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abstraction that characterizes Frank and Benny's
urban peregrinations. The more practical consid-
erations of shooting in busy locations such as
Mathew Street, a popular tourist attraction and
mecca for night-time revellers, demanded the ser-
vices of two burly security guards who joined the
production crew on the Liverpool shoot. As Cox
describes in his book
X Films
(2008), this was
partly to keep drunken on-lookers from disrupting
certain scenes (a quiet word in a doorway with
the offending culprit would usually suffi ce), but
more importantly to stop the theft of production
equipment, a problem for which the otherwise
fi lm-friendly city had acquired something of a
reputation (Cox, 2008, p. 220).
11
In the context of the present discussion
therefore, the cinematic geography of
Three
Businessmen
is approached not in terms of its
realism or its perceived 'urban verisimilitude' (of
which, by implication,
Liverpool: World in One
City
is in some way defi cient), but rather - as a
sur
realist travelogue - its unique spatial and
temporal dynamics, and the ways in which
these prefi gure, articulate or map some of the
experiential disjunctures in space and time
wrought by globalization and the neo-liberal
expansion of multinational capital. In this regard,
and against the contextual backdrop of
Liver-
pool: World in One City
, Frank and Benny's
frustrated gastro tour of 'Liverpool locations' - a
spatial narrative of thwarted or unsated con-
sumption - raises salient questions about the
role and complicity of the moving image in the
production of postmodern urban space.
Furthermore, the fi lm's navigation of these
frequently bewildering landscapes points to
alternative forms of aesthetic, social and cultural
practice which 'go against the grain' of hege-
monic spatio-temporal ordering. These psycho-
geographic modes of critical urban praxis both
map and disrupt the abstract spaces of con-
sumer capital, infusing them with a poetics of
the absurd; the marvellous; the serendipitous
and enchanted (Selwyn, 2007). Cultivating the
layered topographies of an affective geography,
the psychogeographer, or 'critical urban way-
farer' (Roberts, 2010b), creates the imaginative
possibility of an embodied and authentic recla-
mation of everyday urban space.
The oft-cited defi nition of 'psychogeogra-
phy', a termed coined by the Situationist guru
Guy Debord, is '[t]he study of the special effects
of the geographical environment, consciously
organized or not, on the emotions and behav-
iour of individuals' (Debord in Coverley, 2006,
p. 10). As a critical aesthetic response to the
rationalization of (post)modern urban space,
the psychogeographic practice of the
dérive
, or
'urban drift', is more latterly associated with the
work of the writer and fi lm-maker Iain Sinclair.
Noting that '[w]alking is the best way to explore
and exploit the city', Sinclair suggests that
'[d]rifting purposefully is the recommended
mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie,
allowing the fi ction of an underlying pattern to
reveal itself' (1997, p. 4).
As a pithy distillation of the rationale
surrounding the 'doing' of psychogeography,
Sinclair's refl ections seem particularly well-
observed. However, they do not lend themselves
all that readily to the characters of Frank and
Benny, who appear less consciously aware of the
'underlying pattern' which their global tour of
Liverpool is laying bare. 'Drifting purposefully' in
search of a meal, Frank and Benny's journey
narrates a spatial fi ction from which they them-
selves seem somehow disconnected. The 'impos-
sible' geographical ellipses that mark the points
of transition between different (global) locations,
while disorientating and perplexing for the travel-
lers as they try and regain their bearings, are not
ever questioned or seen in any way to be out of
the norm (or 'out of place'). For Frank and Benny,
they are merely navigating a world to which they
have long grown accustomed. An environment
all too crushingly familiar in their workaday, cor-
porate existence as travelling businessmen.
However, as a (purposefully)
psychogeographic
encounter with (or drift through) Liverpool's
urban landscape, their journey is experienced
vicariously, by us, the viewer.
Or is it. . .?
What Cox and writer Tod Davies subtly
convey in
Three Businessmen
is the close cor-
respondence between, on the one hand, the
navigation and architecture of cinematic space,
and, on the other, that of the consumer city,
which shapes and demands evermore globalized
11
Despite the security precautions, equipment was stolen on three separate occasions during the Liverpool
shoot (Cox, 2008, pp. 222-228).
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