Dis/embedded Geographies of Film: Virtual Panoramas and the Touristic Consumption of Liverpool Waterfront

Abstract

Drawing on archive film footage of Liverpool waterfront shot by tourists and other visitors to the city in the first half of the 20th century, this article examines the touristic construction and consumption of a panoramic space of representation that was materially embedded within the everyday flux of a thriving urban—industrial landscape. The deindustrialization of the waterfront and the closing up of the river as a well-integrated social landscape (epitomized by the closure of the dockside Overhead Railway in 1956) have precipitated a certain shift in the various “ways of seeing” that have hitherto structured the tourist gaze in Liverpool. Reflecting on the increasingly disembedded nature of the waterfront in the cultural geography of the city today, the article argues that virtual reconstructions of a panoramic “mobile gaze” orientated around the river and waterfront map a spatial absence and fragmentation characteristic of Liverpool’s emergent postindustrial landscapes of “culture capital.”