Brunsdon - the poignancy of place

8/12/2019 Brunsdon - the poignancy of place

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Charlotte Brunsdon

The Poignancy of Place: London and the Cinema

In the work on London and the cinema of which this article is a part, I am

trying to do two things which rather pull against each other. On the one hand,

I am trying to trace a history of the patterns of representation associated with

this capital city in the second half of the twentieth century. This involves the

identification of key periods, such as the immediate post-war period, the 1960s

and the later 1980s, which were particularly salient in the production of certain

types of cinematic London. It involves the identification of key film-makers,

producers and writers, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Ealing Studios or Hanif

Kureishi, who can be seen to engage repeatedly with London in their work. So

I am, at least partly, working with a notion of the changing representation of

real places that are themselves changing: I have a documentary look. The Port

that we find in the 1951 Ealing film Pool of London (director Basil Dearden) hasonly a ghostly presence in the Docklands of the later 1980s, with a moment of

transition caught in 1979s The Long Good Friday (director John MacKenzie).The parking meter, a key iconographic element in 1960s Swinging London

films, has lost its resonance today and never merits a close-up. The rooming

houses of Notting Dale and Notting Hill Gate in 1950s British cinema had

quite different inhabitants and stories.

On the other hand, one of the ways in which we see, and know andrecognize this London is through cinema. London is never just there it is

produced through stories, some of which are specific to this city, some of

which are the perennial themes of cities: the arrival of the stranger, the

anonymity of the crowd, the importance of appearances, the juxtaposition of

wealth and poverty. The infernal metropolis the hell that is the city is both a

perennial city theme and can be seen to have very specific national variants.

Infernal London is a figure found in a wide range of late-twentieth-century

films sayMona Lisa (Neil Jordan, 1986), Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993) and DirtyPretty Things (Stephen Frears, 2002) and has an extremely long literaryhistory. But its materiality in recent British cinema is different to that of

Dickens or Mayhews London, just as it is also different to infernal New York

or Rio de Janeiro. That is, London, as a complex imbrication of narratives,figures and tropes pre-exists cinema and is simultaneously figured by it.

Genre becomes an indispensable term in this context for it allows us to deal

with the patterning of elements and expectations. There are both different

Londons and different types of London film. The Victorian East End of Ripper

fiction has key iconographic elements whether filmed in a Berlin studio for

Pandoras Box (G. W. Pabst, 1929) or in Prague for the more recent From Hell(Allen and Albert Hughes, 2002). This East End has cobbled streets, dark


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alleys, swirling fog and the muffled sounds of carriage-horses hooves. It is

noticeably the same place as that in which Sherlock Holmes detects when he is

not on Dartmoor. This East End is a different East End to that we find in BritishGangster cinema, whether nouveau or not.1 In all cases, we are offered

Londons whose significance and plausibility as locations are determined not

by where they were shot, but by how that location is used cinematically. In this

argument, the best Londons, the most evocative and compelling Londons,

might have nothing in production terms to do with London as a location at

all. This is to see London in the cinema with a dramatic look.

So I am trying to avoid an ever-lurking geographical literalism, in which

attention to London and the cinema works as a type of list-making oh that

was shot in the studio; that wasnt really filmed in Pimlico; that bridge is in

Barnes not Putney; of course Covent Garden isnt a vegetable market any more

while at the same time recognizing both the existence of a historically

changing, multiply represented capital city and the particular history andconventions of cinema. As critic, Im trying to maintain what John Caughie, in

a differently inflected discussion of television drama, has called a

documentary and a dramatic look.2

We can see the tension between these two looks in the way in which

Wim Wenders has spoken about his 1987 film, Der Himmel ber Berlin / Wingsof Desire in 1997, after the fall of the wall and the re-unification of Eastand West Germany. The film was explicitly concerned with Berlin as a site of

memory, history and story-telling, and Wenders has been concerned

throughout his work with the traces of reality found and preserved in film and

photography. He could hardly have anticipated, though, the radical

transformation of Berlin after he made the film, so that the Berlin which is

overlooked by his angels culturally, politically and geographically no longer

exists:

The fact that something is due to go is always a good reason to include it in a scene.Wings of Desire is full of examples. Almost none of our locations exist any more. Startingwith the bridge where the motorcyclist dies. Thats gone. The place where we had thecircus is now a park. No need to mention Potsdamer Platz, or the Wall either. The wholefilm suddenly turned into an archive for things that arent around any more. Films thatdont call themselves documentaries, feature films, do that to an amazing degree.3

In his use of the word suddenly the whole film suddenly turned into an

archive for things that arent around any more Wenders struggles to express

the transformation of a film text by its historical context of viewing, a

transformation he consciously solicited (The fact that something is due to go

. . .). The film he has made is still the same, structured through the same dramaof the decision of Damiel (Bruno Ganz) to descend to mortality. But it is also,

inexorably suddenly a different kind of drama, a drama about the

disappearance not just of the old Potsdamer Platz for which Homer searches

in the film, but also, subsequently, of the very ruin and wasteland in which he

searches.4 The film inadvertently offers documentary traces which can

overpower Damiels drama and the recording of place, now past, transforms

the significance of the mise-en-scne.

