Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
structures in historical representations of the city in film. The radial ge-
ometries that connect the urban landscape of Liverpool with the urban,
suburban, and regional geographies of the wider Merseyside area prompt
consideration of the networks and practices of mobility that have shaped
the historical development of the city and region. However, other fac-
tors shaping the historical geography of film practice in Liverpool and
Merseyside have also had an important impact on where or, indeed,
how
we might draw the boundaries that delimit and define our object of
enquiry. The redrawing of administrative boundaries, for example, can
have the obvious effect of placing or (more crucially) displacing moving
image geographies that formed clearly defined areas of film, place, and
urban identity. A good case in point is the example of Southport, a town
some thirty miles from Liverpool that was formerly part of the county
of Lancashire but that, following the creation of Merseyside in 1974,
is now in Sefton, one of the five metropolitan boroughs of Merseyside
(alongside Knowsley, Liverpool, St. Helens, and Wirral). In conducting
a longitudinal study of archive films of Liverpool, therefore, the shift-
ing civic and geographic status of films historically aligned to different
county and administrative authorities needs to be taken into account.
Like Southport, Bootle, an independent county borough until 1974, is
now part of Sefton. As a consequence of the redrawing of administrative
boundaries, films shot in areas such as Bootle, including many of the
early Mitchell and Kenyon series of actuality films made of the city in
1900-1901 such as
Employees Leaving Alexandra Docks, Liverpool
(19 01)
and the first reconstructed actuality film,
Arrest of Goudie
(1901), have
become incorporated within a cinematic geography that brings them
into neighboring alignment with Crosby and Seaforth in the borough
of Sefton.26
26
Prior to the movement of the docks to the river mouth at
Seaforth, the historical importance of the dock industries at Bootle has
meant that the town's former imaginaries of place were more closely as-
sociated with those of Liverpool, three miles to the south.
W hile the geographic relocation of local, place-based films may be
of only marginal significance in terms of the broader meanings and
contextual framings that we might otherwise extract from readings of
archival film material, ethnographic research amongst filmmakers in
Merseyside has drawn critical atention toward the contested nature of
