camera cuts to what s/he sees), ‘cuts on subject movement’ (when an actor turns his/her head in a wide-shot and finishes the movement in a mid-shot), ‘shot and reaction shots’ (when the camera cuts from a person speaking to a person listening to see his/her reaction), ‘eyeline matches’ (when the eyelines of two engaged characters are framed), and other continuity editing strategies. Transposed into the sphere of urban environments, a ‘continuity edit’ relates to a city that postulates an ideal, yet rarely reached scenario. Its material reality would need to demonstrate to a large extent a spatial and temporal consistency that is, with the exception of some medieval towns,5 a very rare condition for many European countries today. The term, ‘continuity edit’, when applied to cities is not understood as an urban space that only allows for a one-directional growth. Rather, such cities consist of many different fragments – solids and voids that have been built, demolished and replaced over time. However, this has to be done in such a way as to make these fragments appear to have been ‘cut on the action’ – fragmented and replaced in consistency with the underlying socio-economic, social and architectural structure of a particular time and place.6 Continuity cities have to attest to a nearly uninterrupted development, a city in which the political, mercantile and industrial phases of its evolution have been harmoniously linked to one another (Lefebvre, 2003: 15), a place where every building stands in an overall comprehensive and proportionate manner to each other. In such cases, the physical properties of the city clearly articulate a plot or identity, one that, for instance, can be ascribed to the particular trade, industry or occupation of its inhabitants. The majority of cities have long since lost such a coherency. Indeed, one of the absurdities evident in some planning practices today is the aspiration to return to such a pseudo-ideal, utopian scenario. Debord sees the artificial homogenization of spaces from one generation to the other as a trivial byproduct of post-industrial society that undermines ‘the autonomy and quality of places’: ‘Capitalist production has unified space, breaking down the boundaries between one society and the next. This unification is at the same time an extensive and intensive process of banalization’ (Debord, 2004: 94). How far are we willing to go in order to ‘regenerate’ such an illusion

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of reality? Can we justify the exploitation of a city’s historical heritage at any cost – almost to the extent that it becomes a theme park – as long as a buoyant property market allows it to occur? While it is perhaps possible to imitate a cultural past in architectural terms, it is an impossible task to bring back the socio-economic tissue that defined the character of those various historical building types, such as dock warehouses and other site-specific buildings. Paradoxically, such urban planning strategies counteract the natural evolution of a place and its identity, which is not a static agent, but a force that is in constant flux and dialogue with the present.

Urban montage Around 1918, the Russian film practitioner and theoretician, Lev Kuleshov, conducted a famous film experiment, ‘whereby one image crosscut with another would give the impression of simultaneous or consecutive actions’ (Gillespie, 2000: 22). Using this powerful and effective means of juxtaposing two unrelated shots to create a new meaning (known as ‘Kuleshov Effect’), he quintessentially influenced the thinking and work of Soviet avant-garde artists, such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov. Eisenstein, who admired this technique for its reliance on the audiences’ active engagement with the subject matter, was keen to apply and expand it in his own theatrical work. Eisenstein’s Montage of Attractions, first published in 1923, devises an aggressive, disruptive narrative strategy that should stimulate the sensual apparatus of the audience and encourage it to perceive a certain ideology (Eisenstein, 1974: 78). Crucially, Eisenstein did not depend on the ‘real’ units of time and space, but made use of the ‘discursive function of cinema and its potential to reorganize reality’ (Cook, 1999: 319); a reality that is principally generated in the eyes of the beholder. When Eisenstein’s theory, which he later extended to film practices (referred to as dialectic montage), is brought into the context of contemporary architectural practice, an interesting picture emerges. Eisenstein intended to completely free ‘the theatre from the weight of the “illusory imitativeness” and “representationality” quality’ (Cook, 1999: 79), virtues which, arguably, find parallels in many cities today. Not unlike the traditional theatre referred to by Eisenstein, some cities seem to have lost their original sense of ‘self’, not least because of the progression of time (social, political and economic changes), becoming, at best, an imitation of a lost identity that lies somewhere in the past. They often compete with each other on a representational level, whereby city councils resort to ‘landmark buildings’ by ‘landmark architects’ as a universal remedy for diseased urban landscapes.7 Like a sequence of images that is interrupted by another image as part of a montage, a sequence of buildings can be interrupted by an arbitrary freeform architecture that has, when viewed at a surface level (as image), no relation with its surrounding context (Figure 13.2). Both the filmic montage

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Figure 13.2

Casa da Musica, Porto (courtesy of R. Kronenburg).

and landmark architecture can serve as the powerful underlying instruments of a political and ideological agenda; however, in architectural history, only under particularly exposed circumstances (for example, the Eiffel Tower at the World Exhibition in Paris, 1889; Sydney Opera House, completed 1973) has this led to the synthesis of a new identifying image for an entire city. The editing of a film using montage operates under the assumption that an individual shot is free from the relational constraints of space and time since it does not intend to uphold the illusion of their continuity. As mentioned previously, when inserted into an established urban matrix, landmark buildings have no obvious relation to their surrounding context. However, this assertion is not entirely correct. While on a representational level, the isolated ‘image’ of the signature building may have no relation to its context, the point remains that any insertion into a sequence has semantic consequences. The term relational editing refers to the ‘Kuleshov Effect’ and, as such, to a process by which the meaning of one shot (such as a smiling face) has a significant relation to the following shot (such as [a] a child playing or [b] a dead body). If ‘landmark architects’ would correctly apply the concept of montage, they would be less concerned with formal and material aspects of a building, and more concerned with the (‘image’)

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context in which their building would be placed, since, as Kuleshov has shown, it is that placement that has profound consequences on the meanings that are collectively generated.

Urban cuts The most fundamental method of joining two shots is by means of a cut. Splicing and rearranging the running order of a film print or a digital footage on a timeline is the most basic and, at the same time, the most powerful editorial tool of a film practitioner. The quality of the editor is measured by his/her ability to assemble the footage in accordance with the script and storyboard (so that the editing is in line with the strategy of the narration), as well as his/her artistic skill (or his/her ability to either disguise or emphasize the cut so that it supports the narrative structure of the film). Cuts can shape an edit by leaving out the less important information and, as such, tighten the narrative flow of a film. Cuts allow the editor jumps in time and in space, which, depending on the placement of the cut (for example, a cut on action), hide or reveal gaps in the spatio-temporal unity of the sequence. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is perhaps one of the most famous examples in which a cut on a visual match (being the similar contrast, movement and size of object and background in frame) is used to join two different scenes – one of an ape throwing a bone and the other of a space ship orbiting the earth – that are, in terms of time and space, vastly different from each other. Cuts are important ways of determining the pace and rhythm of a film. They allow the editor to condense and expand the perceived time. Cuts are an important means of attracting and keeping the attention of the viewer. Long scenes without any cuts are generally difficult to watch since, depending on the movement of the camera, among other factors, they become either too boring or too strenuous to watch. Lastly (in terms of the present discussion), cuts influence the emotional connection of the viewer to the scene. Cuts in urban architectural terms can be of course seen as the material joints between two adjacent buildings or districts. However, as demonstrated by Henri Lefebvre, among others, this is not the only level and dimension with which we engage with a perceived spatial urban reality. Cuts (as well as ‘dissolves’, which will be discussed in the following section) can occur in a city’s topologic, socio-economic, or political form. They can also arise when sudden and distinct changes in social dispositions or activities take place. An example of this would be for instance the clashing of territory claimed by skateboarders underneath the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank – a venue designed to host classical music and dance performances – situated alongside commercial spaces of the South Bank Centre.8 Quite often, architectural practice is critical, if not wary of architectural ‘cuts’, especially within a historically sensitive context. Despite the fact that,

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increasingly, heritage and preservation authorities favour clear distinctions between historic and new structures, common practice often seems to retreat to what is perceived as safe ground – a superficial and often inauthentic copy of previous building materials and methods. To simply ‘blend into’ critical urban landscapes, regardless of the planned function developed for inhabitants behind those façades, seems to be a missed opportunity to create a distinct ‘cut’ and, as such, a stimulating influence on the pace, rhythm and narrative of the city. Rather than relying on a vocabulary of what is commonly perceived as acceptable and not acceptable urban language, perhaps the question should be viewed from the perspective of a film/video editor: is it relevant for the narration to disguise the temporal discontinuity of the cut or is it worth emphasizing it? Just as a narrative film is not usually constructed from one cut alone, so architectural and urban cohesion does not come from the treatment of a single join. Typically, it is a sequence of shots/buildings that build up a narrative. Cuts are, in both architectural and filmic practices, important means of engaging with the viewer/urban public. They bring structure to urban sites and provide the potential to form and prescribe new relationships between adjacent socio-spatial situations.

Urban dissolves Dissolves are in filmic terms a method of gradual transition between two images, by which one image fades out while the other simultaneously fades in. Dissolves are, compared to cuts, relatively rare in professional film/video editing. They are often seen as a last resort in cases where a cut would break the narrative flow. Although applied at particularly important points within the plot, in most cases dissolves serve to make the transition between two unrelated shots (passage of time and/or space) pass as unnoticeably as possible. Particularly when used at regular intervals, they appear as almost unnoticeable links between shots, failing to take advantage of the suggestive power of the cut. Whereas distinct cuts in a montage provide an opportunity to create associative meanings independent from the two adjacent shots, dissolves leave relatively little room for imagination in the viewers’ eyes. As a result, when compared with cuts, dissolves are a more authoritative means of engaging the viewer with a narrative. Architectural dissolves can be observed between two adjacent buildings that have no distinct material separation between each other. This trend draws attention to the conjoint character of buildings within certain parts of a city that attempt to ‘act’ in concert; a trend that, paradoxically, could also lead to a lack of identity. Architectural dissolves can also occur on a social level, where two or more social activities or interest groups share an overlapping common space. It is widely accepted in architectural practice that architects and planners have the responsibility to provide spaces for mixed social groups. It could be argued, therefore, that urban dissolves are the desired

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strategy behind, for instance, the design of new housing developments; in other words, neighbourhoods in which lower-income classes find rented or subsidized accommodation, and higher-income classes find property to purchase. While this is certainly a valid and in many European cities practised approach that aims to avoid urban ghettos in which a particular social norm is dominant (such as a residency with only one ethnic, social, age or other group), it is also important to consider the microstructure of such planning. In order to ensure a sustained social balance within such mixed systems, it seems equally important to pay particular attention to a degree of definition and clarity, the physical quality of adjacent spaces (shots) or, in Lynch’s terms, the ‘imageablity’ of individual parts when planning such neighbourhoods (Lynch, 1960: 9–10). Despite the desire to ‘dissolve’ social boundaries, such a treatment of urban environments would provide clearly expressed spaces – different from the overall matrix of the design – that would give room for social, cultural, religious or other conclusive activities. This can be illustrated using the example of a number of Western cities, such as New York and London, in which Chinese, Italian and other immigrant communities not only find ways of articulating the spaces in which they live, but are, at the same time, utilized for enterprises open to tourists and other visitors to these neighbourhoods. Despite the separateness of these social spheres, spaces that permit the maintenance and cultivation of an identity tend to also be confident, permeable spaces in which interaction with other groups can take place.

Conclusion The scope of this chapter can only give a glimpse of the ways in which it might be possible to engage ‘cine-tecturally’ with architecture and the urban fabric. It is seen as the beginnings of a further study into a ‘screen language of cities’, in which explorations of a city’s continuity/montage qualities, the presence of urban cuts and dissolves, and the existence of an urban pace and rhythm, form the basis for a further, time-critical discourse. Ultimately, investigations into the filmic qualities of cities, as outlined above, must be tied to investigations into everyday practices and how these, in relation with the physical fabric of cities, shape particular urban landscapes. By questioning what sort of urban narratives take place, and where and why they occur, it is perhaps possible to gain a better understanding of the way in which we perceive and engage with urban spaces and places. In this context, it would be interesting to see if technological innovations can help scholars to study the perceived and physical properties of cities. What would happen, for instance, if scholarly research were to bring different spatial formations (spatial, geographical and architectural) into closer dialogue with each other, for example, by using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) or Geographic Information Systems (GIS); approaches that are currently in the focus of a

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series of research projects in the Arts and Humanities. Looking into the near future, such modus operandi – based on the generation and processing of time-based spatial and geographic data – would enable researchers to assign narrative and cine-tectural qualities to specific urban terrains. In return, such a mapping of the city could give architects and planners access to strategies and location-specific insights into effective ways of implementing urban regeneration programmes in response to existing urban narratives.

Notes 1. See also Bruno (2002: 67). 2. For further reading on the role of film in the representation and production of modern architecture see Albrecht (2000) and Colomina (1994). 3. This does not apply to abstract film. 4. See also Rabate (1997: 5). 5. Medieval towns were also the point of departure for the studies by Alexander and Rowe, but these were not considered in the filmic terms discussed here. 6. This is different to a strategy, often observed today, which considers only the appearance of the façade. 7. The BBC has produced a wonderful documentary with Jonathan Meades, entitled On the Brandwagon (2007), which precisely challenges this phenomenon. 8. On skateboarding as an urban practice, see also Borden, 2001.

Bibliography Albrecht, D. (2000) [1986]. Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Movies (Santa Monica: Hennessey ⫹ Ingalls). Alexander, C. (1977). A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Barthes, R. (1997) [1967]. ‘Semiology and the Urban’, in N. Leach (ed). Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (New York, London: Routledge), pp. 156–72. Blandford, S., B. K. Grant and J. Hiller (2001). The Film Studies Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Borden, I. (2001). Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body (Oxford: Berg). Bruno, G. (2002). Atlas of Emotions: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso). Colomina, B. (1994). Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press). Cook, P. (1999). The Cinema Book (London: BFI Publishing). Cullen, G. (2005) [1961]. The Concise Townscape (Oxford, Burlington MA: Architectural Press). de Certeau, M. (1984) [1980]. The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press). Debord, G. (2004) [1967]. Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press). Eisenstein, S. (1974). ‘Montage of Attractions: For “Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman”’, The Drama Review: TDR, 18 (1, March, Popular Entertainments): 77–85. Frayling, C. (1995). Things to Come (London: British Film Institute).

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Giedion, S. (1995) [1928]. Building in France/Building in Iron/Building in Ferro-Concrete (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute). Gillespie, D. (2000). Early Soviet Cinema: Innovation, Ideology and Propaganda (London: Wallflower Press). Lefebvre, H. (2003) [1970]. The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press). Lynch, K. (1960). The Image of the City (Cambridge MA: MIT Press). Mallet-Stevens, R. (1925). ‘Le Cinéma et les arts, l’architecture’, Les Cahiers du Mois (16-17): 96. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception (New York, London: Routledge). Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press). Neumann, D. (ed.) (1996). Film Architecture: Set Design from Metropolis to Blade Runner (Munich; New York: Prestel). Rabate, J.-M. (1997). Writing the Image After Roland Barthes (Philidelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Rowe, C. and F. Koetter (1984) [1978]. Collage City (Cambridge MA: MIT Press). Simmel, G. (2003) [1903]. ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in C. Harrison and P. Wood (eds). Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Malden, Oxford, Carlton: Blackwell Publishing). Weihsmann, H. (1995). Cinetecture (Vienna: PVS Verleger). Weihsmann, H. (1988). Gebaute Illusionen: Architektur im Film (Vienna: Promedia).

14 Informing Contemporary Architectural and Urban Design with Historic Filmic Evidence Robert Kronenburg

Introduction Since film making began more than a century ago, cities have been a subject of interest for amateur and professional cinematographers. Examining the way in which a city’s character, form and identity have been represented in historic moving images without doubt increases our understanding of architecture and the urban landscape. Film, and more recently video, recordings communicate urban environment and architectural history in a different way from drawings, photographs and verbal and written descriptions. The actual way in which people have used buildings, streets, squares and parks in the past can be directly observed with the benefit of contemporary knowledge – changes made throughout history as the city has developed can be reassessed by evaluating how they were once used in comparison to how they are used now. In 2005, the project ‘City in Film: Liverpool’s Urban Landscape and the Moving Image’ was instigated at the University of Liverpool, UK, with the ambition of expanding understanding of the relationship between moving image environments, architecture and the urban landscape by examining the way in which films communicate a city’s character, form and identity. Funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the research is led by Dr Julia Hallam and the author with initial project researchers Richard Koeck and Les Roberts, based in the Liverpool School of Architecture and the School of Politics and Communication Studies (www.liv.ac.uk/lsa/ cityinfilm). Liverpool, a city documented and represented in film for more than a century, and one that has experienced archetypal social, economic and cultural pressures on the development of its architecture and urban form, was a particularly suitable case study for this research. In partnership with local, regional and national organizations and individuals, this project has successfully identified and analysed city-focused film material for scholarly analysis and archiving as well as organized public screenings, exhibitions and lectures. 222

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The ‘City in Film’ research continues with a further project, ‘Mapping the City in Film: A Geo-historical Analysis’, that builds on the earlier research and develops it in new directions through the construction of an interactive digital map of Liverpool in film incorporating digitized footage and other geo-referenced spatial and filmic data. It will form the basis of a permanent exhibition at the new Museum of Liverpool from 2011. This essay explores the potential for using historic film to understand more clearly the characteristics of architectural and urban space and applying this knowledge to improve contemporary architectural design. It explores the way in which gathering and analysing a resource of unique visual information about how cities were used in the past can help form the basis for effective and appropriate contemporary city design that reinforces, rather than dissipates, historic cultural and geographic contexts. It presents a case study in which comparative analysis of films has been used to make qualitative judgements about physical factors in the urban patterns that determine how people utilize urban public space. The aim is to more clearly identify and communicate potential valuable design parameters of use to contemporary decisionmakers. Such decisionmakers may not be design professionals and the use of filmic representation to more clearly present the impact of design decisions is an important factor in this investigation. This work re-informs earlier work by the author on the creation of architectural identity in a technological age (Kronenburg, 2001) and the utilization of flexible programming to create responsive and adaptable architectural and urban spaces (Kronenburg, 2007).

