Abstract
Long considered of limited interest, ‘locality’ has emerged as a key concept in both human geography and ethnography, championed by Doreen Massey and Clifford Geertz. It can be argued that all films, whether addressing ‘universal’ or limited audiences, deal in the depiction of place; and that our engagement with these often depends tacitly on how we identify such places, whether in a Western or in North London. Taking cues from Massey’s validation of the ‘merely local’, from De Certeau’s ‘practices of everyday life’ and from experience of working with local archive film, it is argued that spatial apprehension is a neglected aspect of how we engage with all film, and that a sense of the ‘local’ dramatises this engagement, making us active participants in the spaces represented filmically.
For my former colleagues at the Palacky University, Olomouc, where Gregor Mendel once studied and laid the foundations of genetics through his planting of peas.
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Notes
- 1.
See for instance the UK regional film archives’ World War Two programme on Films from the Home Front at http://www.movinghistory.ac.uk/; also the Australian National Film and Sound Archive online collections at: https://www.youtube.com/user/FILMAUSTRALIA.
- 2.
This emerged from a strand of the AHRC Research Centre for British Film and Television entitled ‘The London Project’. See brief history of the LSSC at: http://londonscreenstudy.com/about-us/.
- 3.
Weekly public screenings have taken place over some 7 years. For past programmes of film screened, see: www.londonscreenstudy.com.
- 4.
An early model for the London Screen Study Collection was the Vidéothéque de Paris, established in 1988 as a publicly accessible collection of films portraying all aspects of Paris, now known as the Forum des Images. On its history, see Josette Naiman, ‘La Vidéothéque de Paris’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 1988, 18.18.: http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/xxs_0294-1759_1988_num_18_1_2934.
- 5.
I am indebted for this concept of ‘world-making’ to Daniel Yacavone’s work, first encountered in his Ph.D., and now published in Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). I would add to Yacavone’s largely philosophical account, Roger Odin’s concept of ‘visiting’ the places we see in films through viewing, as outlined in his essay ‘Visiter une ville, voir un film’, in Villes cinématographiques. Ciné-lieux, Théorème n°10 (Paris, Presse Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2007): 213–219; trans. Ian Christie as ‘Visiting a City, Watching a Film’, in Arbeit, Christie, eds., The Uses and Abuses of History (Olomouc: Palacky University Press, 2015).
- 6.
Yacavone invokes the philosopher Nelson Goodman and his book Ways of Worldmaking (1978) as a basis for exploring forms of ‘world-making’, in which new worlds are always re-made from elements of what has gone before (see esp p. 85, and pp. 86–113).
- 7.
The term ‘affective space’ is used in a number of disciplines, although without any consistency (as noted by Thrift, in 2004 and 2009.). The sense I am invoking here refers to how we are responding to spaces, often at an unconscious level, based on formative early experience. For an earlier exploration of ‘filmic space’, see my ‘Landscape and “Location”: Reading Filmic Space Historically’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice vol 4, issue 2, (2000).
- 8.
Frontier Marshall (Allan Dwan 1939) was an earlier version of the ‘heroic’ Wyatt Earp story, and according to IMDb’s listing, this has been reused on a number of occasions. See: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0025144/trivia?tab=mc&ref_=tt_trv_cnn.
- 9.
Beauty in the Borough is held by Bruce Castle Museum, which houses the local history archive for Haringey, a borough created in 1965 by amalgamating Hornsey, Wood Green and Tottenham. The original print was digitised as part of London’s Screen Archives’ regional Screen Heritage project.
- 10.
Dentist in the Chair (Don Chaffey 1960) was a tepid comedy starring Bob Monkhouse, which performed well enough to have a sequel, Dentist on the Job, released the following year. The ABC cinema had opened as the Ritz in 1936 as Muswell Hill’s second super-cinema, just 3 months after the nearby Odeon, which survives as a heritage landmark today, after being tripled in 1974. With nearly 2000 seats, the Ritz could hardly survive as a single-screen venue with attendances declining steadily, and it closed in January 1978, after a change of name to ABC in 1962, shortly after being filmed for Beauty in the Borough. See Jeremy Buck, Cinemas of Haringey (London: Hornsey Historical Society, 2010): 66–68.