60 the poignancy of place: london and the cinema


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I want to discuss three different ways in which we can think about the

intersections of these looks when considering post-war London in the cinema.

City themes and London stories

Wonderland (Michael Winterbottom, 1999), which is set in London over oneNovember weekend, is a film which tries to ground its story of the everyday

lives of one family and its neighbours in a London which is registered, at least

part of the time, as cinma-vrit. The film was shot using a hand-held super16mm camera, with minimal lighting, radio mikes and no extras, in locations

which include a caf, pubs, a bingo hall, a football match at Selshurst Park,

Brixton Police Station, Lewisham Hospital and a firework display.5

Wonderland follows the lives of a South London family over the weekend of

Bonfire Night, intercutting the stories of three sisters, Nadia, Molly andDebbie, with those of their parents, Debbies ex-husband, their neighbours

Donna and her son Franklin, and their estranged brother, Darren, in London

to celebrate his birthday with his girlfriend. Mainly naturalist in style, the film

also includes, at fairly regular intervals, sequences in which a prominent

Michael Nyman score played in different ways, sometimes strings,

sometimes piano and, at the climax of the film, more fully orchestrated

replaces naturalistic sound.6 On several occasions this sound track is used in

combination with time-lapse and slow-motion photographic effects. While the

photographic effects are used for city sequences, as I discuss below, the

Nyman score cannot be tied consistently to individual characters, moods or

locations, and quite often works to unite otherwise separate scenes.

Several critics, including Mazierska and Rascaroli, have read this as a film

about a chaotic and fragmented city characterized by urban alienation.7

However, I think it is much more usefully seen within what Andrew Higson,

in his discussion of 1940s British cinema, has called the melodrama of

everyday life, a genre which he argues to be relatively distinctively British in

its incorporation of certain features of the documentary idea into the

conventions of the domestic melodrama.8 What is particularly interesting

about the films attempts to combine dramatic and documentary looks is the

role of the Nyman score in transforming the status of the image, moving it

from a dramatic to a documentary look.

The first use of the Nyman soundtrack occurs very early in the narrative as

Nadia (Gina McKee) abandons a date in a Soho bar and walks quickly off

through the still lively nightlife. Nadia is the character with whom we have

most contact and the film opens with the soundtrack of her self-description ina lonely heart ad as she has a quick cigarette in a pub lavatory before

returning to the fray of a lonely-heart date. The evening is not going well for

Nadia, and the awkwardness of the encounter is amplified in the way in which

she and her date can hardly hear each other over the noise of the bar, having to

bellow their initial small talk. When Nadia does a runner, though, naturalistic

sound fades and is replaced by the first appearance of the wonderland

theme, played mainly on strings. The first chords are heard in the bar and then

Charlotte Brunsdon 61


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accompany Nadia as she starts walking. At first, as Nadia makes her way past

still-busy bars, the music seems like a theme for her. But as the camera dwells

on dancers and drinkers rendered strange by the absence of their own musicand sound, even returning to Nadias abandoned date in The Pitcher and

Piano, it seems to have a more abstract quality, distancing the viewer from the

good times that are and are not being had by all. In the second part of this

sequence, time-lapse photography is introduced, so that Nadia seems to leave

the scene of her embarrassment more quickly, and to walk speedily through

the West End. Instead of past individuals and particular places, Nadia speeds

through what becomes an undifferentiated late-night urban blur, which is

finally accentuated in the third part of the sequence when Nadia herself has

disappeared and we have only buzzy images of neon blur (see Figure 1).

With this first usage it is not clear how this move out of naturalistic time and

sound will work in the film, and the Nyman score is not consistently associated

with particular characters or moods. The next time it is used Nadia is happyafter a promising meeting with a new date, Tim. But it is also used (with piano)

over a group of scenes with Eileen, Franklin, Nadia and Eddie, with strings for

Eileen at Bingo and for Dan and Jack at a football match. I want to consider

another use with Nadia, again when she is leaving a date, this time with Tim.

