London in Cinema

Charlotte Brunsdon

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838716929
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Charlotte Brunsdon's illuminating study explores the variety of cinematic 'Londons' that appear in films made since 1945. Brunsdon traces the familiar ways that film-makers establish that a film is set in London, by use of recognisable landmarks and the city's shorthand iconography of red buses and black taxis, as well as the ways in which these icons are avoided. She looks at London weather – fog and rain – and everyday locations like the pub and the housing estate, while also examining the recurring patterns of representation associated with films set in the East and West Ends of London, from Spring in Park Lane (1948) to Mona Lisa (1986), and from Night and the City (1950) to From Hell (2001). Brunsdon provides a detailed analysis of a selection of films, exploring their contribution to the cinematic geography of London, and showing the ways in which feature films have responded to, and created, changing views of the city. She traces London's transformation from imperial capital to global city through the different ways in which the local is imagined in films ranging from Ealing comedies to Pressure (1974), as well as through the shifting imagery of the River Thames and the Docks. She addresses the role of cinematic genres such as horror and film noir in the constitution of the cinematic city, as well as the recurrence of figures such as the cockney, the gangster and the housewife. Challenging the view that London is not a particularly cinematic city, Brunsdon demonstrates that many London-set films offer their own meditation on the complex relationships between the cinema and the city.

1

Landmark London

When a film shows Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square, St Paul's Cathedral, Piccadilly Circus, red buses and black taxis, you know you are in London. This is the shorthand iconography of location, 'landmark London', which allows film-makers to indicate that their stories, or particular parts of their story, are set in London. Films that are entirely studio-shot may insert a little stock footage, location shooting or model work to reference this landmark iconography, to place their stories in London. Location-shot films may go to great pains to offer fresh views of familiar landmarks, or attempt to eschew them altogether in favour of accent and character as ways of establishing setting. For the paradox of landmark imagery is that it must be already familiar in order to elicit recognition, and 'already familiar' is often, already, overfamiliar. Thus, in Seth Holt's 1958 film, Nowhere to Go, the location of a solicitor's office in the City of London is shown through the reflected image of St Paul's in the brass door plate, employing a landmark image but doing so in a way that demands a fresh attention, as well as indicating a certain self-consciousness about the device.

In using these recognisable images, a film both refers to the urban imaginary of a specific city and also stages it, contributing to the many images, characters and tales that constitute that urban imaginary. This is nicely recognised in the opening of Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950). The film opens in a theatre with a frontal shot of the proscenium arch. The title credits are played over the safety curtain of the theatre stage. As the credits roll, the curtain rises in front of the unmoving camera. The spectacle revealed behind the curtain is not a stage dressed for a performance, but location footage of St Paul's Cathedral rising above surrounding bombsites and traffic. The London setting of the film is revealed in a gesture that, five years after the end of the Second World War, uses formal invention to draw attention to the survival of the cathedral among the ruins. While this shot is the first of three, which move in to a two-shot of the occupants of a sports car, the narrative significance of the speeding car is overwhelmed by the dramatic, self-conscious staging of St Paul's in post-war London. The joke of the theatrical curtain rising on cinematic reality, rather than theatrical artifice, can only confirm the accomplishment of the cinematic artifice employed.

Stage Fright: the curtain (just visible at the top of the image) rises on St Paul's

This landmark iconography, like that of all capital cities, is an historically formed, multimedia iconography which is always about location but never just about location. While all cities have their landmarks, those of capital cities also carry complex and sometimes contested national and international meanings. Britain's imperial past and London's global significance in the Victorian period is strongly represented in London landmark imagery, with the Palace of Westminster, Tower Bridge and Trafalgar Square and Nelson's Column dating from the nineteenth century,¹ but there is also an earlier historical repertoire (the Tower of London, St Paul's) that confirms London's status as an 'old city'; and there is an emerging one of millennial modernity, which includes Richard Rogers' 1986 Lloyd's Building, the Millennium Wheel, Tate Modern and 30 St Mary Axe (the Gherkin).

Landmark iconography is not specific to cinema, although there are specifically cinematic ways of deploying it, as I will explore. Principal of these is a 'landmark montage', which functions as an establishing shot sequence at the beginning of a film, or to mark a move in location. Single shots of key landmarks, such as the Palace of Westminster, or St Paul's, can also be inserted into the space and time of film narratives, while other films integrate landmark imagery within narrative space and time. Landmark iconography is produced historically in a range of ways across many sites and practices, including postcards, engravings, guided tours, museums and souvenir shops. The historical marketing of London analysed in the study of London guidebooks by scholars such as David Gilbert, Fiona Henderson and John Eade² provides one set of sources for tracing the transformations to landmark London, just as the agency Film London, established to facilitate filming in London, provides another. 'Grands projets' architecture (such as Millennium wheels), T-shirts with tube maps, miniature red telephone kiosks key rings and the televising of Parliament all contribute to the production and circulation of the landmark images of London. The artist Banksy, spraying 'This is not a photo-opportunity' on a lamp-post opposite Parliament, draws attention to the role of everyday photography in reproducing London as a city of tourist views.³ The representative status of particular landmarks has its own history and their iconographic presence can wax and wane at particular times, as Stephen Daniels has shown with the extra-cinematic history of St Paul's Cathedral.⁴ For the cinema, the cathedral, which was London's tallest building until 1958, has a silhouette which can be easily referenced and recreated in the studio. Following its iconic significance in the photography and cinema of the Second World War and the immediate post-war period, it has recently gained a new view with the redevelopment of the South Bank, the building of the Millennium footbridge and 30 St Mary Axe. In this view, St Paul's (old) is recruited to a funkier, modem London represented by the steel lines of the bridge or the dark glass curves of 30 St Mary Axe. Modern, professional Londoners, such as the characters in Closer (2004), can be filmed with the cathedral as a fashionably accented backdrop, and it is this mixture of ancient and modern, with a little bit of shopping thrown in, which is characteristic of twenty-first-century landmark London montages.