Architecture, urban space and film making The city is humankind’s most complex creative act. It is also an act that has no final form – cities are continuously changing, morphing, shrinking, growing. Urban design requires a critical understanding of the conscious choices to be made in creating spaces and places occupied, often simultaneously, by many individuals and organizations with widely differing responsibilities and requirements. The multiple and competing stakeholders and the interdisciplinary design process involving architecture, services, landscape, highways, transit, result in the process of urban design being the most complex task of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, there have been many practice theories that have sought to impact on the creation of better city design. For example; the use of ‘serial vision’ to define the urban landscape as a series of related spaces, (Cullen, 1961); the understanding of the city using ‘mental maps’ rather than two-dimensional diagrams (Lynch, 1960); the city as a ‘collage’ of new and old forms that work together in contemporary space (Rossi, 1984 [1966]; Rowe, 1978). It is fascinating that these approaches to urban design and architectural practice have reciprocal themes in film practice. Architect, film scriptwriter and author James Sanders has commented

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on the way that moving pictures offer up a new way of looking at city space that relates to the ambitions and techniques proposed by Cullen and Lynch: ‘More than anyone might imagine, feature films, whether made on the studio lot or … shot on the streets of the city itself, offer a superb platform from which to comprehend the urban landscape – at times providing a fresh glimpse of familiar terrain, at other times opening up dramatic new vistas’ (Sanders, 2001: 10). Like architecture, film is a time-based art. In the way that people move through physical buildings and space to experience architecture and the urban environment, film moves the viewer’s senses through virtual space to communicate ideas and narrative in an experiential way. Like architecture, film is a technical art demanding skills and expertise in the science and engineering of production, created in a collaborative process that requires teamwork and shared motivation from often large groups of people (although they may be working towards fulfilling the vision of an individual or partnership). The architect and the filmmaker have distinctive and yet related views of the spatial environment that engages with the creation of space, place and architectural form. They both also have the expertise to determine image and identity in a way that can have significant influence on human emotions and environmental comprehension. Understanding the impact of architectural design as it is undertaken prior to construction is an imperative skill for designers who use their own human experience to relate to the environments they are creating. However, their own experience is always limited, and must be expanded by the knowledge and expertise of clients, building users, and other related design and construction professionals such as structural and environmental engineers, materials specialists, and builders. Filmmakers also use their own experience to create their filmic environment, sometimes in personal and powerful ways that both stimulate and shock the film viewer. However, they also require the input and expertise of set designers, casting directors, scriptwriters, cinematographers, film editors to name just a few. There are many more comparisons – and some great dissimilarities, not least that for many people the use of a particular architecture comes without choice – you have no option but to use some buildings, but watching a film is almost always optional. However, the creative practices of making architecture and making film are undoubtedly related in important ways including, perhaps most significantly, their reliance and interaction with other disciplines. Architecture is undoubtedly influenced by related creative disciplines such as sculpture, interior design, furniture design and landscape, and these can help in the creation of beautiful, useful, inspiring buildings. Can film do the same? Moving-image media history begins with the proto-filmic experiments of the early nineteenth century, through the emergence of the true cinematic

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experience from 1895 on, to the widespread sophisticated filmic content of today, which has now universally embraced digital technologies. Though architectural history is much longer than this, the filmic qualities redolent in the perception of architectural space have always been an intrinsic part in its creation, even though architects and filmmakers could naturally only appreciate this link once moving-picture technology was available to record, explore, and interpret it; as David Clarke states, ‘the histories of film and city are imbricated to such an extent that it is unthinkable that the cinema could have developed without the city’ (Clarke, 1997: 1). As a technological manifestation of an eye that records, it was quickly recognized that film enabled human beings to move through space in a new virtual way that was both exciting and revealing. The moving picture not only takes people to places they would not normally be able to visit, it enables them to see and appreciate space in ways they would not normally do. This was a manifestation of technological progress both in the ability to witness foreign places through this new medium but also through the realization that international travel was now more immediate and possible. Films shaped people’s perceptions of and anxieties about the environment in which they lived by allowing comparison with other places (Conde, 2007). The motives for creating important city buildings and their surrounding urban design is often based on profoundly aspirational motives. Architecture is a physical manifestation of aspiration and a vehicle for achieving the objective of perceived higher status. The leaders of cities (and even countries), identify the progress their society has made by the creation of highly visible construction projects, for specific building functions and for reshaping the image of the city. These projects are most usually fashioned to reflect the image of organizations and places they wish to emulate and visual information resources have been key influences on the development of the modern city. Visual representations from abroad, drawings and paintings in the eighteenth century, photography in the nineteenth century and film in the twentieth century, influenced developers and designers in the search for both aspiration and the exotic – for example the rebuilding of London in the eighteenth century in the Renaissance model, or the replication of Shanghai’s waterfront to match its western trading partner Liverpool in the early twentieth century. This pattern continues today with the building of cultural ‘palaces’ such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Casa de Musica in Porto, using internationally renowned architects (Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas respectively), whose work is widely recognized from publications and television. In the past it has primarily been physical distance that has made filmic records of the city useful in providing information that can aid new urban design development. However, this medium can also be valuable when that barrier is time. Films cannot only show the physical shape and form of historic architecture and city space but also how people of the time used them,

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and it is especially valuable if the recordings are of buildings or places that no longer exist. The information contained within the moving image can be perceived as a form of evidence that has the potential to assist contemporary designers to make more appropriate interventions in historic urban environments, but also to review changes in the way city space is used, in order to assess the benefits, or otherwise, of physical alterations made over the years. If we are to use these films in this way, how certain can we be that the evidence is accurate? Early films were actualities, recording the everyday life of urban inhabitants. Amateur film making also recorded buildings, spaces and places for their own intrinsic interest as well as the events taking place at the time. These types of film are therefore particularly useful for this purpose in that they are comparatively unmediated – consequently, the observed activities and patterns of behaviour by city inhabitants relate to their actual needs and desires rather than a pattern devised specifically for the camera or scenario. As James Sanders states: ‘It is difficult to overstate the impact of these primitive films … They are, in the end, not about the city: they are the city – one or two minutes of it, transposed precisely, second by second, from then to now’ (Sanders, 2002: 26). The places seen in these films appear wholly familiar to contemporary viewers, even though great changes were taking place in areas such as building form and scale, transport, and services integration. However, although the places seem familiar, the way contemporary populations live and experience everyday life has changed profoundly, particularly in terms of changes in living standards and knowledge of the world. Nevertheless, the apparent familiarity enables contemporary viewers to make direct spatial comparisons with the present, and surprisingly many of the things we see in these ‘past’ cities are still aspirations for today; for example, integrated public transport systems, pedestrian and cyclist-focused urban spaces, geographically identifiable non-homogenous places. The city and its intrinsic building block, architecture, is often not only the setting for narrative but the vehicle for communicating ideas and emotions, a fact recognized by Fredric Jameson who typically, also analyses the apparent contradictions of this fact: ‘Since the experience of daily life is arguably related in some fundamental way to the urban … it may be most appropriate to convey this aesthetic problem by way of our impressions of cities, which, notoriously disunified or random, and spanning a great qualitative range between the personal or the private memory and the public, anonymous, institutional, or stereotypical, are not obviously the most immediately suitable raw materials for a work of art’ (Jameson, 1992: 105). Acknowledging this complexity, another way to utilize film in architecture might be to improve the practice of architectural design by encouraging both architects and building users to appreciate the language of film as a much clearer way for them to communicate, and therefore to get a much better fit between user needs and the building as end product. Film is already an interface for

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viewers to appreciate sophisticated spatial design; however, its current primary use is for entertainment (though it is of course also used to inform and educate) – it might also be a tool to improve the physical designed world in which we enact our lives. Clearly, there is potential to explore the relationship between architecture and film for the practical benefits it might bring to contemporary architectural issues. An important question is whether architects’ appreciation and understanding of space and form in the design process is enhanced by utilizing a filmic space approach – this is examined in other aspects of the author’s research. However, this chapter focuses on what might be revealed about architectural history and people’s use of city environments as recorded in moving-image media and whether it is of use to contemporary designers. In order to investigate this question a case study was undertaken utilizing the Liverpool-based resource created by the ‘City in Film’ project.

Liverpool: City in Film From the earliest days of the moving image, the virtual environments of film have played a significant role in the way architecture, cities and urban spaces have been imagined and represented. Yet despite the intrinsic bond that exists between the filmic and the built, there have been surprisingly few attempts to utilize the relationship between moving-image representations of architecture and urban space to understand more definitively the social, material and lived spaces which they reference. The ‘City in Film’ project has sought to directly engage with the materiality of the urban fabric that underpins the film practices undertaken in a defined city environment, and in so doing create an added layer of meaning and purpose to the viewing of these films. One aspect of this work has been to examine specific locations in the city to compare the way their use has changed in response to physical architectural and urban design developments. The ambition was to reveal if there were differences in the way city inhabitants used public spaces in the past compared to today, and if there was something that could be learned from this knowledge that would benefit contemporary design in similar situations. It is important to note that although still photographs and text descriptions can also provide evidence regarding this, the direct comparison that can be made from looking at film has the potential to be significantly more revealing. In addition, as many decisionmakers are not professional designers, the particular benefits of filmic media in communicating complex information about spatial design could be of benefit in reinforcing the lessons learned. One of the tasks of the ‘City in Film’ project was to identify the specific location of historic films using a range of techniques but primarily by matching remaining identifiable buildings and landmarks, as this evidence is irrefutable. Once these specific locations had been found, camera viewpoints and

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positioning could also be identified. This has been done for films that are significant not only for their historic importance, but also for their siting in locations that have similar site boundaries to the present day (usually articulated by building facades on these boundaries, although the actual buildings may have changed). This last criterion is surprisingly easy to satisfy because it takes great political and commercial will to change street layouts in modern cities due to the complexity of multiple plot ownerships and subterranean servicing requirements. Even in a city like Liverpool, which suffered significant bomb damage during the Second World War, much (though not all) of the city was rebuilt within the pre-existing street layout. Far more changes (many would say damaging ones) occurred in the 1970s when both city government and developers saw large-scale under-cover shopping complexes and urban office centres as a commercial opportunity. Film from several periods was selected based on the ability to relate the location to recognizable extant sites in the city and the complexity of activity taking place in the clip. The earliest was a famous sequence shot by Lumière in Lime Street in 1897. This is adjacent to one of the main entry

Figure 14.1 Liverpool Lime Street: Lumière still from 1897 and contemporary still from 2007 (top); Liverpool The Strand (Cat. Lumière N°701): Anson Dyer still from the 1929 film A Day in Liverpool and contemporary still from 2007 (bottom). Lime Street [Alexandre Promio], 1897 © Association frères Lumière.

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location points into the city, Lime Street Station, and looks across to what is now the World Heritage site of St George’s Hall (Figure 14.1, top). This was a highly important part of the city in the nineteenth century and remains so today, used for civic and popular functions as well as a place of arrival with powerful architectural resonance. A sequence from Anson Dyer’s 1929 film A Day in Liverpool (also known as City of Ships) was also used. This is located on The Strand, the wide thoroughfare that runs parallel to the River Mersey and separates the commercial office district from the Liver Buildings, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building – familiar icons used in many contemporary images to identify the city (Figure 14.1, bottom). In Dyer’s time the Overhead Railway that followed the dock road passed above The Strand (from which the famous 1897 Lumière film was made), and there was also a street level railway line. Sometimes it has been possible to compare films from more than one period. Another 1897 Lumière sequence is of Church Street, then and now the main large-scale shopping street of the city (Figure 14.2, top). It can be compared with a sequence from Jim Gonzalez and the Liver Cine Group showing a view of the same place (though from a slightly different camera point) in 1975 (Figure 14.2, bottom). Once appropriate locations were identified it was a relatively simple task to take new footage from the original camera placing in order to provide direct comparison. Showing these film sequences simultaneously side by side makes a remarkable, immediate, comparison possible – almost instantly, similarities and differences in the physical environment, but more importantly in the way people use it, become apparent. The first notable feature is that significant architectural landmarks remain the most important feature in the cityscape, even though it is apparent that these early films focus on the activity in the space rather than the buildings that surround it. Nevertheless, these buildings not only identify place in terms of topography and geography, but also in terms of identity and character. The immense robust presence of the classical St George’s Hall is a feature which sets location but also the civic character of a city that has experienced wealth and confidence. Even when the uses of these buildings have changed, for example a former grand hotel on Church Street is now a department store, the architectural character still imbues both historic presence and continuity of identity. A difference in the physical environment is arguably one that could be determined from still photographs. However, moving images not only locate the physical change but also provides information on how people react to it – how they use, avoid, or ignore it. The historic urban environment has far less clutter and far greater design coherence in terms of what is now often described as street furniture. There are far fewer objects in the nineteenthcentury street and these are designed within a limited palette of materials and styles. Furthermore, each object has a readily identifiable use, which in the vast majority of cases would be used directly by city dwellers – street

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Figure 14.2 Liverpool Church Street: Lumière still from 1897 and contemporary still from 2007 (top); Jim Gonzalez, Liver Cine Group still from 1975 and contemporary still from 2007 (bottom). Church Street (Cat. Lumière N°700) [Alexandre Promio], 1897 © Association frères Lumière.

lamps, postboxes, seating are some examples. Signage relates to both pedestrians and vehicle users, and hoardings and advertisements have a common design language that is geared towards providing information. In the recent films, the clutter is vastly increased. Different sorts of street lamps for different purposes, separate signs at different levels for general pedestrians and vehicles but also for specialist users such as highways and services engineers and police. There are far more barriers to separate pedestrians from vehicles, and numerous unidentifiable boxes containing mechanisms for various automatic systems. Masts for telephones, mobile phones, and cameras swamp the skyline. Advertisements use a vast range of styles and images where the main objective is to attract attention to the product or service rather than provide information about it. Another similarity, from the earlier periods depicted in film, is the significance that both pedestrian and vehicle movement has in determining how a space is used and what it is used for. However, it is also quite clear that the changes in this area are also among the most important and arguably provide the most potential for developing alternative design agendas

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for contemporary urban environments that fundamentally improve the city experience for inhabitants. In old films, both pedestrians and vehicles are shown to have much greater freedom to navigate through the spaces of the city. It is easy for the contemporary viewer to be envious of these people moving so freely across road and pavement, jumping off trams as they move. The pedestrian has primary right of way and vehicles pause as people cross the road. The scene shows a remarkably liberating environment (and not necessarily a more dangerous one, see below). Trams, cars and lorries, horse-drawn vehicles, bicycles and, in the case of the Strand, even steam engines share the same space with pedestrians of all ages. In comparison, present-day traffic-free zones appear lifeless and monotonous, and yet the 1975 film shows streets filled with buses, taxis and cars that squeeze pedestrians into restricted areas, clearly indicating why largescale pedestrianization was introduced. In Liverpool, city planners even created a system of skywalks that separated people from vehicles completely (and also most of the key urban spaces). It proved impractical and its isolated bridges have now largely been removed. The key factor in the nineteenth century city environment was not only the diversity of traffic and an awareness of this by all users but the speed of vehicles. Vehicles moving at just above the speed of the pedestrian enables vehicles and pedestrians to share the same space. This street scene is still present in some parts of European cities today, for example Amsterdam, where buses, trams, cars, bicycles and pedestrians share the same space in parts of the city where physical development has been restricted because of the urban pattern of narrow streets and canals bounding numerous, small, individually owned building plots. The fact that the Lumière film shows that this scene is something that Liverpool once had and lost, in a pattern of urban form that remains relatively unchanged, makes it especially compelling and in important ways a source of regret. The parts of Liverpool seen in these moving images often have the same size streets bounded by the same scale buildings; however, poor design decisions have been made that prioritize vehicle movement or, equally problematic, exclude it completely. Faster moving vehicles are understandably more noisy, more threatening and more dominant – city centres that discourage mixed activities become bland and deserted outside core business periods. That the difference between the rich, varied building use and traffic arrangement of the past, and the exclusively shopping and pedestrianized or vehicle-dominated zones of today, is so clearly shown in these comparative films reinforces the power of the message. There are many more detailed comparisons that can be made, however. Viewers of these films are left with the general sense of the vitality and freedom of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century city street scene coupled with a unified architectural environment. The twenty-first century street scene is in comparison cluttered, restricted and lacking in a specific identity and image, which is a key element in establishing a sense of place.

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Undoubtedly, there are greater demands on contemporary city environments, which require more physical interventions in the space, and also there is greater scope for more diverse architectural statements in contemporary building design. However, drawing attention to the differences between the early modern age and today and favouring the urban scene of the past is not a matter of nostalgia – it is a recognition of design characteristics that can be reinterpreted for the contemporary scene given a shared objective and coordination between city planners and services. Recognizing such factors is not driven by wistful idealism but by realistic forward-looking ambitions for vital and relevant city design in the future. This provides valuable information for the designers of new buildings in historic city environments, who gain a better understanding of the situation of their new interventions, but it also provides an important resource for urban space planning in general in which safe, identifiable, diverse, responsive place making must be the objective. It might be concluded that the conclusions drawn from comparing these films could have been predicted without this investigation and merely describe already widely held ambitions for the design of the contemporary city. However, the value of the filmic evidence is twofold. First, it provides proof of a type of working urban engagement that cannot be refuted and therefore adds to the body of historical knowledge about architecture and the city. Second, it provides powerful imagery of a vibrant past that can be regained, imagery which might be invaluable in convincing those who might place efficiency or expediency above richness and complexity in city design.

Bibliography Clarke, D. B. (ed.) (1997), The Cinematic City (London and New York: Routledge). Conde, M. (2007), ‘Early Film and the Reproduction of Rio’, in A. Marcus and D. Neumann (eds), Visualizing the City (Abingdon and New York: Routledge), pp. 31–49. Cullen, G. (1961), The Concise Townscape (London: Van Nostrand). Jameson, F. (1992), ‘Allegorizing Hitchcock’, in Signatures of the Visible (New York and London: Routledge). Kronenburg, R. H. (2007), Flexible: Architecture that Responds to Change (London: Laurence King). Kronenburg, R. H. (2001), Spirit of the Machine (London: Academy). Lynch, K. (1960), The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Rossi, A. (1984 [1966]), Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Rowe, C. and Koetter, F. (1978, reprinted 1984), Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Sanders, J. (2002, first published in the US, 2001), Celluloid Cities: New York and the Movies (London: Bloomsbury).

15 The Real City in the Reel City: Towards a Methodology through the Case of Amélie François Penz

Architectural historian Nicholas Bullock in 2003 remarked that ‘[h]owever compelling the film, we must remember as we surrender to its enjoyment that the world of cinema is ultimately not one of neutral recording, but of artifice, one wonders indeed how architectural and urban historians will see those films in 30 to 50 years from now!’ (Bullock, 2003: 397). At stake is the need to have a focused and rigorous reading of the city on the screen in order to estimate its potential archival and historical value, and, paraphrasing Keiller (2003: 384), explore the filmic spaces of the past in order to better anticipate the spaces of the future. The architecture and planning profession need to better comprehend the mechanisms by which a city can be portrayed on the screen, so that they too can convey their vision of a future city by means of the moving image. Therefore new analytical tools need to be devised. In his film essay Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), Thom Andersen analysed how Los Angeles had been portrayed in 211 films by considering three headings: the city as background, the city as a character, and the city as a subject. Using those broad categories as a starting point, this chapter proposes a methodology to analyse the concept of the city being itself in location films. This ‘city centric’ approach aims to decode the ‘citiness’ criteria in mainly fictional cinema. Since there are no universal methods for film analysis (Aumont and Marie, 2004: 29) and given that the most common methods such as textual and structural analysis would not suit our purpose, a new methodology is being put forward here, tailored to the particular issue of evaluating how much ‘city is there in city films’. In other words: Is it playing itself or another city, is it the subject of the film or a mere background, and how is the city characterized? It aims to appraise this notion through a series of criteria which are the tools and indicators devised to extract the city being itself component of the films analysed. Besides considering Thom Andersen’s own approach, the methodology is partly influenced by the use of the city as found in New Wave films, and this rationale has been explored elsewhere (Penz, 2007: 143–7). Overall, the analysis comprises four main categories – general 233

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context, identification, manipulation and interpretation – that are divided further into subcategories (see Table 15.1 below). It is first introduced in general terms with the help of a number of filmic examples and then tested through a case study, Amélie1 (Jeunet, 2001).

Towards a methodology to analyse the concept of the city being itself General context A number of aspects are helpful to grasp before doing a close analysis of a film within the confines of the city being itself. For example, it may prove useful to understand if the film is being potentially allied to a film genre, a particular school or artistic movement. As such, the fact that a film might be identified as part of the French ‘Nouvelle Vague’ or Italian neo-realist movement would be significant in terms of its treatment of the city. Knowing the director’s past career and artistic affiliation is equally informative. Similarly, to comprehend the political context can be paramount; for example, no serious studies of La Haine (1995) can ignore the social unrest in the French suburbs which took place prior to the making of the film (Penz, 2007). Equally, a knowledge of the cultural context may be crucial for some filmmakers; Ozu’s approach to cinematography is deeply rooted within Japanese culture2 and is a key component to understanding his approach to filming space.

