Of Time and The City and Urban Reflections

We will be celebrating the publication of Mark Tewdwr-Jones’ Urban Reflections: Narratives of Place, Planning and Change (Policy Press, 2011) with screenings on the theme of URBAN PLANNING and its relationship with the narrative strategies of cinema.

The feature screening, Terence Davies’ ‘elegiac yet prickly’ Of Time and the City (2008), is a love song and eulogy to Liverpool in the 1950s and 60s, using newsreel and documentary footage supplemented by his own commentary voice-over and contemporaneous and classical music soundtracks. The film was chosen on its release as Sight and Sound’s Film of the Month, with the Guardian describing it as ‘a British masterpiece, a brilliant assemblage of images that illuminate our past.’

We will also show two other short films about the use of land in planning projects and on film. R K Neilson-Baxter’s ‘All That Mighty Heart’ (1962), shot by the Oscar-winning David Watkins for British Transport Films, shows a poetic ‘day in the life’ of London during the construction of the new Victoria Line. It includes fleets of Routemaster buses, the control rooms of the tube, early CCTV, vintage lights at Piccadilly Circus and children building sandcastles on the banks of the Thames. The little known ‘Destination Louvain La Neuve’, a short film from the New Town Archive, shows a historic snapshot of idealistic urban planning in Belgium and its promotion.