Some (brief) notes on cinemetrics II

If anyone is getting confused as to why my comments are appearing and disappearing at the end of posts, it’s simply because there is no one quite so indecisive as the author …

Power Laws and cinemetrics

In an earlier post I wrote about power laws and the distribution of mean relative frequencies (MRFs) of shot scales.

I think that MRFs have a useful role to play in statistically analysing film style – they can tell us if a group of films is dominated by a single scale (Lang’s German films) or if there is a more evenly spread usage of scales (the Hitchcock films and Lang in Hollywood). Looking at MRFs will not tell us which scale is dominant, but that is easy to find out.

However, having looked at this area in more depth, I would have to say that I do not think that there is much of a future in the power laws approach. Power regression does provide a good model – but it appears that it is not consistently the best. Exponential regression seems to be more consistent,with logarithmic regression is better too on occasion (but not so consistently). For example, for five Swedish films produced between 1917 and 1920 (see Table 1 below), R² (power) = 0.9817, while R² (exponential) = 0.9897. Not a big difference, but enough to say that a power law probably is not the best explanation for the trend in this data.

This suggests that power laws are unlikely to be a good explanation for the distribution of MRFs. Of course, the problem now is that I’m also sceptical about the use of exponential regression – given a quick enough decline in distribution of MRFs, an exponential regression line will give a very similar result to a linear curve and so it will not be possible to clearly distinguish between them. Overall, then, I think it is probably best just to use the linear model and to see how far MRFs deviate from this. Essentially, this means stating whether the distribution is linear or not (irrespective of what it might actually be) and looking for patterns in this statistic only. This is, of course, a much quicker and simpler way to proceed than comparing two or more regression models for each group of films, and so it has that advantage as well.

Power laws were worth a look, but I don’t see a future in it (or at least I see only an unnecessarily confusing one).

Table 1 presents some results for the distribution of MRFs for some groups of films when fitted to a linear curve using the model y = ax + b, where a is the slope and b is the intercept. As before this data is from Barry Salt’s database at the Cinemetrics website. Two things stand out: (1) early silent films are poorly fitted by the linear model; and (2) the groups of films that do fit the linear model have similar values for the slope and intercept of the regression curve. In fact, the results for the first five groups in Table 1 can all be adequately modelled by    a = -0.036 and b = 0.29. This is presented in Figure 1, where the red line is the regression model. Why this should be the case is a mystery – why are Thorold Dickinson’s films simialr to Josef von Sternberg’s, Fritz Lang’s, and Alfred Hitchcock’s across time and different countries? We can conclude that shot scales are unlikely to be an indicator of authorship (although, as before, a larger study is needed to confirm this) [1]. Perhaps these regression coefficients crop up wherever continuity editing is used (which would not be the case before 1920 in Europe – hence the values for Lang in Germany and Sweden), or wherever Hollywood has been a determining factor in the development of film style, as it has been in Europe (hence the British film’s similarity to Hollywood. (This raises the question of how shot scales are used in non-Western cinema: I would love to see the distribution of MRFs for Japanese films of the 1930s). Nonetheless, it is a startling empirical regularity, and hopefully soon I will have some more systematic results to present.

Table 1 Linear regression of the distribution of the mean relative frequencies of shot scales in some motion pictures

Figure 1 Linear regression of y = -0.036x + 0.29 on five groups of films

PPCC Data

Barry Salt requested the results for the probabilty plot correlation coeffecient (PPCC) for some 40 films I have looked at. These are presented in Table 2, while Table 3 includes a reel-by-reel breakdown for Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1928) for the same statistic.

Table 2 PPCC data for 40 films from the Cinemetrics database

Table 3 PPCC data for Man witha Movie Camera (1928)

Notes

1. To date I have found no empirical evidence to support auteurism at all, while I have repeatedly found evidence of group styles, whether those groups be defined by nation, studio, or era.

