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 amtrying 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 withthis capital city in the second half of the twentieth century. This involves theidentification of key periods, such as the immediate post-war period, the 1960sand the later 1980s, which were particularly salient in the production of certaintypes of cinematic London. It involves the identification of key film-makers,producers and writers, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Ealing Studios or HanifKureishi, who can be seen to engage repeatedly with London in their work. SoI am, at least partly, working with a notion of the changing representation ofreal places that are themselves changing: I have a documentary look. The Portthat 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 oftransition caught in 1979’s The Long Good Friday (director John MacKenzie).The parking meter, a key iconographic element in 1960s Swinging Londonfilms, has lost its resonance today and never merits a close-up. The roominghouses of Notting Dale and Notting Hill Gate in 1950s British cinema hadquite 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 isproduced through stories, some of which are specific to this city, some ofwhich are the perennial themes of cities: the arrival of the stranger, theanonymity of the crowd, the importance of appearances, the juxtaposition ofwealth and poverty. The infernal metropolis – the hell that is the city – is both aperennial 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-centuryfilms – say Mona 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 ofDickens’ or Mayhew’s London, just as it is also different to infernal New Yorkor 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 dealwith the patterning of elements and expectations. There are both differentLondons and different types of London film. The Victorian East End of Ripperfiction has key iconographic elements whether filmed in a Berlin studio forPandora’s 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

alleys, swirling fog and the muffled sounds of carriage-horses’ hooves. It isnoticeably the same place as that in which Sherlock Holmes detects when he isnot 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 offeredLondons whose significance and plausibility as locations are determined notby where they were shot, but by how that location is used cinematically. In thisargument, the best Londons, the most evocative and compelling Londons,might have nothing – in production terms – to do with London as a location atall. This is to see London in the cinema with a dramatic look.

So I am trying to avoid an ever-lurking geographical literalism, in whichattention to London and the cinema works as a type of list-making – oh thatwas shot in the studio; that wasn’t really filmed in Pimlico; that bridge is inBarnes not Putney; of course Covent Garden isn’t a vegetable market any more– while at the same time recognizing both the existence of a historicallychanging, multiply represented capital city and the particular history andconventions of cinema. As critic, I’m trying to maintain what John Caughie, ina differently inflected discussion of television drama, has called adocumentary 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 Über Berlin / Wingsof Desire in 1997, after the ‘fall of the wall’ and the re-unification of East and West Germany. The film was explicitly concerned with Berlin as a site ofmemory, history and story-telling, and Wenders has been concernedthroughout his work with the traces of reality found and preserved in film andphotography. He could hardly have anticipated, though, the radicaltransformation of Berlin after he made the film, so that the Berlin which isoverlooked by his angels culturally, politically and geographically no longerexists:

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. That’s 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 aren’t around any more. Films thatdon’t 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 anarchive for things that aren’t around any more’ – Wenders struggles to expressthe transformation of a film text by its historical context of viewing, atransformation 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 thedisappearance not just of the old Potsdamer Platz for which Homer searchesin the film, but also, subsequently, of the very ruin and wasteland in which hesearches.4 The film inadvertently offers documentary traces which canoverpower Damiel’s drama and the recording of place, now past, transformsthe significance of the mise-en-scène.

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I want to discuss three different ways in which we can think about theintersections 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 everydaylives of one family and its neighbours in a London which is registered, at leastpart of the time, as cinéma-vérité. The film was shot using a hand-held super16mm camera, with minimal lighting, radio mikes and no extras, in locationswhich include a café, 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 ofBonfire Night, intercutting the stories of three sisters, Nadia, Molly andDebbie, with those of their parents, Debbie’s ex-husband, their neighboursDonna and her son Franklin, and their estranged brother, Darren, in Londonto celebrate his birthday with his girlfriend. Mainly naturalist in style, the filmalso includes, at fairly regular intervals, sequences in which a prominentMichael 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 incombination with time-lapse and slow-motion photographic effects. While thephotographic effects are used for city sequences, as I discuss below, theNyman score cannot be tied consistently to individual characters, moods orlocations, and quite often works to unite otherwise separate scenes.

