London as Screen Gateway explores how London features within screen narratives and as a location of screen industry activity. Reflecting the diversity of roles the city plays both on screen and within the screen industries, the volume explores the intersection between London as a material place and its position within a cultural imaginary.
Conceptualising London as an archival city, as a collection of specific places and spaces, and as a part of national and international cultural and economic flows, contributors from film studies, television studies and media studies approach London through the lenses of textual analysis, historical work, industry studies and user experience. Chapters explore how London has appeared on screen across film and television, how screen content frames notions of place and belonging within the diasporic communities across the city, how the city has become a hub for the UK and global screen industries and how it intersects with national and local media policy.
This interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to scholars and students of film studies, television studies, media industry studies, games studies, cultural and media studies.
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Introduction
Part I
London as Archive
1. ‘The BFI: London's gateway to Cinema and Media studies for all’: Interview by Elizabeth Evans with Sarah Currant, Melanie Hoyes and Emma Smart
ELIZABETH EVANS
2. Millennium Mills: London’s Last Post-Industrial Ruin and its Media History and Industry
ANNA VIOLA SBORGI
3. Sherlock Holmes, Archive London: Phantasms of Authenticity at the Festival of Britain, 1951
CONSTANCE BALIDES
4. Watching the Detectives: Flânerie and Surveillance in Luther’s London
BRENDAN KREDELL
5. Adaptations and Intertexts: How Disney Imagines London in ‘Mary Poppins’ and Saving Mr. Banks
SUSAN OHMER
6. The Rough and the Smooth: Touching and the Tactile in British London Films of the 1920s
JOEL CASEY
Part II
London Locations
7. London Film-Location Walking Tours: Labouring at the Intersection of Text, Location and Place
SARAH ATKINSON
8. ‘Rivers Can Be Very Sinister Places’: Alfred Hitchcock Takes a Satirical, Ominous London Crime Cruise in Frenzy
K BRENNA WARDELL
9. Is London Real? The Actual/Virtual/Fantastic City from Blow-Up to Bandersnatch
REBECCA FINE ROMANOW
10. London and the carnivalesque in Catastrophe (Channel 4, 2015-2019), and Fleabag (BBC, 2016 – 2019)
FRANCES SMITH
Part III
London and Beyond
11. Leaving London: The BBC, Channel 4 and The Symbolic Diversity of Location
ELIZABETH EVANS
12. Invisible London: Unveiling the Immigrant Landscape in The Receptionist
TZU-CHIN INSKY CHEN
13. Piccadilly Lights as Pandemic Portal? The Case of CIRCA Art’s Public Projection Series
MALINI GUHA
Afterword: Peak London: The Spectacular and the Banal in the ABC Decade
CHARLOTTE BRUNSDON
Biography
Elizabeth Evans is Professor of Screen Cultures at the University of Nottingham. Her research examines the intersection of screen audiences, screen industries and technology studies. She is the author of Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media and Daily Life (2011) and Understanding Engagement in Transmedia Culture (2020) and co-editor of Participations: The Online Journal of Audience and Reception Studies.
Malini Guha is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University. As a contributing editor for the online journal Mediapolis, she writes a regular column, ‘Screening Canada’, where she explores an aspect of Canada’s mediated place-making in relation to recent issues concerning its global role and domestic negotiation of racial and ethnic difference.
