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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Charlotte Brunsdon 69
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).
70 the poignancy of place: london and the cinema
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.
Charlotte Brunsdon 71
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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.
Charlotte Brunsdon 73