Several critics, including Mazierska and Rascaroli, have read this as a filmabout 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 ofeveryday life’, a genre which he argues to be ‘relatively distinctively British’ inits ‘incorporation of certain features of the documentary idea into theconventions of the domestic melodrama’.8 What is particularly interestingabout the film’s attempts to combine dramatic and documentary looks is therole of the Nyman score in transforming the status of the image, moving itfrom a dramatic to a documentary look.

The first use of the Nyman soundtrack occurs very early in the narrative asNadia (Gina McKee) abandons a date in a Soho bar and walks quickly offthrough the still lively nightlife. Nadia is the character with whom we havemost 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 beforereturning to the fray of a lonely-heart date. The evening is not going well forNadia, and the awkwardness of the encounter is amplified in the way in whichshe and her date can hardly hear each other over the noise of the bar, having tobellow their initial small talk. When Nadia does a runner, though, naturalisticsound 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

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accompany Nadia as she starts walking. At first, as Nadia makes her way paststill-busy bars, the music seems like a theme for her. But as the camera dwellson dancers and drinkers rendered strange by the absence of their own musicand sound, even returning to Nadia’s abandoned date in The Pitcher andPiano, it seems to have a more abstract quality, distancing the viewer from thegood times that are and are not being had by all. In the second part of thissequence, time-lapse photography is introduced, so that Nadia seems to leavethe scene of her embarrassment more quickly, and to walk speedily throughthe West End. Instead of past individuals and particular places, Nadia speedsthrough what becomes an undifferentiated late-night urban blur, which isfinally accentuated in the third part of the sequence when Nadia herself hasdisappeared 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 andsound will work in the film, and the Nyman score is not consistently associatedwith 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 forEileen at Bingo and for Dan and Jack at a football match. I want to consideranother 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 datein the film, clearly considers him to have some potential. The next time we seethem together, in his central London flat, he has cooked them both a meal and

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

they have then had sex. What I’m interested in here, apart from Gina McKee’svery fine performance of uncertainty about how much she is being humiliated,is the move between the particular, local story of Nadia’s 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 andmedium shots, with characters rarely centred in the image, which gives aslightly nervous, unpredictable impression which my description smoothesout. Nadia’s evening too has been intercut with those of other characters, sothere are time ellipses. After one of these, in which we understand Tim andNadia to have had sex on a bed/sofa in his flat, Tim pulls on a shirt, walkingover to the kitchen area, leaving Nadia half undressed and a little dishevelledsitting on the bed. Standing in the kitchen, he gets a beer from the fridge andloads himself a plate of left-over food from a saucepan, turning up the livingroom light as he comes back. Nadia, who has been offered neither drink norfood, 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 cushionbehind her. He offers to call her a cab, but she says she’ll take the bus. The firstnotes of the Nyman score are heard as she leaves. When Nadia has gone, Timturns the lighting back down. The detail of this scene – the food shovelled out of the saucepan, the unoffered drink, the adjusted cushion and Tim’smanipulation of the lighting – gives precision to Nadia’s humiliation, as doesher struggle to put her tights back on. However, the next sequence doessomething rather different.

We have the clear identification of a bus stop just off Trafalgar Square, withboth the dome of the National Gallery and the bus itself working asiconographic London images. But Nadia’s lonely journey home through therain on the last bus begins to generalize her predicament. What starts as asequence which reaffirms the public geographical location of the personaldrama moves into a more perennial ‘city’ sequence, invoking the theme ofloneliness in a crowd. Hunched in her seat, Nadia is filmed surrounded,accosted and ignored by other travellers who are filmed with time-lapse, lackof continuity and the Nyman score. Now while on the one hand we have beenclearly shown that this is Saturday night London nightlife, on the other thedisassociation of the mise-en-scène encourages us to read at a more generallevel. Although we know exactly what has happened to Nadia, we are alsoencouraged to see Nadia as just one person in a huge city. The soundtrack iscrucial in changing the type of time and space of the film from a veryparticular set of events in one character’s life to a more general, abstractmeditation on city life. The sequence pulls together a topical story – Nadia’sparticular Saturday evening in London – with a perennial city theme, theloneliness and anomie of the city.9 It is in this sense that Nadia, and othercharacters, can be seen as representative city dwellers. The qualities of themusic, its soaring and swooping orchestral score played over the rainy darkLondon streets and the chaotic Saturday night bus, both generalize andtranscend Nadia’s story.

