Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
six
Mapping the City in Film
Julia Hallam and Les Roberts
In this chapter we examine how geospatial computing
tools such as GIS can contribute to an understanding of the develop-
ment of local film culture and its contribution to projections of “place,”
drawing on archival research into Liverpool and Merseyside on film.
We will map some of the contradictory and ambiguous spatialities that
historically have mediated ideas of “the local” and “the regional” in
a range of moving image genres, exploring the correlations between
categories of genre, date, and location as assessed in relation to records
in a spatial database consisting of over seventeen hundred films shot
in Merseyside from 1897 to the 1980s. Significantly, the use of GIS has
revealed the ways in which particular styles and genres of filmmak-
ing create their own cinematic maps, initiating new modes of spatial
dialogue between the virtual landscapes of the moving image and the
architectural, geographic, and imagined spaces within which they are
embedded.
A provincial city on the Mersey estuary in England's northwest of
around four hundred thousand people, Liverpool is internationally re-
nowned for its football teams (Liverpool and Everton), its music (the
1960s Mersey sound and the Beatles), its infamous slave-trading past,
and the three buildings at the Pier Head that dominate its iconic wa-
terfront - the Royal Liver, Cunard, and Port Authority buildings, col-
loquially known as the “Three Graces.” Granted UNESCO world heri-
tage status in 2004 for its innovative enclosed dock systems and grand
nineteenth-century neoclassical civic buildings, the once-thriving port,
deemed in the nineteenth century the “second city” of the British Em-
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