Front Matter
Pages: i-iv
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Table of Contents
Pages: v-vi
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List of Illustrations
Pages: vii-x
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Preface and Acknowledgements
Pages: xi-xvi
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1Cinematic Geography: Mobilizing the Archive City
Pages: 1-31
Pitch the words ‘Liverpool’ and ‘film’ to the casual cineaste and you will more than likely solicit a response ranging from general blankness to a list that includes perhaps half a dozen or so features shot in, or in some way associated with the city. With the notable exception of the documentaryOf Time and the City(2008), Terence Davies’ eulogy to the city in which he grew up (and, as with many in the post-war period, was destined to leave), for the most part the extent to which the city has left its cinematic imprint on the wider cultural...
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2An Incriminated Medium? The City as Urban Spectacle
Pages: 32-63
Of the many ‘turns’ that have, with increasing regularity, come to define points of theoretical re-orientation in recent years, the ‘mobility turn’ has arguably been one of the most far-reaching and significant. As to what exactly ‘mobility’ refers to here I will elaborate further below. But it is important to stress at this juncture that it is within the theoretical framework of spatiality that these elaborative discursions are more specifically situated. In framing ideas of a ‘mobility turn’ in terms of the production of mobility (Cresswell 2001) my analysis is focused on the ways in which these are closely bound...
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3Cityscapes: Panoramas and the Mobile Gaze
Pages: 64-96
In Max Ophüls’sLetter from an Unknown Woman(1948), virtual travel by train in one key scene establishes a panoramicmise-en-scènein which the mobile gaze of film and its moving-image precursors is doubly alluded. Seated in a simulated train compartment, the film’s two main characters, Lisa Berndle (played by Joan Fontaine) and Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan), are seated opposite each other beside a window, the curtains of which are pulled back either side of the ‘frame’ like a cinema screen. Outside the window, scenic backdrops – panoramic reproductions of Venetian and Alpine landscapes – pass by creating the impression...
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4City Limits: Crossing Boundaries of Place and Identity
Pages: 97-127
In 2006 a musical comedy called ‘Brick Up the Mersey Tunnels’ was performed at Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre. The plot centres around a fictitious terrorist organization called the ‘Kingsway Three’ who decide to brick up the tunnels in response to the snobbish attitudes towards Liverpool and Liverpudlians they encounter among people from the other side of the Mersey. The play was inspired by a letter in theLiverpool Echofrom a woman in the Wirral who was complaining about the Liverpool accent, despite the fact that, like many from across the river, she actually worked in the city.¹ In a...
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5Movie-mapping: Cinematographic Tourism and Place-marketing
Pages: 128-161
In Luis Buñuel’s filmThe Phantom of Liberty(1974), a Python-esque series of absurdist sketches, a French bourgeois couple flick through photographs which a creepy-looking man in a park had given to their daughter (with the instruction ‘do not show to grown ups’). We initially only see the parents’ reaction to the photographs and not the images themselves, yet from their evident disgust (and arousal) we naturally assume they are looking at pornographic imagery. However, it soon becomes apparent that the images are those we might typically expect to see on tourist postcards: a sunset scene; the Madeleine Church in...
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6World in One City: Travel, Globalization and Placeless Space
Pages: 162-189
In a report published in January 2009, Liverpool was cited as one of the UK cities likely to be worst hit by the global economic recession. The city was ranked as the worst performer in the Social Deprivation Index of UK cities, with the lowest employment rate, highest level of benefit claimants and third highest rates of social inequality (after Manchester and Blackpool).² With the election of the Conservative-led coalition government in May 2010, and an austerity programme of massive cuts in public expenditure that is expected to result in the worst unemployment statistics for a generation, the city’s economic...
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7Cinematic Cartography: Mapping the Archive City
Pages: 190-218
Liverpool is a place and a space made up of many different cities. This is reflected both geographically in the heterotopic composition of its urban landscapes, and in the way the city has been understood conceptually. Throughout this book Liverpool has variously been conceived of as a virtual city, reel city, disappearing city, real-and-imagined city, surreal city, generic city, centripetal city, centrifugal city and archive city. While each of these reflect the specific and overlapping configurations of time and space that have left their imprint on modern Liverpool, it is the last of these – the archive city – that...
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Afterword
Pages: 219-222
In his review of the final Harry Potter film,Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2(2011),The Guardianfilm critic Peter Bradshaw comments on the use of London’s St Pancras railway station to represent nearby King’s Cross, from where, in the stories, the Hogwarts train departs. Noting that ‘millions of tourists are undoubtedly convinced that this building is, in fact, King’s Cross’, he concludes that ‘[St Pancras] may be forced simply to change its name’.¹ Whether or not this actually happens, that such an outcome is even conceivable gives some insight into the ways film and cinematographic tourism...
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References
Pages: 223-239
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Index
Pages: 240-248
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