The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections

Abstract

More than a decade has passed since this journal highlighted the ‘cross-fertilization’ that was taking place between the fields of film studies and geography, with a special issue on ‘Space/Place/City and Film’.1 The interest that the editors had identified has continued to flourish and to set the background to diverse research projects. In the British context, one of the most successful and well-disseminated of these projects was ‘A city in film: Liverpool's urban landscape and the moving image’, based at the University of Liverpool from 2006 to 2010. Edited after the completion of the first stage of that project, Richard Koeck and Les Roberts's The City and the Moving Image brings together scholars from film and architecture backgrounds in a collection of case studies which eschew the usual suspects (such as film noir) for a startlingly varied and original range of material. Broadly speaking, explorations into the relationship between the city and the moving image have taken two distinct methodological routes, informed by a familiar divide in film and television studies between textual and extratextual emphases. The idea of cinema as ‘a quintessentially urban set of practices’, introduced on the first page of this book, is contentious amongst cinema historians but has proved fruitful as an approach to the analysis of film space and narrative. Most of the essays in this collection are concerned with the cinematic presences of particular cities – not only Paris, London and Berlin, but also Dachau, Nice, Detroit and, of course, Liverpool. This exploration of different locales is stimulating because it stems from a concrete, detailed engagement with these towns rather than an abstract notion of the modern metropolis. The fact that only a couple of the chapters mention commercial feature films suggests that using place as the focus of investigation can open up a range of relevant cinematic materials, providing new talking points that need not touch on notions of quality or authorship. There is a refreshing eclecticism in the kinds of film covered in this book, from promotional films for a cruise line to the artist's films of Tacita Dean and the mildly politicized amateur films discussed by Ryan Shand. Such variety produces uneven results, and the relative obscurity of many of the films discussed means that readers will probably not have seen them – but might well be prompted to seek them out after reading the rich, perceptive descriptions provided by some of the authors. The four articles in the second part of the book, ‘Landscapes of Memory and Absence’, are particularly successful in transcending the section's vague title through well-written, evocative accounts of both cinematic and actual spatial experiences.