Toward Spatial Humanities: Historical GIS and Spatial History

6. Mapping the City in Film

143 Mapping the City in Film Julia Hallam and Les Roberts six In this chapter we examine how geospatial computing tools such as GIS can contribute to an understanding of the development of local film culture and its contribution to projections of “place,” drawing on archival research into Liverpool and Merseyside on film. We will map some of the contradictory and ambiguous spatialities that historically have mediated ideas of “the local” and “the regional” in a range of moving image genres, exploring the correlations between categories of genre, date, and location as assessed in relation to records in a spatial database consisting of over seventeen hundred films shot in Merseyside from 1897 to the 1980s. Significantly, the use of GIS has revealed the ways in which particular styles and genres of filmmaking create their own cinematic maps, initiating new modes of spatial dialogue between the virtual landscapes of the moving image and the architectural, geographic, and imagined spaces within which they are embedded. A provincial city on the Mersey estuary in England’s northwest of around four hundred thousand people, Liverpool is internationally renowned for its football teams (Liverpool and Everton), its music (the 1960s Mersey sound and the Beatles), its infamous slave-trading past, and the three buildings at the Pier Head that dominate its iconic waterfront –the Royal Liver, Cunard, and Port Authority buildings, colloquially known as the “Three Graces.” Granted UNESCO world heritage status in 2004 for its innovative enclosed dock systems and grand nineteenth-century neoclassical civic buildings, the once-thriving port, deemed in the nineteenth century the “second city” of the British Em- 144 Julia Hallam and Les Roberts pire, has reinvented itself for the twenty-first century as a postindustrial city dependent, at least in part, on heritage and cultural tourism for its continuing economic development and prosperity. The city shared this patternofgrowth,decline,andregenerationwithmanyportcitiesinEuropeandNorthAmericaduringthenineteenthandtwentiethcenturies , their fortunes ebbing and flowing with the shifting tides of global capital and commercial trade. The films collated in the City in Film database document urban life throughout a century of decline, redevelopment, and reinvention. Visitors passing through the city in the 1890s, many of them European migrants on their way to a new life in the United States aboard the liners that plied the Atlantic trade route between Liverpool and New York, could marvel at the nine miles of busy docklands by traveling the length of the waterfront on the first electric overhead railway in the world. This was a journey taken by Jean Alexandre Promio, a cameraman working for the Lumière Brothers who recorded the first moving images of the docks from one of the railway carriages in one of the first known instances of a “tracking” shot (Panorama pris du chemin de fer électrique, Lumière Brothers, 1897). Promio also recorded the modern, architecturally innovative office blocks in the commercial district around the Strand, Water Street, Castle Street, and Dale Street, capturing the busy shoppers on adjacent Lord Street and Church Street (Church Street, Lumière Brothers, 1897) and the vestments of civic pride enshrined in the grandeur of St. George’s Hall, shot from St. George’s Plateau, just outside Lime Street railway station (Lime Street, Lumière Brothers , 1897). Based on a reading of the length of the shadows in Promio’s images, it seems probable that, like many visitors to the city, Promio arrived at Lime Street and recorded his images, crossing St. George’s Plateau as he traveled from the station to the waterfront via the main thoroughfare, Church Street.1 Today, the neoclassical hall and the accompanying buildings on the Plateau (the Walker Art Gallery, the William Brown and Picton Libraries in tandem with the Albert Dock, and the Three Graces at the Pier Head) form the core of the maritime mercantile city. Unusually, the city boasts two cathedrals, both built in the twentieth century. The impos- Mapping the City in Film 145 ing Anglican Cathedral, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in 1903 in the Gothic Revival style, is the fifth largest cathedral in the world. Towering above the commercial district and Liverpool’s Chinatown on St. James’s Mount, it took seventy-four years to build and was finally completed in 1978. Facing it, close to the University of Liverpool’s Victoria Building at the other end of Hope Street, is the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, a modernist building affectionately known locally as “Paddy’s...