Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
footage of these events, including newsreel items, student productions
such as
Sphinx Reel No. 6, 1956: Pantomania
(Basement Film Unit, 1956)
and
Sphinx Reel No. 7, 1957: Panto 1957
(Basement Film Unit, 1957) pro-
vides perhaps the best coverage of the events and of the geographical
range of the procession.
Notable additions to cinematic geographies given over to festivals
and parades in the 1960s and 1970s include, as with the Basement Film
Unit productions, routes through the city center in the shape of the
homecoming celebratory parade following Liverpool Football Club's
Football Association Challenge Cup win in 1965. This event was covered
in the British Movietone production
Ee-Aye-Addio - the Cup's Back Home
(1965), showing the rapturous reception of the team, led by their captain,
Ron Yeats, and legendry manager, Bill Shankly, from many thousands
of supporters lining the streets of the city. The Hope Street area was an-
other location that featured in films from this period in the form of the
Hope Street Pageant, which took place in 1977 in celebration of Queen
Elizabeth's silver jubilee and her visit to Liverpool in June of that year.
This event was documented in
Hope Street Glory,
a Granada Television
production narrated by the Liverpool poet Roger McGough.
Finally, returning to Pier Head, by the 1970s there was a decline in
the use of the area for festivals and parades, as evidenced in archive filmic
records. This mirrors the more general economic and industrial decline
of the docks and waterfront area, which had, by the 1970s and 1980s,
reached its nadir. Indeed, responding to the growing mood of militancy
and social unrest that was felt throughout the city at the time, in the
1980s the Pier Head was more likely to play host to trade union rallies
and political demonstrations, as documented in
Unemployment March,
1980,
filmed by students from Prescot College of Further Education. St.
George's Plateau was also a place where political demonstrations were
frequently held, videos and recordings of which were made in the 1980s
by filmmakers who formed part of a growing independent film sector
on Merseyside clustered around a communally run production resource
known as Open Eye.
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The greater availability of video enabled local
people to talk back to television news and current affairs programming;
broadcast footage of the notorious Toxteth riots was counterbalanced
by a documentary made by Liverpool Black Media (
hey Haven't Done