Identification City type This criterion aims to define the type of city being filmed – metropolis, suburb, provincial town – its size, geographical location and other relevant physical characteristics. It is a useful indication as one does not necessarily expect the same type of narrative in a metropolis as in a small town. The semanticist Gardies points out that films use the referential value of spaces to create ‘expectations horizons’ in the spectator (Gardies, 1993: 76). Similarly, Table 15.1

Summary of Criteria

General context

Identification

Manipulation

Interpretation

Director’s background Cultural and political context Film genre

City type

Temporal city

The dramatic city

City identity

The sound of the city Digital city

Impact and polemic

City topography The documented city

People in the city

Spatial and social practice

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Branigan, using a cognitive approach, refers to a top-down perception where perceptual processes are ‘based on acquired knowledge and [narrative] schemas’ (Branigan, 1992: 37). So, for example, in westerns, when a character goes through a saloon door there is an expectation on the part of the spectator that certain types of events may take place. In other words, places are charged with expectations and may trigger in the spectator previously acquired narrative schemas that the director may or may not use to good effect. City identity The identifiability aspect is often part of the director’s signature. Hitchcock almost invariably gives a clue about the city in the very first establishing shot. For example, the opening sequence of Psycho (1960) shows a god’s-eye view of Phoenix with the words ‘Phoenix, Arizona’ superimposed in white lettering across the screen, while in the first shot of The Birds (1963), just before Tippi Hedren’s character is about to enter the pet shop, the camera pans right to left across a poster with the words ‘San Francisco’ on it. By contrast, Chabrol states that, referring to Bellamy (2009), ‘[b]efore we arrive at the house, there are six or seven shots of houses and swimming pools … if the places are not named, then the viewer begins to exercise his brain … it keeps the spectator guessing … but it also avoids revealing all to the audience … there is nothing worse than a film starting with “London, 1983”’ (Chabrol, 2009: 20). And yet Chabrol’s anonymous montage of houses and swimming pools equally builds a sense of expectation through the evocation of an atmosphere and an environment. Hitchcock and Chabrol approaches are diametrically opposed and yet both rely on establishing shots of city and town spaces to trigger the imagination of the spectator. In the case of toponymic spaces, that is, where the space is named or identified through landmarks, the film is geographically, socially and historically rooted while the opening of Bellamy would be seen as generic, as would the opening shot of American Beauty (Mendes, 1999) as it portrays the ubiquitous American suburb in all its universality. City topography Cinema may use cities in creative ways to reorganize city spaces into narrative geographies where urban fragments are collaged into spatial episodes. This approach to a cinematic creative geography was first noted by Kuleshov in 1921 (Yampolsky, 1994: 45). The alternative to creative geographies is cinematic topographical coherence. Both approaches, used in montage as well as in continuity editing traditions, may give different readings of the city and have a different impact on our spatial perception. Thom Andersen states in Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) that ‘[l]ike dramatic license, geographic license is usually an alibi for laziness. Silly geography makes for silly movies’. Indeed the use of topography within a city film may prove crucial not only for archival value but also for artistic endeavours. However, in the right hands the creative geography notion can be rewarding. Kruth states that ‘Martin

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Scorsese and Woody Allen come out as the auteurs of a real New York work’, while acknowledging different approaches in filming the same city. Kruth adds ‘Scorsese’s construction of a screen metropolis owes no doubt a great debt to Kuleshov’s creative geography. What Scorsese aims at is to capture not the letter but the spirit of a place; this is done through meticulous and increasingly obsessive attention to details […]. Whereas Woody Allen’s New York can be taken at face value, Scorsese’s city is a movie town’ (Kruth, 1997: 70–1). The document city The French New Wave filmed the streets of Paris ‘documentary style’ (Godard, 1961: 35), prompting film historian Alain Bergala to note that ‘Godard’s Parisian films of the time [the 1960s] are a precious and unique documentation on all which is changing in the city and the way it affects those living in it. […] Masculin – Féminin and Vivre sa Vie are full of purely “documentary” sequences with “real passers-by” from which the actors are absent, sequences destined to record, as the Lumière cameramen did before, the state of Paris and its suburb at the time, which we would consider nowadays as archive material’ (Bergala, 2005: 713–14). In other words, the French New Wave cinema offers material of great archival value to architectural and urban historians, often by letting the camera run for several seconds over street scenes with no fictional action, using wide angles, deep focus and long shots as in the tradition of the Italian neo-realist movement. This is a tradition which is still with us today as many contemporary directors film the city in all its rawness and everydayness; see for example the cinema of the Dardenne brothers or Hou Hsien Hsu. The documentation of the city through films over time can potentially lead to a form of ‘cinematic urban archaeology’, making visible the becoming of the modern city and its subsequent transformations since 1895. Such retrospectively longitudinal cinematic studies of cities are now possible through the increasing availability of archive material, not just fiction but documentaries as well as amateur footage.

Manipulation Temporal city In the concept of the city being itself, by definition the film is ‘of the time’ or contemporary with the time of filming. This would preclude ‘costume films’ from being considered simply because they would either be filmed in studio or use the city selectively. In so doing they would need to exclude contemporary buildings and streets, constituting a severe editing of the city. This is the case, for example, in An Education (2009), which portrays suburban Twickenham of the early 1960s but is actually shot on location in Ealing in 2009. At the opposite side of the temporal scale are films which use the contemporary city to portray the future. Perhaps the most notorious example

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is Godard’s Alphaville (1966), set in the future but using contemporary Paris. In the same vein is Marker’s La Jetée (1962), also set in the future. Both films use the real city, and therefore present a genuine historical value that eludes ‘costume films’ despite the fact that the city impersonates a future city as opposed to ‘itself’ in the temporal sense but not in the spatial sense. The sound of the city Sound constitutes an important area of study to help characterize cities, and is a field of study in its own right.3 However, research in this area is rarely linked to films partly because historically the natural sound of the city was seldom used in the film industry, which has nurtured a long tradition of soundscape design in post-production; natural sounds only start to be used in the 1960s under the influence of Jean Rouch and the cinéma vérité movement (Marie, 2005: 70). After that the use of real city sounds in films became prevalent in particular post mid-1970s with the advent of the Dolby Stereo technology. La Haine (1995), for example, uses it to good effect to characterize the estate of Chanteloup-les-Vignes: in the first sequence shot, Said stops to pay attention to the sound of a motorbike which circles around them on the estate ring road, giving a genuine sense of distance between the source of noise and Said. The audio information may therefore constitute a valuable asset when it comes to understanding the space of the city. However, when it comes to music, in particular non-diegetic music adds an extra perceptual layer that somewhat masks the natural sound and ultimately takes away from the reality of the city. Therefore so-called realist filmmakers such as the Dardenne brothers use almost exclusively diegetic sound and music. Digital city In the city being itself concept the city is without ‘make-up’, as indicated in the memorable voice-over of the opening shot of Dassin’s Naked City (1948): ‘this is the city as it is, hot summer pavements, the children at play, the buildings in their naked stone, the people, without make-up’. The city is filmed as is, with the minimum of interference. In other words, during the postproduction stage there should be no or minimal image manipulation despite the possibilities/temptation offered by the digital process. This is something more and more difficult to assess due to the advent of digital technologies, and also more difficult to resist for filmmakers.4 But as a result, it is getting harder for the spectator to assess what they are really looking at. People in the city In the city being itself concept, passers-by play out themselves and, apart from actors, there are no or few extras. The people of the city are caught on camera and may occasionally glance towards it or look at the actors. This was a very common occurrence at the time of the French New Wave and Italian neo-realist movement. Rohmer summarizes the position as follows: ‘my main

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reason for doing so concurs with Lumière. I say that the passer-by in the street being filmed is at the same time a spectator and as such he searches for the truth’ (Rohmer, 2005: 25). In other words the passer-by cum spectator in some ways validates the process of ‘life caught unaware’ and makes it more real or at least is a guarantee of realism and a key indicator of the ‘city being itself’. Typically Hou Hsien Hsu has long sequence shots with numerous Parisians looking straight at the camera in Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), while by contrast, in Michael Haneke’s long opening sequence shot on the Boulevard Raspail in Code Unknown (2000), the street is effectively turned into a studio by mixing actors with extras. While populating a scene with actors and extras as opposed to ‘real’ people does not affect the fabric of the city, it is one move away from documenting the city and its inhabitants, as advocated in the voice-over of the opening shot in Naked City: ‘a great many thousands of New Yorkers played out their roles also, this is the city as it is’.

Interpretation The dramatic city In the concept of the city being itself, the location is one of the main ‘actors’ as expressed by Manuel di Oliveira (2003), who stated that in his oeuvre ‘the city [Porto] is the principal character’. This notion is very close to Bazin’s statement regarding décor: ‘Cinema must treat the décor as an actor in the drama’, insisting on the dramatic function of every element in a set (Bazin, 1998: 113). In other words, we must be able to identify the fluctuation of the ‘spatially organised narratives’ building on a concept previously investigated (Penz, 2003: 159–64). In this notion of the ‘spatially organised narrative’, it is possible to disentangle the space from the narrative, the technical aspects from the action, the special effects from the content. Therefore specific scenes that are key to the dramatic function of the city should be analysed, taking into account the space(s), the narrative, the cinematography, the sound design and soundscape, the light and any other relevant factors so as to demonstrate ‘[t]hat the physical geography of the work remains rigorously determined by an artistic geology where form and content are completely identified to each other’ (Bazin, 1998: 77). When Said, Hubert and Vinz are seen for the first time in the centre of Paris (La Haine, 1995), Kassovitz uses a compensated zoom: within seconds the Paris perspective of the grand boulevard behind them loses all depth of field and becomes a blur. The ‘unstitching’ of the characters from the background signals that they do not belong to the Paris intra muros. They belong to the suburb of Chanteloup-les-Vignes where, in the first part of the film, the ‘cité’ is portrayed with great sharpness and depth of field. This simple cinematographic device exemplifies the dramatic function of the city whereby the narrative is spatially expressed.

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Impact and polemic Information on the film’s impact and polemic would influence the city being itself concept, especially if it has a bearing upon the image of the city itself. Keiller makes the point that ‘[t]he representation of urban spaces in films does seem to be a factor in the current scenarios of urban regeneration […] the sight of a familiar space in film can momentarily banish the sense of marginality that haunts even the most central urban locations’ (Keiller, 2003: 382). The impact may be minor, as in the case of the village of Pennan, on the East cost of Scotland, that became famous in the 1980s for being used as one of the main locations in the film Local Hero (1983). As a result, film enthusiasts have come from all over the world to make a phone call in the red telephone box which featured in the film. According to Wikipedia, ‘the phone box was in fact originally put there only as a prop for the film, and then removed, but as a result of public demand a genuine telephone box was installed a few metres from the original spot, and has been a listed building since 1989’ (http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennan). More serious was the geo-political polemic encountered in 2008 in the making of Quantum of Solace (2008). ‘In the film Bond only briefly visits Bolivia, but the decision by the producers to use locations in Chile to represent Bolivia has inflamed local tensions. Chileans traditionally look down on the poorer Bolivians and there have been protests about the Bond crew using Bolivian flags and uniforms while filming on the streets of Antofagasta [in Chile]’ (Leonard, 2008). Indeed, cities have become well aware of cinema’s potential impact on their image and local economy. Most famously, Rotterdam created in 1996 the Rotterdam Film Fund in order to attract filmmakers. Its purpose was twofold: help the local economy as well as contribute to the rebuilding of the city’s image (Rotterdam had been razed to the ground during the Second World War). Spatial and social practice Films can reveal social practices where social relations are spatially organized: cinema makes explicit the relationship between the geography of an area within the social order and practice of the time. In the paddling pool scene in Gomorra (2008), children are playing while the camorrists patrol the roof of Le Vele estate, Scampia in Naples. In itself this scene says a lot about day-to-day life, of what it is like to grow up and live on such an estate, about the everydayness and banalization of crime. But the key is in the cinematography, the zoom out shot, which at the end of the scene reveals the estate of Le Vele as a fortress where the children are situated symbolically one level below the camorrists’ patrol, implying that one day they too will most likely patrol the roof. This one shot reveals the spatially organized social practice of the Camorra. In doing so, cinema renders a tangible vision of a reality through situations and provides a passage between an aesthetic of representation and an aesthetic of perception.

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The case of Amélie General context Amélie is Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s first film on location, as his previous films such as Delicatessen (1992) and La Cité des Enfants Perdus (1995) were studio productions. Significantly, prior to Amélie, Jeunet directed a major Hollywood production, Alien: Resurrection (1997). In terms of genre, Amélie is not easily classified. Andrew’s analysis attempts to set the film against the background of the New Wave ‘[q]uoting Truffaut’s Jules and Jim,5 Amélie claims to be a new New Wave film’ (Andrew, 2004: 46) before adding ‘[w]hat would Truffaut have thought of Amélie?’ (ibid.: 37). There is certainly a link with Truffaut6 as he would appear to have used Montmartre and its immediate surroundings more than any other filmmaker. Referring to Les 400 Coups (Truffaut, 1959), Andrew remarked that ‘Amélie, for that matter, may live in a building adjacent to the dingy Doinel apartment in the Clichy neighbourhood’ (Andrew, 2004: 35). In the encyclopedia La Ville au Cinéma, Amélie appears under Montmartre in the ‘Paris décor’ section (Binh and de Lépinay, 2005: 527): ‘Montmartre is indeed the symbol of this city of artists, free or scandalous, crowded and creative, whose golden age belongs to the past and whose magic is revisited in the studio (An American in Paris 1951; Moulin Rouge (1952), French Cancan (1955) or in the digital world such as in Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain, Moulin Rouge! (2001))’. Amélie is one of a long line of films shot in Montmartre in the eighteenth arrondissement, a quarter traditionally associated with painters and artists and which dominates Paris on a hill (‘La Butte’), with Le Sacré Coeur basilica together with La Place du Tertre as its most representative and visited icons. Clearly, this part of Paris is associated with films embedded in a romantic past, particularly American films of the 1950s staged in Paris (but built in the studio).

Identification City type The presence of the métro, large train stations, crowded street markets and a wide range of locations are all signals that we are in a large city. A significant part of the film also takes place indoors,7 mainly shot in studios8 apart from the café and the train and métro stations. The architecture is mainly nineteenth-century mixed with early to mid-twentieth-century, and there are no modern buildings in sight. In terms of traffic, it appears as if this big city is blessed with no traffic jams; in fact we barely see any cars. As the main character, Amélie, does not drive, we become familiar with several large train stations and many forms of métro, including the ‘métro aérien’. We note too the presence of a large river (La Seine) in a couple of shots, as

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well as a canal (Canal Saint Martin). Stairs also play an important part in the film, not just outdoor steps which clearly indicate the presence of a hill (Montmartre), but also indoor stairs of which there are an unusual amount. The suburb too is present, populated with pavilions. Finally, the weather seems to be generally clement, mainly sunny, with some spectacular skies. Beyond those relatively objective ‘markers’, ‘expectation horizons’ are triggered by the fact that Amélie is set in Paris and Montmartre, bringing to the surface possible ‘narrative schemas’ in the spectator by association with the romantic past of this part of the city. City identity Montmartre is fully identified in the opening sequence, the first three out of four ‘tableaux’, prior to the credits. In the very first shot the voice-over informs us that ‘a blue fly […] landed in Rue Saint Vincent, Montmartre’; in the second sequence, the voice-over similarly situates the action ‘at the same time in a restaurant near Le Moulin de la Galette’, while the third tableaux reveals Le Sacré Coeur, a major Montmartre landmark, carefully framed outside the window of a flat situated – the voice-over informs us – just south of Montmartre on the ‘5th floor 28 Avenue Trudaine’. Both the visuals and the voice-over reinforce each other in situating the film geographically and topographically. Many other areas of the city are also present at various points in the film. The Paris suburb too is present as Amélie regularly visits her father’s pavilion and pays a visit to the grocer’s parents (Collignon) in a very similar neighbourhood. But these are no cités, they are the first generation of banlieues of the 1930s, found in Godard’s Bande à part (1964) and not unlike those we see in the distance from the rooftop of the barbecue scene in La Haine. City topography The identification with Montmartre gives the film a strong topographical coherence. Some obviously far too touristic sites were not included, such as La Place du Tertre, but the other prominent landmark of Montmartre, Le Sacré Coeur, looms large.9 The other noticeable landmarks in the area are the métro stations, Abesses and Lamarck-Caulaincourt, resulting in an overall strong geographical coherence as shown in the map below (see Figure 15.1). Just south of Montmartre is Pigalle and its Moulin Rouge, at the bottom of the Rue Lepic, where the Café des Deux Moulins is situated, but we never quite get to see it although its presence is felt through the interior of the sex shop10 where Nino Quincampoix works. The documented city Given that all the outdoor scenes have been shot in situ in Paris, in principle Amélie presents a good record of the locations and in particular of Montmartre in 2000. However, a number of manipulations, evoked in the

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Figure 15.1 Various locations in Montmartre showing strong topographical coherence in Amélie.

‘digital city’ section below, puts into question the value of Amélie as a faithful record which would appeal to architectural and urban historians 30 to 50 years from now, to paraphrase Bullock’s words. Nevertheless there are some valuable archive sequences; for example, in the scene where Amélie marches a blind man along the Rue Lepic, there is a sighting of a now vanished boucherie chevaline (horse butcher). Other locations outside Montmartre include the street market of La Rue Mouffetard (5ème arrondissement), Le Pont des Arts (1er arrondissement), Le Canal Saint Martin (10ème arrondissement) and so on,11 amounting to an usual mixture of vernacular and historical sites.

Manipulation Temporal city The dating of the film is very precise and deliberate. It corresponds to the time of Lady Diana’s death in 1997, which is announced on the television news in Amélie’s flat. Jeunet deemed it important to root the film in contemporary France as he was aware that there was a certain atemporality which could be misleading: ‘I like to modify the reality and visually it is difficult to know if it is today or 20 years ago … it is more emotionally

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engaging if it is a story about the world of today as opposed to imagination like Delicatessen’ (Jeunet, 2002). Indeed, it is hard to find much trace of ‘the city of today’ in the film, and when Nino goes around the city on his ‘blue mobylette’, itself a 1970s icon, Jeunet is at pains to portray a Paris devoid of cars, without traffic jams, a city asleep reminding us of René Clair’s Paris qui Dort (1924). Since there are no contemporary buildings and no modern architecture in sight, it is mainly the ‘vernacular’ Paris that is portrayed. It is a world of colourful kitsch interiors and quaint street markets linked by an ever present public transport system. Jeunet’s self-confessed love of train stations manifests itself through the spectacular crane shots of La Gare du Nord and La Gare de l’Est which take the audience from just underneath the iron roof structure to just above the station floor, a formidable allegory of nineteenth-century monumental architecture. Unmoved by the technical feat, the historian of transport Saturno refers12 to Jeunet’s depictions of the train stations as bordering on the caricature, yearning towards une image d’Épinal [old fashion picture postcard]’ (Saturno, 2005: 247). As Amélie does not drive she not only uses trains, but also the métro, with a special penchant for ‘le métro aerien’ which figures prominently in the film, in particular when she goes around Paris looking for Dominique Bredoteau. The accelerated sequences of ‘metro aerien’ are not unlike similar images seen in Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) where, in the 1920s, the train symbolized the machine age, modernism and ultimately a near future, while in the case of Amélie a similar icon takes us back in time and signifies the past. Indeed, Jeunet readily admits that Paris is very different, ‘it is a big cheat … there is dog shit on the pavement, it rains and there are lots of traffic jams’ (Jeunet, 2002). The sound of the city Amélie’s soundscape is probably best remembered for its music, which is overwhelming present. As Vanderschelden has pointed out, ‘music is a crucial component of Amélie’s mood and a key element of its popular success’ (Vanderschelden, 2007: 62). Within the context of the city being itself concept, Yann Tiersen’s music track is particularly significant because of the use of the accordion. Powrie indicates that ‘[i]t is difficult to conceive of anything more marked as “French” than the sound of the accordion […] it signifies a precise location – Paris – as well as the imaginary space which Paris evokes: romance with a whiff of the exotic, an exoticism which turns the banal and the everyday into the sophisticated and the exceptional’ (Powrie, 2006: 137). And so in the first few seconds of Amélie the spectator would intuitively understand the location of the film – Paris – through the music even before the narrator has the chance to mention Montmartre (see section above on city identity). The romantic mood conveyed by the music would only be

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reinforced by the sight of Montmartre. Powrie goes on to add that ‘[t]he accordion is also a marker of the past as well as “Frenchness”’ (Powrie, 2006: 137). This is indeed crucial to adding a retro feel to Amélie that will only be reinforced by a whole range of visual markers as explored below. Digital city By the time Jeunet started filming Amélie, he had just finished directing Alien: Resurrection, and by that time he was well used to digital technologies and special effects. Furthermore, Jeunet admits that he is ‘used to controlling everything, even the sky’ (Jeunet, 2002), and indeed in many outdoor scenes the sky was digitally enhanced. More drastically in the seminal outdoor shot of the Café des Deux Moulins, a supermarket on the right has been digitally erased. This did not go unnoticed and in a book entitled ‘Paris au Cinema’, Binh noted that ‘Jeunet almost makes an animation film shot in real location with real people’ (Binh, 2005). This is echoed by Schmerkin, who refers to Amélie as ‘a disguise of reality and a digital face-lift of Paris’ (Schmerkin, 2005). Jeunet himself acknowledges ‘having pushed the green a bit too much … I regret it but it was a new technology’. On the other hand, he wanted to push the colours ‘because the story is colourful’ (Jeunet, 2002). People in the city Jeunet exclusively used actors and extras for this film and acknowledges that some passers-by accidentally caught by the camera were digitally erased (Jeunet, 2002). A few were spared, a little boy running among the pigeons on the Square Willette as well as two little girls in the distance looking towards Nino in the same scene (Jeunet, 2002). But there is a ‘Lumière moment’ as Amélie was the star of the festival au clair de lune13 in Paris in 2002 whereby films are screened back where they were shot in the first place. The screening took place in the Square Willette in August 2002 in front of 9000 people, mainly those from the area, coming to see not themselves, but their streets, shops and metro, a phenomenon much like the attraction that led audiences to queue up at fairgrounds at the beginning of cinema.