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Landmark London

Wonderland makes use of the internationally recognized iconography oflandmark London to locate its action. It doesn’t 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 fromNadia’s South London flat, and in the sequence I have just discussed we sawthe National Gallery and a red bus. You know you are in London when yousee Tower Bridge, Big Ben and Westminster from the river, St Paul’s,Piccadilly Circus, red buses and black taxis. This iconography, like that of allcapital cities, is an historically formed, multi-media iconography which is, atone level, always about location, but which is never just about location; it isalways, of necessity, also about national identity, and increasingly about themarketing of unique tourist destinations. This iconography is not specific tocinema and extends from postcards to plastic replica policeman’s 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 thishegemonic discourse of location – with that river, that clock, those buses andthose taxis – but there are various ways of going about it. The eschewing ofwhat Katherine Shonfield has called ‘the tourist hardware’10 is often moresignificant in a London-set film than its inclusion, and there are very differenttonalities with which iconographic elements can be used in narratives. Butlandmark iconography is also both historical and contested in ways I can onlyhint at here. Just which image or sound, in which combination, in whichperiod, means ‘This is London’ is one of the ways in which the documentaryaspect of fiction film can be traced through the drama.

Pierre Sorlin has suggested that the same image within landmarkiconography can either block or incite the viewer’s engagement.11 An exampleof blocking would be the use of Big Ben (image and/or chimes) at the top ofnews bulletins on British media. The signification is minimal – we are inLondon and that is enough. The use of the image is transparently in the serviceof 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 ‘touristhardware’ landmark imagery is that it is so encrusted with official andcommercial meanings that it is very difficult to use it in a way that incitesinterest. The opening of Patrick Keiller’s film London (1993) is a good example ofthe invocation of landmark imagery – Tower Bridge – with a voice-over thatincites an unfamiliar engagement with the image. The soundtrack, PaulSchofield’s patrician voice-over, announces ‘Dirty Old Blighty’, ‘a catalogue ofmodern miseries, with its fake traditions, its Irish war, its militarism andsecrecy, its silly old judges, its hatred of intellectuals, its ill health and bad food,its sexual repression, its hypocrisy and racism and its indolence. It’s so exotic, sohome-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 interrogateBlighty and to incite reflection on what is, after all, one of her fake traditions.

Katherine Shonfield suggests that ‘Hollywood’s judgement on what areLondon’s 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, StPaul’s, the Tower of London and Tower Bridge.13 Thirty years later,Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996) chose Big Ben, the statue of Boadicea, TowerBridge, Nelson’s Column – but also Carnaby Street, motorbike couriers, asteel-drum player and a Pearly King and Queen. But it was understood thatTrainspotting 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 Renton’s arrival inLondon be briefly conveyed, and this the film did with an upbeat montage ofhackneyed and more modern images showing that the conventions of arrivalin London were being used, but that everyone concerned was cool enough toknow that these were the conventions you had to use. London iconography ishere a third-order system of signification, in which the familiar postcardimages are used but in a way which recognizes their commodification, andindeed inscribes a knowingness about this commodification in the image – asin the ingratiating Pearly King and Queen and the various waves andsalutations given to us, the viewer, on this fantasy tour.

A rather more innocent way of engaging with landmark London can befound in 1960s Swinging London films, which can I think be defined by thefact that they do it ‘zanily’. The swinging protagonists encounter key elementsof 1960s landmark London – Trafalgar Square, parking meters, red phoneboxes, the Horseguards – and fool around in some way – driving too fastround Trafalgar Square in an MG, piling out of a phone booth, trying to makebearskinned sentries laugh. In Darling (1966) the adultery of Diana Scott (JulieChristie) is signified with a close-up on a parking meter as the indicatorswitches 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 thedome of St Paul’s, it is shot from Nadia’s South London flat, just as TrafalgarSquare and the National Gallery are almost unrecognizable in the rain. TheRiver Thames too is present, but it is narrativized as a private public place, notjust 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 traditionalrepresentation of the West End so that the streets through which Nadia walksare lined with the shapeless huddled forms of the homeless – their ravagedalcoholic faces are present here, in this fiction film, not siphoned off into aspecial feature about homelessness. This approach attempts to groundlandmark London in a lived, material, everyday city so that there is aninhabited London between the landmarks.