She has previously met Tim for a drink at lunch-time and, unlike her first date

in the film, clearly considers him to have some potential. The next time we see

them together, in his central London flat, he has cooked them both a meal and


Figure 1. Nadia (GinaMcKee) in the West End(Wonderland, 1999, MichaelWinterbottom).Photograph BFICollections. Copyright:PolyGram Films (UK) Ltd


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they have then had sex. What Im interested in here, apart from Gina McKees

very fine performance of uncertainty about how much she is being humiliated,

is the move between the particular, local story of Nadias Saturday night andthe placing of this story as a city, and London, story.

The scene, as is characteristic of the film, is shot in edgy close-ups and

medium shots, with characters rarely centred in the image, which gives a

slightly nervous, unpredictable impression which my description smoothes

out. Nadias evening too has been intercut with those of other characters, so

there are time ellipses. After one of these, in which we understand Tim and

Nadia to have had sex on a bed/sofa in his flat, Tim pulls on a shirt, walking

over to the kitchen area, leaving Nadia half undressed and a little dishevelled

sitting on the bed. Standing in the kitchen, he gets a beer from the fridge and

loads himself a plate of left-over food from a saucepan, turning up the living

room light as he comes back. Nadia, who has been offered neither drink nor

food, says that she had better go and starts struggling to pull up her tights, asTim watches, snacking. As she leans forward to do this, he tidies a cushion

behind her. He offers to call her a cab, but she says shell take the bus. The first

notes of the Nyman score are heard as she leaves. When Nadia has gone, Tim

turns the lighting back down. The detail of this scene the food shovelled

out of the saucepan, the unoffered drink, the adjusted cushion and Tims

manipulation of the lighting gives precision to Nadias humiliation, as does

her struggle to put her tights back on. However, the next sequence does

something rather different.

We have the clear identification of a bus stop just off Trafalgar Square, with

both the dome of the National Gallery and the bus itself working as

iconographic London images. But Nadias lonely journey home through the

rain on the last bus begins to generalize her predicament. What starts as a

sequence which reaffirms the public geographical location of the personal

drama moves into a more perennial city sequence, invoking the theme of

loneliness in a crowd. Hunched in her seat, Nadia is filmed surrounded,

accosted and ignored by other travellers who are filmed with time-lapse, lack

of continuity and the Nyman score. Now while on the one hand we have been

clearly shown that this is Saturday night London nightlife, on the other the

disassociation of the mise-en-scne encourages us to read at a more generallevel. Although we know exactly what has happened to Nadia, we are also

encouraged to see Nadia as just one person in a huge city. The soundtrack is

crucial in changing the type of time and space of the film from a very

particular set of events in one characters life to a more general, abstract

meditation on city life. The sequence pulls together a topical story Nadias

particular Saturday evening in London with a perennial city theme, theloneliness and anomie of the city.9 It is in this sense that Nadia, and other

characters, can be seen as representative city dwellers. The qualities of the

music, its soaring and swooping orchestral score played over the rainy dark

London streets and the chaotic Saturday night bus, both generalize and

transcend Nadias story.



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Landmark London

Wonderland makes use of the internationally recognized iconography oflandmark London to locate its action. It doesnt start with an aerial shot of thePalace of Westminster and the River Thames, but it does use central London,

Soho and Chinatown. Very early on we see a shot of the rainy city from

Nadias South London flat, and in the sequence I have just discussed we saw

the National Gallery and a red bus. You know you are in London when you

see Tower Bridge, Big Ben and Westminster from the river, St Pauls,

Piccadilly Circus, red buses and black taxis. This iconography, like that of all

capital cities, is an historically formed, multi-media iconography which is, at

one level, always about location, but which is never just about location; it is

always, of necessity, also about national identity, and increasingly about the

marketing of unique tourist destinations. This iconography is not specific to

cinema and extends from postcards to plastic replica policemans helmets toTube map placemats, although it can be used in specifically cinematic ways,

one of which is a cinematic fantasy tourist bus in which editing means that no-

one has to endure the bits between the landmarks.

All films which claim London as their setting must engage with this

hegemonic discourse of location with that river, that clock, those buses and

those taxis but there are various ways of going about it. The eschewing of

what Katherine Shonfield has called the tourist hardware10 is often more

significant in a London-set film than its inclusion, and there are very different

tonalities with which iconographic elements can be used in narratives. But

landmark iconography is also both historical and contested in ways I can only

hint at here. Just which image or sound, in which combination, in which

period, means This is London is one of the ways in which the documentary

aspect of fiction film can be traced through the drama.