- 11.
Frederick Cleary (1905–1984) was a member of London Corporation’s Court of Common Council and chairman of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association. He is commemorated by a garden named Cleary Garden off Victoria Street, EC 4HQ. See also: http://www.londongardensonline.org.uk/gardens-online-record.asp?ID=COL019.
- 12.
The film is included in the 2012 DVD London Rediscovered: A Panorama of Films from the 1950s, available from the London Screen Study Collection, Birkbeck College.
- 13.
In the prefatory advertisement to his Natural History of Selbourne, Gilbert White wrote of ‘laying before the public his idea of parochial history, which, he thinks, ought to consist of natural productions and occurrences as well as antiquities’. He also urged other ‘stationary men’ to consider observing their situations in greater detail. Massey writes of ‘a sense of place’ being associated with ‘memory, stasis and nostalgia’ in Space, Place and Gender, p. 119.
- 14.
One of a series of films made in Lambeth by Ronald Yeatman and the Astral Cinema Club, following his Lambeth Festival Week in 1951. This covered local celebrations during the Festival of Britain, just as Lambeth Rejoices reflects a wide range of local celebrations accompanying the 1953 Coronation, from sports and entertainment in the park to exhibitions, a carnival procession and street parties, culminating in more formal events at Lambeth Palace and a visit by the Queen and Prince Philip. (16mm b/w silent films, 14 mins. Held by Lambeth Borough Archives and the BFI National Archive). The Elephant Will Never Forget, directed by John Krish in 1953, was largely filmed during London’s ‘last tram week’ in July 1952, combining reportage with re-creation, a musical-hall song and an eloquent commentary. For details and background, see: http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1077323/index.html.
- 15.
The flâneur was a recognised urban type in nineteenth-century France, but was given cultural currency by Charles Baudelaire’s essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (Le Figaro 1863) and Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Writer of Modern Life’, and in the vast literature that these essays and authors have created.
- 16.
‘Phantom rides’ were an early genre of film, taken from a moving vehicle, which gave viewers the sensation of moving along a railway track or road, without the means of locomotion being visible. This film has the given title The Canterbury Tour and is tentatively dated c.1923, presumably on the basis of two films from 1922 and 1923 seen advertised at a cinema on the high street. For a description, see Screen Archive South East catalogue at: http://sasesearch.brighton.ac.uk/view/?from=search&fromid=adv%3D1%26search%3Dcanterbury%2Bhigh%2Bstreet&film=1024.
- 17.
On the portrayal of Canterbury in film, see my chapter, ‘History is Now and England’, in Ian Christie and Andrew Moor, eds., Michael Powell: International Perspectives on an English Film-maker (London: BFI Publishing, 2005).
- 18.
This film, never edited into a short newsreel story, has been published on an LSSC DVD, Their Past Your Future, under the given title Housewife’s Story.
- 19.
One ‘theme’ of the film is the shortages of foodstuff, and the limitations imposed by rationing; and another is the promise of new housing that young families looked forward to amid the material miseries of 1948. My own family, in Belfast, was housed in a new suburban estate built after the war, so I find it easy to identify with the baby seen in this film, who may well have grown up in Crouch End.
- 20.
The fact that both are silent – like the majority of amateur and family films – recalls arguments from the early years of synchronised sound that this provided less scope for audience immersion – often dismissed as reactionary, although touched upon by early theorists, such as Erwin Panofsky, in his account of the ‘co-expressibility principle’, in the essay ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Picture’ (1995), and Marshall McLuhan in his classification of media as ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ in Understanding Media (1964).
- 21.
Doreen Massey, already quoted here, ends her collection Space, Place and Gender with a 1992 essay ‘Politics and space/time’, which calls for ‘an alternative view of space’ that stresses its social construction and the intrinsic interrelation of space and time. Film invariably provides a temporal image of places, both in fictional genres and in the matter-of-fact local, yet this dimension of filmic experience has received depressingly little attention.
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Christie, I. (2017). ‘Merely Local’: Film and the Depiction of Place, Especially in Local Documentary. In: Penz, F., Koeck, R. (eds) Cinematic Urban Geographies. Screening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46084-4_5
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