Documenting Cityscapes: Urban Change in Contemporary non-Fiction Film

A Short Spatial Autobiography

As a child, I used to spend a few weeks every summer at my grandparents’ home in Ferrol, in northern Galicia. Most times, I travelled there by car with my whole family; my father drove through the meandering roads, my mother talked for most of the trip, and my sister and I simply got bored or, at worst, felt sick. An important part of this family ritual took place when we entered the town, after crossing As Pías Bridge. In that particular spot, my mother almost always made the same comment: ‘this area was full of fields before’. Then, I looked through the car window and invariably saw the same tower blocks to the left and the same warehouses to the right: everything pretty ugly, to be honest. I systematically tried to imagine those fields, but they clearly belonged to another town, a previous and missing town that I could never meet. Unconsciously, I have hitherto retained my mother’s words, and now, wherever I go, I cannot help but wonder what those places would have been like in the past.

It did not take me too long to realise that space is constantly changing. One Saturday morning in the early 1990s, when I was about ten years old, a giant bulldozer began clearing the empty plot that had been in front of my house for my whole life. In the course of a decade, my childhood playground became first a construction site and then a residential area, which I never liked despite the architect’s efforts to create a friendly urban environment. At the time, that empty plot was an important part of my life, although it was nothing special: a hillside full of weeds and rubbish with a narrow path that climbed up to the top, which was already another neighbourhood. The place was not particularly beautiful, but it was there, it was my everyday horizon each time I left my house. Unwittingly, I grew fond of that wasteland, and I still remember it today, when it is long gone. To me, like the fields on the outskirts of Ferrol to my mother, that empty plot is a place of memory, and I would say that my fascination with changing cityscapes comes from the awareness that everything that stands today may disappear tomorrow.

Places of Memory

Subjective spatial history depends on the feelings, emotions and experiences that we associate with certain places, which may ultimately become our places of memory. This term was coined by French historian Pierre Nora, who defined a lieu de mémoire as ‘any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community’ (1996: xvii). Originally, Nora used this concept to refer to the places and objects in which French national memory is incarnated, meaning that places of memory should be regarded as a collective heritage. Nevertheless, the same term can also be applied to those places that have a personal significance by simply shifting perspective: once grand narratives have been overshadowed – for better or for worse – by local and short-term concerns, what was formerly understood as ‘individual’ and ‘subjective’ has recently acquired as much importance as what was formerly understood as ‘collective’ and ‘objective’, at least in its capacity to address existential issues. Therefore, our respective places of memory help us explain to ourselves who we are, where we come from and, sometimes, even where we are going.

Everything can be a place of memory, because this status only depends on the affective meaning that we project on a given space. It is an unconscious activity: we are constantly imbuing our everyday environment and the places we have visited just once with positive or negative connotations. We may feel topophilia or topophobia for them, but we have to feel something, because otherwise they would not be our places of memory. We can even consider them as ‘sacred places’ for each of us, at least from a Durkheimian perspective, inasmuch as they follow a similar dynamic to that observed by Jennifer Jordan in Berlin memorials:

Many of these sites seem to have a sacred quality about them in the sense of their having been set apart from the mundane and infused with unusual powers of instruction and remembrance. The term sacred is perhaps problematic in this setting, but it captures the sense that these sites are literally out of the ordinary, infused with mourning and warning, with messages about right and wrong. Using the term in the Durkheimian sense also reminds us that ‘by sacred things one must not understand simply those personal beings which are called gods or spirits; a rack, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word, anything can be sacred’ (Durkheim 1965: 52). Similarly, a parking lot, a vacant building, or a playground may also become invested with powerful meanings of mourning, atonement, and warning. (2003: 44)

Places of memory are thereby our anchors in time and space, the points of reference from which we can shape our personality, establish our identity and counteract the alienation resulting from contemporary processes of globalisation. They are as real as imaginary, because they are located in both landscape and mindscape: if they are long-standing places, we can ritually visit them, but if not, which is usually more common, we have to remember or imagine them. Their volatile nature prevents our eternal return to these places, but there are a few tools that make our way back easier: a picture, a postcard, a film, a gift, a souvenir, a melody, a smell, a flavour … in short, anything that can trigger our memory. Since moving images occupy a prominent place on this list, we must wonder how they manage to shape, document, recreate and even reinterpret our places of memory, wherever they are.

A Matter of Approach

The relationship between cinema and the city has been one of the favourite subjects of film researchers in recent decades. I have been working on this issue for a decade, in which time I have written many papers about the representation of the city in the work of certain filmmakers and national cinemas, or simply about the representation of a given city (2006, 2008, 2009, 2010a, 2010b, 2014a). As I progressed in my research, I realised that there already are dozens of books that deal with the same subject (see, for example, Althabe & Comolli 1994; Barrios 1997; Clarke 1997; Shield & Fitzmaurice 2001, 2003; Barber 2002; Jousse & Paquot 2005; AlSayyad 2006; Mennell 2008; Webber & Wilson 2008; Koeck & Roberts 2010). This bibliography has explored the possibilities of auterist, national, transnational, geographical and even architectural approaches better than I could ever do, so I took my time to find out what else I could say about this subject. Another book on the different ways a particular city has been depicted? No, because I would be neither the first nor the last scholar in undertaking a similar research (see, for example, Costa e Silva 1994; Sanders 2001; Brunsdon 2007; Wrigley 2008; Solomons 2011). Should I extend the scope of my study to all the cities in a given country and a given national cinema? Or, better still, to all the cities in a whole continent and its respective national cinemas? Again, I think I am too late to do that (see Niney 1994; Mazierska & Rascaroli 2003; Everett & Goodbody 2005). Should I embrace a sociological approach to address a theoretical abstraction like the global city, the transnational city, the cosmopolitan city, or whatever else that sounds up-to-date? Well, sincerely, I have to admit that my research profile is not the most appropriate to undertake that job, which anyway has also already been done (see Krause & Petro 2003; Rodríguez Ortega 2012).

If I have learnt anything in the past few years is that the way we perceive the city in film has more to do with the evolution of cinema than with that of urbanism (see Sorlin 2005: 34–5). The meaning of an image of a place of memory will always be mediated by the formal device chosen by the filmmaker to show that particular spot. Accordingly, instead of directly interpreting the content of images, I have decided to search for their meaning in their formal features, that is, their dispositif, a key term that originated in French theory and has been defined by Australian critic Adrian Martin as ‘a way of filming according to certain pre-established rules and concepts’ (2010: 382). That is to say that I will try to decode images through forms, focusing first on the ‘how’ in order to then explain the ‘what’ and ‘why’. How has the cinematic city been depicted on film? What modes of representation have been employed by filmmakers? And, above all, what do these devices mean? What are their connotations?

These preliminary questions have obviously conditioned the structure of this book, which is based on style, although this will not be the only aspect analysed. In fact, I would like to locate my discourse within several fields of study; namely, film studies, urban studies, history, aesthetics, geography, sociology and, last but not least, documentary studies. Since non-fiction film has a privileged relationship with the real, it would clearly be of special interest to know how documentary makers have depicted the city, because they create a cinematic space that, unlike fiction, never ceases to represent a real space. Of course, I am not the first researcher interested in this issue. French critic and filmmaker Jean-Louis Comolli wrote an excellent article on the representation of the city in non-fiction film for the encyclopaedia La ville au cinéma (2005). In that text, he analysed ten selected moments in film history associated with different periods of urban history. The following table seeks to summarise his main ideas and categories.