Interpretation Dramatic city Jeunet skilfully deploys the various parts of the city according to the narrative and mood of the characters. By and large the setting is Montmartre, but not always; for instance, to celebrate her success with Bretodeau and to immortalize this ‘perfect moment’ (as voiced by the narrator),14 Jeunet shows Amélie crossing the Pont des Arts with a steadycam shot which captures first

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the majestic domed Institut de France behind Amélie, then L’Ile de la Cité on her right and finally the grand architecture of the Louvre in front of her as the perfect match to this triumphal moment. Wrapped within the monumental city, her sense of celebration is echoed by the slow motion shot, as if allowing her to relish every second of this ‘perfect moment’. The slight vertical tilt of the camera accentuates the sense of dizziness she no doubt experiences at that point. Everything is perfect, the sun is shining, the Seine glitters, even the pigeons are playing their part by flying away gracefully in front of her. Unusually, the Pont des Arts is empty, a rare occurrence for this busy location. Amélie is alone, and for the 20-second duration of that shot it is as if she owns Paris or rather as if we the audience are invited to identify Paris with Amélie. By contrast, later on in the film the dramatic overhead shot in the ticket hall of the Gare de L’Est totally dwarfs Amélie who has just lost sight of her love behind a luggage train. This ‘god’s-eye viewpoint’ of the monumental station architecture heightens her sense of loneliness as she stands like a ‘frozen ant’ in front of the photograph booth. However, beyond the sporadic use of the dramatic function of the grand architecture of Paris, Jeunet draws on Montmartre where Amélie lives and works to affirm his vision of the city. In particular there is a very telling scene where we see Amélie dashing across the road to help a defenceless blindman cross the street. Curiously, it is not a scene which contributes to the advancement of the drama. It helps to establish Amélie’s character, but more crucially within the context of this study it is a vital indicator of the type of city and society she inhabits, which of course further reflects on her character. In this scene (which lasts one minute), we experience an extremely careful assemblage of sound, music, images and words. The camera is very mobile (mainly steadycam) with fast blurry movements giving us the point of view of Amélie who interprets and visualizes the world for the blindman; great care has been given to her words15 as well as to the sound design in order to complement and enhance Amélie’s descriptions. The blindman is a clever narrative device which allows Jeunet to describe blow by blow a street scene and its content which otherwise would be hard to convey. What Amélie describes for the blind man – in effect us, the audience – is a slice of France which is both timeless and traditional and is best captured in the food which she describes. For example, the image of the lollypops (Pierrot-Gourmand is an icon which dates back to the end of the nineteenth century); the cheeses are traditional regional goat cheeses (picodons de l’Ardèche and Chabichou du Poitou), the cuts of meat are also carefully chosen (ham on the bone and ‘travers demi-sel’). This amounts to a description of what the French would call ‘produits du terroir’, rooted in traditional and regional products. Likewise the mention of the boucherie chevaline (horse meat butcher) can only refer to a time when horse meat was popular, while in 2001 it has long ceased so to be.16 The same applies to la glace au calisson (calisson

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ice-cream) which is a speciality of Aix-en-Provence and a most unusual type of ice-cream! The scene is shot from Amélie’s point of view with fast camera moves, mainly cuts, as she describes the shops, food and people around her. This spontaneity is, of course, highly controlled and we are very far from the experiments with cinema vérité, although on the surface it has some of the features and freshness of a home movie. Each image has not only been carefully chosen and framed, but the colours have been digitally enhanced, blurred or sharpened depending on the desired effect. So, for example, the tomatoes in front of the melon stall are vividly red and shiny, while the lollypops arranged around the Pierrot-Gourmand figure fill the screen with green, cream and red. The scene is shot on a brilliantly sunny day with food and people alike catching the sunlight. Everybody around Amélie smiles, including the Pierrot-Gourmand figure, and there is laughter which Amélie identifies to the blindman as coming from the flower lady’s husband. The overwhelming impression is of a timeless environment not unlike the portrayal of La Rue Lepic in a film shot in 1928 by André Sauvage, Études sur Paris. The social impact and the polemic The film was enormously successful. Amélie was highly praised by both the Government and the Opposition, and President Jacques Chirac had a special preview in the Elysée Palace (Lalanne and Peron, 2001). It triumphed both in France and abroad, and became the biggest box office success a French movie in the US has known (ibid.). The movie won many awards, although it was rejected by the Cannes festival. During 2001 its impact was huge and became known as the ‘Amélie effect’. Fashion magazines published articles about how to dress like Amélie and how to get an Amélie haircut. There were a number of French television programmes visiting Montmartre interviewing, among others, the owner of the Café des Deux Moulins and its regulars, Monsieur Ali, the proud owner of the now renamed Collignon grocery, and shop owner of the rue Lepic (INA[1], 2002). As a result, real estate prices appear to have increased, an unforeseen side effect of the film (INA[2], 2002) and the result for Montmartre is still seen today with many tourists photographing the Café, the grocery etc. Websites from all over the world offer guidance and itineraries on visiting Montmartre in Amélie’s footsteps. However, a polemic started when critic Serge Kaganski (2001) wrote an article entitled ‘Amélie pas jolie’ criticizing Jeunet for presenting an old-fashioned view of Paris, presenting a sanitized version of France, and in particular deploring a lack of ethnic diversity in the film. He further accused him of copying Prévert and Doisneau and of wanting to control every square inch of the screen. However, politically the film was well received by all parties in France, much to the irritation of Tesson in his editorial for Les Cahiers du Cinéma ‘[t]hat politicians attempt to appropriate a phenomenally successful French

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film speaks volumes about their current difficulties, but doesn’t say much about cinema’ (Tesson, 2001: 1), before adding that ‘[t]his populist Brigadoon proposes a dreamlike village preserved under glass, an enchanted vision of Paris, liberated from the reality of the suburbs […] an absolute dream’. A few years later and beyond the original polemic, a number of historians, film experts and academics have voiced an opinion on the film, such as Binh and Schmerkin quoted above. Van der Pol, placing himself as a ‘cultural tourist’, argues that ‘Amélie reveals that Paris’s reality is nothing but one of the many possible “realities”, and that the Parisians are merely playing different games of make-believe, with props out of the past and out of the present’ (Van der Pol, 2004). However, the general consensus is that Montmartre is portrayed like an image d’Èpinal. Robert and Tsikounas concur when they state that ‘the Paris recreated in studio by Trauner and Meerson in the 30s, which takes us straight back to a 19th century iconography, is just as anachronistic as the Montmartre of Amélie, a new variation on an “old Paris”’ (Robert and Tsikounas, 2004: 6). Indeed with Amélie, Jeunet is firmly in the vein of ‘poetic realism’, a French tradition which goes back to the 1930s as noted by Vincendeau: ‘Amélie Poulain’s locations and characters recycle the look and sensibility of the poetic realism that flourished in French cinema in the 30s’ (Vincendeau, 2001), a strand of cinema most prominent in the films of Marcel Carné. However, irrespective of the polemics, Amélie remains a cult film and the character of Amélie is now part of the French consciousness as exemplified by the declaration of Laurence Vichnievsky, a high-profile judge and politician: ‘I am an active sceptical, an Amélie, I want to recreate social links!’ (Davet, 2009). Cinema as a form of spatial and social practice The caricatural nature of Amélie and its characters does not really lend itself to a social portrayal of any great significance except perhaps for a rendering of le petit peuple de Paris, the little people de Paris. Vanderschelden argues that ‘[t]he residents of this “village-in-the-city” are colourful “little people” – the regulars of a bar, the local grocer and his assistant, the concierge, the painter […] They promote a popular sense of community’ (Vanderschelden, 2007: 70). One could also add to this list, the newspaper kiosk assistant, the tobacconist, the street market vendors etc. And indeed there is some interest in the portrayal of a community and its working in its everydayness. Similarly in the blindman scene, Jeunet reconstructs for us a piece of street market which has nine shops carefully expressed verbally and visually:17 a horse meat butcher, a flower shop, a patisserie, a fruit and vegetable stall, an ice cream shop, a charcuterie, a cheese shop, a butcher, and finally a newsagent kiosk. However, it remains debatable whether Jeunet in its everyday representation of the city and ‘its little people’ attains a credible mediation of reality as a form of spatial and social practice.

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Conclusion A rapid overview of the salient points in each family of criteria provides a useful summary of the main issues discussed. General context: significantly Amélie is Jeunet’s first location film, the cultural and political context is not particularly relevant to the film, and despite the looming background of Truffaut in particular, neither the film nor Jeunet fit a particular film genre. Identification: the identity of Paris is instantly established and Montmartre as a romantic location is charged with ‘expectation horizons’. Manipulation: Amélie portrays a Paris yearning for the past – both visually and musically – which has been given a ‘digital face-lift’ and without any of its true inhabitants being present. Interpretation: Jeunet skilfully gave city spaces a dramatic function. Paris is not a mere background but a character as expressed. However, the way the character of the city was expressed created a polemic. Nearly ten years after its release the polemic has died down but the impact is still being felt in Montmartre where busloads of tourists are still pounding the ‘Amélie trail’. We can therefore safely conclude that Amélie does not satisfy the city being itself concept. In particular it fails the manipulation criteria on all three counts. It does not contain enough of ‘itself’ to satisfy historians and neither does it correspond to the type of cinema defended by Thom Andersen in his assertion that ‘cinema should have a direct, accurate relationship to reality’ (Andersen, 2003). The city is now being played with and ‘tampered with’. We move away from the city being itself and shift towards a new notion: the city being played with. While it is difficult to give particular weighting to the different criteria proposed in the methodology, it is inevitable that some factors should emerge as more salient to the analysis of a particular film. In the case of Amélie the issue of temporality appears to be especially crucial. Indeed, if we return to our original quest to provide better tools in order for the design professions to comprehend the mechanisms by which cities are portrayed on the screen, in order to better anticipate the future, then Amélie provides a mixed message at best. As shown in the analysis, Amélie presents itself as being rooted in the present but is in fact harking back to the poetic realism of Marcel Carné, Doisneaux and Prévert. And it is precisely this evocation of an idealized past – but rooted in the present – that made Amélie such an appealing film endorsed by all French politicians. The past nowadays may be far more reassuring than the future. In that sense Amélie has inspired a political confidence in a bolder past, clearly a worrying message and one which architects and urban designers in charge of imagining our future cities should reflect on. Overall we have arrived at this conclusion through the help of a methodology devised and used here for the first time. This mode of systematic ‘city-centric’ film analysis appears promising in unravelling the complex mechanisms which makes up a film’s numerous components. But there

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is no doubt that this methodology will need to be developed further and require several iterations before being truly effective.

Notes 1 The original title for the film is Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain, but it is usually referred to as Amélie. This abbreviation will therefore be used throughout the text. 2. ‘His camera, always placed about three feet from the floor, registers the low-level viewpoint of a seated Japanese. His films’ contemplative resignation to mutability and his purist approach to form preserve the traditions of Japanese art, often evoking the ineffable wisdom of Zen Buddhism’ (Bordwell, 1998: 1). 3. One of the best research institutes in this field is the CRESSON (Centre de recherche sur l’espace sonore et l’environnement urbain), based in Grenoble, France. 4. For example film director Penny Woolcock, talking about the making of Mischief Night (2006), mentioned having rendered the Leeds skies bluer and sunnier in post-production than they actually were (Film seminar, Trinity Hall College, Cambridge, 29 January 2007). 5. When Amélie goes to the movies she notices a fly across the screen in a scene from Jules et Jim: ‘And I also like to spot the little detail nobody will ever see’. 6. Four of his films were in part shot in and around Montmartre: Les 400 Coups (1959), Baisers Volés (1968), L’Amour en Fuite (1979) and Le Dernier Métro (1980). 7. Among the indoor scenes are an unusual number shot on staircases, some with old-fashioned lifts. 8. The studios were situated in Germany, and Jeunet mourned the fact that, at the time, the sound stages in France had more or less disappeared (Jeunet, 2002). 9. Jeunet chose all the locations in Paris himself, and since he lives in Montmartre he planned it around his neighbourhood, ‘my café, the streets where I shop, my metro station’. His familiarity with the area and its people was an advantage in ironing out the difficulties associated with filming in a busy part of the city, although it took him a year to convince the owner of the Café des Deux Moulins, of which he is a regular, to agree to the film (Jeunet, 2002). 10. On the audio commentary of the DVD, Jeunet refers to it as ‘my sex shop’ as it is just around the corner from his flat (Jeunet, 2002). 11. It is worth mentioning that if one wants to play the game of ‘identify the city’, the task has been made easy for Paris through two publications: Paris Vu au Cinéma (2003) and Ciné Paris (2003). Both books track film locations in Paris by arrondissement (quarter), not just for Amélie, but for hundreds of films. Significantly, both books, appearing two years after the film, have unmistakably been motivated by the success of Amélie and its association with the image of Paris on the screen. 12. She also refers here to Jeunet’s following film, Un long dimanche de fiançailles (Jeunet, France, 2004), where he portrays La Gare d’Orsay. 13. Festival au clair de lune (2002): http://parisvoice.com/02/june/html/update2. cfm. 14. Voice-over: ‘Amélie suddenly has a strange feeling of complete harmony. It’s a perfect moment. Soft light, a scent in the air, the quiet murmur of the city. She breathes deeply … life seems so simple and clear.’ 15. ‘Venez je vais vous aidez, on descend ... et hop c’est parti ... la on croise la veuve du tambour de la fanfare elle porte la parure de son mari depuis qu’il est mort ... attention hop ... tiens l’enseigne de la boucherie chevaline a perdu une Oreille ... ce rire c’est

250 The Real City in the Reel City le mari de la fleuriste il a des petites rides de malice aux coins des yeux ... oh dans la vitrine de la patisserie il y a des sucettes pierrot gourmand ... vous sentez ce parfum c’est Peppone qui fait goutez ces melons au clients ... ah chez marion on vend de la glace au calisson ... on passe devant la charcuterie ... 79 le jambon a l’os ... 45 le travers demisel ... on arrive chez le fromager 12.90 les picodons de l’ardeche et 23.50 le Chabichou du poitou ... chez le boucher il y a un bébé qui regarde un chien qui regarde les poulets rotis ... maintenant on est devant le petit kiosk a journeaux juste a l’entrée du metro ... et moi je vous laisse ici aurevoir’. 16. In an article in Le Monde regarding the disappearing trades (28 March 1990) they refer to the closure of 90 per cent of the boucheries chevalines in the 1980s. In fact the shop shown in the film is no longer there and was replaced by a mobile phone shop. 17. Aside from a celebration of the vibrancy of the street market life in France, the scene also captures the last year when all the prices are in Francs as opposed to Euros as the change from one currency to an other took place on 1 January 2002.

Bibliography Andrew, D. (2004). ‘Amélie or Le Fabuleux Destin du Cinéma Français’, Film Quaterly 57.3: 34–46. Alphaville (Godard, France, 1966). Aumont, J. and Marie, M. (2004). L’analyse des films (Paris: Armand Colin). Bazin, A. (1998). ‘Marcel Carné, Le Jour se Lève’, in J. Narboni (ed.), Le Cinéma Français de la Libération à la Nouvelle Vague 1945–1958 (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma). Bergala, A. (2005). ‘Jean-Luc Godard’, in T. Jousse and T. Paquot (eds), La Ville au Cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma). Binh, N. T. (2005). Paris au Cinéma: la Vie Révée de la Capitale de Méliès à Amélie Poulain (Paris: Parigramme). Binh, N. T. and de Lépinay J.-Y. (2005). ‘Paris’, in T. Jousse and T. Paquot (eds), La Ville au Cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma). Bordwell, D. (1988). Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (London: BFI). Branigan, E. (1992). Narrative Comprehension and Film (London: Routledge). Bullock, N. (2003). ‘Two Cinematic Readings of the Parisian Suburbs’, in City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, Abingdon: Taylor & Francis Publication, 7 (3): 386–99. Chabrol, C. (2009). ‘Rencontre avec Odile Barski, Claude Chabrol et Gérard Depardieu par Emmanuel Burdeau et Eugenio Renzi’, Cahiers du Cinéma, March (643): 10–21. Chabrol, C. (2009). ‘Rencontre avec Odile Barski, Claude Chabrol et Gérard Depardieu’, Cahiers du Cinéma, 643: 20. Davet, G. (2009). ‘Nouvelle Vague’, in Le Monde, 20 Novembre 2009. Available at http://www.lemonde.fr/cgibin/ACHATS/acheter.cgi?offre=ARCHIVES&type_ item=ART_ARCH_30J&objet_id=1106940. August 2010. Di Oliveira, Manuel (2003). Libération, 26 July. Gardies, A. (1993). L’Espace au Cinéma (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck). Godard, J.-L. (1961). ‘But “Wave” adds Brightness’, Films and Filming, September. INA[1] (2002). Cinéma de Quartier, television programme aired on FR3 on 21 January (Inathêque de France). INA[2] (2002). L’effet Amélie Poulain, television programme aired on FR3 on 29 March (Inathêque de France).

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Jeunet, J-P. (2002). DVD 2, Interview (Paris: Momentum Pictures). Kaganski, S. (2001). Libération, 31 May. Keiller, P. (2003). ‘The City of the Future’, City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, 7 (3): 375–86. Kruth, P. (1997) ‘The Color of New York: Places and Spaces in the films of Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen’, in F. Penz and M. Thomas (eds), Cinema and Architecture (London: British Film Institute), pp. 70–83. Lalanne and Peron (2001). Libération, 25 April. La Jetée (Marker, France, 1962). Leonard, T. (2008). ‘James Bond gets New Villain as Chilean Mayor Drives at Daniel Craig’, The Telegraph, 3 April. Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ worldnews/1583805/James-Bond-gets-new-villain-as-Chilean-mayor-drives-atDaniel-Craig.html. August 2010. Marie, M. (2005). La Nouvelle Vague (Paris: Armand Colin). Penz, F. (2003). ‘Architecture and the Screen from Photography to Synthetic Imaging Capturing and Building Space, Time and Motion’, in M. Thomas and F. Penz (eds), Architectures of Illusions – From Motion Pictures to Navigable Interactive Environments (Bristol: Intellect Books). Penz, F. (2007). ‘The City Being Itself? The Case of Paris in La Haine’, in A. Marcus and D. Neumann (eds), Visualizing the City (London: Routledge). Powrie, P. (2006). ‘The Fabulous Destiny of the Accordion in French Cinema’, in P. Powrie and R. Stilwell (eds), Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 137–51. Robert, J.-L. and Tsikounas, M. (2004). Imaginaires Parisiens (Paris: CREDHESS). Rohmer, E. (2005). ‘Un cineaste dans la ville-Entretien avec Éric Rohmer’, in T. Jousse and T. Paquot (eds), La Ville au Cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma), pp. 19–27. Saturno, C. (2005). ‘Gare’, in T. Jousse and T. Paquot (eds), La Ville au Cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma), pp. 247–49. Schmerkin, N. (2005). ‘Numérique’, in T. Jousse and T. Paquot (eds), La Ville au Cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma), pp. 94–7. Tesson, C. (2001). ‘Lara contre Amélie’, in Cahiers du cinéma, 559. The Naked City (Dassin, US, 1948). Vanderschelden, I. (2007). Amélie (London: I. B. Tauris). Van der Pol, G. (2004). ‘The Fabulous Destination of a Cultural Tourist in Paris-Games of Make-Believe in Jeunet’s Amélie (2001)’, New Review of Film and Television Studies (Taylor & Francis Publication), Vol. 2, No. 2 (November ): 257–66. Vincendeau, G. (2001). ‘Café, Society’, Sight and Sound 11 (8). Available at http://www. bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/15. August 2010. Yampolsky, M. (1994). ‘Kuleshov’s Experiments and the New Anthropology of the Actor’, in R. Taylor and I. Christie (eds), Inside the Film Factory (London: Routledge), pp. 31–50.

Websites http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennan. August 2010.

Filmography Alien: Resurrection (Jeunet, US, 1997). American Beauty (Mendes, US, 1999). An American in Paris (Minnelli, US, 1951).