Information transduction in the cinema

A version of this post was presented to the CCM Research group at the University of Central Lancashire on 21 February 2007. It is presented here with the first part – a (not entirely satisfactory) discussion of ecological approaches to film theory – missing, and a new introduction. The model in figure 1 now seems incomplete and needs further development, but I think it still has some uses as a basic description of information and perception in the cinema.

Wade and Swanston point out that in order to come to a full understanding of vision it is necessary to ‘include an appreciation of the neurophysical processes that are initiated by the activity of light on the receptors of the eye. These involve the modification of light energy into nerve impulses and their transmission to areas at the back of the brain where they are analysed’ (1991: 59). In my opinion, it is precisely this ‘appreciation of neurophysical processes’ that should form the basis of film theory – not least because we need to be able to account for own experiences of the cinema in formulating hypotheses about it. A cognitive approach to film theory allows theorists to build self-reflexivity into their research. The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image promotes research in this area, with a particular emphasis on viewer’s emotional experiences. David Bordwell has recently written on the latest research to emerge here and  here.

However, I have been repeatedly frustrated by the lack of a model of communication in the cinema that can account for the viewer’s perception of a film in terms of neurophysical processes. For example, Carl Plantinga (1999) has noted that ‘[o]ne of the least explored aspects of film and television is their sensory means of communication’ (239) – but then on the next page he asserts that ‘[c]learly, film directors use the human face to communicate information about the emotions of characters’ (240, original emphasis). These are the only two occasions Plantinga mentions communication – but he goes from a topic that is one of the ‘least explored’ to the self-evident clarity of the assertion that films communicate emotions to the viewer. Plantinga never defines what he means by communication or information, though we may infer that he means the transmission from screen to spectator of meaningful content about the emotional states of a particular character. However, as Thayer has pointed out, such communication is impossible:

The ways in which we traditionally conceive of communication – those being inadequate and untenable – stand as obstacles to more adequate and more potent ways of conceiving of communication … Those preconceptions, our traditional concepts of communication, are often insidious. ‘Communication is the “transfer of meaning”’ has an appealing ring to it. But since none of our receptors is capable of receiving ‘meaning,’ the notion of transfer is a flagrantly untenable one (Thayer 1979: 10).

The work of Paul Bach-y-Rita (2002, 2003) at the University of Wisconsin deserves special mention here. Bach-y-Rita and his fellow researchers have used televisual sensory substitution systems to restore the modality of sight to vision impaired individuals, and he has addressed the impact of restored sight and emotion content:

we found that while experienced blind TVSS subjects could perceive faces and printed images, they were very disappointed when perception was not accompanied by qualia: A Playboy centerfold carried no emotional message, and the face of a girl-friend or a wife created an unpleasant response since it did not convey an affective message. We consider this to be comparable to the lack of emotional contact of curse-words in a language that has been learned as an adult. It is possible that the emotional content could be developed over a long period of usage. On the other hand, a blind infant using a vision substitution system smiles when he recognizes a toy and reaches for it, and a blind 10-year-old child perceiving a flickering candle flame by means of a TVSS is enchanted (Bach-y-Rita et al. 2003: 293).

This quote is very suggestive for cognitive film theorists working in the area of emotion. It raises a fundamental question: what is the nature of communication in the cinema? This paper explores this question through looking at information and the different forms it takes in the viewer’s experience of a motion picture.

Information in the cinema

Francis Crick points out that there ‘is one fact about the brain that is so obvious it is seldom mentioned: it is attached to the rest of the body and communicates with it. The nervous system receives information only from the various transducers in the body’ (1994: 81). This principle has long history and may be traced back to Johannes Müller’s law of specific nerve energies, which states that it no matter how a sensory system is stimulated, the resulting sensation will always be of the type appropriate to that system (Müller 1826). For example, the stimulation of the optic nerve will result in visual sensation regardless of whether that stimulation is by flashing light, by electric shock, or by pressure on the eye (Norrsell et al. 1999); and this sensation is dependent upon the part of the brain in which the sensory pathways terminate and not the stimulus. Thus we ‘see with the brain, not the eyes’ (Bach-y-Rita et al. 2003: 285) as the images that pass through the pupil and are focussed on the retina go no further: ‘The sole source of output from the retina to the rest of the brain is the action potentials arising from the million or so ganglion cells’ (Bear et al. 2007: 300). The brain has no independent reference as to the cause of electro-chemical signals that are transmitted along the optic nerve because the ‘response of a nerve cell does not encode the physical nature of the agents that caused its response. Encoded is only “how much” at this point on my body, but not “what”’ (Foerster [1973] 2003: 214).

