Mapping the city in film: a geo-historical analysis

The relationship between film and urban environments in one that is well established in writings on both film and cities. From the earliest days of the medium, the immaterial architectures of film have played a significant role in the way cities have been imagined and represented. Yet despite the almost elemental bond that exists between the filmic and the urban, there have been surprisingly few attempts to map the relationship between filmic representations of urban space and the social, material and lived spaces within which they are embedded. In this regard the current AHRC-funded project 'City in Film: Liverpool's Urban Landscape and the Moving Image' has proved ground-breaking insofar as it has sought to directly engage with the materiality of the urban fabric underpinning film practices in Liverpool. However, there are few explicitly cartographic analyses of film in studies to date. This project will provide the first full and extended research into this field of enquiry by developing an interactive digital map of Liverpool in film that will draw on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology. Utilising already established resources on Liverpool's urban landscape in film, which include a comprehensive database of films made in and of Liverpool from 1897 to the 1980s, the research will enable different urban spatial formations (filmic, architectural, geographic) to be brought into critical spatial dialogue. Geographically referencing the film footage within contemporary and historical landscapes, this innovative project will establish a unique and sustainable model for research into cities and film. Maps, as Franco Moretti notes, function 'as analytical tools...bringing to light relations that would otherwise remain hidden'. By opening up the different cinematic spaces of the city to detailed cartographic and spatial analysis the researchers will be able to explore more effectively the correlation between the material development of the city (for example, changes in patterns of mobility, the horizontal and vertical expansion of the city, housing and transportation developments, architectural quality) and the filmic spaces of representation that have mediated and captured the changing character of Liverpool's urban fabric.

The research will involve detailed spatial analysis of a range of non-fiction genres (actualities, amateur/independent, documentaries, newsreels). The ability to geo-reference the data drawn from these films enables the project team to pursue innovative avenues of research that will contribute to interdisciplinary discussions on themes of place, space and representation within urban environments. The digitisation of selected film footage is integral to the analytical and evidence-based engagement with our research problems and questions. By conducting extensive ethnographic and qualitative research amongst amateur and independent filmmakers in Liverpool and Merseyside, as well as archival research into both filmmaking and planning practices in the city, we will gain a detailed understanding of the social, political and historical contexts within which key film practices were situated . This contextual data, along with audio-visual material drawn from interviews, oral histories, as well as digitised footage from a core selection of filmic material, will be incorporated within the GIS map, providing a rich and multi-layered reading of the city's architecture and social, cultural and historical geographies.

One of the principal aims of this project is to explore cutting edge ways of disseminating research on film to a wide range of audiences, through, for example, public screenings and exhibitions, conferences and seminars. In 2010 a version of the GIS film map will form part of an interactive public display to be exhibited at the new Museum of Liverpool, and the complete database will be accessible form the university library for scholarly and research activity.