Civic Visions: Mapping the ‘City’ Film 1900–1960

Abstract

Films made in and about cities offer a rich source of material for investigating projections of civic identity and citizenship and their relationship to the changing urban imaginary of the twentieth century. Focusing on a range of films made in and about a provincial city and collated by the ‘Mapping the City in Film’ project as part of research into the relationship between film, architecture, and urban space, this paper explores how textual and genre analysis can be complemented by the use of accurate mapping tools such as geographical information systems software (GIS). GIS creates a framework for an open ended multi-disciplinary, intermedial exploration of film and space in which location information can be mapped and visually organised. This enables, for example, an exploration of how various forms of place-making activity are projected at particular times by different cultures of film production and film-related practices. The paper argues that GIS visualisation methods in partnership with traditional film analysis and historical contextual information can begin to map an affective architecture of place.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Dr Les Roberts for assisting with the development of this paper and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Notes

¹ Analysis of feature film productions, City in Film database, http://www.liv.ac.uk/lsa/cityinfilm/catalogue.html

² Films by these filmmakers include Letter to Brezhnev (Chris Bernard 1984), Three Businessmen (Alex Cox 1998), Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies 1988). Screenplays include No Surrender (Alan Bleasdale 1985), Grow Your Own (Frank Cottrell Boyce 2007), Liam (Jimmy McGovern 2000) and Shirley Valentine (Willy Russell 1989).

³ This material forms part of the History Detectives permanent exhibition at the Museum of Liverpool.

⁴ Regional television developed in England with the passing of the Television Act in 1954; the franchise holder, Granada Television, started broadcasting in 1956. Television ownership rose nationally during the decade from around a million licenses issued in 1953–54 to 10,469,753 by the end of the decade (Hallam 2003).

⁵ Conley uses the concept of a ‘subject position’ in speech act theory to suggest that the ‘viewer-position’ in cinema studies might be an interrogative position occupied by the spectator: ‘a map in a movie can prompt us to ask where we are in view of the film’ (2007: 212).

⁶ Footage shot by amateur filmmakers that record 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. See Hallam 2010.

⁷ See, for example, St Georges Day in Liverpool (1901), Lord Roberts Presenting Medals to Boer War Volunteers in Liverpool (1901), Visit of Lord Kitchener to Liverpool? Or Lord Roberts in Liverpool (1901), Trafalgar Day in Liverpool (1901), Visit of Lord Roberts and Viscount Kitchener to Receive Freedom of the City, Liverpool (1902).

⁸ The Mersey Tunnels: 60 Years 1934-1994, Angus Tilston, Pleasures Past, 1994.

⁹ For a more developed discussion on using geospatial computing tools to map film and urban space see Hallam and Roberts (forthcoming).

¹⁰ For a detailed account of the development of Merseyside cine societies, see Hallam 2010.

¹¹ Material developed as part of this project is held on the GIS database at the Museum of Liverpool and can be accessed in part from the interactive exhibit in the History Detectives gallery.