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