It is more common, though, for naturalist cinema – which Wonderland isn’tquite – to mark its authenticity through its eschewal of landmark London.There are no views north in Gary Oldman’s Nil By Mouth (1997), nor south in

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Ken Loach’s Riff-Raff (1991). Loach’s Up the Junction (1965) showed only therailway lines of Clapham Junction as the hint of a less local London. NaturalistLondon establishes its claim to be the real London through its use of voice andaccent, transforming most of landmark London to the equivalent of ReceivedPronunciation or Tourist Town. Only the most attenuated forms of landmarkiconography – the corner of a bus, the flash of a taxi – are used to identifylocation. The exceptional locations here are King’s Cross and Soho, which arerecognizable 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 representationof prostitution unites both Soho and King’s Cross, as a good night out beginsto turn into a hell of a night.

Landscapes of loss

When I began this research I was committed to avoiding two tendencies. Ididn’t want to become a ‘location bore’, endlessly informing my companionswhere scenes were actually shot, scrutinizing the image for signs of place,puzzling over the geography of an edit: in short, someone obsessed with afantasy cinema of geographical veracity. Nor did I want to become one ofthose people who observes, over many a cinematic image, ‘Of course, that’s allgone now’, as if the value of cinema resided solely in its ability to present uswith long-vanished locations.

I have been unsuccessful in both ambitions, trespassing forlornly over thesite of the former Gainsborough Studios as it is transformed into luxuryapartments and pursuing the dullest British films because of where they wereshot, finding myself delighted by glimpses of long-demolished dance-halls.The devastation and redevelopment of the Docks which was such a feature ofthe Thatcher years – and which in fact provides many more locations fortelevision than film – is a constant provocation for anyone interested inLondon. But it has been King’s Cross which has forced me to want to exploresomething of the poignancy of place on film. As Wim Wenders observes, theinadvertent archive quality of cinema insists.

King’s Cross, as I have already suggested, features, with Soho, as the keylowlife site of landmark London. The Copenhagen tunnel, the ironworkbridges, the gas holders, St Pancras, Goods Way and Battlebridge Road featurein numerous films, both as themselves and, for example in the case ofBattlebridge Road, as one of the rare cobbled streets still available for filming‘the past’. It is to King’s Cross that desperate provincial parents hasten insearch of runaway children, and it is life in the infernal London on the streetsaround King’s Cross which signifies the failure of the runaway’s dream infilms such as Stella Does Tricks (Coky Giedroyc, 1996) and Mona Lisa.

Mike Leigh’s 1988 film, High Hopes, is mainly set in King’s Cross, openingand closing there. Leigh’s films are generally discussed in terms of workingmethod, 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 heis 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 ofthe city are constructed in this film.

High Hopes was made in ‘deep Thatcherism’16 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 IIsettlement and the selling off of a range of nationalized enterprises such as therailways. With a huge boom in London house prices and with large bonusesthe norm in the post-‘Big Bang’ London Stock Market,17 the yuppie was thetriumphant figure of the decade which was marked by an increasedpolarization between rich and poor. Following the unsuccessful Miners’ Strikeof 1984–5, it was a period of demoralization and deep trauma for thegeneration radicalized in the 1960s, and High 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 shortyears ago . . . Cyril [the central male character] must be more deeply frustratedthan ever by the gulf between how things are and how they ought to be, andhow ever-increasingly hard it has become to do anything about it.’19 One ofMrs Thatcher’s most controversial policies was the sale of council (social)housing, which had an immediate visual effect in that the first act of many newhouse or flat owners was to differentiate their dwelling from those around itwith the purchase of a new front door. The planned uniformity of estates andblocks of flats was transformed, just as the increasing gentrification of innerLondon in the property boom led to penetration by the wealthy of previouslyworking-class areas. This is the London of High Hopes. It is a London laid outwith a diagrammatic simplicity, not of geographical location but of types ofhousing and housing ownership.

