LIVERPOOL

City of the Imagination

Text by JULIA HALLAM

If Liverpool didn't exist, it would have to be invented.

Félicien De Myrbach, quoted in Of Time and the City (TERENCE DAVIES, 2008)

A city on the edge, a city more Celtic than English, a city of intense passion, of humour, music, poets and football clubs, a city disliked by Tory politicians and their ilk for its 'bolshy' attitude to authority and subversive determination to do things its own way. Liverpool has always figured as a place of danger in the English imagination: the epicentre of free trade and 'gateway to Empire' in the nineteenth century, the great wealth generated by the international slave trade also became a source of notoriety. Philanthropic gesture bequeathed the city some of the finest civic buildings in Europe, including the magnificent St George's Hall, while astute commercial acumen commissioned Jesse Hartley to build the world's first secure warehouse system – the Albert dock – completed in 1846. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Liverpool's docks were some of the largest in Europe; the city was home to more than 700,000 people, many of them seafarers and Irish émigrés living in the densely crowded courts bordering the waterfront.

When the Lumière Brothers' cameraman Jean Alexandre Louis Promio stepped off the train at Lime Street en route to Ireland in 1897, he set up his camera on St Georges Plateau and recorded the first moving images of the city in front of the huge neoclassical hall. At this time St Georges Hall defined the city's identity internationally, just as the Liver Birds atop the Royal Liver Building and the 'Three Graces' skyline form the iconic epicentre of the city's public image today. Early film-makers were captivated by the busy waterfront, capturing scenes of loading and passenger embarkation in films such as Cunard Mail Steamer Lucania Leaving for America] (Mitchell and Kenyon, 1901). A thrilling chase sequence on the Overhead Railway and across rooftops of the embarkation sheds at the end of The Clouded Yellow] (1950) captures the view from the railway before it was demolished in 1956.

Stories of crime, hardship and immorality set in bleak nineteenth-century tenements and grim terraced streets typify Liverpool's early film history. Mitchell and Kenyon's Arrest of Goudie (1901), claimed as one of first dramatic stagings of a real crime for the screen, is set in the terraced streets of dockland Bootle, and The Eviction (1901) is set in worker's housing in Garston. Her Benny (1920), a classic 'rags to riches' tale, takes place amidst the crowded courts of Scotland Road, home to Liverpool's vibrant Irish population. British film in the post-war period continues these traditions; Waterfront (1950), a story of a mother abandoned by her sailor husband, is a typical British social-problem film set in the now demolished Gerard Gardens. Built in the 1930s to provide modern facilities and a clean environment, in Waterfront and the well-known Violent Playground (1958) the tenements are depicted as breeding grounds of criminality and immorality, their occupants irrevocably tarnished by generations of seafaring and casual employment.

By the 1980s, Liverpool had become one of the poorest cities in Europe. The haunting beauty of its derelict dockyards and once grand civic buildings began to attract film-makers. Local writer Alan Bleasdale's poignant series of films for British television, Boys from the Blackstuff (1981), depicts the deserted Albert docks in a sequence where former docker and political activist George, wheelchair bound, reminisces about the hopes of his youth. George epitomizes the kind of heroes found in Ken Loach's controversial drama of dockland politics The Big Flame (1969), an ongoing concern in films such as Dockers (1999). The boost to local production from Channel 4 created a space for regional film-makers; Letter to Brehznev (1985) opens with the iconic waterfront seen by Russian sailors from an inward-bound ship heralding a romantic tale between seaman Peter and local girl Elaine who opts for life in Soviet Russia rather than staying in Thatcher's Britain. Yet it is perhaps Terence Davies's films of growing up in Liverpool in the 1950s that established Liverpool's landscapes and stories in the pantheon of British cinema; his painful reveries of remembrance and loss in Distant Voices, Still Lives] (1988) and The Long Day Closes] (1992) changed the grey terraced streets of childhood into palimpsests of longing and desire. Of Time and the City] (2008) is an elegy to a city and a culture that in Davies's mind has all but disappeared, its landscapes re-packaged by the heritage industry, its people consumed by greedy materialism and footballers' 'wag' culture.

Since the 1980s the historic waterfront (declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 2004), and the rapidly re-developing wastelands around it, attracts film-makers worldwide; contemporary Liverpool has one of the most filmed landscapes in the United Kingdom, but it rarely plays itself. Apart from a handful of well-known films such as Liam (2000), The 51st State (2001) and Nowhere Boy (2009), the Victorian warehouses, Georgian terraces and neoclassical monuments are stand-ins for elsewhere. Chariots of Fire (1981) began the trend, using Liverpool's magnificent eighteenth-century town hall interior to represent the British embassy in Paris; the grand buildings nearby become Moscow in The Hunt for Red October] (1989). In 1989 the city became the first in Britain to open a film office, a one-stop shop that takes care of all the needs of companies shooting in the city. Since 2008, the city has re-invented itself as a European Capital of Culture, attracting artists, musicians and film-makers to a city which in the words of one its well-known writers 'just loves to talk'. It's this ability to tell stories that helped to establish the city as the 'Hollywood of North'; more feature films were shot in Liverpool than in any other UK city outside London during the 1990s, a trend that seems set to continue with major productions such as Sherlock Holmes (2009), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 3] (2010), Captain America: The First Avenger] (2010) and Route Irish (2010) shooting on location in and around the city.

A CASE OF COUP DE...