252 The Real City in the Reel City An Education (Scherfig, UK, 2009). Bande à part (Godard, France, 1964). Baisers Volés (Truffaut, France,1968) Bellamy (Chabrol, France, 2009). Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Ruttman, Germany, 1927). The Birds (Hitchcock, US, 1963). Brigadoon (Minnelli, US, 1954). Code Unknown (Haneke, France/Austria, 2000). L’Amour en Fuite (Truffaut, France, 1979). La Cité des Enfants Perdus (Jeunet & Carot, France, 1995). Le Dernier Métro (Truffaut, France, 1980). Delicatessen (Jeunet & Carot, France, 1992). Études sur Paris (Sauvage, France, 1928). Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (Jeunet, France, 2001). Flight of the Red Balloon (Hsu, France, 2007). French Cancan (Renoir, France, 1955). Gomorra (Garrone, Italy, 2008). Jules et Jim (Truffaut, France, 1962). La Haine (Kassovitz, France, 1995). Les 400 Coups (Truffaut, France, 1959). Local Hero (Forsyth, UK, 1983). Los Angeles Plays Itself (Andersen, US, 2003). The Lumière Brothers’ First Films (Tavernier, France, 1996). Masculin-Féminin (Godard, France, 1966). Moulin Rouge (Huston, US, 1952). Moulin Rouge! (Luhrman, US, 2001). Night on Earth (Jarmusch, US, 1991). Paris qui Dort (Clair, France, 1924). Psycho (Hitchcock, US, 1959). Quantum of Solace (Forster, UK, 2008).

16 Let Architecture ‘Play’ Itself: A Case Study Helmut Weihsmann

Notes on the Villa de Noailles: A perfect example of a pre-prepared filmset Man Ray’s experimental film poem Les Mystères du Château du Dé (1928/29) is a fictional and non-narrative ‘ghost story’ set in the architecture of the famous Villa de Noailles (1923–8) in southern France (Figure 16.1). The odd tale begins in Paris, where two gentlemen (Man Ray and Jacques-André Boiffard) meet in a handsome art deco bar (designed by Georges DjoBourgeois), chatting, drinking and playing dice. The opening shot depicts a wooden hand of a macchino, which drops a pair of dice. By pure chance the men decide to leave Paris and travel together down south with Man Ray’s smart automobile Voisin. Fate leads them to a small town where they notice a mysterious looking ‘cubist castle’ on a hilltop underneath the crumbling ruins of a medieval fortress. In a following shot, the cubic shape of the castle reflects the pair of fallen dice. At the end of their long journey, the two men enter this odd castle of modernity and try to penetrate its mystery. There they meet some very strange looking people with their mysterious masks, costumes, rituals and games. The enigmatic plot is improvised just like the fall of the dice by pure chance. The very last shot of the film depicts the lifeless hand of the mannequin appearing once again with the caption: quand bien même il serait lancé dans des circonstances éternelles, jamais un coup de dés n’abolira le hazard which means even in eternity, a throw of the dice will never abolish chance. The smart hill residence in Hyères (Côte d’Azur), designed by renowned architect and film decorator Robert Mallet-Stevens, is an early and rare example of modern architecture in France. Man Ray’s surrealistic film tale is also in many ways a revealing example of the interchange between cinema and modern architecture. Also interesting is not only the cinematographical approach to modern architecture, but also how architecture can actually ‘play’ itself or perform in a (silent) movie. 253

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Figure 16.1 Helmut Weihsmann: Cinetecture, Vienna 1995. 1 Villa with garden terrace; 2 Cubic triangular garden; 3 Existing cloister buildings; 4 Sport deck; 5 Salon rose; 6 Swimming pool; 7 Terraces; 8 Squash court; 9 Guest quarters.

Circumstances and background for a key film of the French avant-garde Man Ray’s last commissioned film, the surrealistic film essay Les Mystères du Château du Dé, was shot entirely ‘on location’ in a recently built, extravagant and artistic villa on a steep and stony ex-vineyard in Hyères on the French Côte d’Azur for a rich and eccentric couple, who were prominent patrons of contemporary art in France during the 1920/30s. The modernistic Villa de Noailles (1923–8) built for its young and wealthy owners Vicomte Charles de Noailles and his wife Marie-Laure, by the French film architect MalletStevens (1886–1945), ranks as one of the first examples of modern ‘purist’ architecture in France, even though it was the first building Mallet-Stevens ever erected.1 In many ways the cubic structure itself served for pictorial, representational and theatrical purposes, which makes it stand out as a perfect example of the interlocking connections and relationships between architecture and cinema. The strange form of the cubic villa, its spectacular setting and unusual landscaping below the hilltop of a medieval monastery,

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its rich interior decorations, its terraces with abstract hanging gardens and mysterious, labyrinth like spaces within the pile of cubes made it already a perfect a priori, perhaps even a ‘ready-made’ filmset in concrete for the lyrical, dreamlike and surrealistic exploration of its spaces and strange inhabitants through the camera lenses of Man Ray. The chaotic, fragmented and restless layout of the Villa de Noailles with its various semi-white cubes reminded the American-born cinematographer and photographer instantly of a pair of falling dice, rolling down a steep hill. The château’s striking cubic shape made him think of the poem ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ by Stéphane Mallarmé, which was to become not only a paraphrase of its film title, but also the ‘main theme’ of his story, since the plot is just as accidental as the roll of the dice. Artist Man Ray wrote somewhat later in his memoirs about the impression or instant attraction and admiration he got from this strange and mysterious, but fascinating villa when he first saw a photograph of it (Ray, 1964: 248). Besides the architect Mallet-Stevens’s virtual interest in contemporary Cubism, his previous classical training under the influence of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris is also evident in his design of the Villa de Noailles. Although the cubistic, puristic, clean and chic image of the famous Villa de Noailles may seem quite progressive and modern at first glance, its architectonical structure, its building technique, design method and spatial conception are quite conventional, superficially modern and even traditional to some extent, seeking to link the past with the present and near future. First of all, its representational character, high poetic spirit and even ‘mood’ of the place reminds us indeed of the aristocratic, monumental and representational model of the French Renaissance and baroque château typology and garden architecture, built by such monarchs as Charles I and Roi du Soleil Louis XIV in the Loire valley and outside Paris for their summer feasts and plaisir. As strange as it may seem, the scheme of Villa de Noailles reminds us of the feudal medieval castle Château Chambord (1523–36) on the Loire near Orleans, built by the King Charles I for his extremely formal hunting parties and royal festival activities during more peaceful times.2

The architect of the radical chic Mallet-Stevens is best remembered for his exciting early modern architectural sets in French silent movies just after the First World War. Born in Paris on 24 March 1886 into an artistic family of wealthy Belgian descent, he was as an infant a frequent guest at the famous Palais Stoclet (1905–11) in Brussels, the unique modern Gesamtkunstwerk designed for his uncle Adolphe Stoclet by the famous Viennese architect and designer Josef Hoffmann. These first impressions of the austere and elegant style of Viennese Secessionism, the superb drawing skills of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the exact reading of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Wasmuth publications in Germany made

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an everlasting imprint on his mind and architectural style. The secessionist and art nouveau style would greatly influence Mallet-Stevens’s first interior designs and film decorations of the early 1920s, and would provide the model for his charming sets in the typical art deco style of the period. His first attempt at simplification and sobriety is already noteworthy in Le Secret de Rosette Lambert (1920), a decorative film by Raymond Bernard, until he reached his formal austerity with the sets for L’Inhumaine (1923) and especially with Le Vertige (1925) by the better known director Marcel L’Herbier. By 1921 the enthusiasm of several leading French cineasts led to the formation of the world’s first film art association, the Club des Amis du Septième Art (CASA) under the guidance of French-Italian critic Ricciotto Canudo and filmmaker Louis Delluc. Their common friend Mallet-Stevens was well suited to spearhead CASA’s architectural crusade. The most dazzling event which illustrated the Parisian chic and artistic milieu of the ‘roaring ’20s’ in which Mallet-Stevens found both his collaborators and supporters was L’Inhumaine by film director and producer Marcel L’Herbier. The first modern art film in France was a remarkable manifesto of the avant-garde: Mallet-Stevens did most of the sets and model in futuristic spatial volumes himself, in particular the engineer’s electric tower; Fernand Léger did the beautiful decor of the large laboratory for the same hero, and the celebrated director L’Herbier called on the trained architect and avant-garde film director Alberto Cavalcanti, decorator Claude Autant-Lara and the designer Pierre Chareau for the rest of the decoration and furniture in this melodramatic movie. The austere and chic sets survive better than the rather silly movie itself. In addition to Fernand Léger’s machine art, Mallet-Stevens liked Sonja Delaunay’s painting and costumes or Paul Poiret’s marvellous geometric patterns defining an imaginary, non-veristic and virtual space. The celebrated international fair of decorative arts and modern industry held in Paris in 1925 was Mallet-Stevens’s chance for fame. As an innovative architect, his only experience up until his first commission for Charles de Noailles consisted of some fancy creations for the annual Salon d’Automne and the sketches/drawings for some beautiful villas and shop fronts in the Viennese secessionist and Otto-Wagner-style for the album Une cité moderne. Two potential projects of 1913 – a villa for Madame Paquin in Deauville and a noble country house for the musicologist Jules Ecorcheville – fell through due to war, when Mallet-Stevens signed up as a volunteer pilot in the French air force. Between 1920 until 1924 he proposed some large-scale models of new building types (a bookshop for fine arts) and life-size pavilions in various prestigious exhibitions in Paris, including a full-scale model of an Aéro-Club at the Salon d’Automne in 1922 and various installations for the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs in 1924. Unlike some talented students of the academic Wagner-School or romantics of the Dutch and Austro-German School of Expressionism, Mallet-Stevens rejected academic formalism and denied mass and engineering expressionism. Instead he chose cubic,

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well-portioned boxes, simple geometric volumes with abstract graphic and ornamental rendering of surfaces and flat roofs. Much like the lyricism and elementary purism of the neo-constructivist Dutch De-Stijl movement, Mallet-Stevens put all his efforts into making the building shape a study in plasticity experimentation. However, he did not forget his early lessons from Russian Cubism (Malevich) or Futurism (Antonio Sant’Elia) in playing with mass blocks, cubes, setback volumes, terraces, etc. embedded in reinforced concrete for structure and stability. Mallet-Stevens would himself use some of the innovative ideas and theories based on the concept of space as being continual, open and dynamic, yet his spatial definition of the Villa de Noailles was still – in comparison to Le Corbusier, J. J. P. Oud or the famous teachers at the Bauhaus – much more conservative and formalized, in the sense that the building’s structure is still subordinated to its exterior shape as a pile of intersecting cubes and additive rooms rather than open and free flowing spaces. Aside from the formalistic play of cubic blocks to form a massive and monumental central tower of the edifice, Mallet-Stevens uses the same formalistic features and cubo-futurist vocabulary as he did in his filmsets for L’Inhumaine the year before. Mallet-Stevens was deeply moved and impressed by the models of Theo van Doesburg and Cornelius van Eesteren for their revolutionary maison particulière (also known as the Maison Rosenberg), which was exhibited in the gallery of Léonce Rosenberg in Paris in the autumn of 1924. In spite of the fact that Mallet-Stevens’s new architectural fashion ‘mode’25’ or ‘jazz style’ emerged right after this sudden exposure to Kasimir Malevitch, Theo van Doesburg, Gerrit Rietveld and other De-Stijl artists and architects through important magazines, exhibitions and events in Paris, does not mean he was less original than his French contemporaries Le Corbusier, André Lurçat and Amédée Ozeanfant of L’ Esprit Nouveau. Formulating the systematic research of his precursors Van Doesburg or Le Corbusier, Mallet-Stevens invented a new elementary, systematic and unique formal code. This style used elementary components that are formed by the spatial definition of architecture which were radically questioned and redefined by Van Doesburg and Le Corbusier, the aggressive spokesman for the group L’Esprit nouveau in Paris. Only by chance did Mallet-Stevens get the commission from his patron Charles de Noailles. Originally, the Vicomte had Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from the Weimarer Bauhaus in mind as his architect for the country villa by the sea, but since Mies was unavailable within the near future and his efforts with Le Corbusier had not been as successful as hoped, he then contacted Mallet-Stevens, a recently appointed professor of architecture at L’Ecole Spéciale D’Architecture in Paris, to entrust him with the work. In retrospect, Mallet-Stevens was not the greatest architect of his time, but a very fashionable and a very successful one indeed. His clean and beautiful exhibition and cinematographic architecture made a great impression on the bourgeois artistic and intellectual community after the famous Salon

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d’Automne of 1924 in his home town Paris. Despite his progressive ideas and modernist viewpoint in the wake of the French avant-garde movement, and his affinity with the revolutionary Dutch group De-Stijl or with some futurist artists and writers or his personal contacts with Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian and Alberto Sartoris, he was very underrated by his contemporary architects of the true and pure avant-garde. Modest and well-mannered, Mallet-Stevens never pretended he was greater than his talent or better by any means than his arrogant contemporaries Frank Lloyd Wright, Peter Behrens, Josef Hoffmann, Adolf Loos or Le Corbusier. Even though MalletStevens was labelled superficially an ‘architect of the rich’ – since he was sought out only by wealthy, private clients – he was already quite middleaged by the time he got his first commission to actually build a permanent edifice for the art lover Vicomte Charles de Noailles and his young wife for their neat little holiday residence near the French Riviera. Perhaps due to his practical inexperience with the craft of building, Mallet-Stevens did not want to make a big fuss, much less a manifesto of his first built structure.

The building and its site When Mallet-Stevens started conceiving and drafting the structure for the Villa de Noailles on the stony hillside lot facing the sea near the tiny mountain village of Hyères, he had to respect the hilly terrain, which was neither banked up nor flattened out. The natural landscape was thus an essential element of the composition and the architect’s aim was to integrate the architecture into the landscape in the best way possible. The terraced and compiled cubes of the structure itself were oriented to the sun, therefore all the rooms except for the kitchen, the pantry, the workshop and other smaller utilitarian chambers faced south, providing maximum sunlight and view. All the rooms were laid out horizontally on various levels of the terrain, connected with a few interior and exterior steps. The reception room (vestibule), an elegant entrance foyer with the straight stairwell, the petit salon, a small study or social room, a dining room (salle à manger), the kitchen with several service rooms, lavatory, two guest rooms and a private refuge (which was blasted into the rock bed at the back of the house) were located on the ground floor. Upstairs were the divided bedrooms for Mr and Mrs Noailles in each wing, their individual parlour and lavatories, an open terrace for exercise and a room for laundry besides another small vestibule to the main stairwell. On the uppermost level were the rooms for an ‘artist in residence’ or a special house guest. Integration of the principal functions resulted in more densely piled up volumes with open terraces and several separate staircases, making the scheme a rather confusing conglomerate of mixed forms and functions in a huge pile growing further up the hill. Also the less decipherable facade with a somewhat sheltered and even ‘hidden part’ in the rear did not clarify all of the spatial programme it offered.

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The somewhat bizarre lighting of the staircase and service rooms in the rear were supplemented only on occasion by a mere spot of artificial light and two vertical window openings with abstract decorative stained window panes, designed by Louis Barillet. Adjoining the first stage of construction was the addition of five guest rooms along a long corridor connecting this wing with the main building. Later – on the next higher level – a large, half open swim and gymnastic hall with large sliding glass doors to a lofty sun terrace and an interesting light plafond of colourful glass bricks and a maze of concrete beams was added above the pool, most likely by the supervising architect Gabriel Guévrékian (1900–70), who was also responsible for designing several interiors and features in conjunction with Pierre Chareau, Charles Hess, Francis Jourdain, Georges Djo-Bourgeois and Mallet-Stevens himself. A larger complex with five guest rooms and several more service rooms was added in another apartment block creeping further up the hill. In a separate, older part of the existing ex-convent was the main kitchen with yet more rooms for servants, gardeners and chauffeurs. There are two entrances to the lot, one from the back door of an upper pathway through the garden to the open porch to the house; the other main access from a winding road below the main plateau was through a subterranean passageway through the old wine cellar of the house, where the Vicomte kept his rare and valuable painting collection in the laundry room, stacked on wire racks, which once served for drying the laundry in the basement. Going out by this main route to the street, we also come to the garage with the five fine Bentleys of Charles de Noailles, who also collected beautiful automobiles and famous race cars as well as fine art works. The Vicomte and his wife were of sophisticated taste and spirit, who loved to live in a comfortable home whose spaces had a cosy and warm atmosphere, symbolic form and functions, the opposite of Le Corbusier’s ‘machine à habiter’. In spite of the standard elements used in modern architecture or the purist architectural style that one recognizes as Cubo-Modernims filmmakers’ special affinity would emerge for (fake) architecture, and affinity which goes beyond simple affinity to theatrical effects for dramatic, emotional and picturesque moments. One can of course find a similar sentiment in certain ironical works of Le Corbusier (the weird penthouse of Charles de Beistegui near L’Etoile in Paris), Theo van Doesburg (Café-Brasserie L’Aubette in Strasbourg) or even Mies van der Rohe (Villa Tugendhat in Brno). Like so many pseudo-revolutionaries of his time, Mallet-Stevens elaborated the basic principles of a new and fancy kind of ‘visual architecture’ by designing buildings like sets, and building furniture, movie sets and models which look like handsome architecture. At the very beginning of the project, a local building practitioner by the name of Léon David, a solid craftsman of common sense and building experience, made the first stock-making plans of the site in the late summer of 1924, measuring the pre-existing stone buildings, the crumbling ruins,

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terrace walls, cellars and caverns or cisterns underneath the abandoned convent of Saint-Bernard by 16 October 1924. David was also responsible for the first rough draft from 31 January 1924 of a windmill-shaped villa on a plateau above the cellars, which was to become the basis of the new villa by Mallet-Stevens. Before Mallet-Stevens set foot on the lot he designed a compact little model of the house, naming it simply ‘Villa 1924’, and drew floor and section plans from April to May 1924. As for the architectural details, they are almost French classical in their brute, simplified geometry: blank and clean surfaces, pure cubes, punched into by rectangular voids, are set off against a pyramid of superimposed parallel epipedons. All these geometrical forms are related, in elevation, through a series of tracés régulateurs (regulating lines), a method of proportional diagonals and triangles in a square grid which Mallet-Stevens and his fellows of French Classicism used in subsequent ‘ideal proportioned’ buildings to achieve simple relationships between disparate parts. Meanwhile, a high stone fence with large peek-out windows and a gateway was built on the main plateau of the site, enclosing a large garden with planted trees and neatly trimmed scrubs, giving the place a certain mystique from the very beginning. The broad, linear and horizontal appearance of the cubic castle caused a pleasant flattening of the volumes necessary to integrate them into the environment. The architect chose to use the crude rocks that were found or dug out on the site to fill and level the garden terraces, thus saving the cost of building material and transport. Also the chiselled and trimmed stones dug out from the foundation were either used for the masonry of garden walls or to create the load bearing walls of the building. The walls of the subterranean levels were of bare limestone; all other walls of the exposed façades were of the same core material of the rocky soil, but plastered with fine grinded stone material mixed with dab grey cement stucco. Only the constructive parts – that is, stairs, columns, floor slabs, beams, window or door frames and most of the cantilevered balconies and the flat roofs – were of prefabricated steel concrete or ‘ferro cement’, produced and moulded directly on the site. The setback open-air terraces would all have a garden enclosed by a massive declining stone wall, an element which would equally define precisely the profile and contours of the landscaping of the site as well as the interaction between the interior and exterior spaces of the villa and its hanging gardens. However, doorsteps, wall openings and other devices of theatrical perspective would create real and imaginary borders between the house and the landscape. A visitor, like Man Ray, would admire the open window frames or the so-called false windows in the walls of the main garden, because it gave him the impression of being in an open-air gallery with paintings of natural landscapes on the wall (Ray, 1964: 249). Of course, for this important commission, the débutant Mallet-Stevens invited his fellow architects, artists and designers to collaborate, among