The film opens with a very long, masked shot of a man walking along astreet – a strip of film in the middle of the screen which is then unmasked toreveal 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 isa location-shooting of Euston Road (the road on which the three north-boundLondon stations, Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross, are sited close to eachother). The man then makes his way, first firmly and then hesitatingly, to hisencounter with Cyril (Phil Davies) who lives at the back of King’s Cross in ablock 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 knowswhere Ballswood House is. Wayne’s arrival in London reworks a very familiarcity story, the arrival of the ingénue from the countryside. Wayne doesn’tunderstand the scale and anonymity of the city: ‘My sister. Vivienne Bennett.Do you know her?’ Nor does he understand what comprises an adequateaddress. Shirley (Ruth Sheen), Cyril’s partner, can tell immediately thatVivienne lives in a block of council flats:

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S: ‘Well, Ballswood House is a block of flats.’W: ‘No, it’s not. It’s a house, see – 29, Ballswood House.’S: ‘Yeah, but . . . it’s in a street . . . and you ain’t got the street name.’

But Wayne doesn’t come from the countryside, he comes from Byfleet inSurrey, and he doesn’t fall among thieves but among Cyril and Shirley, whorecognize his vulnerability and naivety and put him up for the night beforefirmly returning him to his mother the next day. So Wayne serves as a deviceto introduce us to the good city people of this story, who live in a squattedVictorian block of flats behind King’s Cross. We see their small, dingy flat andlearn their politics (a very spikey cactus is called Thatcher) and understandthat under their scruffy, baggy, functional clothing beat hearts of gold (seeFigure 3).

Shirley and Cyril are the most rounded characters in the film, and theirdepth and interiority are developed partly through their lack of materialgoods. They are juxtaposed quite schematically with two other couples, theBooth-Braines and Cyril’s sister and her husband, Valerie and Martin. TheBooth-Braines are heartless, wealthy gentrifiers who live in an inner-cityVictorian terraced house next door to Mrs Bender (Edna Doré), Cyril andValerie’s mother, while Valerie and Martin live in the suburbs in semi-detached ostentatious vulgarity. Critical discussion of this film tends to circlearound whether Leigh is ‘fair’ to the yuppie Booth-Braines and the more

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Figure 2. Wayne (JasonWatkins) arrives inLondon at Cyril andShirley’s block of flats(High Hopes, 1988, MikeLeigh). Photograph BFICollections. Copyright:Mike Leigh / PortmanFilms

suburban Valerie and Martin. I’m more interested in how he uses the corecharacters to sketch out a map of London in terms of the types of homes theyinhabit. For we have the social housing of Wayne’s sister and Mrs Bender – acouncil block blossoming the new doors of privatization and a poorly-maintained Victorian terrace. Right next door to Mrs Bender we have theexpensive curtains20 and modernized interior of the Booth-Braines, who drivea mud-spattered Saab and who balance their intrepid foray into inner-cityproperty-owning with somewhere in the country. Valerie and Martin haveless cultural capital and less money, and are arguably presented as slightlyless loathsome, although Valerie’s carefully chosen, ostentatiously fashionable1980s interior is both ridiculed and used to reflect her shallow self-regard. TheBooth-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, fromwhich the taxi fare would be ‘about fifteen . . . score [pounds]’. With theprivately rented flat of Martin’s lover, and the squatted Victorian tenement ofCyril, Shirley and Suzi, the film offers a mapping of London in terms ofdifferent possible relations between incomes and homes. This is London as itis lived by people of different circumstances in their different homes,necessarily thrown together. And it is a London that Leigh wishes to seepossessed not by the Booth-Braines, who clearly have the most money, but byShirley and Cyril and Mrs Bender. This is shown through the use of location-shooting in the final scene of the film.

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Figure 3. Shirley (RuthSheen) and Cyril (PhilipDavies) 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 / PortmanFilms

This concluding scene is set on the roof of Shirley and Cyril’s block of flatsand was filmed on one of the several Victorian blocks on Cheney andBattlebridge Roads which were preserved throughout the 1980s and 1990s aslicensed squats.21 Mrs Bender has stayed the night with Cyril and Shirley afterthe upsetting, climactic party at Valerie and Martin’s.22 In the morning, Shirleyand Cyril encourage her to climb up to the roof of the building where Shirleymaintains a little container garden among the chimney stacks. The film usesthe London landscape to provide an emotional resolution – literally, highhopes – for both greater family connection and the possibility that there will bechildren for Cyril and Shirley. Mrs Bender seems confused at first – ‘Where isthis?’ – but begins to enjoy the vista as Cyril points out King’s Cross, StPancras, the gasworks and St Paul’s, ‘like a big tit’. This is an unfamiliar viewof these familiar landmarks – so close to the great arched glass and iron shed ofSt Pancras but still offering a panoramic London skyline – so it is not just MrsBender 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 MrsBender is now being offered excursions by Cyril and Shirley. We are with MrsBender when she exclaims with wonder that it is ‘the top of the world’ (seeFigure 4).