Images in the cinema are comprised of variable physical properties in the pattern of silver salts of the film’s emulsion (Enticknap 2005: 203), so that light projected through a film and reflected by a screen is energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation and is experienced by the viewer as changes in the intensity of light and colour, and its position in the frame (Read 1998: 1). This light carries no qualitative information about the environment – there is only quantitative data about the energetic properties of the light. As Foerster points out ([1972] 1981: 263): ‘the environment contains no information, the environment is as it is.’ The viewer, as a perceiving system, is capable of receiving light as energy as evolution has led to the development of a visual system that responds to changes in the quantitative properties of a stream of photons (e.g. hue, luminosity) without knowledge of the cause of such properties. The viewer, then, is open to energy (‘how much’) but is closed to information (‘what’) (Ashby 1956).

As sensory systems function by ‘transducing some type of environmental energy into a form that can be analysed by the cells in the central nervous system’ (Wade and Swanston 1991: 59), perception cannot be considered direct – it is mediated by the sensory and neurophysiological processes of the perceiver. Those processes begin with light being focussed onto the retina:

Light emitted by or reflected off objects in space can be imaged by the eye onto the retina. Light energy is first converted into membrane potential charges in the mosaic of photoreceptors. … photoreceptor membrane potential is converted into a chemical signal (the neurotransmitter glutamate), which is again converted into a membrane potential changes in the post-synaptic bi-polar horizontal cells. This process of electrical-chemical-electrical signalling repeats again and again, until the presence of light or dark or colour is finally converted to a charge in the action potential firing frequency of the ganglion cells (Bear et al. 2007: 306).

The light energy reflected by a cinema screen enters the viewer’s eye where it is converted into a pattern of stimulation, and is projected to the magnocellular and parvocellular layers of the lateral geniculate nucleus before being relayed to the visual cortex (Farah 2000). As quantitative information, the pattern of stimulation at the retina is syntactic (Shannon and Weaver 1949), and is transduced into the functional information by the firing of neurons in the visual cortex. There is a non-random correlation between these two types of information (Gulick [1980] 1990).

A perceiving system is not aware of this complex process of information transduction, only of the results of this process (Jackendoff 1987). Somehow – and this remains a mystery to philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists – a perceiver is conscious of these results and they are meaningful. The semantic information that is the content of consciousness is an emergent product of the mind, and cannot be reduced to syntactic relations: information only becomes meaningful when a perceiver is able to link it to information structures he or she already possesses (Stonier 1997). Such information, then, is highly context-dependent, and from this it must be concluded that the environment does not contain sufficient information to guide a perceiver’s behaviour. The question of meaning comes down to how a perceiving system generates units of experience and relates them to conceptual structures that from the basis for subsequent modes of acting and thinking (Redfern 2004). As semantic information cannot be distinguished from those modes it becomes pragmatic information when it is embedded in a social practice (Zoglauer 1996).

The transduction of light energy to syntactic to functional to semantic/pragmatic information creates a layered hierarchy of information levels in which higher information concepts depend on lower level information concepts but cannot be reduced to them (Zoglauer 1996). This relationship is represented in Figure 1. Though we are conscious only of information at the semantic/pragmatic level of this hierarchy it is essential that we include the lower information levels and do not marginalise the physical inputs to the viewer as a perceiving system or ignore the viewer’s neurophysiological processes of information transduction.