Pierre Sorlin has suggested that the same image within landmark

iconography can either block or incite the viewers engagement.11 An example

of blocking would be the use of Big Ben (image and/or chimes) at the top of

news bulletins on British media. The signification is minimal we are in

London and that is enough. The use of the image is transparently in the service

of location we are not being asked to think about Big Ben, or to remember

its use in films like Seven Days to Noon (Roy and John Boulting, 1950).12

Incitement, Sorlin suggests, is more interesting in that we know where we are,

and can now explore the visual presentation of the city. The point about tourist

hardware landmark imagery is that it is so encrusted with official and

commercial meanings that it is very difficult to use it in a way that incites

interest. The opening of Patrick Keillers film London (1993) is a good example ofthe invocation of landmark imagery Tower Bridge with a voice-over that

incites an unfamiliar engagement with the image. The soundtrack, Paul

Schofields patrician voice-over, announces Dirty Old Blighty, a catalogue of

modern miseries, with its fake traditions, its Irish war, its militarism and

secrecy, its silly old judges, its hatred of intellectuals, its ill health and bad food,

its sexual repression, its hypocrisy and racism and its indolence. Its so exotic, so

home-made. Through the juxtaposition of sound and image, Keiller challenges



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the normal, blocking use of Tower Bridge as signifier of location, to interrogate

Blighty and to incite reflection on what is, after all, one of her fake traditions.

Katherine Shonfield suggests that Hollywoods judgement on what areLondons big four emerges from the mist at the beginning of Mary Poppins,when Mary descends on London to be met by the Houses of Parliament, St

Pauls, the Tower of London and Tower Bridge.13 Thirty years later,

Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996) chose Big Ben, the statue of Boadicea, TowerBridge, Nelsons Column but also Carnaby Street, motorbike couriers, a

steel-drum player and a Pearly King and Queen. But it was understood that

Trainspotting was recycling tourist images; sometimes the signalling oflocation is so perfunctory that no more than street signs Piccadilly Circus,

Regent Street are shown. The narrative demanded that Rentons arrival in

London be briefly conveyed, and this the film did with an upbeat montage of

hackneyed and more modern images showing that the conventions of arrival

in London were being used, but that everyone concerned was cool enough toknow that these were the conventions you had to use. London iconography is

here a third-order system of signification, in which the familiar postcard

images are used but in a way which recognizes their commodification, and

indeed inscribes a knowingness about this commodification in the image as

in the ingratiating Pearly King and Queen and the various waves and

salutations given to us, the viewer, on this fantasy tour.

A rather more innocent way of engaging with landmark London can be

found in 1960s Swinging London films, which can I think be defined by the

fact that they do it zanily. The swinging protagonists encounter key elements

of 1960s landmark London Trafalgar Square, parking meters, red phone

boxes, the Horseguards and fool around in some way driving too fast

round Trafalgar Square in an MG, piling out of a phone booth, trying to make

bearskinned sentries laugh. In Darling (1966) the adultery of Diana Scott (JulieChristie) is signified with a close-up on a parking meter as the indicator

switches mechanically first to excess charge and then to penalty.14

Wonderland, in contrast, attempts a naturalist approach in which landmarkiconography is never isolated from its context. So although we do see the

dome of St Pauls, it is shot from Nadias South London flat, just as Trafalgar

Square and the National Gallery are almost unrecognizable in the rain. The

River Thames too is present, but it is narrativized as a private public place, not

just a sight, when Eddie (John Simm) spends a long time on Southwark Bridge,

peering into the water, rehearsing the story he will tell his pregnant wife

about walking out of his job. Winterbottom also contests the traditional

representation of the West End so that the streets through which Nadia walks

are lined with the shapeless huddled forms of the homeless their ravagedalcoholic faces are present here, in this fiction film, not siphoned off into a

special feature about homelessness. This approach attempts to ground

landmark London in a lived, material, everyday city so that there is an

inhabited London between the landmarks.

It is more common, though, for naturalist cinema which Wonderland isntquite to mark its authenticity through its eschewal of landmark London.

There are no views north in Gary Oldmans Nil By Mouth (1997), nor south in



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Ken Loachs Riff-Raff (1991). Loachs Up the Junction (1965) showed only therailway lines of Clapham Junction as the hint of a less local London. Naturalist

London establishes its claim to be the real London through its use of voice andaccent, transforming most of landmark London to the equivalent of Received

Pronunciation or Tourist Town. Only the most attenuated forms of landmark

iconography the corner of a bus, the flash of a taxi are used to identify

location. The exceptional locations here are Kings Cross and Soho, which are

recognizable landmark sites with particular lowlife connotations. In Nil ByMouth the lads go up West to Soho, just as characters from working-classareas of South and East London have throughout the history of British cinema.

