Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
genres engage with a historically contingent geography of place. Trans-
ferring the City in Film catalog to a GIS platform enables the develop-
ment of a more refined process of geohistorical analysis as well as the
production of a range of georeferenced contextual materials, including
digitized segments of particular films, interviews with filmmakers, cine
society programmes, company/organizational material, and supporting
documentation. The use of GIS also enables the research team to situ-
ate the content of films listed in the catalog using digital mapping tools,
informing understandings of the ways in which the city is visualized by
specific genres and at particular times. Furthermore, the mapping pro-
cess is enabling a fruitful dialogic tension to emerge between different
perceptions of place and identity as they are articulated in specific genres
and filmmaking practices.
Locating the City in Film
The use of the name Merseyside to depict a regional area raises the first
problem that this research had to confront, that of the blurred and shift-
ing boundaries between the city and its hinterland. Using Ordnance
Survey maps from the 1890s to the present and historical boundary data,
we can trace how the changing political and administrative boundaries
of the city and its hinterland have shaped the cinematic geography of the
films at different times. One of the questions that quickly emerge when
mapping a city's representation in film is where to draw the boundaries
that define the urban area. W hat or where is the object that is the “city
in film”? At the start of our research the area bounded by the inner ring
road to the east that demarcates the inner core of the nineteenth-cen-
tury city from its twentieth-century suburban and industrial hinterland
(Queens Drive) and the natural border of the R iver Mersey to the west
and south marked out the area that was initially to be the geographical
focus of enquiry. This was in large part a practical consideration - the
need to delimit the amount of potential research material. However, as
the current City in Film map of Liverpool and Merseyside shows, at-
tempts to “geographically fix” a clearly defined urban spatial area have
proved problematic, an indication that many of what can or could be
regarded as “Liverpool films” takes us, by default, to consider a more