Figure 1 Information transduction in motion picture perception

Representation in the cinema

The concept of representation is central to both cognitive psychology and to the study of all media forms as well as more specifically the cinema. Representation is a term used in a wide variety of senses and can refer to any symbolic description of the world. Thus, from a psychological perspective, representation refers to mental images that correspond to objects that lie beyond a perceiver’s sensory systems; while in film studies, representation is used in reference to the reflection or distortion of the ‘real’ (Dyer 1985). Both these uses of representation are manifest in the application of cognitive models to the cinema: in watching, say, The Scarlet Pimpernel (Harold Young, 1934) the viewer has a mental image of the depiction of the Pimpernel as an English gentleman adventurer (Richards 1997) (see Figure 2).

If the above description of information transduction in motion picture perception is accepted then the concept of representation is of no use in accounting for the viewer’s experience of a film. As the viewer is, in informational terms, organisationally closed his or her conscious experience cannot be said to correspond to anything that exists independently of the viewer. As an organisationally closed system that interacts necessarily with its own states, the viewer has no external point of reference by which to judge the correspondence of mental images to the world: the viewer has no means of establishing a correspondence between his or her perception of The Scarlet Pimpernel and the film itself. If it is accepted that the viewer is organisationally closed then the sensory structure, patterns, or images he or she experiences are the viewer’s own construction, and the notion that they represent an aspect of the world has no empirical foundation. Glasersfeld (1995, 1999) argues that in the place of representation, we should use the term presentation, as this is closer to Kant’s deployment of vorstellung in ‘The Conflict of the Faculties,’ to refer to concepts that are generated by a perceiver: ‘the mind can only create only presentations of its own objects and not of the real things, that is, through these presentations and concepts, things cannot possibly be known as they might be in themselves’ (quoted in Glasersfeld 1995: 39-40). The qualitative aspects of the viewer’s experience are solely determined by the viewer, and his or her experience of The Scarlet Pimpernel is a mental presentation of the viewer that emerges as a result of a complex process of information transduction.

Figure 2 Leslie Howard as The Scarlett Pimpernel (1934)

The concept of constructions that do not correspond to an external reality does not imply epistemological solipsism. Lorenz (1941) argued that evolution has provided us with a perceptual system that allows us to operate in the absence of information about the ‘real world.’ This principle has been developed by evolutionary epistemologists (Campbell 1974) and radical constructivists (Glasersfeld 1995), who argue that constructions are adaptations that provide us with viable ways of thinking and acting in an environment (Sjölander 1999). This principle of adaptation is derived from the work of Jean Piaget (1937), who approached the construction of knowledge as a biologist. For Piaget, adaptation involves two complimentary and simultaneous processes: a cognising organism primarily seeks to organise experience in terms of the psychological structures (schemes) it already possesses, i.e., it seeks to assimilate experience; if the result of this process creates a perturbation the organism attempts to accommodate the error either by modifying an existing scheme or creating a new one. It is this balance between assimilation and accommodation that Piaget describes as adaptation. Knowledge is actively constructed, and is adapted to fit the environmental constraints that act on an organism in order to avoid internal contradictions and achieve equilibrium. Glasersfeld describes the principle of adaptation in radical constructivist thought:

[A]daptation is not an activity but the result of the elimination of all that is not adapted. Consequently, on the biological level, anything that manages to survive is ‘adapted’ to the environment in which it happens to find itself living.… Taken out of the biological context and applied to cognition, this means that ‘to know’ is not to possess true representations of reality, but rather to possess ways and means of acting and thinking that will allow one to attain the goals one happens to have chosen (2001: 39).

The key to evaluating competing knowledge claims, therefore, is not to seek to compare them to the ‘real world’ that cannot be known, but to assess their cognitive viability or functional fitness.

In observing a film, the viewer abstracts regularities from his or her conscious experience and seeks to fit those regularities into pre-existing information structures. In watching The Scarlet Pimpernel, the viewer identifies regularities in their experience of watching a film and links this semantic information to what he or she already knows about ‘Englishness’ and ‘gentlemanly behaviour.’ A viewer who has no understanding of these concepts will be unable to establish such connections, and as a consequence will interpret the film very differently. Perception is, to a significant extent, dependent upon the viewer’s prior experiences and knowledge, and is comprised of a sense-making activity that involves the building up of conceptual structures by linking new information to old. The result of this process cannot be regarded as being representational as the viewer has no means of accessing the film directly.