Soho, of course, is one of the few locations in British cinema where we find sex,

and the long historical association between naturalism and the representation

of prostitution unites both Soho and Kings Cross, as a good night out begins

to turn into a hell of a night.

Landscapes of loss

When I began this research I was committed to avoiding two tendencies. I

didnt want to become a location bore, endlessly informing my companions

where scenes were actually shot, scrutinizing the image for signs of place,

puzzling over the geography of an edit: in short, someone obsessed with a

fantasy cinema of geographical veracity. Nor did I want to become one of

those people who observes, over many a cinematic image, Of course, thats all

gone now, as if the value of cinema resided solely in its ability to present us

with long-vanished locations.

I have been unsuccessful in both ambitions, trespassing forlornly over the

site of the former Gainsborough Studios as it is transformed into luxury

apartments and pursuing the dullest British films because of where they were

shot, finding myself delighted by glimpses of long-demolished dance-halls.

The devastation and redevelopment of the Docks which was such a feature of

the Thatcher years and which in fact provides many more locations for

television than film is a constant provocation for anyone interested in

London. But it has been Kings Cross which has forced me to want to explore

something of the poignancy of place on film. As Wim Wenders observes, the

inadvertent archive quality of cinema insists.

Kings Cross, as I have already suggested, features, with Soho, as the key

lowlife site of landmark London. The Copenhagen tunnel, the ironwork

bridges, the gas holders, St Pancras, Goods Way and Battlebridge Road feature

in numerous films, both as themselves and, for example in the case of

Battlebridge Road, as one of the rare cobbled streets still available for filmingthe past. It is to Kings Cross that desperate provincial parents hasten in

search of runaway children, and it is life in the infernal London on the streets

around Kings Cross which signifies the failure of the runaways dream in

films such as Stella Does Tricks (Coky Giedroyc, 1996) andMona Lisa.Mike Leighs 1988 film,High Hopes, is mainly set in Kings Cross, opening

and closing there. Leighs films are generally discussed in terms of working

method, performance and his attitude to his mainly working-class



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characters.15 Most of his work is set in Greater London and internationally he

is seen as a significant chronicler of late-twentieth-century British working-

and lower-middle-class life. I want, instead, using the double focus of adramatic and a documentary look, to analyse how location and the space of

the city are constructed in this film.

High Hopes was made in deep Thatcherism16 and, like Der Himmel uberBerlin / Wings of Desire (1987), before Glaznost and the fall of the Berlin Wall.In Britain, this was the period of the dismantling of the post-World War II

settlement and the selling off of a range of nationalized enterprises such as the

railways. With a huge boom in London house prices and with large bonuses

the norm in the post-Big Bang London Stock Market,17 the yuppie was the

triumphant figure of the decade which was marked by an increased

polarization between rich and poor. Following the unsuccessful Miners Strike

of 19845, it was a period of demoralization and deep trauma for the

generation radicalized in the 1960s, andHigh Hopes is one of a group of angry,oppositional films which includes The Last of England (Derek Jarman, 1987)and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (Stephen Frears, 1987).18 Leigh has subsequentlyobserved, How the world has changed since we made this film only six short

years ago . . . Cyril [the central male character] must be more deeply frustrated

than ever by the gulf between how things are and how they ought to be, and

how ever-increasingly hard it has become to do anything about it.19 One of

Mrs Thatchers most controversial policies was the sale of council (social)

housing, which had an immediate visual effect in that the first act of many new

house or flat owners was to differentiate their dwelling from those around it

with the purchase of a new front door. The planned uniformity of estates and

blocks of flats was transformed, just as the increasing gentrification of inner

London in the property boom led to penetration by the wealthy of previously

working-class areas. This is the London ofHigh Hopes. It is a London laid outwith a diagrammatic simplicity, not of geographical location but of types of

housing and housing ownership.

The film opens with a very long, masked shot of a man walking along a

street a strip of film in the middle of the screen which is then unmasked to

reveal that he is in a very busy street, surrounded by pedestrians and traffic.

The Gilbert Scott red-brick landmark of St Pancras Station signifies that this is

a location-shooting of Euston Road (the road on which the three north-bound

London stations, Euston, St Pancras and Kings Cross, are sited close to each

other). The man then makes his way, first firmly and then hesitatingly, to his

encounter with Cyril (Phil Davies) who lives at the back of Kings Cross in a

block of flats (see Figure 2).

Wayne (Jason Watkins), clutching his suitcase and his carrier bag, is lookingfor his sister and asks Cyril, who is fiddling with his motorbike, if he knows

where Ballswood House is. Waynes arrival in London reworks a very familiar

city story, the arrival of the ingnue from the countryside. Wayne doesnt

understand the scale and anonymity of the city: My sister. Vivienne Bennett.