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others his artistic friends and colleagues from the prestige apartment complex Rue Mallet-Stevens (1927) in Auteuil outside Paris. These included some of the most prominent artists of the day. Most notable was the Persian architect Gabriel Guévrékian, who laid out a strange and imaginative jardin triangulaire of pure geometric shape to add to the visual pleasure of the villa. Another celebrity of French Modernism was the famous architect and furniture designer Pierre Chareau, who installed a halfenclosed roof gymnasium (chambre en plein air), or the famous Dutch painter Theo van Doesburg, who created an interesting mural inside the tight space of a perpendicular air chute (chambre des fleurs). Noteworthy are the glazed windows and ceilings for the study by designer Louis Barillet or the fixtures of the Martel brothers. Also many interesting cubist sculptures by Henri Laurens, Alberto Giacometti, Constantin Brancusi, Vilmos Huszár, Georges Vantongerloo et al. are featured throughout the villa and the gardens. Some very peculiar design and science objects, like a barometer, sundial and a rotating metal sculpture from Jacques Lipschitz placed at the spearhead of the sunken garden, or a cubist Minerva and the patron figure Marie by Henri Laurens on the rooftop of the guest house were added by the owners in their obsession with art and design. Besides designing the cute American art deco bar in the chic Parisian apartment of the Vicomte, Georges Djo-Bourgeois and his wife Elsie were responsible for the interior design of the dining and tea room (salle à manger), including its unique built-in cupboards and the simple furniture for the added guest house of 1928 (petite villa) by Charles Hess, and the austere but sensual pink study (salon rose) for the Vicomte by Mallet-Stevens himself. The modern and extremely functional furniture was designed and crafted by the De-Stijl artist Sybold van Ravesteyn; some geometric carpet designs were by Eileen Grey; some hanging studio lamps were from Gerrit Rietveld and other fixtures and household equipment, such as the inevitable art deco clocks in every parlour, were designed by Francis Jourdain. As time proceeded, the cubic, concrete castle unfortunately grew out of proportion due to many careless alterations and unfortunate additions by the various (unknown) successors of Mallet-Stevens, who involuntarily resigned after increasing disputes with the Vicomte, particularly over aesthetic and technical problems of design concerning the lookout tower and leaking roof terraces in particular. It is believed that Guévrékian took charge of finishing the existing parts of the swimming pool and the new guest wing on the north side, accessible by a long, enclosed flight of stairs directly from the street. Constant building activity continued under the guidance of Léon David until the year 1933, with a subterranean squash court and new garages with a new passageway to the property. At the end it was sad that the chaotic and often planless construction of the new parts destroyed the character of the site and swallowed the old house completely. Thus the intentions and efforts of Mallet-Stevens were not granted by his clients

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at all. On the contrary, some of the features of Mallet-Stevens’s ambitious designs were either dropped, altered or later destroyed by the authorship of Vicomte de Noailles himself. It should be mentioned here that the crowning lookout tower –the so-called Belvedere – became the reason for a major dispute between the architect and his client, who disliked its impracticability for purely functionless aesthetic reasons, as Charles de Noailles complained in a rather fierce letter of 29 April 1925 to Mallet-Stevens. When the house was finally finished by various architects and artists, another remarkable visitor to the villa, the French photographer Léon Deshairs, noted that from the interior, the punctuated walls of garden and living room create a new sense of endless space (Deshairs, 1928: 4). The building itself was, however, half buried in the hill, which provided a somewhat earthy, squatting, compressed and horizontal appearance despite all the purity and formal abstraction of the cubic volumes piling on top of each other. A lofty private atelier (salon rose), blasted into the rockbed, featured a windowless, sky-lighted room with colourful glassworks again by Louis Barillet and functional furniture designed by Pierre Chareau and chrome-steel chairs by Marcel Breuer. A tiny two-story shaft between the ground floor and the upstairs (an abstract geometric chamber painted in bright primary colours called the chambre des fleurs, an inaccessible little ‘flower room’) was designed like the front porch door by Theo van Doesburg. The only vertical element of the design, the slim lookout and observation tower as a reference point (point de vue) – which was in time lowered as the building proceeded until it was altogether eliminated by the client, who did not at all approve of it and let it be decapitated – determined the disposition of the rooms around a central stairwell. The Villa de Noailles is equally complex from a typological and from a pragmatic point of view, for within the context of Mallet-Stevens’s development from cinema to architecture it is both the paradigmatic dwelling and the palatial monument of modern living. His architectural ability but also ambiguity stem from his double concept of space in architecture and in cinema. First by working with small cardboard and/or gypsum models, he elaborated a kind of ‘prototype’ that he could adjust to his theoretical cubist approach and concept. The formal architect Mallet-Stevens imagined some kind of cubic sculptural mass that he could experiment with on an adjustable scale and effect, like his sets for the cinema. Developing a geometric scheme on square-gridded paper, he then constructed a universe of lines joined by optical relationships. Eventually he started to fit a ‘façade’ into a square, then drew circles and by constructing an ordre du régles of horizontal and vertical lines, he subsequently achieved both contrast and harmony between the solids and voids, leaving the geometrical structure in its right place. The polyhedric cube that he imagined gave his architecture both an elegant and monumental aspect. But the odd building itself is somewhat anti-modern in the sense that it is not true to its formal appearance

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and principles of construction, defined by some of the purists of modern architecture. One could easily presume or mistake the Villa de Noailles for a purist reinforced concrete construction, but instead it is a bastard, a composite of diverse building materials and construction methods. Using reinforced cement exclusively for a monolithic structure was not only too expensive but even unnecessary for a ‘country home’. Instead a mixed form of ‘regional’, indigenous, even spontaneous and anonymous architecture was chosen.

Clients of wealth and taste Naturally one asks, who actually were the clients and patrons of the villa and what were the reasons for their very personal film, which was incidentally first screened on 1 May 1929 for a private circle of friends of the nobleman de Noailles in the luxury suite in Paris, and a little later premiered at the Parisian art cinema Studio des Ursulines on 12 June 1929, juxtaposed with the scandalous and anarchistic film Un Chien Andalou (1929) by the two provocateurs Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. The Spanish film director Luis Buñuel was part of the scene of Surrealists who were frequently invited to the Villa de Noailles on summer holidays. During his prolonged stay in the summer months of the year 1929, he and the painter Salvador Dalí wrote the scenario for their new film L’Age d’or. The beginning is based on the unfinished novel 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade. Luis Buñuel writes vividly in his memoirs Mon dernier soupir (1982) about the scandal his first feature movie aroused during its brief and turbulent screening, and eventually all the trouble it caused him and his patrons.3 Both the elegant Vicomte Charles de Noailles (1891–1981) and his young, beautiful and rich wife Marie-Laure (1900–70) were of aristocratic and/or wealthy descent. Charles was the offspring of a noble family with a long heritage in French and Basque history, with very aristocratic manners and good taste but unfortunately, due to postwar bankruptcy without much economic potential and influence. However his wife, the fashion model Marie-Laure, was the daughter of Baron de Bischoffsheim, one of the richest Jewish bankers besides the family of Baron de Rothschild in France. Her mother and famous grandmother Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevignée (née Laure de Sade) originated from the very prestigious and aristocratic family of the infamous Marquis de Sade. After the couple’s glamorous wedding and honeymoon in Nice, they both entered the high society of wealth and taste in Paris. For her wedding present Marie-Laure received a large piece (1.75 hectares) of unused farmland in Hyères on a steep and stony slope just beneath the ancient ruins of a medieval castle (Castel Sainte-Claire) on the site of the abandoned convent Saint-Bernard overlooking the village of Hyères. The site was a dramatic setting and also a perfect spot for a quiet and remote winter retreat for relaxation, artistic meditation and enjoyment in the wild landscape of the

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Midi under a perfect blue Mediterranean sky, where the famous American novelist Edith Wharton (Age of Innocence) once spent many peaceful holidays in the countryside near the castle. The rather isolated location seemed also to suit the newly married couple’s wish to create some kind of haven for their modern taste, a kind of Noah’s Ark for the elite. Their passion for both collecting and commissioning modern art and their infatuation with modernity carried over into their personal lives, as well as defining their taste and elegant lifestyle. Charles de Noailles was a genuine art lover, snob and bel ésprit. His collection of modern art was legendary and phenomenal, and he commissioned many avant-garde artists to design and furnish his house with paintings, murals, sculpture, furniture, stained glass windows, flowers, curtains, carpets, gadgets and knick-knacks. He was also an enthusiastic cinema lover and patron of the ‘seventh art’. Just after Man Ray’s short film was finished, the de Noailles gave a dinner in their luxury Parisian home for all those participants and guests involved in the making of the film, and the projection of it followed. Everyone was highly amused, trying to identify the masked persons in the film. The refined couple and hosts of many important artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers were delighted and at once proposed that Man Ray make yet another full-length film, which they would also finance. Being influenced by the experimental Dada and Surrealist movements of the French ciné avant-garde circles of the 1920s, Vicomte de Noailles and his wife helped several aspiring musicians, actors, writers and film artists and supported some young and promising film directors to produce such major films as Un Chien Andalou (1929) by Luis Buñuel, Menjant Garotes (1930) by Salvador Dalí and Le Sang d’un Poete (1930) by the celebrated poet Jean Cocteau. In the end, however, the poetics of the Villa de Noailles reside in the complexity and contradiction of Mallet-Stevens’s dual personality – a controversial figure who was at once an aesthete and an innovative architect, a dandy and a dedicated follower of fashion as well as a progressive artist and inventor of the Parisian avant-garde circle in the 1920s and 1930s. MalletStevens was neither interested in leftist politics nor in social causes or communal architecture for a ‘new society’. Instead he built for the upper class who were keen on the avant-garde arts and film. As a film architect and set designer, Mallet-Stevens gave the cinema its artistic and architectural potential; his symbolic screen and real architecture were acting just as much as a stage scenario. Either intended or accidental, the whole scheme of the Villa de Noailles is constantly reminiscent of a modern ocean liner stranded on a hilltop. Each level of the ‘nautical’ building shape is a sort of ‘ship deck’, including sun decks, terraces set back, smooth white façades, aligned rows of bay windows, railings, metal guardrails, portholes, command bridge, smoke stack, a towering wind pocket and everything that goes with it. Aside from the overall smoothness, cleanness and brightness of its striking and pure volumes, the château also displays the marine and aeronautical metaphors

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of Purism, which sought to incorporate the ship and machine aesthetic (or metaphoric) deliberately in the utopian ideas and projects of revolutionary architecture, industry and society. Even to the smallest furnishing and so-called equipment (time clocks, thermometers, hydrometers, astrolabes, telescopes and other astrological instruments or scientific measuring instruments) of the dwelling, either in the exterior, terraces, balconies, etc. or often in the interior of the social rooms, gymnasium and swimming pool, the image of a boat is intended and omnipresent. Aside from the fact that the location of the Villa de Noailles is rural, it brings ‘urban culture’ to the site by setting up the same formalistic vocabulary as for any contemporary ‘villa suburbana’ in the vicinity of Paris. The Villa de Noailles is unique in the body of Mallet-Stevens’s oeuvre. Neither in his exhibition architecture of the Salon d’Automne nor his commercial architecture of the same period nor shortly after in his urban villas in Ville d’Avray, Boulogne or Mézy does he attain a work of comparable charm and richness. Credit has also to be accorded to the many collaborators on the project in the first stage of its construction. In his prestigious Hyères villa project, Mallet-Stevens sought deliberate collaboration from numerous sources in order that the building for his first client Vicomte de Noailles could benefit from the best professional finishing and refinement of details. Nevertheless there is something sublime and uncanny about the place. Both the rough treatment of the substructure by its brute volumes and severe treatment of the main façade, emphasized by the use of large window bays, the alignment of openings and repetitious balconies and loggias, creates a feeling of mystery, much like the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. The architecture is discreet, mute and mysterious due to its strict rhetoric, any life and austerity inside being relieved by the use of a minimal amount of decoration. One of few exterior decorations, a typical trademark of Mallet-Stevens, is the garden entrance, in which the colourful abstract design on the door expressly recalls a painting of Theo van Doesburg or Piet Mondrian. Here, the intersection of the porch roof and doorpost on the plan suffice to define the volumes of the entrance, and become an important signal, a sort of psychological threshold, where the entrance becomes a starting point for the visitor into a world of its very own. As in the short film of Man Ray, the ‘concrete villa’ was the starting point of a dreamlike journey, in which the stimulus was just strong enough to be perceived artistically and produce a poetic response.

Secret of architecture Is Man Ray’s film poem about the mystery of architecture or of life? Can any film or any photo still really ‘explain’ architecture and its secrets hidden behind the surfaces. Or can an image involve your feelings of the design ambitions and process of the architectural creator, or can we really

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experience the richness of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional screen? Other questions evolve as to how this particular photogenic and cinematic Villa de Noailles exposes itself to its visitors through the lens of the camera, and how architecture plays itself on film, and what kind of narrative, language, symbols and metaphors it uses to communicate. And finally, questions arise about how these important issues of representational versus private space, or the place of the site, play an important role in the cinematic procedure of mapping a building, its space and to some extent its environment or natural surroundings. In several scenes of the lyrical film short Les Mystères du Château du Dé by Man Ray we can observe how these issues actually interact, interfere and correspond with each other in many surrealistic ways. The building is, as I pointed out earlier, in constant exchange with its natural surroundings, often in conflict with its own inherent parts and foreign additions. Mallet-Stevens was very fortunate to design and construct his first villa for the patron Vicomte Charles de Noailles under perfect circumstances. The finished first stage of the building (petite maison) agreeably surprised its owner to the extent that he wanted his dwelling to be documented on film. Already during its construction in 1924 he commissioned the film company Cinégraphic, under the direction of Marcel L’Herbier, to make a short documentary about his estate in Hyères, which the renowned producer of L’Inhumaine sub-commissioned his assistant Jacques Manuel to execute. The lost documentary with the title Biceps et bijoux, writes Marcel L’Herbier, was a ‘suitable spectacle’ for a ‘tip-top crowd of society mongers’ (L’Herbier, 1979: 112–13). In its highly sensual appearance and its artistic equation between architect, designer and filmmaker, the building of Mallet-Stevens itself stands out as a perfect example of a ‘signature trademark’ of modern taste and richness. The extremely photogenic architecture can actually play and express itself, recalling the celebrated term caméra stylo by Alexandre Astruc for the governing coding of the New Wave aesthetics and poetics. Although the term signature trademark implies, of course, a recognizable and personal character in style and methodology, a strong personal and distinctive visual style of a movie set can imprint the spectator’s vision just as well, blurring the collaborative efforts of filmmaker and architect as a team. As a very successful set designer, Mallet-Stevens invented a new role called total design, which meant the control of each detail and stage designing of each and every detail for the camera. Man Ray, on the other hand, made his film poem (ciné poème) in its natural and magical setting by displaying its hidden surrealist potential. By this wonderful transformation, he showed Mallet-Stevens’s cinematographic talents as well as his decorative merits as an architect of his time and age. Man Ray made a film of precise lyricism and poetry; each shot an architectural and graphical composition about a dynamic house in constant movement with the help of a film camera, a ‘scientific machine’ as the invention of cinematography was called by the Lumière brothers in 1895.

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In Mallet-Stevens’s case, we can see his ambitions and efforts as a set designer alongside his aim as a contemporary architect to reveal modernism in film by valid means of modern, vanguard expressions. As well as propagandizing for purist architecture, he advocated progressivism in film, and in 1928 – at the same time Man Ray was filming the Villa Noailles – Mallet-Stevens wrote the only book to date devoted exclusively to the subject of modern architecture and cinema, Le Décor Moderne au Cinéma. The physical content of space, modern architectural ideas had moved into the field of modern physics and metaphysics, exploring theories and concepts parallel to ideas of space in philosophy and natural sciences. However, architecture is not a science but an art form. But there is one thing that architecture and science share – both follow inner logic. One may reason now a posteriori, that architecture has simply borrowed from innovations in the sciences, and the whole idea of space/time architecture, as proposed by cinematography, is just an afterthought; but cultural dispositions and coherences with the zeitgeist refute such facile deductions. By the time avant-garde Modernism arrived in German and French cinema during the mid-1920s under the rubric of Neues Bauen or L’Esprit Nouveau (New Architecture), it had already lost its vigour or impetus and become a cliché certified by the term ‘International Style’.4 Advocates and polemicists of Modernism alike continued to portray abstract art and architecture as the most rational and contemporary expressions of the modern zeitgeist, that is of course of new building materials, techniques and methods, and to some extent a new man of the infamous Machine Age. The unifying claims of the International Style in the West could no longer conceal the fact that the modernist canon of abstract, geometric forms, open floorplans, flat roofs, pillars, window ribbons, cantilevers and curves was only one among many possible ‘styles’ of contemporary architecture or ways of expressing modern design in the twentieth century. On the other hand, others, including Mallet-Stevens himself, had already started reclaiming vernacular, popular and classical references with new decorative and aesthetic sensibilities suited best for filmset design.

The role of architecture in the film – general architectural approach to set design Again, how does architecture become a leading role in a film? Can the elements and materials of a building actually play or express themselves? How can they exemplify an architectural idea by means of a camera’s eye? So rich is the example Les Mystères du Château du Dé in its visual information that the film resembles a movie on modern, abstract art and the architecture of Mallet-Stevens. Were not its smooth façades, strange vistas of pure cubes and abstract images of light perhaps the first impressions that stimulated the imagination of the filmmaker? And was it not perhaps Mallet-Stevens who created these images from the start and marked the style of the film? While

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not denying Man Ray’s status as a true film auteur, the concrete filmset of the villa makes a convincing case for the ideas and intentions that MalletStevens expressed in his photogenic approach to architecture. There are two basic principal ways of perception of space in cinematography – the realistic (pictorial) and the abstract (synthetic) approach. The idea of abstract space in cinema originated with the Russian Suprematist or Constructivist movement (Malevich, Tatlin, El Lissitzky) and the CuboFuturists’ (Boccioni, De Stijl) concepts in Western European avant-garde art during the years just before the outbreak of the First World War. But above all, Cubism and Purism were the first art movements visualizing the new consciousness of spatial abstraction. The new awareness of an ‘endless’ and ‘relative’ space idea, as an architectural principle in the early mathematical theories of Georg-Friedrich Riemann, Karl Friedrich Gauss, Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein, revolutionized not only physics but changed the perception of space in architecture as well. The fact that the first ideas of abstract space emerged together with the first avant-garde movements of art, architecture and cinema demonstrates that the idea of space is inherent to both modern architecture and avant-garde cinema. The revolutionary new aesthetics of space, produced by the majority of the ‘third generation’ of architects following Art Nouveau, Cubism and Futurism seemed quite antithetical to the ideal of corporeal mass and ‘style’ among contemporary artists during the 1920/30s. This new concept of space, once it was established by critics and public alike, allowed the architects, filmmakers and theorists to escape from hybrid aspects in the material treatment of ‘style’ and taste. The idea of space established a new perspective that finally abolished eclecticism, because it gave rise to an immaterial meaning of architecture and the concept of space. This idea of space, initially both an aesthetic and functional concept, evolved into a prevailing functional principle in both architecture and film.

Conclusion Not surprisingly at all, the work of a film designer, art director and film decorator is not generally recognized by the general public, much less respected by writers and critics. Yet the creative synergy between architecture and cinema has yet to be explored more deeply and scientifically. A subject that has received very little attention from historians, theoreticians, critics, architects and practitioners of film design are the isomorphic relationships and morphologies between the arts and cinema. Given the general neglect of filmsets and film design in film literature and in present-day intellectual discourse, the film decor has received scant attention within the larger discussion of film history and theory. Just in the last two decades, considerations of the aesthetics of film decor and set design have been advanced by a small number of film technicians or practitioners and even fewer critics and scholars, myself being

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one of the pioneers in the field. With regard to Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Arthur Schopenauer, both making the famous analogy between architecture and music, the romantic German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling described architecture as ‘frozen music’ in one of his famous lectures (1856) on philosophy. In this analogy the harmonics of ancient music theory (i.e. Pythagoras) is applied to the Vitruvian ideal proportions of architecture and the rhythm of speech in rhetoric and poetry. There coexists a particular tradition in architectural history comparing architecture with music, which extends from Leon Battista Alberti to Daniel Libeskind. I suggest that this convention constitutes an architectural analogy that I would like to call poetical or lyrical architecture. For centuries architecture, painting and sculpture have been determined as the supreme Fine Arts. First the arts are hierarchically organized and, furthermore, the visual arts are concerned with beauty (venustas) that pleases the eye, just as music appeals to the ear. However, architecture is neither an optical issue nor even ‘petrified music’, but a multi-sensual affair with form, function, material, colour, space and time. Understanding architecture, therefore, is not the same as enjoying visual effects or being able to determine the style of a building by certain external features. It is not enough to see and enjoy architecture with your eyes solely, you must experience it in its authentic reality. One must observe the inner beauty of architecture, how it was designed and conceived for a special need and true function, and how it was attuned to the entire context and relationships to its surroundings. Indeed most people judge architecture superficially only by its external appearance, just as the architect, painter, sculptor, photographer or filmmaker deals with aesthetics. But the standards of aesthetics have changed over the years. The classical division between performing arts (dance, theatre and music) and visual arts (painting, sculpture and architecture) gradually eroded with the emergence of modernism during the fin-de-siècle. Among the cineasts of the French film avant-garde of the 1920s, especially the theoreticians Ricciotto Canudo, Elié Faure and two leading pioneers Louis Delluc and Jean Epstein of the journal Gazette des sept arts had argued that the cinema’s closest relative besides music is architecture. Therefore ‘cinematic architecture’ for them was a hypothetical model of connections and meanings, as it still is today.