Conclusion

In adopting an evolutionary-constructivist approach it is possible to develop a model of information transduction in motion picture perception that is non-representational, ecologically viable, and takes as its starting point the viewer as a biological perceiving system. This approach leads to the conclusion that perception is not direct, and the highly detailed, coherent world that such a viewer experiences is an autopoietic construct of the viewer (Maturana and Varela 1980). The ‘impression of reality’ in the cinema may be accounted for as the viewer’s construction of his or her own experiential reality. The viewer does not pickup information from a film because, to paraphrase Foerster, the film contains no information; the film is as it is.

References

Ashby, W.R. (1956) An Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman and Hall.

Bach-y-Rita, P. (2002) Sensory substitution and qualia, in A. Noe and E. Thompson (eds.) Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 497-514.

Bach-y-Rita, P., M.E. Tyler, and K.A. Kaczmarek (2003) Seeing with the brain, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 15 (2): 285-295.

Bear, M.F., B.W. Connors, and M.A. Paradiso (2007) Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain, third edition. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Williams, and Williams.

Campbell, D.T. (1974) Evolutionary epistemology, in P.A Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of Karl R. Popper. LaSalle, IL: Open Court: 412-463.

Crick, F. (1994) The Astonishing Hypothesis. London: Simon and Schuster.

Dyer, R. (1985) Taking popular television seriously, in D. Lusted and P. Drummond (eds.) TV and Schooling. London: BFI: 41-46.

Enticknap, L. (2005) Moving Image Technology: From Zoetrope to Digital. London: Wallflower Press.

Farah, M.J. (2000) The Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Foerster, H. von ([1972] 1981) Notes on an epistemology of living things, Biological Computer Laboratory Report 9.3, University of Illinois; reprinted in Observing Systems. Seaside, CA: Intersystems Publishing: 258-271.

Foerster, H. von ([1973] 2003) On constructing a reality, in F.E. Preiser (ed.) Environmental Research Design, Volume 2. Stroudsburg, Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross: 35-46; reprinted in Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition, New York, Springer: 211-228.

Glasersfeld, E. von (1995) Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning. London: RoutledgeFarmer.

Glasersfeld, E. von (1999) Piaget’s legacy: cognition as adaptive activity, in A. Riegler, M. Peschl, and A. von Stein (eds.) Understanding Representation in the Cognitive Sciences: Does Representation Need Reality? New York/Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers: 283-287.

Glasersfeld, E. von (2001) The radical constructivist view of science, Foundations of Science 6 (1-3): 31-43.

Gordon, I.E. (1997) Theories of Visual Perception, second edition. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

Gulick, R. van ([1980] 1990) Functionalism, information, and content, Nature and System 2: 139-162; reprinted in W.G. Lycan (ed.) Mind and Cognition: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 107-129.

Jackendoff, R. (1987) Consciousness and the Computational Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lorenz, K. (1941) Kants Lehre von Apriorischen im Lichte gegenwärtiger Biologie. Die angeborene Formen möglicher Erfahrung, Blätter für deutsche Philosophie 15: 94-125.

Maturana, H.R., and F. Varela (1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realisation of the Living. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.

Müller, J. (1826) Zur vergleichenden Physiologie des Gesichtssinnes des Menschen und der Tiere. Leipzig: C. Knobloch.

Norrsell, U., S. Finger, and C. Lajonchere (1999) Cutaneous sensory spots and the ‘law of specific nerve energies:’ history and development of ideas, Brain Research Bulletin 48 (5): 457-465.

Piaget, J. (1937) La construction du réel chez l’enfant. Neuchatel: Delachaux et Niestle.

Plantinga, C. (1999) The scene of empathy and the human face in film, in C. Platinga and G.M. Smith (eds.) Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press: 239-255.

Read, R. (1998) The Essence of Communication Theory. London: Prentice Hall.

Redfern, N. (2004) Communication and meaning in the cinema, Constructivism in the Human Sciences 9 (2): 39-48.

