Of Memory and the City

Liverpool is a place and a space made up of many different cities. This is reflected both geographically in the heterotopic composition of its urban landscapes, and in the way the city has been understood conceptually. Throughout this book Liverpool has variously been conceived of as a virtual city, reel city, disappearing city, real-and-imagined city, surreal city, generic city, centripetal city, centrifugal city and archive city. While each of these reflect the specific and overlapping configurations of time and space that have left their imprint on modern Liverpool, it is the last of these – the archive city – that I wish to return to in this concluding chapter. Historiographically, the metaphor of the archive shifts the temporal cartography of the city-infilm away from a surface diachrony of historical narrative towards temporal verticality and depth. Re-envisioned as an archaeology of deep memory, it is less the linearity of historical time (the space of narration) that determines the way archival image-spaces are mapped, than ‘the cautious probing of the spade in the dark loam’ of urban spatial memory (Benjamin 1999b: 576). The prevalence of archaeological tropes of ‘excavation’, ‘unearthing’ or the ‘layering’ of urban ‘strata’ in relation to film and cultural memory, as well as reflecting Benjaminian ideas on time, memory and history, also signals the emergence of a critical spatial imagination that has begun to leave its mark on urban cultural studies. As I discuss below, that has in turn prompted a growing interest in geospatial and GIS mapping technologies as tools for mining the layered topographies of film, memory and urban space (Hallam and Roberts forthcoming). The historiographical implications of a database, or more accurately a spatial database model of urban cinematic geography, are thus oriented around the navigational possibilities of the archive city. In this conception the city-in-film in understood as a relational assemblage of archival image-spaces rather than as a virtual chronology of individual filmic ‘narrative moments’ (‘like the beads of a rosary’, to cite Benjamin [1999c: 255]), where narratives of urban space – the city's spatial stories – express a temporal linearity that belies the altogether different temporal architecture of individual and collective memory.