Search

My research explores the crucial role of screen media in representing the politics of gentrification in East London. Although the accelerated pace of regeneration and its divisiveness affect the whole city and gentrification is now being studied at a planetary scale, East London has emerged as a laboratory for global trends in urban renewal since the 1980s, with the redevelopment of the Docklands, and it has continued as such with the regeneration of the area for the 2012 Olympic Games. The film and media I explore produce an archive of East London as a radically contested urban terrain where different communities and social actors negotiate access to public space and housing. I argue that the Eastern part of the city is today characterized as a transitional space and as a site of convergence and global connectivity, in contrast to its earlier depiction as the poverty struck and crime-ridden, but more authentically working-class “other” to the West End. In order to render the complexities and nuances of this mediascape and the different political stances towards gentrification it represents, I explore a wide range of formats, including feature films, television documentaries, television series and essay films. I contextualise these screen productions within the wider mediated constructions of urban space which contribute to the place-making of the area, from music videos to real estate promotions. I explore how the ongoing socio-economic transformation of East London taking place off screen is mapped on screen through three distinct modes of media activity: production, representation, and resistance. I situate my research at the intersection of film and urbanism, therefore drawing on studies of London on screen and spatial analyses of film and media and setting them in conversation with housing studies, sociology and geography. Although a socio-historical analysis of the media texts is at the core of my research, I also consider aspects of production and circulation that contribute to shaping the media landscape of East London, intervening in an area of film studies that is still not sufficiently studied: the role of film and media in representing gentrification and its counter-narratives.

London’s Soho is no longer considered the 'demi-monde' of the metropolis. Like an urban village, its rapid gentrification has led to the sanitization of its bohemian past. Since the turn of the 21st century, public campaigns concerned with its preservation as a site of subcultures have sought to protect its reputation in the public imagination as a melting pot of desire, subversion, repulsion and transgression. After the Second World War, Soho’s milieu of hedonists, beatniks, impresarios, restauranteurs, strip-tease artists and spivs was rooted in its historical function as a refuge for immigrants and its early modern development as a centre of consumption. Its cosmopolitan identity was intrinsically linked to the commercial renaissance of the area following the wartime devastation of London. This was chiefly driven by local entrepreneurs in consonance with the popular press who promoted their small businesses, cafés, restaurants, cinemas, strip clubs and bookshops to the nation. However, despite Soho’s rich cultural history and the growth in literature examining the relationship between cinema and the city in the last twenty years, there remains an absence of academic scholarship on the representation of this particular urban space. This thesis seeks to fill this research gap by providing a detailed study of Soho in post-war British cinema from 1948 to 1963 and taking an interdisciplinary approach which draws upon historical, cultural and urban studies of the area. I will provide close analysis of twelve films and theatrically released documentaries from a filmography of over one hundred Soho set productions. These are predominantly lowbudget, exploitation films which, I argue, are worthy of discussion as exemplars of British and international filmmaking in a time and place of intense social transformation, technological innovation and growing permissiveness. I will also consider how these filmmakers mediated the spaces of Soho by shooting on location with some additional use of studio sets. In my analysis of these films, I will draw attention to the impact of cinematic frameworks and creative personnel upon the formulation of cinematic images of Soho. By shedding light on these neglected films, this thesis opens up a wider discussion around the significance of specific localities as depicted by London films. Placed in the context of Soho and London history, it contributes towards the ever expanding urban and cultural scope of British cinema scholarship.

'Remembering and Forgetting: Women and Disabled Veterans in British and American Silent Cinema' examines the representation of women and disabled ex-servicemen in British and American popular cinema of the 1920s. Images of injured veterans and women’s war work are central to Hollywood fictional narratives but suffer a proportional absence in British cinema of the same era. I argue that historically the iconic soldier has held a privileged place in the Western understanding of the Great War, but that in the immediate aftermath of the conflict a transatlantic cultural memory was in contestation with different social groups vying for a place in that memory. Through a comparison of Hollywood and British fictional film narratives, as well as government and trade publications, popular press, and newsreels, I illustrate the representational differences and similarities regarding injured ex-servicemen and women. I have uncovered the titles of over 250 films – some still well-known, others forgotten – and aim to: 1) revise the dominant belief that the war genre in the 1920s was primarily concerned with the heroics of men in the trenches, 2) advocate that a transatlantic approach is essential to understanding a cinematic memory of the war, and 3) expose the diversity of representations and understandings of the Great War in British and American films of the 1920s. Ultimately, I demonstrate that women and disabled veterans in a cinematic memory of the Great War occupied a space somewhere between remembering and forgetting.