Richards, J. (1997) Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Shannon, C.E., and W. Weaver (1949) The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, Il.: University of Illinois Press.

Sjölander, S. (1999) On the evolution of reality – some biological prerequisites and evolutionary stages, Journal of Theoretical Biology 187 (4): 595-600.

Stonier, T. (1997) Information and Meaning: An Evolutionary Perspective. New York: Springer.

Thayer, L. (1979) Communication: sine qua non of the behavioural sciences, in R.W. Budd and B.D. Ruben (eds.) Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Communication. Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden: 7-31.

Wade, N.J., and M. Swanston (1991) Visual Perception: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge.

Zoglauer, T. (1996) Can information be naturalised?, in K. Kornwachs and K. Jacoby (eds.) Information: New Questions to a Multidisciplinary Concept. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag: 187-207.

Hell is a City (Val Guest, 1960)

This piece was originally presented as an introduction to a screening of Hell is a City at the Mitchell and Kenyon Cinema, University of Central Lancashire as part of a series on British crime films organised by Susan Sydney-Smith. I originally saw Hell is a City as a first year undergraduate at Cinema 3 at the University of Kent in 1996 – there were only six people in the audience and I was the youngest by some distance. At the end of the film, an elderly gentleman seated in front of turned to his son and said “Now that’s a proper film.” I couldn’t agree more …

Image from Hammer Horror Posters

Hell is a City is thriller that takes us into the world of Harry Martineau, a tough police inspector (played by Stanley Baker) tracking down an escaped prisoner-turned murderer Don Starling (John Crawford), whilst coping with a frigid, nagging wife (Maxine Audley) who resents the time he spends on his work. Directed by Val Guest, who had established a reputation as a maker of taught, low-budget thrillers such as They Can’t Hang Me (1955) and science-fiction classics such as The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), Hell is a City has been unjustly overlooked by many critics and historians of British cinema [1].

[You can access the trailer for Hell is a City at the Hammer Archive here]

Along with Basil Dearden’s Violent Playground (1958), Hell is a City has defined the development of post-war hardboiled detective fiction in the United Kingdom. Hell is a City marks a deliberate break with the literary tradition of the amateur detective that had been so popular before the Second World War to project an image of the professional detective that is more recognizable to us from American pulp fiction of Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler. Filmmakers such as Jules Dassin and Cy Endfield had come to Britain from Hollywood to escape the blacklists of the McCarthy era, and brought with them the style and moral ambiguity of the film noir. Hell is a city, and the city in question is Manchester. Depicted as ‘a dangerous, dark, and insecure place,’ the city is ‘characterised by paranoia, menace, violence, personal betrayal, greed, lust, and the corrosive effects of a society based on the pursuit of money’ [2]. The robbery that sets the story in motion is of the takings of a local bookmaker. The innermost conflicts and desires of the characters are rooted in the claustrophobia and stasis of the city; and, like many noirs, the dénouement of the film involves a precarious chase across a rooftop at what is now the Cornerhouse cinema at the corner of Oxford Road and Whitworth Street. The use of noir style to depict the city is supplemented by the traditions of British social realist cinema; only in Guest’s direction this realism becomes harsh and brutal. Hell is a City was released in the same year as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960), and bears comparison to the films of the British new wave. This film shares with its contemporaries a concern for the social lives of ordinary working class people in the north, with a particular emphasis on time spent at leisure. The film documents the traditional gambling games of the northern working class and the camaraderie of the public house. Unlike the films of the British new wave, however, it interprets this working class culture within the generic limits of the crime thriller, and resists some of the typical stylistic markers of the period. The film lacks ‘that long shot of our town from that hill’ that was so prevalent in British filmmaking in the early 1960s, and until the finale, the camera remains unflinchingly at street level amidst the shadows and back streets of the northern industrial city.