Do you know her? Nor does he understand what comprises an adequate

address. Shirley (Ruth Sheen), Cyrils partner, can tell immediately that

Vivienne lives in a block of council flats:



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S: Well, Ballswood House is a block of flats.W: No, its not. Its a house, see 29, Ballswood House.

S: Yeah, but . . . its in a street .. . and you aint got the street name.

But Wayne doesnt come from the countryside, he comes from Byfleet in

Surrey, and he doesnt fall among thieves but among Cyril and Shirley, who

recognize his vulnerability and naivety and put him up for the night before

firmly returning him to his mother the next day. So Wayne serves as a device

to introduce us to the good city people of this story, who live in a squatted

Victorian block of flats behind Kings Cross. We see their small, dingy flat and

learn their politics (a very spikey cactus is called Thatcher) and understand

that under their scruffy, baggy, functional clothing beat hearts of gold (see

Figure 3).

Shirley and Cyril are the most rounded characters in the film, and their

depth and interiority are developed partly through their lack of materialgoods. They are juxtaposed quite schematically with two other couples, the

Booth-Braines and Cyrils sister and her husband, Valerie and Martin. The

Booth-Braines are heartless, wealthy gentrifiers who live in an inner-city

Victorian terraced house next door to Mrs Bender (Edna Dor), Cyril and

Valeries mother, while Valerie and Martin live in the suburbs in semi-

detached ostentatious vulgarity. Critical discussion of this film tends to circle

around whether Leigh is fair to the yuppie Booth-Braines and the more


Figure 2. Wayne (JasonWatkins) arrives in

London at Cyril andShirleys block of flats(High Hopes, 1988, MikeLeigh). Photograph BFICollections. Copyright:Mike Leigh / PortmanFilms


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suburban Valerie and Martin. Im more interested in how he uses the core

characters to sketch out a map of London in terms of the types of homes they

inhabit. For we have the social housing of Waynes sister and Mrs Bender a

council block blossoming the new doors of privatization and a poorly-

maintained Victorian terrace. Right next door to Mrs Bender we have the

expensive curtains20 and modernized interior of the Booth-Braines, who drive

a mud-spattered Saab and who balance their intrepid foray into inner-city

property-owning with somewhere in the country. Valerie and Martin have

less cultural capital and less money, and are arguably presented as slightly

less loathsome, although Valeries carefully chosen, ostentatiously fashionable

1980s interior is both ridiculed and used to reflect her shallow self-regard. The

Booth-Braines, Cyril and Shirley and Mrs Bender all live close to each other in

London. Valerie and Martin live in the no-place which is the suburbs, from

which the taxi fare would be about fifteen . . . score [pounds]. With the

privately rented flat of Martins lover, and the squatted Victorian tenement of

Cyril, Shirley and Suzi, the film offers a mapping of London in terms of

different possible relations between incomes and homes. This is London as it

is lived by people of different circumstances in their different homes,

necessarily thrown together. And it is a London that Leigh wishes to see

possessed not by the Booth-Braines, who clearly have the most money, but by

Shirley and Cyril and Mrs Bender. This is shown through the use of location-

shooting in the final scene of the film.


Figure 3. Shirley (RuthSheen) and Cyril (Philip

Davies) watch Wayneleaving their flats for thefirst time (they eventuallyhave to put him on a bus).One of the Grade II listedgasometers, erected by theImperial Gas Light andCoke Company in 1880, isvisible in the background;decomissioned in the 1980sthree of these weredisassembled in 2002.Photograph BFICollections. Copyright:Mike Leigh / Portman

Films


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This concluding scene is set on the roof of Shirley and Cyrils block of flats

and was filmed on one of the several Victorian blocks on Cheney and

Battlebridge Roads which were preserved throughout the 1980s and 1990s aslicensed squats.21 Mrs Bender has stayed the night with Cyril and Shirley after

the upsetting, climactic party at Valerie and Martins.22 In the morning, Shirley

and Cyril encourage her to climb up to the roof of the building where Shirley

maintains a little container garden among the chimney stacks. The film uses

the London landscape to provide an emotional resolution literally, high

hopes for both greater family connection and the possibility that there will be

children for Cyril and Shirley. Mrs Bender seems confused at first Where is

this? but begins to enjoy the vista as Cyril points out Kings Cross, St

Pancras, the gasworks and St Pauls, like a big tit. This is an unfamiliar view

of these familiar landmarks so close to the great arched glass and iron shed of

St Pancras but still offering a panoramic London skyline so it is not just Mrs

Bender who has to learn to adjust to her surroundings. We do too, particularlyin a film which has been so very earthbound and interior, and in which Mrs

Bender is now being offered excursions by Cyril and Shirley. We are with Mrs

Bender when she exclaims with wonder that it is the top of the world (see

Figure 4).


