Conference call for papers

Cinematic Urban Geographies

Thursday, 3 October 2013 to Friday, 4 October 2013
Location: CRASSH, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT - SG1&2

Conveners

François Penz (Architecture Department, University of Cambridge)

Co-Conveners

Richard Koeck (School of Architecture, University of Liverpool)
Chris Speed (Edinburgh College of Art)
Andrew Saint (English Heritage)

Summary

The Cinematic Urban Geographies conference aims to explore the different facets by which cinema and the moving image contribute to our understanding of cities and their topographies. This event will be the final act of an AHRC research project entitled Cinematic Geographies of Battersea.

The Cambridge conference will offer a unique opportunity to debate issues of cinematic geographies, filmic urban characterisation within the cultural & social dimension and database cinema (metadata) as well as film archives and the locative media potential afforded by the new generation of mobile phones.

The conference will take place over two days – corresponding to two complementary themes:

Theme 1 probes the many trajectories and points of contact between the cinema and its topographic context. This opens a number of sub-themes, including:

• films as sites of memories –lieux de mémoires (after Pierre Nora) 
• ‘movie centric’ maps of cities – map-reading and ciné-tourism
• cinematic cityscapes within social & cultural practices
  
• cartographic cinema: the role of maps in films
• cinematic cartography: the cinematic appeal of maps

Theme 2 is concerned with the process of cinematic restitution at the place where films were shot – probing the issue of bringing the invisible filmic material layered over the city to life –through the sub-themes:

• visualising the cinematic urban archaeology of a city
  
• geo-locating movies in the city – mobile Apps
  
• public engagement with local films through social networking
• database cinema – meta cinema – cinemetrics
  
• virtual cinematic sites of memories 

Call for Papers

We welcome abstracts of no more than 500 words in one of the two main conference themes, with a perspective relating to one of the sub-themes. Conference papers should take 20 minutes to read. A separate cover-page should be submitted with the title of the paper and the name, affiliation, e-mail address and full postal contact information of the author. The abstract and cover-page should be sent as a Word doc or pdf file via e-mail to cug@aha.cam.ac.uk, with the subject heading: 'CUG paper submission'. Please indicate which of the listed sub-themes you would like to contribute to.

10 minutes x 1 image/clip

We also strongly encourage graduate students and early career researchers to present work-in-progress in the 10 minutes x 1 image session, on one of the two main conference themes. We welcome abstracts of no more than 250 words. A separate cover-sheet should be submitted with the title of the paper, the name, affiliation and full contact information of the author. The abstract and cover-page should be sent as a Word doc or pdf file via e-mail to cug@aha.cam.ac.uk, with the subject heading ‘CUG 10x1 submission’. Please indicate which of the listed sub-themes you would like to contribute to.

The deadline for abstract submissions is 1 July 2013 and all applicants will be notified of the outcome by 15 July 2013.

Sponsors

Supported by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH), the Architecture Department and the AHRC.

Accommodation for non-paper giving delegates

We are unable to arrange accommodation, however, the following websites may be of help.

Visit Cambridge
Cambridge Rooms
University of Cambridge accommodation webpage

NB. CRASSH is not able to help with the booking of accommodation.

Administrative assistance: conferences@crassh.cam.ac.uk

cinematicbattersea Facebook page now active.

Optimists of.... ?Chelsea

The Optimists of Nine Elms is a 1973 film about a grumpy old entertainer (played by Peter Sellers sporting, for reasons that never become apparent, a large prosthetic nose...) who lives with his talented dog in a derelict canalside warehouse supposedly in Nine Elms, Battersea. The film charts his relationship (these were more innocent times) with two "'Battersea" children, Liz and Mark, in a well-trodden filmic path from antagonism through tolerance to friendship. It all plays out against the backdrop of post-industrial decay, as the children wait their chance to move from their cramped Victorian ("Victorian", like "Battersea" is always bad in films up to the 1980s) basement flat with outside loo into the clean, new concrete flats they see "across the river" (meaning north of the river, of course). Except the filming locations tell a different story. That derelict warehouse? It's in Chelsea... Crown Wharf, Lots Road, now the west London branch of Bonhams auctioneers, the decay all around is the site of swanky Chelsea Wharf, just beside Lots Road Power Station.... all north of the river, like the children's basement flat, which is actually in Uverdale road, Chelsea, just behind the power station, all seen here a few years earlier from a picture in English Heritage's Aerofilms archive:

http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/image/epw006137

Those wonderful flats are actually miles to the east, and south of the river, at Thamesmead, which plays a less congenial role in A Clockwork Orange, and, more recently, in Misfits.

What does this tell us? Even in 1973 "Chelsea" would not have been plausible as an emblem of social decay. Battersea, more particularly Nine Elms, was a shorthand all Londoners would have understood for deprivation. The discourse of south London = bad, north London = good is as old as Old Father Thames. Aileen Reid, Survey of London

Villain in Nine Elms

Here is an image from the final scenes of the feature film Villain (1971) starring Richard Burton as a Kray-esque crime lord. The image shows the waste ground near the raised railway line that cuts through Nine Elms east of Battersea Power Station. The end of Villain gives us a fascinating look at how the area used to look before the area was developed, also given the scale of the future development plans for the area. See the image below for a model of how the area will look in the not so distant future. Here also is a link to Wandsworth council's website describing the strategy for the area.

http://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/info/200079/regeneration/371/nine_elms_on_the_south_bank

Symposium 5th October 2012

Cinematic Battersea: The City as Interface

This 1-day workshop was conceived as a forum for researchers and practitioners working on similar themes – with whom we would like to share our on-going thoughts and activities – as well as explore directions for future research/practice and joint funding applications.

The symposium addressed the following key themes:

Theme 1: Cinematic mapping and film archives
What are the mechanisms through which films relate to the city’s topography, the fabric of the city and its social making? What issues arise regarding the use of film archives and what are the potentials and limitations in making this material (archive and/or amateur footage) accessible to the public/accessible to the public?

Theme 2: Geo-referencing
Several digital humanities research projects have, in the past, tried geo-referencing archive material. One of the issues to emerge is the discrepancy between analytical tools (e.g. GIS) that lack a user-friendly or project-specific interface, and freely available tools (e.g. Google Maps) that have limitations for the deployment and accessing of narrative and time-based material (such as film). Are there ways to overcome such gaps?

Theme 3: Public engagement & networking in space and place
There is little doubt that locative mobile technologies and social networks offer new opportunities that are of interest to researchers working with film and other archive materials. But how can a meaningful dialogue between the academic community and the public be explored?