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

This is a dramatically satisfying resolution – holding in abeyance, as it does,what might happen, offering us only the vision of multitudinous but locatedpossibility, presented as a 360o view of King’s Cross.23 Within the terms of thefiction this panorama is an objective correlative for the tentative emotionalrapprochement. It is, within its own terms, dramatically poignant, and the useof location is an integral part of this. It would not work with a studiopanorama and the fact that so much is given by a view which is regularlyobscured by the chimney stacks offers a very fine rendition of how littlesatisfies Mrs Bender and Cyril and Shirley. However – and this is where I havebecome a sad archivist – the London in which Cyril encourages his mother totake hope is surely not the complex of luxury hotels and Eurostar freightdepots currently being built on this site.24 Now the buildings stand alone inthe 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 whenthe film was made. The documentary look has its own drama in thispoignancy of place.

Main film creditsWonderland (UK, 1999). Director: Michael Winterbottom. Producers: MicheleCamarda, Andrew Eaton. Screenplay: Laurence Coriat. Director ofPhotography: Sean Bobbitt. Editor: Trevor Waite. Production Designer: MarkTildesley. Music / Music Producer: Michael Nyman. A Kismet Film Companyand Revolution Films production for PolyGram Filmed Entertainment andBBC Films. 108 minutes.

Cast: Shirley Henderson (Debbie Phillips), Gina McKee (Nadia), MollyParker (Molly), Ian Hart (Dan), John Simm (Eddie), Stuart Townsend (Tim),Jack Shepherd (Bill), Enzo Cilenti (Darren), Sarah-Jane Potts (Melanie), DavidFahm (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: LindyHemming. Music: Andrew Dickson. Sound: Billy McCarthy. A Portman Filmfor Film Four International with the participation of British Screen. 110minutes.

Cast: Philip Davis (Cyril), Ruth Sheen (Shirley), Edna Doré (Mrs Bender),Heather Tobias (Valerie), Philip Jackson (Martin), Lesley Manville (Laetitia),David Bamber (Rupert), Jason Watkins (Wayne), Judith Scott (Suzi), CherylPrime (Martin’s Girlfriend), Diane-Louise Jordan (Chemist Shop Assistant).

Acknowledgements

This paper was presented to the ‘ImagiNation’ conference at Tate Britain in2002. Thanks to the organisers for inviting me, and to Sarah Thomas forchecking some film details.

Charlotte Brunsdon 71

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.9–35.

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 film’s release,emphasizing the way in which some practices – such as not using clapperboards – just evolved(interview with Michael Winterbottom, ‘Through the looking-glass’, Guardian, 19 July 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 becausethat’s what he does all the time . . . what Sean brought, because he’s 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 that’s interesting. I felt that with the other people we talked to itwould just become a stylistic thing; I didn’t want it to be a stylistic thing. Sean was always trying to beat 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 wasn’t the point. We wanted to change the waywe were working, rather than just do it as [a] device’ (Andy Kaufman, ‘Michael Winterbottom’sWonderland’, IndieWire.com, 28 July 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 every7–8 minutes later.

7 Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli, From Moscow to Madrid, London: I. B.Tauris, 2002, pp.187–93.

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 Eileen’s family are also offered as in some way representative, but now offin-de-siècle 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: OxfordUniversity Press, 1995, p.262).

9 Mette Hjort discusses topical and perennial themes in her discussion of the extent to whichcontemporary 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 1939–1990, 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 Maid’shortly after the introduction of parking meters in London, testifies to both the historical specificityand the cross-media resonance of some landmark symbols (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, firstreleased 1 June 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 Leigh’s ‘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 in British Cinema in the 1980s, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1999, chapter 7.

19 Mike Leigh, foreword to screenplay of High 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).

72 the poignancy of place: london and the cinema

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. In High 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 King’s 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 King’s 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. 34–46.

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