Perusing through the Melbourne Curious blog alerted me to the fact that Australian Screen have some amazing historical footage of my home city, Melbourne, available for viewing and download. It got me thinking again about the role that films play in preserving a record of our built environment.
Before I expand on those thoughts, here’s a sample of the stuff they have. There’s extracts from Marvellous Melbourne: Queen City of the South, a film from 1910 by Charles Cozens Spencer. It gives a great sense of the feel of Melbourne’s streets at that time.
From about 1920 there’s the nicely eccentric City Traffic in Variable Moods.
And from 1931, there’s Melbourne Today.
When I watch any of these, I can’t help but think about the undervalued role films play in preserving our built form heritage. Urban planners and architects tend to think of heritage preservation as purely an issue of retaining actual buildings, and of course from a heritage perspective there is no substitute for doing so. But not all buildings can be kept due to the myriad other pressures on the city. And if one of the main reasons for retaining buildings is to get some sense of the story of a place, and what life was like in previous times, then planners, architects and heritage preservationists should think about the other ways in which this built form heritage is preserved. Films are part of that equation.
Documentary films such as those on the Australian Screen site have a particularly obvious historical interest and preservation value. They are shot with the explicit intent of creating just such a record. However it’s also worth thinking about the ways in which other kinds of films create a trace record of the city in which they are filmed. I am particularly conscious of this because the research I’m doing for my PhD has me constantly looking around the action in the centre of the frame to look at details of the sets and locations in which films were shot. And I’ve written here about my interest in the way films carry strong traces of the places in which they are made. The explosion of cinema in the twentieth century means it has actually become a vast repository of information about the cities and places around us.
For one example, consider John Bengtson’s remarkable books Silent Echoes, Silent Traces, and Silent Visions, which use scenes from silent comedies to reconstruct early Los Angeles. Bengtson’s work, which often contrasts the locations as seen in the silent films with the locations as seen today, paints a particularly compelling view both of the early twentieth century form of Los Angeles, and its complete ruination in the subsequent century.
Because films record so much more than just the physical record of places, they make especially rich records of the city. This is something I tried to explore in my piece on Dogs in Space a couple of years ago. That film is part of a swathe of 1970s and 1980s Australian films that depict the inner city suburbs of Melbourne on the cusp of their yuppification: think also of Monkey Grip, Malcolm, Death in Brunswick, The Big Steal, and so on. The change to those suburbs in the last twenty years means that we already can look at these films and see them as a record of a lost moment in our city’s history, marvelling at the grubbiness of the streets or the thought of a bunch of broke heroin addicts living in a two storey terrace in Parkville. So while narrative might obscure the pure recording of the environment that we see in those silent documentaries, it can also add a lot of information about culture, social values, behaviour, and the like that enriches the record of the city. We take this kind of information for granted when films are new, but it becomes more interesting as time goes by.
The other thing I think about is that so few people actually bother to make such deliberate records of the city any more. The films of Cozens Spencer are incredibly valuable records of what Melbourne was like a century ago, yet how many people would deliberately film such long shots of a tram ride up Swanston Street today? I think those early years of film encouraged a particular urge for matter-of-fact documentary recording that we have largely moved on from as the technology has become more taken for granted. We do offset that in other ways, of course: by shooting more footage, and through better access to the material that is shot. In the world of photography, tools like geotagging offer some mind-boggling possibilities when it comes to assembling and accessing shared repositories of people’s photographic records of places, and similar technology will presumably be more commonly applied to moving picture records in future.
Yet I’m still not completely sure that a hundred years from now we’ll have many cinematic records of typical city life in Melbourne of 2011 that have the simplicity and comprehensiveness of Cozens Spencer’s footage. For this reason, I suspect we will still be left peeking at the buildings visible in the corners of narrative films for our documentary record of what Melbourne looked like in the early years of the twenty-first century.