Figure 4. Cyril, Shirley andMrs Bender (Edna Dor),looking north-east, on theroof of the flats at the endofHigh Hopes. PhotographBFI Collections. CopyrightMike Leigh / PortmanFilms


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This is a dramatically satisfying resolution holding in abeyance, as it does,

what might happen, offering us only the vision of multitudinous but located

possibility, presented as a 360o

view of Kings Cross.23

Within the terms of thefiction this panorama is an objective correlative for the tentative emotional

rapprochement. It is, within its own terms, dramatically poignant, and the use

of location is an integral part of this. It would not work with a studio

panorama and the fact that so much is given by a view which is regularly

obscured by the chimney stacks offers a very fine rendition of how little

satisfies Mrs Bender and Cyril and Shirley. However and this is where I have

become a sad archivist the London in which Cyril encourages his mother to

take hope is surely not the complex of luxury hotels and Eurostar freight

depots currently being built on this site.24 Now the buildings stand alone in

the indecipherable remains of Cheney and Battlebridge Roads with the new,

huge glass and steel roof of the new terminal almost brushing against them.

There is something unbearably poignant in seeing a view from a now-isolatedbuilding of an area which no longer exists, a poignancy not imagined when

the film was made. The documentary look has its own drama in this

poignancy of place.

Main film credits

Wonderland (UK, 1999). Director: Michael Winterbottom. Producers: MicheleCamarda, Andrew Eaton. Screenplay: Laurence Coriat. Director of

Photography: Sean Bobbitt. Editor: Trevor Waite. Production Designer: Mark

Tildesley. Music / Music Producer: Michael Nyman. A Kismet Film Company

and Revolution Films production for PolyGram Filmed Entertainment and

BBC Films. 108 minutes.

Cast: Shirley Henderson (Debbie Phillips), Gina McKee (Nadia), Molly

Parker (Molly), Ian Hart (Dan), John Simm (Eddie), Stuart Townsend (Tim),

Jack Shepherd (Bill), Enzo Cilenti (Darren), Sarah-Jane Potts (Melanie), David

Fahm (Franklyn), Ellen Thomas (Donna).

High Hopes (UK, 1988). Written and directed by Mike Leigh. Producers: SimonChanning-Williams and Victor Glynn. Cinematography: Roger Pratt. Editor:

Jon Gregory. Production Designer: Diana Charnley. Costume Designer: Lindy

Hemming. Music: Andrew Dickson. Sound: Billy McCarthy. A Portman Film

for Film Four International with the participation of British Screen. 110

minutes.

Cast: Philip Davis (Cyril), Ruth Sheen (Shirley), Edna Dor (Mrs Bender),

Heather Tobias (Valerie), Philip Jackson (Martin), Lesley Manville (Laetitia),

David Bamber (Rupert), Jason Watkins (Wayne), Judith Scott (Suzi), CherylPrime (Martins Girlfriend), Diane-Louise Jordan (Chemist Shop Assistant).

Acknowledgements

This paper was presented to the ImagiNation conference at Tate Britain in

2002. Thanks to the organisers for inviting me, and to Sarah Thomas for

checking some film details.



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Notes

1 The Krays (Peter Medak, 1980), the biopic about the East End gangsters, has Jack the Hat McVitie(Tom Bell) tell the infant twins the story of Jack the Ripper.

2 John Caughie, Progressive Television and Documentary Drama,Screen, 21 March 1980, pp.935.

3 Wim Wenders, from The Act of Seeing, quoted in A. Graf, The Cinema of Wim Wenders: the CelluloidHighway, London: Wallflower Press, 2002, p.118. Thanks to Alice Rothwell for bringing this to myattention.

4 The elderly Homer (Curt Bois) wanders the desolate wasteland close to the Wall that was thePotsdamer Platz, remembering the coffee houses and the civilized debate of the public sphere of theWeimar Republic. It is the rapid commercial redevelopment of the Potsdamer Platz which has beenseen as symptomatic of the cultural degradation of capitalism, following reunification.