One of my arguments in this book is that all films that claim London as their setting must engage with this hegemonic discourse of location – with that river, that clock, that bridge, those buses and those taxis – but that there are various ways of going about it. The exclusion of what Katherine Shonfield has called 'the tourist hardware'⁵ is often more significant in a London-set film than is its inclusion, and there are very different tonalities with which iconographic elements can be used in narratives, as will be discussed below. Just which image or sound, in which combination, in which period, means 'this is London', is one of the ways in which the historical and documentary aspect of fiction film can be traced through its dramatic mise en scène.

Closer: a twenty-first-century landmark London view

This chapter has three parts. I start by examining some 'this is London' sequences from a range of films. The very ubiquity of some of these images in the cinema could lead to some rather dull lists, so instead I have chosen to look in detail at particular sequences in a few films with the aim of highlighting the contrasting ways in which different films use the same imagery. I then proceed to discuss three London 'landmarks' that are less monumental than Tower Bridge and Big Ben: the red London bus, the pub and the fog. While the red double-decker bus is always cited as a cliché of London-ness, I will argue that its appearance in the cinema is often managed with considerable subtlety. The complex spatiality of public houses, where status and belonging can be negotiated with a glance, provides a rich setting for a medium in which space is constructed through the interplay of looks and gazes, and demands discussion in a book on London in the cinema, even though pubs are by no means specific to London-set films. A brief consideration of foggy days in London films shows the way in which landmark London imagery signifies time as well as place. For if there is a predominance of Victorian landmarks in the cinematic signifying of London, there is also a substantial tradition of the cinematic presentation of London as a Victorian city, within which fog is a key motif. This London requires only a gas street lamp, a cobbled street, a horse-drawn carriage and a wisp of mist to be identified, and begins to demonstrate the way in which landmarks signify genre as well as time and place.

In later chapters, I will discuss the way in which the eschewing of landmark London can be as significant as its imaging, particularly in films that make the realist claim to show an authentic London and, thus, want to avoid familiar images such as Tower Bridge and Piccadilly Circus. But here I want to concentrate on the familiar and often clichéd images that signify 'This is London' and the chapter closes with a discussion of the role of landmark imagery in the staging of an uncanny London in two films made fifty years apart, Seven Days to Noon (1950) and Twenty-Eight Days Later ... (2002).

'This is London'

Night and the City (1950) was the first of blacklisted director Jules Dassin's European films and was made, with some location shooting, at Shepperton by Twentieth Century-Fox. It is interesting here for its complex presentation of a doubled London. London landmarks are shown as the superficial attractions – the surface – of a much grubbier underworld, while generically it is both American film noir and, through the use of location and character actors, British realist. This doubling is introduced at the beginning of the film through the relationship between landmark London images and a voice-over narration. The film's title sequence gives cast and crew credits over a brief, dark montage of night-time London views, including the Embankment, Tower Bridge and Piccadilly Circus, returning, for the final shot of the sequence, to the Palace of Westminster from the Albert Embankment. The up-tempo orchestrated musical accompaniment to the title sequence hints at (rather non-British) excitement to come, but also introduces a more plangent violin theme, which suggests that the out-comes of the film may not be entirely happy. London is established as the location for the film through this dark, five-shot montage, but the narration, which begins after the title sequence over a lighter image of Westminster, disregards the 'London' that has been carefully established, beginning instead with the more general noir proposition: 'Night and the city. The night is tonight, tomorrow night or any night.'

This narration, over images that foreground the River Thames in its misty beauty, promises the generalised urban anomie of film noir. Only after the dominance of 'night and the city' in general has been established does the narrator specify, over a cut to Piccadilly Circus, with Eros centred, and a double-decker bus moving from right to left to obscure it, that 'The city is London'. There are two kinds of 'establishing' going on here – one of place, the other of genre. While the images are recognisable landmark London images: the place of government, the River Thames and the slightly more risqué centre of the West End, the voice-over promises something less straightforward. The darkness of the images – this is clearly London at night – offers generic clues as to the type of narrative that will be set here, but it is the narration that both fixes, and disavows, the location. This is London – but it is London within a repertoire that includes New York and Los Angeles, rather than Cardiff and Edinburgh. A cut to a figure running across monumental steps and then a silhouetted St Paul's confirms the 'noirish' promise of the voice-over narration and the existential randomness of the temporal setting, 'any night'. We understand that while this time, tonight, it is London – and a London rendered with some precision, as I discuss in Chapter 3 – the story we are being told is a perennial city tale, a story of 'the city' in general.

Night and the City: 'the night is tonight, tomorrow night or any night'

This view of Westminster from across the water is used in innumerable films, sometimes with just a shot, unrelated to other aspects of the mise en scène, to signify arrival or location in London. There is a sudden shot of Westminster in the 1946 Ealing film, The Captive Heart, which is set mainly in a German prisoner-of-war camp, where a captured Czech officer, Captain Hasek (Michael Redgrave), corresponds to his supposed wife Celia Mitchell (Rachel Kempson) in an English village (to escape death he has masqueraded as her dead husband). The film is notable for the evocation of English village life with which Captain Hasek falls in love, cricket on the village green, the changing seasons, gardening; as he does with the woman who describes it to him. This rural imaginary of England is the counterpart to landmark London, and within the narrativised spaces of the film is set against the prison camp. However, suddenly, about forty minutes in, there is a single shot of the Palace of Westminster and Big Ben from Westmi...