This new, British hardboiled fiction also marks a rejection of the cosy post-war vision of the police in England evident in The Blue Lamp and its television revival, Dixon of Dock Green. In the figure of George Dixon, the British ‘Bobby’ was represented as a kind, caring, friendly father-figure, but even contemporary audiences found Dixon ‘too good to be true,’ too comfortable, too safe in the post-war world [3]. In the modern world, the niceties of Dixon are unsuited to dealing with criminals like the desperate and brutal Don Starling. In Hell is a City the police officer is not so far removed from the criminal he pursues. Chief Inspector Martineau is the mirror image of Starling: as he tells his wife: ‘I know how his [Starling’s] mind works. I grew up with him. We went to the same school together, fought in the same war.’ Martineau is a man torn between two places; the city he must defend at all costs, and the safe suburban home his wife has created. He cannot reconcile himself to his wife’s lifestyle because he understands the criminal world so well. It is the scenes between Martineau and his wife that are perhaps the greatest source of tension in the film, and like many films of the British new wave marriage is depicted as a suffocating feminine environment where an obsession with propriety and property create a trap for the male for the virile hero. Where Dixon is homely and articulates a ‘home-spun’ wisdom, Martineau is – indeed, he must be – rooted in the city, but at the same time adrift on its rain-soaked streets. He belongs in the city, but is homeless within it; his day-to-day life is one of temporary allegiances formed in the public spaces of the pub, and his tentative relationship with the barmaid, Lucky. In Andrew Spicer’s view, the film ‘destroys the paternalist paradigm where crooks are evil and the policeman can return safely to his family, replacing it with alienated modern man, a detached unstable loner who can only feel at home on the night-time city streets’ [4]. Martineau is a fascinating character wonderfully played by Stanley Baker. It is Baker who, in the post-war period, came to embody the modern British tough guy. Anthony Carthew, writing in 1960 for the Daily Herald, noted Baker’s ‘violent, modern, unheroic personality … This man intrigues me because he is so utterly against the run of leading men. His big boxer’s body, crag of a chin, his flat voice and assertive masculinity – all make him the odd man out of British films’ [5]. Baker’s urgent, desperate performances of the 1950s and early-1960s are unheroic, and at the same time tragic. He has seen too much to be hopeful; and in Hell is a City, when Julia tells Martineau that Starling deserves to die, he replies, ‘None of us are perfect.’

Guest’s exploration of the noir city through British social realism made the world of The Blue Lamp look dated and unrealistic; and, though it did not produce the television equivalent of Dixon of Dock Green, it is Hell is a City that has proved to be the more influential film. The alienated, disaffected detective unable to find a place in professional suburban middle-England has become the defining feature of the British crime literature, cinema, and television drama. It is Martineau rather than Dixon that Ian Rankin’s Rebus or Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennyson or Waking the Dead’s Boyd refers to in their depiction of the British police officer.

Credits

Hell is a City (Associated British Picture Corporation/Hammer Film Productions, 1960) prod. Michael Carreras dir. Val Guest wr. Val Guest, novel Maurice Proctor ph. Arthur Grant ed. John Dunsford, James Needs m. Stanley Black. Cast: Stanley Baker (Inspector Harry Martineau), John Crawford (Don Starling), Donald Pleasance (Gus Hawkins), Maxine Audley (Julia Martineau), Billy Whitelaw (Chloe Hawkins), Joseph Tomelty (Furnisher Steele), George A. Cooper (Doug Savage), Geoffrey Frederick (Detective Devery), Vanda Godsell (Lucretia ‘Lucky’ Luske), Charles Houston (Clogger Roach), Joby Blanshard (Tawny Jakes), Charles Morgan (Laurie Lovett), Peter Madden (Bert Darwin), Dickie Owen (Bragg), Lois Daine (Cecily Wainwright).

Notes

1. This has again become apparent recently, as the film is not mentioned in the sections on British film noir in Wheeler Winston Dixon’s Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
2. Ray Pratt, Projecting Paranoia: Conspiratorial Visions in American Film. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001: 48.
3. Susan Sydney-Smith, Beyond Dixon of Dock Green: Early British Police Series. London: I.B. Tauris, 2002: 106.
4. Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, 2001: 54.
5. Quoted in Andrew Spicer, ‘The Emergence of the British Tough Guy: Stanley Baker, Masculinity, and the Crime Thriller,’ in Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy (eds.) British Crime Cinema. London: Routledge, 1999: 88.