5 Michael Winterbottom discussed his production procedures in several interviews on the films release,emphasizing the way in which some practices such as not using clapperboards just evolved(interview with Michael Winterbottom, Through the looking-glass, Guardian, 19July 1999). TheDirector of Photography, Sean Bobbitt, came from a news/documentary background: What I likedwhen we did tests in Soho was he would just be right there and completely unfazed by it becausethats what he does all the time . . . what Sean brought, because hes a documentary guy, is that whenthe actors were doing different things each time, he was used to the idea of trying to capture themoment, and trying to find the bit thats interesting. I felt that with the other people we talked to itwould just become a stylistic thing; I didnt want it to be a stylistic thing. Sean was always trying to be

at the right place and the right time, so that involves a camera movement. I think his handheld isamazingly steady. Nothing is like wobbly-cam, that wasnt the point. We wanted to change the waywe were working, rather than just do it as [a] device (Andy Kaufman, Michael WinterbottomsWonderland, IndieWire.com, 28July 2000. (http://www.indiewire.com/people/int_Winter_Michael_00728.html).

6 Slightly less frequent in the earlier part of the film, these sequences are regularly placed about every78 minutes later.

7 Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli, From Moscow to Madrid, London: I. B.Tauris, 2002, pp.18793.

8 Higson elaborates this category in relation to 1940s British cinema. The alternation of public andprivate space in Wonderland can be usefully considered in relation to a similar alternation in This HappyBreed (1944) despite their very obvious differences. The South London based This Happy Breed, whichwas made in the last years of World War II but is set from 1919 to 1939, takes the Gibbons family asrepresentative of the nation and interweaves their private dramas with the key events of the inter-waryears. In Wonderland Bill and Eileens family are also offered as in some way representative, but now offin-de-sicle Londoners. The aesthetic problem which the films share is the articulation of personallives and public spaces and contexts, which Higson discusses in terms of the interrelation ofmelodramatic and documentary generic traditions (Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag, Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1995, p.262).9 Mette Hjort discusses topical and perennial themes in her discussion of the extent to which

contemporary Danish films are about Danish-ness; see M. Hjort, Themes of Nation in M .Hjort andS. Mackenzie, eds, Cinema and Nation, London: Routledge, 2000.

10 Katherine Shonfield, Walls Have Feelings:Architecture, Film and the City, London: Routledge, 2000,p.135.

11 Pierre Sorlin, European Cinemas, European Societies 19391990, London: Routledge, 1991, p.12.

12 Seven Days to Noon has extraordinary shots of a deserted London.

13 Shonfield, Walls Have Feelings, p.135.

14 Lovely Rita, the 1967 Lennon/McCartney song about an encounter with Lovely Rita, Meter Maidshortly after the introduction of parking meters in London, testifies to both the historical specificityand the cross-media resonance of some landmark symbols (Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, firstreleased 1June 1967).

15 See, for example, Ray Carney and Leonard Quart, The Films of Mike Leigh, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000, which is particularly keen to stress Leighs difference to US undergraduates.

16 Mrs Thatcher led the Conservative Party to victory in 1979. Although she was forced to resign in 1990,it was not until 1997 that the Conservatives lost an election.

17 The Big Bang came on 27 October 1987, when screen trading replaced the old stock market floor; seeDavid Kynaston, The City of London, vol. iv:A Club No More, London: Pimlico, 2002.

18 John Hill discusses the critical response to these films inBritish Cinema in the 1980s, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1999, chapter 7.

19 Mike Leigh, foreword to screenplay ofHigh Hopes in Naked and Other Screenplays, London: Faber andFaber, 1995, p.188.

20 Raphael Samuel nominates the knicker blind as one of the characteristics of 1980s retrofitting(Theatres of Memory, London: Verso, 1994, p.60).



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21 This meant that their inhabitants could legally use and pay for gas, electricity and water and involveda negotiated agreement with the local council. Licensed squats were seen as (often rather long) short-term solutions to the occupation of vacant property in the wave of organized squatting in the 1970s.Camden Council was involved in many such arrangements, often involving contested evictions, as inthe nearby Tolmers Square.

22 As with several of his films, Leigh chooses a family gathering to bring characters together and releaseunderlying tensions. InHigh Hopes Valerie has insisted on hosting a birthday party for Mrs Bender andgets very drunk. Shirley has to take Mrs Bender home in a taxi.

23 Richard Wentworth, who has lived in Kings Cross for twenty-five years, installed a periscope whichoffered similarly unfamiliar views of the same area in his Artangel exhibition An Area of OutstandingUnnatural Beauty, held in the General Plumbing Supplies Building, York Way, 4 September 17November 2002.

24 Lynda Nead offers a vivid historical corrective to my melancholy with her discussion of the buildingof the Underground in Kings Cross in the 1860s. She uses a series of prints from The Illustrated LondonNews to show the devastation caused; see Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-century London, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 3446.


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Brunsdon - the poignancy of place

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