Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the “place” and identity of local film cultures in the region. Respond-
ing to the question as to whether he regards himself as a Merseyside
filmmaker, Jim Morris, a member of Southport Movie Makers, an ama-
teur film club established in 1949, pointed out that his filmmaking col-
leagues, as well as people in Southport more generally, have tended to
set themselves apart (symbolically and geographically) from “Mersey-
side,” drawing a boundary somewhere around Crosby that excludes the
nearby heavily industrialized dockland areas such as Seaforth, now in
south Seton:
W hen I first came to Southport it was in Lancashire, and then it became
Merseyside. Well, that didn't bother me . . . but [for another member of the
club] any where south of Crosby he doesn't know; [and]
Liverpool . .
. ? [laughs]
And that is the atitude of a lot of people in Southport. . . . It is always a sore
point in Southport. . . . “Sefton,” well, I think they perhaps accept Sefton as a
more suitable title, but “Merseyside”? - I think they associate that word with
all that is bad.
27
The imagined geography represented by such views encompasses rural
Formby, an affluent middle-class coastal town to the south of Southport,
but not industrial Bootle and other urban areas nearer to Liverpool.
This example demonstrates some of the problems that arise when
atempting to map and place local ilm cultures. Film location sites, as
merely points on the map or polygon data, narrate a spatial story that
elides the more fuzzy dynamics of lived and symbolic space. The in-
corporation of qualitative data in the form of video and audio files of
interviews, oral histories, and other ethnographic-based materials on the
GIS platform provides for a more nuanced reading of a city or region's
film geographies. This anthropological approach to visual cultures of
space and place allows for a greater recognition of the fluid, open, and
contested nature of geographic boundaries. Moreover, to include the
work of Southport-based filmmakers on our GIS film map of Merseyside
is itself to misrepresent the locally refined sense of place that has shaped
and defined the habitus and identity of members from Southport Movie
Makers. By ataching qualitative data to point data on the map, we are
thus able to chart a more representative view of how film geographies
are perceived and articulated by those who both produce and consume
local films.
