The set of formal strategies analysed here have been highly influenced by contemporary discourses on urban change, from Edward Soja’s real-and-imaginary geographies to Francesc Muñoz’s urbanalisation, but they also influence our perception of urban space, inasmuch as they establish a certain kind of gaze at the city that can be adopted by their usual residents and occasional visitors. Moreover, all these strategies share a similar subjective gaze that aims to be closer to citizens than to the institutions or corporations responsible for recent major transformations. This means that contemporary non-fiction production, especially when approaching the essayistic and experimental domain, tends to develop a critical reading of the urban surface guided by the two following purposes. The first would be to gather, give shape and express the different insights of citizenship on urban change, in an attempt to make the audience identify with the film’s discourse; while the second would be to invite those viewers who are initially indifferent or opposed to this critical discourse to become aware of the consequences of this process. Many non-fiction films are therefore agents of urban change, because they ultimately express and convey a critical perception of late-capitalist urban planning in order to draw the audience’s attention to the policies that filmmakers want to challenge, question or even change. Accordingly, the politics of representation in current urban documentaries has evolved into a politics of place-making and sense-making, which simultaneously serves to delve into the past of cities and shape their future, as suggested by François Penz and Andong Lu:
Such an exploration of the filmic spaces of the past may enable historians, architects and urbanists to better anticipate the city of the future. […] The processes involved in cinematic urban archaeology exhume, unlock and preserve past memories. And, as an applied concept, it may have far-reaching implications for planning and urban regeneration purposes as well as for heritage and conservation. (2011: 12)
The concept of cinematic urban archaeology has to do with Marc Ferro’s claim that cinema may be ‘source and agent of history’ (1988: 14), given that an image, or, more accurately, a single framing, can contain the entire memory of a place, both for what it shows (its past or current image) and for what it suggests (its missing image). Cinematic spaces, however, not only refer to the past, but also to the present and future of the depicted places. They are much more than memories of a now-defunct city, that is, a city that only exists on the screen, a source for cinematic urban archaeology, since they shape and underpin our sense of place and our ideas about how urban space should be – that is, they are a source of inspiration for urban planning. As discussed throughout this book, most cinematic cityscapes are also collective memoryscapes that go back to a more or less idealised past, as well as individual mindscapes that offer new meanings for old spaces, thereby creating an imaginary city that complements the real one and even foresees its future developments. In this sense, both landscape films such as London, Lost Book Found and Los and urban self-portraits such as Porto of My Childhood, My Winnipeg and Of Time and the City are prime examples of works capable of depicting the city as the set of these three landscapes – cityscapes, memoryscapes and mindscapes – in order to simultaneously address its past, present and future.
Considering that the post-industrial crisis and the subsequent urban renewal have left indelible traces on the urban surface, it is no wonder that almost all the films analysed in this book raise the need for the work of mourning. No matter how much time has passed since the disappearance of a given place of memory (it may be several years and even decades, as in some landscape films and most urban self-portraits), everyone – the inhabitants of the depicted spaces, beginning with filmmakers themselves, but also the audience – eventually misses the places that have somehow shaped their personality. The work of mourning can be fed by feelings of nostalgia, melancholy or saudade, or simply by awareness about the passage of time, but in all cases it stimulates the filmmakers’ creativity when paying tribute to places of memory, whether by embracing the usual topics of funeral discourse, such as tempus fugit and memento mori, as Thames Film and Of Time and the City do, or by developing more playful strategies, as in London, My Winnipeg or The Decay of Fiction, three works in which the boundary between city-referent and city-character is consciously blurred.
Two reasons that explain the growing importance of the work of mourning in contemporary urban documentary are the key role places of memory play in the process of identity building and the recent shift in social sciences and humanities from an objective paradigm to a subjective one, in which facts are no longer more important than feelings. In this context, the triad formed by cinematic cityscapes, memoryscapes and mindscapes allows filmmakers to express different subjectivities at once, thereby combining several perspectives (from the inside and the outside, from below and from above, etc.) in narratives that usually extend from the present to the past, even when they take place in an apparently synchronic present. The main advantage of this approach based on intersubjectivity is its ability to represent urban change as a shared experience, in which spatiality arises from the blend of three complementary gazes: first, the gaze of the inhabitants of the depicted space; second, the filmmaker’s gaze; and third, the audience’s gaze. Thus, for the residents of any city-referent, intersubjectivity serves to convey the perception of their own habitat to a wider audience; for filmmakers, this approach is basically a way of speaking about themselves through the experience of others; and for the audience, it is a way of thinking about themselves and their places of memory through film. This last idea is ultimately behind the use of metafilmic strategies in those works in which filmmakers build the cinematic city from their own condition as viewers, as Thom Andersen did in
Los Angeles Plays Itself.
Let us briefly see how this identification process operates in the first case study, One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later. On the one hand, some Milwaukeeans, when recognising certain film locations, may experience feelings ranging from topophilia to topophobia towards these places, such as nostalgia, affection, astonishment, annoyance, displeasure or even disinterest, especially the people who appear in the images. On the other, the filmmaker, by selecting the film locations, is consciously or unconsciously establishing a personal mapping of the depicted area based on his own preferences, as he also does in the rest of his landscape films, beginning with Los. And last but not least, viewers may appropriate these locations in order to project their own feelings and emotions on them, regardless of whether they have ever been there or not. In fact, the ability of some film locations to become receptacles of certain moods and meanings can explain the recent rise of film tourism.
Without going any further, I have myself visited many film locations just because they appeared in my case studies: the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, from where James Benning filmed the city’s skyline in
Los; the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch, which is praised in
London; the Staten Island ferry in New York City, from where Chantal Akerman filmed the last shot of
News from Home; Everton Brow in Liverpool, where Bernard Fallon originally took the picture ‘The Long Walk’ that would be later included in
Of Time and the City; and the mouth of the River Douro, where Manoel de Oliveira ended
Porto of My Childhood. One way or another, I have travelled through time and space over the past six years thanks to cinema, and I hope to continue doing so in the future. In fact, this is one of the many reasons why we should thank cinema for documenting, preserving and recreating cityscapes, because these kind of city films allow us, first and foremost, to return to many places of memory over and over again.