Notes 1. Only part of the glorious modern villa has been reconstructed in its original state as a museum and gallery space. Unfortunately, many fixtures are lost and have not yet been replaced. It is also a pity that the swimming pool hall with its lofty ceiling of coloured glass bricks and mirrors, has been turned into a sterile conference room and has lost its original character and charm. 2. Let me explain my argument more clearly here. The Château Chambord was not built for reasons of fortification alone, but for the more representational and ceremonial purposes of the High Court with its imposing and impressing manneristic

270 Let Architecture ‘Play’ Itself architecture and social rooms for etiquette. Much like the modern cubist Villa de Noailles, it basically serves itself. Also the rigid geometrical beauty and harmony of the Château Chambord equals that of the modern Château du Dé by MalletStevens. Dominating the design of the medieval courtyard of Chambord is the square-shaped central tower (so-called donjon) with its spiral staircase in the centre of a Greek-cross-shaped arrangement of chambers and its bizarre roofscape of picturesque chimneys and individual attic houses peeking out of steep rooftops. In the Villa de Noailles there is a clear logical separation between functional zones such as the public ground floor, and the private rooms upstairs. Besides the clear rational circulation pattern, the sexual division between the male and female follows the best, traditional pattern of Beaux-Arts planning principles. Although the name of the main architect is yet unknown – one theory believes it was the King himself who conceived the architecture – and the building chronology of Château Chambord remains quite mysterious, the influence of Italian artists and architects on its initial planning stages are quite obviously present. In the year 1517 King Charles I invited the renowned master Leonardo da Vinci from the Republic of Florence to his court at Amboise to design his new residence at Romorantin on the River Saudre, but due to Leonardo’s death in the same year, being the victim of a great plague in 1519, the project of Leonardo for Romorantin was abandoned and altered to a new building site at Chambord on the Loire. Even though there is no document or drawing available now to prove Leonardo’s engagement in the project of Chambord, there is the strong influence of Leonardo on its making, best recognized in the grand double-helix stairwell. Prior to Leonardo’s death in France, architect Fra Giocondo alias Giovanni da Verona (c. 1433–1515) designed some rudimentary plans with his compatriot by the name of ‘El Boccador’ for the building. A further three major artists of Lombardia had great influence in French and Continental mannerist architecture of the Renaissance during their various engagements in France. Besides Rosso Fiorentino, inform his arrival in 1530 until his premature death in 1540, there was Primaticcio, who worked during the construction period until 1570 at the castle, and finally the theoretician Sebastiano Serlio (arrived in 1541), whose influence was chiefly through his writings rather than his works on the general form. 3. See the very enlightening personal correspondence between Luis Buñuel and Charles de Noailles (Buñuel, 1993). 4. This crucial position of the avant-garde and its critique of Modernity within a larger scope of contemporary culture and fashion during the 1920/30s in France has already been the intriguing topic and subject of my book Cinétecture – Film. Architecture (Weihsmann, 1995).

Bibliography Buñuel, L. (1993), L’Age d’or: Correspondance Luis Bunuel-Charles de Noailles: lettres et documents (1929–1976), edited by J.-M. Bouhours and N. Schoeller (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou). Deshairs, L. (1928), ‘Une villa moderne à Hyères’, Art et Décoration (XXXII année, JulyDecember). L’Herbier, M. (1979), La tête qui tourne (Paris: Édition Belfond). Ray, M. (1964), Autoportrait/Self-Portrait (Paris: Èditions Robert Laffont). Weihsmann, H. (1995). Cinétecture – Film. Architecture (Vienna: PVS Verleger).

Index 20th Century Fox, 185, 201 27 Years Later, 151 28 Days Later (2002), 92 2012, 142, 156, 165, 166 A Day in Liverpool, 71, 229 A Kid for Two Farthings, 157 À Propos de Nice, 36, 37, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47 A13 (1994), 158 Abbas, Ackbar, 43, 44, 47, 201 absence, 13, 48, 69, 81, 89, 90, 106, 108, 114, 119, 120, 126, 129, 136, 137, 142, 170, 197, 198 actuality, 1, 4, 19, 23, 29, 79, 82, 83, 122, 142, 177, 179, 188, 196 advertisement, 11, 119 advertising, 22, 24, 29, 51, 81, 110 Albany, 26 Alberti, Leon Battista, 269 Albrecht, Donald, 7, 11, 208, 220 Alexander, Christopher, 48, 97, 205, 209, 220 Alexanderplatz, 90, 104 Alien: Resurrection (1997), 240, 251 Allen, Woody, 93, 142, 146, 147, 148, 189, 236 Alpers, Svetlana, 144 Alphaville (1966), 237 AlSayyad, Nezar, 1, 7, 11, 14, 22, 184 amateur film, 20, 23, 33, 50, 51, 52, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 82, 85, 180, 195, 197, 200, 202, 206, 222, 236 American Beauty (1999), 235, 251 Amsterdam, 149, 190, 231 An American in Paris (1951), 240, 251 An Education (2009), 236 Anderson, Lindsay, 78, 180 Anderson, Thom, 206 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 12, 92 ArcGIS, 200 archaeology, 198–199, 206, 236 architecture, 1, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 22, 24, 32, 40, 45, 48, 55, 100, 101,

107, 109, 112, 127, 135, 147, 158, 164, 179, 186, 190, 191, 193, 195, 196, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 212, 213, 215, 219, 220, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 232, 233, 240, 243, 245, 253, 254, 255, 257, 258, 259, 262, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270 archive, 1, 9, 10, 19, 22, 23, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 48, 51, 67, 69, 70, 72, 84, 142, 151, 169, 195, 199, 236, 242 archive city, 198 Asylum (2000), 159 Atlantic, 25, 27, 28, 42 audience, 8, 27, 52, 60, 63, 64, 66, 74, 93, 94, 99, 106, 119, 127, 198, 215, 235, 243, 245 Augé, Marc, 95, 118, 183 aura, 9, 97 Australia (2008), 185, 201 Autant-Lara, Claude, 256 authenticity, 9, 23, 94, 166, 180, 184, 193 Aux Niçois qui mal y pensent (1995), 44 avant garde, 10, 39, 43, 55, 70, 120, 149, 150, 159, 161, 208, 254, 256, 264, 267–268, 270 Babcock, Lawrence, F., 25 Bachelard, Gaston, 146 Baisers Volés (1968), 245, 249 Baker, George, 112 Baker, Phil, 161 Bande à part (1964), 241 Barber, Stephen, 11, 22, 38 Barringer, Tim, 177 Barthes, Roland, 4, 13, 206, 211, 213 bateaux-mouches, 183, 201 Battersea Power Station, 96, 102 Battle of London (1941), 180 Baudelaire, Charles, 104 Baudrillard, Jean, 184 Bazin, Andre, 238 Beat City (1963), 72 Bebington Scenes (1954), 75

271

272

Index

Behrens, Peter, 258 Belfast, 25 Bellamy (2009), 235 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 45, 104, 107, 111, 136, 179 Bennett, Tony, 177 Benning, James, 150, 151 Bergala, Alain, 236 Berlin, 43, 89, 104, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 120, 128, 133, 149, 208, 212, 243 Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927), 43, 149 Berman, Marshall, 175 Bévérini, Alain, 39 Bibber, Teeter, 30 Bilder fran Härnösand (1904), 188 Binh, N-T, 240, 244, 247 Biograph, 174, 177 Birkenhead, 74, 75, 83 Black, Barbara, 176 Black Joy (1977), 92 Blight (1996), 158 blind fields, 141 Blow-Up (1966), 92 Boat for Businessmen (1961), 76 body, 12, 28, 38, 153, 190, 210, 216, 232, 265 Boese, Carl, 208 Boiffard, Jacques-André, 253 Bolivia, 239 Boomtown! Liverpool Movie and Television Map, 190 Booth, Charles, 170 Boston, 137 Brancusi, Constantin, 261 Branigan, Edward, 235 Braveheart (1995), 193 Breaking and Entering (2006), 100, 101 Brick Lane (2007), 157, 159 Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), 189 Britain, 10, 19, 23, 25, 32, 50, 55, 56, 61, 66, 67, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 85, 97, 98, 100, 142, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 185, 188 Britain Prepared (1915), 179 British Film Institute (BFI), 33 British Pathé, 174 British Tourism Authority, 188

Broken Blossoms (1919), 157 Bruce, Robert, 52, 53, 55, 67 Bruno, Giuliana, 2, 3, 10, 14, 69, 71, 78, 84, 102, 104, 135, 144, 146, 162, 183, 200, 202, 220 Brunsdon, Charlotte, 14, 22, 89, 91, 167, 189 Buchanan, Andrew, 61–62 Bullock, Nicholas, 233, 242 Buñuel, Luis, 259, 260, 266 Burton, Alan, 61 Canada, 19, 25, 26, 32, 33 Cannes Film Festival, 69, 246 Canudo, Ricciotto, 8, 9, 256, 269 Carné, Marcel, 42, 247, 248 Carter, Erica, 95 Cartesian, 3 cartography, 13, 141, 142, 144, 145, 152, 153, 196, 200 Casa da Musica, 225 Castro, Teresa, 141, 142, 144 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 256 Cayrol, Jean, 136 Chabrol, Claude, 209, 235 Chain (2004), 90, 114, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123 Chalfen, Richard, 61, 63, 64, 66, 78 Chanan, Michael, 90, 114, 118, 120, 123 Channel Tunnel, 101 Chard & Co, 174 Chareau, Pierre, 256, 259, 261, 262 Charter Year (1957), 76 Chenal, Pierre, 208 Chicks Day (1951), 56 Children (1976), 70 Chirac, Jacques, 246 Chirico, Giorgio de, 265 Chombart de Lauwe, Paul-Henry, 153 chorography, 145, 150, 151 Christmas Carol (1947), 51 cine-club, 20, 50, 60 cine-tecture, 205 cinemantics, 213 cinematic cartography, 141, 142, 170, 171, 188, 195, 196, 198, 200 cinematic geography, 89, 141 cinematographic tourism, 143, 186, 187 cinematography, 9, 169, 176, 179, 184, 234, 238, 239, 266, 267, 268

Index Cinquegrani, Maurizio, 4, 142, 169, 171 Cité du Rue Mallet-Stevens (1927), 261 City in Film project, 84 City of the Future (2007), 188, 196 city symphony, 1, 120 civic, 19, 24, 55, 66, 75, 77, 119, 129, 131, 176, 190, 229 Clair, René, 243 Clarke, David, 2, 7, 22, 225 Classe tous risques (1959), 40 Close My Eyes (1991), 100 Club des Amis du Septième Art (CASA), 256 Cocteau, Jean, 264 Code Unknown (2000), 238 Cœur Fidèle (1923), 39 cognitive mapping, 144, 148, 165 Cohen, Jem, 90, 114, 118, 119, 120, 122 comedy, 29, 41 concentration camp, 90, 125, 127, 128, 129, 132, 135, 136, 137 Conrad, Joseph, 3 Consenting Adults (1967), 180 consumerscapes, 12, 184, 191 consumption, 5, 9, 19, 27, 29, 31, 73, 142, 183, 184, 185, 186, 189, 190, 191, 194, 197, 200, 203, 201, 210, 212 Corkin, Stanley, 178 Cosgrove, Denis, 171 Côte d’Azur, 39–40, 42, 253, 254 Council of the Gods (1950), 51 Crown Film Unit, 142, 180 Crystal Palace, 171, 172, 174–178, 180 Cubism, 255, 257, 268 Cullen, Gordon, 205, 209, 224 Cunard, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 76, 229 Dachau, 89, 90, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 140 Dali, Salvador, 263, 264 Dardenne brothers, 236, 237 Davies, Terence, 32, 70, 71, 85, 91 Day Except Christmas (1957), 78 de Certeau, Michel, 37, 38, 45, 46, 48, 107, 166, 211 de Noailles, Charles, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 270

273

Dean, Tacita, 89, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 158, 202 Death and Transfiguration (1983), 70 Debord, Guy, 5, 11, 142, 152, 214 Delaunay, Sonja, 256 Deleuze, Gilles, 38 Delicatessen (1992), 240 Delluc, Louis, 9, 39, 256, 269 Demy, Jacques, 41 Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920), 208 dérive, 152, 153 Derrida, Jaques, 49 design, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 22, 27, 32, 179, 205, 206, 208, 209, 212, 219, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 229, 230, 231, 232, 237, 238, 245, 248, 255, 261, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 270 De-Stijl, 257, 258, 261 Detroit, 89, 90, 114, 118, 120, 123 Detroit, Ruin of a City (2006), 90, 114, 120, 123 diasporic spaces, 89 digital, 5, 6, 12, 13, 29, 30, 31, 33, 38, 106, 129, 135, 141, 196, 212, 217, 223, 225, 237, 240, 242, 244, 248 digitization, 19, 22, 30 Dimendberg, Edward, 2, 5 diorama, 107, 111, 183 Dirty Pretty Things (2002), 101 Discord in the Desert (1932), 74 dissolves, 206, 217, 218, 219 Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), 69 distribution, 8, 23, 26, 31, 188 Djo-Bourgeois, Georges, 253, 259, 261 documentary, 20, 25, 43, 57, 61, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 89, 120, 121, 122, 123, 131, 136, 137, 142, 148, 153, 159, 179, 180, 208, 220, 236, 266 Doesburg, Theo van, 257, 259, 261, 262, 265 Doisneau, Robert, 246 Donald, James, 11, 37, 38, 162 Driver, Felix, 172, 178 Dyer, Anson, 71, 228, 229 early film, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 13, 24, 29, 32, 39, 82, 142, 150, 175, 180, 188, 206, 229

274

Index

Edison, Thomas, 8, 178 editing, 37, 43, 56, 61, 64, 78, 93, 94, 99, 174, 209, 213, 214, 216, 217, 218, 235, 236 Eiffel Tower, 216 Eisenstein, Sergei, 12, 206, 215 electrification, 11 embodied, 3, 9, 47, 79, 83, 104, 170, 173, 176, 177, 180, 183, 211, 212 embodiment, 2, 6 emotional, 3, 28, 42, 65, 72, 76, 79, 84, 136, 137, 147, 161, 183, 197, 217, 259 Empire Marketing Board, 29, 142, 179 empty spaces, 77, 89, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 100, 102 Epstein, Jean, 9, 39, 162, 269 Estuary (1980), 4, 158 Études sur Paris (1928), 246 Europe, 25, 26, 63, 96, 112, 127, 128, 173, 178, 192, 209 European Capital of Culture, 69, 191 everyday, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 13, 20, 37, 38, 66, 73, 75, 78, 83, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121, 147, 148, 170, 181, 195, 206, 212, 213, 219, 226, 243, 247 Everyday Except Christmas (1957), 180 exhibition, 8, 25, 30, 51, 53, 63, 66, 74, 109, 138, 142, 171, 172, 175, 176, 223, 257, 265 experiential, 1, 12, 137, 141, 224 façade, 108, 109, 220, 262, 265 Facaros, Dana, 39, 40 Fair Play (c1963), 76 Family Portrait (1951), 142, 180 Fernsehturm (2001), 89, 90, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111 Festival of Britain, 100, 142, 180 fiction, 56, 64, 93, 101, 107, 122, 148, 178, 236 Fièvre (1921), 39 film-induced tourism, 185, 186 Film London, 187, 189 film noir, 2, 153 film-related tourism, 186, 187, 188, 191, 194 First World War, 25, 132, 153, 255, 268

Flaherty, Robert, 142, 149, 150 Fleetword Maritime Museum, 34 flânerie, 2, 3, 45, 151, 152 flâneur, 2, 3, 46, 107, 109, 150, 153 flâneuse, 151 Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), 238 Foucault, Michel, 6, 79, 171 French Cancan (1955), 240 French New Wave, 206, 236, 237 Freud, Sigmund, 44 Friedberg, Anne, 104 Friedkin, William, 39 From Hell (2001), 157 Full Metal Jacket (1987), 91 Fullerton, John, 82 Gardies, André, 234 Gaumont, 174 GDR, 104, 109 Gehry, Frank, 225 genre, 20, 39, 63, 66, 91, 153, 191, 196, 209, 234, 240, 248 geographer, 2, 93, 146, 153 Geographic Information Systems (GIS), 6, 141, 219 Gershwin, George, 146 Get Carter (1971), 97 Giacometti, Alberto, 261 Giedion, Sigfried, 208, 209 Gilbert, David, 178, 179 Gilloch, Graeme, 117 Glasgow, 20, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 178 Glasgow Our City (1949), 53 Glasgow Today and Tomorrow (1949), 53 global, 10, 21, 23, 27, 29, 104, 107, 112, 120, 165, 171, 185, 188, 191 Global Positioning System (GPS), 13, 141, 219 Godard, Jean-Luc, 12, 209, 236, 237, 241, 251 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 269 Gonzales, Jim, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84 Gomorra (2008), 239 Google Earth, 141 Great Exhibition, 175, 177, 180 Grierson, John, 29, 179 Gropius, Walter, 10 Guédiguian, Robert, 39, 42 Guèvrékian, Gabriel , 259

Index Guggenheim Museum, 225 Gunning, Tom, 82, 150, 188 habitat, 79, 117 Hales Tours, 162 Hallam, Julia, 6, 14, 20, 69, 78, 85, 191, 200, 202, 222 Haneke, Michael, 238 haptic, 135 Harley, John Brian, 144–145, 154 Harry Potter, 191 Harvey, David, 2, 7, 184 Hayek, FA, 68 Heath, Stephen, 39 Hedren, Tippi, 235 Henderson, Fiona, 21, 179 Hepworth, Cecil, 174, 176 heritage, 21, 22, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 47, 72, 132, 184, 185, 188, 189, 191, 194, 196, 200, 203, 201, 215, 218, 263 Hess, Charles, 259, 261 Highmore, Ben, 2, 9, 198 Hilary and Jackie (1998), 191 Hilberseimer, Ludwig, 10 Himmelblau, Coop, 12 Hitchcock, Alfred, 39, 42, 235 Hobsbawm, Eric, 169 Hoffmann, Josef, 255, 258 Hogenkamp, Bert, 52, 63, 73 Honecker, Erich, 109 Horrall, Andrew, 176 Hors de prix (2005) housing, 20, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 67, 84, 176, 219 Housing Problems (1935), 179 Hoylake Cine Group, 76 Hsu, Hou Hsien, 236, 238 Hue and Cry (1947), 102, 104 Hugo, Victor, 211 Huster, Francis, 41 Huszár, Vilmos, 261 Hyde Park, 175, 178, 180 Hyères, 253, 254, 258, 263, 265, 266 ideology, 61, 107, 157, 165, 169, 170, 179, 180, 215 Il était une fois un flic (1972), 41 imperialism, 1, 3, 169, 171, 172, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181

275

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), 152 In Place of Death (2008), 90, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 137, 138, 140 inhabit, 78, 183, 212, 213 Interchangeable Ltd, 175 Island Race (1995), 158 It Happened in the North (1953), 51 Italian neo-realist movement, 234, 236, 237 Jameson, Frederic, 7, 148, 165, 226 Jarman, Derek, 69, 70, 158 Jennings, Humphrey, 142, 148, 180 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, 240, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248 Jourdain, Francis, 259, 261 Jules et Jim (1962), 240, 245 Justin de Marseille (1931), 39 Kaganski, Serge, 246 Kanigel, Robert, 36, 40 Kassovitz, Mathieu, 238 Kaufman, Boris, 36, 37, 43, 44, 47 Kay, Graham, 197, 202 Keiller, Patrick, 1, 9, 14, 90, 114, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 147, 148, 158, 167, 188, 189, 196, 233, 239 King, Elaine, 82, 101, 102, 201, 255, 270 King Kong (2005), 201 King’s Cross, 101, 102 Kirby, Lynne, 3 Knowles, Eric, 76 Koeck, Richard, 1, 5, 7, 9, 14, 84, 198, 205, 208, 222 Koetter, Fred, 210, 212 Koolhaas, Rem, 12, 225 Korda, Alexander, 48, 209 Kracauer, Siegfried, 117, 121 Kronenburg, Robert, 205, 206, 216, 222, 223 Kubrick, Stanley, 12, 217 Kuhn, Annette, 86, 97 Kuleshov, Lev, 215, 216–217 KZ Dachau, 126, 127, 128, 131, 133, 134, 136 L’age D’or (1930), 263 L’Amour en Fuite (1979), 245

276

Index

L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui (1929), 208 L’Herbier, Marcel, 208, 256, 266 L’Inhumaine (1924), 208, 256, 257, 266 La Baie des anges (1963), 41 La Haine (1995), 234, 237 La Jetée (1962), 237 La Mer de toutes les Russies (1995) La Nouvelle Vague, 209 La Nuit américaine (1973), 42 La Prom’ (1995), 44 Laclau, Ernesto, 7 Lady L. (1964), 42 Landsberg, Alison, 72, 137 landscape, 8, 13, 38, 45, 73, 79, 82, 84, 89, 90, 91, 101, 107, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 141, 145, 150, 158, 159, 161, 162, 166, 172, 178, 179, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 195, 197, 198, 222, 223, 224, 258, 260, 263 Laurens, Henri, 261 Lautner, Georges, 41 Lauwers, Mieke, 63, 73 layering, 47, 90, 198 Le Corbusier, 10, 55, 207, 208, 209, 257, 258, 259 Le Dernier Métro (1980), 245, 249 Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001), 206, 234, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 246, 247, 248 Le Grice, Malcolm, 158 Le Sacré Coeur, 240, 241 Le Sang D’une Poete (1930), 264 Le Secret De Rosette Lambert (1920), 256 Le Vertige (1925), 256 Lebas, Elisabeth, 52, 66 Lefebvre, Henri, 2, 4, 5, 14, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 141, 143, 156, 157, 167, 169, 186, 214, 217 Léger, Fernand, 256, 258 Les 400 Coups (1959), 240, 245 Les Cahiers du Cinéma, 246 Les Égouts du paradis (1979), 41 Les Enfants du paradis (1945), 42 Les Kankobals (1995), 44 Les Mystères Du Château Du Dé (1928/29), 207 Let Glasgow Flourish (1952-56), 50, 51, 52, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 65, 66, 67 Letter to Brezhnev (1985), 191, 192

Levell, Nicky, 174 Libeskind, Daniel, 269 Lightplay: Black-White-Grey (1932), 208 liminal landscapes, 89 lived space, 4, 5, 38, 84, 116, 142, 143, 201, 227 Liver Cine Group, 79, 229, 230 Liverpool, 3, 9, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 89, 138, 178, 184, 186, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 211, 222, 223, 225, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231 Liverpool, Echoes of the 1940s and 1950s (1994), 70 Liverpool: City of Change (c1960s), 79, 82 Liverpool: the Pace Quickens (c1960s), 79 Liverpool: the Shapes of Future (c1960s), 83 Liverpool: the Swinging Sixties (1994), 70, 71, 72 Liverpool Film Office, 190, 191, 202, 203 Liverpool Sounding (1967), 71, 78 Lloyd Wright, Frank, 207, 255, 258 Local Hero (1983), 93, 239 location, 9, 10, 36, 41, 42, 44, 47, 48, 73, 76, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 98, 99, 128, 132, 143, 147, 151, 164, 173, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 201, 202, 227, 228, 229, 233, 234, 236, 238, 240, 243, 244, 245, 248, 254, 264, 265 Lola Montes (1955), 42 London, 3, 72, 78, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 105, 108, 112, 114, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 142, 143, 147, 148, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 188, 189, 190, 192, 195, 212, 217, 219, 225, 235 London (1994), 90, 114, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 147, 148 London Can Take it (1940), 180 London Filmmaker’s Co-op, 158 London Zoo, 171, 173 Loos, Aldolf, 10, 258

Index Los Angeles, 15, 17, 49, 102, 103, 182, 188, 206, 220, 221, 233, 235 Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), 102, 104, 233, 235 Love Actually (2003), 189 Lumière, 8, 10, 19, 151, 173, 228, 229, 230, 231, 236, 238, 244, 266 Lurçat, André, 257 Lury, Karen, 2, 93 Lynch, Kevin, 165, 189, 219, 224 M&C Saatchi, 185 MacCannell, Dean, 9, 104 Madonna and Child (1980), 70 Malevitch, Kasimir, 257 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 255 Mallet-Stevens, Robert, 207, 208, 209, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 264, 265, 266, 267, 270 Man Ray, 207, 208, 253, 254, 255, 260, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268 Man with a Movie Camera (1929), 43, 149 Manchester, 15, 32, 33, 34, 49, 138, 140, 178, 182, 185, 204 Mandy (1952), 97, 102 Manhattan (1979), 142, 146, 149, 178 Mann, Claude, 41 mapping, 2, 4, 6, 7, 13, 76, 78, 94, 111, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 148, 152, 154, 165, 171, 179, 184, 188, 189, 196, 200, 220, 266 mapping impulse, 141, 144, 145, 154 Mapping the City in Film project, 201 mapscapes, 151 Marcus, Alan, 14, 90, 125, 126, 129, 137, 138, 140 maritime, 27, 28, 31 Marius et Jeannette (1997), 39 marketing, 5, 24, 27, 29, 31, 142, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194, 201 Marseille, 38, 39, 40, 42, 48, 209 Marseille Vieux Port (1929), 209 Massey, Doreen, 2, 92, 93, 118 Match Point (2005), 93, 188 Mayhew, Henry, 170 Mazierska, Eva, 184 McDowell, Tara, 89, 104, 179 McGrath, Caitlin, 23 McNeill, Isabelle, 19, 36, 48

277

McQuire, Scott, 3 Meades, Jonathan, 217 Mediterranean, 36, 38, 44, 48, 264 Mekas, Jonas, 63 Memo Mori (2009), 142, 156, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167 memory, 5, 9, 13, 20, 37, 38, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 69, 71, 73, 81, 84, 85, 89, 90, 94, 97, 106, 110, 111, 116, 119, 120, 121, 125, 129, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 142, 143, 151, 159, 162, 166, 180, 184, 186, 195, 198, 200, 201, 210, 226 memoryscapes, 70, 72, 79 Menjant Garotes (1930), 264 mental maps, 223 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 206, 210 Merseyside, 20, 71, 73, 74, 75, 78, 85, 143, 191, 192, 195, 197, 199, 202 metadata, 30 methodology, 115, 116, 134, 136, 195, 196, 233, 234, 248, 266 Metropolis (1927), 55 migration, 25, 28, 29 Mimi (2003), 42, 43, 45, 46 Mingard, Paul, 192 Mischief Night (2006), 245, 249 Miss Potter (2006), 185 Mitchell & Kenyon, 8, 10, 19 Mitchell, Timothy, 172 mobility, 2, 3, 6, 13, 19, 24, 29, 36, 43, 44, 98 modernism, 83, 100, 172, 208, 209, 243, 267, 269 Modernity, 19, 21, 270 Moholy-Nagy, László, 208 Mondo (1995), 42 Mondrian, Piet, 150, 258, 265 montage, 12, 26, 56, 58, 72, 83, 84, 119, 122, 130, 134, 136, 137, 161, 206, 213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 235 Montmartre, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249 Montreal, 19, 24, 26 Moreau, Jeanne, 41 Morning in the Streets (1959), 71, 84 Moulin Rouge (1952), 240 movie map, 142, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 194, 199, 200 Moviegram Films, 53

278

Index

Moving Image Development Agency (MIDA), 192 Mumbai, 188 Munich, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134 Municipal, 52, 58 museum, 177, 269 Mutoscope, 174 Naked City (1948), 237 Naples, 102, 239 narration, 55, 78, 91, 95, 121, 122, 126, 134, 136, 137, 161, 165, 209, 210, 217, 218 narrative, 2, 11, 12, 37, 41, 46, 64, 70, 89, 91, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 114, 119, 120, 122, 123, 126, 136, 137, 144, 147, 171, 181, 183, 205, 209, 210, 211, 214, 215, 217, 218, 220, 224, 226, 234, 235, 238, 244, 245, 266 national, 4, 21, 23, 30, 32, 40, 56, 75, 77, 143, 165, 172, 185, 187, 188, 189, 192, 222 navigation, 187, 196, 201 Neumann, Dietrich, 7, 11, 14, 100, 208 New Agency, 172 New Brighton, 75, 76, 197, 198 New York, 23, 26, 63, 72, 93, 102, 105, 108, 146, 147, 148, 149, 166, 178, 190, 201, 219, 236, 238 New York Street Scenes (1896–1898), 178 Newcastle and District Amateur Cine Club, 86 Nowhere Boy (2009), 191 Newland, Paul, 142, 156 newsreel, 24, 29, 61, 64, 71, 74 Nice, 19, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 263 Nice, Very Nice (1995), 44 Nocturne (2002), 158 non-place, 89, 114, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 157, 183 Norris Nicholson, Heather, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29, 72, 73 North West Film Archive (NWFA), 35 North West Vision and Media, 192, 194 Notting Hill (1999), 101 Nouvel, Jean, 12 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, 95, 96, 195 Nuit et Brouillard (1955), 136, 140

Nutti, Lucia, 150 Odin, Roger, 60 Of Time and the City (2008), 69, 72, 84, 85 Old St John’s Market & Town Scenes (c1960), 79 Oliveira, Manuel di, 238 Olympic Games, 142, 156, 164, 165 On the Waterfront (1954), 31 One Way Boogie Woogie (1977), 150 Opération Magali (1952), 40 Oud, J.J.P., 257 Our City (1949), 53 Our Homes (1949), 53, 54, 55 Ozeanfant, Amédée, 257 Ozu, Yasujiro, 234 Pagnol, Marcel, 39, 42, 48 Pais, Theodore, 125, 126, 130, 134 Palast (2004), 89, 104, 108, 109, 110, 111 Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), 90 palimpsest, 125, 127, 131, 160, 166, 198 Pallasma, Juhani, 12 panoptic, 3, 13, 37 panorama, 46, 84, 105, 107, 110 panoramic perception, 3, 83 Paris, 3, 12, 105, 108, 111, 112, 120, 152, 153, 183, 190, 209, 212, 216, 236, 237, 238, 240, 241, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 253, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 261, 263, 265 Paris qui Dort (1924), 243 Passport to Pimlico (1949), 97, 100 Pauls, Michael, 39, 40 Peace and Plenty (1939), 56 Pennan, 239, 251 Penz, François, 7, 10, 13, 102, 104, 205, 206, 233, 237, 234, 238 Performance (1970), 97, 98 Petit, Chris, 159, 167 phantom rides, 1, 162, 176 Philadelphia, 23, 192 photogenié, 148 photography, 5, 10, 24, 109, 112, 153, 158, 172, 208, 225 Piccadilly (1929), 157 planner, 10, 212 Pleasures Past (1974), 197, 198 Poelzig, Hans, 208

Index Poiret, Paul, 256 Porto, 12, 216, 225, 238 Potsdamer Platz, 110, 112, 114 poverty, 70, 71 Powrie, Phil, 243, 244 Prague, 137 Pressure (1974/76), 92 Prévert, Jacques, 246, 248 production, 6, 8, 10, 13, 20, 24, 27, 42, 50, 52, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 64, 66, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78, 94, 100, 116, 117, 141, 142, 150, 152, 166, 169, 172, 184, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 197, 200, 201, 205, 208, 209, 210, 214, 220, 224, 240 Progress Report No.2 (1948), 53, 54, 56 projection, 6, 19, 31, 141, 165, 183, 264 Promenade (1995), 12, 36, 39, 43, 44, 47, 48 promenade architectural, 12 Promio, Alexandre, 173, 175, 228, 230 Prostitute (1980), 94 Psycho (1960), 235 psychoanalysis, 1 psychogeography, 90, 142, 147, 152, 161 Ptolemy, 150 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 215 Purism, 265, 268 Quantum of Solace (2008), 239 Queen Square Market (1962), 85 Queen Victoria, 171, 177, 178 Raban, William, 158 Ready, Steady Go (1963–66), 72 Redshift (2001), 158 regeneration, 19, 21, 22, 26, 32, 157, 161, 184, 187, 190, 200, 212, 220, 239 Reggae (1971), 180 regional, 21, 23, 32, 72, 143, 150, 187, 188, 189, 192, 222, 245, 263 Reisz, Karel, 180 Rennie Mackintosh, Charles, 207, 255 Repérages (1996), 44, 47 representation, 3, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 26, 39, 47, 48, 52, 83, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123, 143, 156, 162, 165, 166, 169,

279

171, 172, 188, 196, 200, 201, 208, 212, 220, 223, 239, 247 Resnais, Alain, 136 rhythmicity, 3 Richardson, Emily, 142, 143, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 185 Riefenstahl, Leni, 137, 140 Rietveld, Gerrit, 257, 261 Rivette, Jacques, 209 Robert, Jean-Louis, 36, 39, 40, 52, 60, 97, 142, 149, 206, 207, 208, 222, 247, 253 Roberts, Les, 1, 5, 6, 14, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 142, 183, 186, 188, 191, 198, 200, 202, 222 Robinson, Ian, 4, 90, 114, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 147, 148 Rohmer, Eric, 209, 237 Rome, 27, 44, 96, 132, 190 Room at the Top (1959), 72 Rosemore Films, 79, 82, 83 Rotterdam, 239 Rouch, Jean, 237 Rowe, Colin, 205, 210, 212, 220, 223 Ruoff, Jeffrey K., 63, 65 Ruttmann, Walter, 43, 149 Ryan, Deborah, 20, 50, 79, 176, 202 Sachsenhausen, 132 Said, Edward, 170, 172, 237, 238 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), 92 Sanders, James, 10, 223, 226 Sant’Elia, Antonio, 257 Sartoris, Alberto, 258 Saunders, Lynn, 191, 200 Sauvage, André, 246 Schindler’s List (1993), 131 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 3 Schmerkin, Nicolas, 244, 247 Schneer, Jonathan, 173 Schofield, Peter, 185, 187, 194 Schopenauer, Arthur, 269 Scorsese, Martin, 236 Scotland, 52, 54, 58, 59, 65, 75, 93, 138, 239 screenscapes, 154 Second World War, 40, 44, 50, 52, 71, 75, 76, 96, 212, 228, 239 Sefton Park, 83

280

Index

Sennett, Richard, 173 serial vision, 209, 223 set design, 10, 11, 205, 221, 260, 262, 263, 264 Seven Days (1974), 158 Seven Days to Noon (1950), 92 Shand, Ryan, 20, 50, 78, 79, 202 Shannon, Roger, 192 Sheldon, Karan, 30 Sherwin, Guy, 158 Shohat, Ella, 1, 3 Simmel, Georg, 212 Simon, Claire, 32, 45, 46, 48 Sinclair, Iain, 90, 142, 143, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 195 site-specific, 13, 189, 215 Situationists, 5 Skladanowsky, 8 Smashing Time (1967), 92 Smith, John, 67, 85, 158, 167, 175 Soja, Edward, 7, 92 soundtrack, 44, 45, 47, 61, 62, 70, 71, 151, 160 South Bank Movie Trail, 189 South Kensington Museum, 177 Southampton, 19, 24, 25 Sparrows Can’t Sing (1962), 92, 157 spatial turn, 6, 7, 92, 144 spatiality, 2, 3, 6, 7, 115, 186, 200, 205 spectacle, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 28, 104, 148, 176, 178, 185, 194, 197, 201, 266 spectator, 45, 84, 134, 135, 136, 150, 162, 184, 214, 234, 235, 237, 238, 241, 243, 266 spiritual, 117, 156 Squires, Judith, 95 St Petersburg, 47, 190 Stam, Robert, 1, 3 Stebbins, Robert, 60 Steinmetz, George, 90, 114, 118, 120, 123, 124 Stewart, Melissa, 51 Stoker, Bram, 169 Studios de la Victorine, 42, 49 Studios Riviera, 42 Study in Reds (1927), 64 Sturken, Lisa, 71 Sunday by the Sea (1953), 51 Sundial (1992), 158

surveillance, 13, 118, 142, 143, 146, 156, 162 surveying, 142, 145, 152, 153, 154 Swan Cine Club, 75 Swann, Paul, 184, 192 Swedish Tourist Association, 187 Sweeney! (1977), 98 Sweeney 2 (1978), 98 Sydney Opera House, 216 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 12 Taut, Bruno, 10 Tautou, Audrey, 41 temporality, 8, 90, 107, 248 Thames and Clyde Film Productions, 53 The Battle of the Somme (1916), 179 The Birds (1963), 235 The Cardinal and the Corpse (or a funny night out) (1992), 159 The Cemetery (2010), 137, 140 The Changing Face of Liverpool (c1960s), 78 The Concise Townscape (1961), 209 The Eagle’s Track (1953), 51 The Elephant Man (1980), 157 The French Connection II (1974), 39 The Ghetto (2009), 137, 140 The Last Laugh (1932), 74 The Last of England (1987), 92 The Long Day Closes (1992), 69 The Long Good Friday (1979/81), 92, 100, 157 The Memorial (2010), 137, 140 The Reckoning (1970), 97 The Strange Affair (1968), 97 The Way We Were (2008), 72 Things to Come (1936), 209 Those Were the Days (2005), 72 Thunderbirds (2004), 189 Tiersen, Yann, 243 Tilston, Angus, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 81, 84, 85, 86 To Catch a Thief (1955), 39, 42 topography, 7, 76, 83, 93, 121, 141, 146, 175, 183, 191, 193, 195, 196, 229, 234, 235, 241 topophilia, 142, 145, 146, 147, 148, 154 topophobia, 147, 148 Total Khéops (2002), 39 Totality (2000), 111

Index Toulmin, Vanessa, 8, 23 tourism, 5, 36, 40, 104, 130, 143, 152, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194, 203, 201 Tourism Australia, 185 Tourneur, Maurice, 39 transatlantic, 22, 24, 25, 26, 29, 32, 70 Transit (2006), 142, 156, 158,158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167 transition, 8, 12, 20, 37, 43, 82, 96, 109, 164, 192, 209, 218 travelogues, 24, 82, 148, 149, 150, 151, 195 Trilogie marseillaise, 39 Triumph des Willens (1935), 137, 140 Truffaut, François, 12, 42, 209, 240, 248 Tschumi, Bernhard, 12 Tsikounas , Myriam, 247 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 146 Turn of the Tide (1967), 78 Twenty-Four Dollar Island (1926), 149, 150 UK Film Council, 187, 201, 204 Un Chien Andalou (1929), 263, 264 UNESCO, 31 Universal Exhibition, 177 United States, 140, 182 Up the Junction (1965 and 1967), 92 Urban, Charles, 174, 176, 177, 179 urbanism, 4, 5, 7, 11, 121, 123 Us and Them (1970), 200 utilitarianism, 55 Van der Pol, Gerwin, 247 van der Rohe, Ludwig Mies, 257, 259 van Eesteren, Cornelius, 257 van Ravesteyn, Sybold, 261 Vanderschelden, Isabelle, 243, 247 Vantongerloo, Georges, 261 Venice, 109, 137 Vertov, Dziga, 12, 43, 149, 206, 213, 215 Vichnievsky, Laurence, 247 Victim (1961), 92 Victoria Jubilee Bridge, 26

281

Viennese Secessionists, 207 view aesthetic, 82, 150, 188 Vigo, Jean Vigo, 36, 37, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47 Villa de Noailles, 207, 253, 254, 255, 257, 258, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 270 Villain (1971), 97 Vincendeau, Ginette, 247 virtual, 4, 6, 9, 11, 13, 20, 37, 38, 43, 45, 48, 84, 94, 102, 110, 115, 121, 183, 184, 186, 193, 198, 224, 225, 227, 255, 256 Visit Britain, 188 Visit London, 187, 189 Visit to Soviet Union (1959–60), 51 visual mapping, 142, 144, 145, 151, 153, 154 visuo-haptic, 134, 135, 136, 137 Vitagraph, 177 Wachowski brothers, 11 Wales Screen Commission, 188, 202 Walton, John, 184 Walturdaw Company, 174 Warwick Trading Company, 174, 175, 177 waterfront, 22, 24, 26, 27, 28, 32, 75, 77, 80, 82, 83, 225 Waterloo Road (1945), 96 We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959), 180 Wegener, Paul, 208 Weihsmann, Helmut, 10, 11, 205, 206, 208, 253, 254, 270 Weimar, 11, 257 Welsby, Chris, 158 Wharton, Edith, 31, 264 Who Cares? (1971), 71, 72, 85 Wilhelm Schelling, Friedrich, 269 Wilson, Jane and Louise, 8, 158 Wollen, Peter, 94, 100 Woolcock, Penny, 249 World’s Fair, 171 Zilzer, Gyula, 40 Zimmermann, Patricia, 64