A survey of UK motion picture production by government region

Since 2000, policy makers have sought to boost the global competitiveness of the film industry in the United Kingdom and to enhance its capacity for endogenous development through the territorialisation of filmmaking as an economic and cultural activity at the regional level. National bodies, such as the UK Film Council, sell the UK as a ‘film hub’ to the global film industry, while responsibility for implementation of film policy has been devolved to the regional screen agencies (Redfern 2007). This post looks at the regional geography of motion picture production in the UK between 2003 and 2007, using information drawn from official and unofficial databases.

Data

Data was taken from the UK Film Council’s list of British films produced from 2003 to 2007 with budgets in excess of £500,000 [1]. The UK Film Council places British films in one of four categories: co-productions involving the UK as a production partner (COP); domestic features made by a UK production company (DOM); inward co-productions originating outside the UK (ICP); and inward feature films substantially originating outside the UK (INW). A limitation of the data is that it only covers productions with a budget greater than or equal to £500,000, and this excludes a significant part of UK film production. Small- and micro-budget productions are not included, and so the data presented here will actually underestimate the level of film production in the UK’s regions.

The UK Film Council does not provide data on the geography of production in the UK, and in order to determine the locations used for filming, the locations search feature on www.imdb.com’s advanced search was utilised. When present this data is typically accurate for contemporary films, but it is difficult to assess how much data is missing. Unfortunately there is no other source that provides a similarly broad range of geographical data, as data on where film production takes in the UK is typically not collected by the regional screen agencies (although Northern Ireland Screen added a production guide to its annual reports in 2007 which does contain a list of locations for each film to shoot in the province). This data can be cross checked against other databases, press releases, and websites, but should generally be used as an estimate of the geography of film production. Given a large enough dataset it is possible to be reasonably confident that the major geographical trends can be correctly identified – beyond this and the data may prove to be unreliable.

A further issue is that this data does not reflect the level of filmmaking activity in a particular place – it does not specify if a location was used for several weeks or for a single day. Nor is it possible to estimate the level of production spend in a region.

The presentation of the data is based on the following assumptions

• Where a film is produced in more than one region, then this counts as one connection to each region. As a film may be produced in more than one region, the total number of connections exceeds the total number of films.
• A film has a single connection to region only, even if numerous locations within that region were used.
• Production at a studio is classed as production activity in a region (e.g., production at Shepperton takes place in Surrey and so is classed as South East England).

The UK Film Council includes documentaries in its database, but these have been excluded here.

Results

The UK Film Council lists 713 British films of which 462 were at least partially shot in the UK. Location data was unable for 104 of these films, leaving 358 films on which the analysis is based. Table 1 presents a breakdown of the number of UK productions to shoot in the UK by year and production category. Nearly half of the films covered here are domestic productions, with the remained mostly comprised of inward features and co-productions involving a UK production company as a significant producing partner. Incoming co-productions do not form a significant part of feature film production in the UK.

Table 1 UK feature films with budgets of £500,000 or greater to shoot in the UK from 2003 to 2007

The regional distribution of UK feature films produced in the UK from 2003 to 2007 is presented in Tables 2 and 3. The dominance of London, the South East, and East of England is immediately apparent, and these three regions account for 68.69 per cent of the total connections in the UK. From Table 2 it is evident that inward productions and co-productions to the UK are restricted to the south eastern England, although over half the films produced in Scotland were from these categories. Only two incoming co-productions were involved shoots outside south eastern England. There is very little production activity in the North East of England, with four films in five years accounting for less than 1 per cent of the total. Looking at the change in the overall level of production from year to year (Table 3) in each region, the geographical distribution of feature film production is stable and shows very little variation over the period covered here. There is production in every region in every year except for the West Midlands in 2003 and the North East in 2004 and 2007.

Table 2 Regional distribution of UK feature film production by production category, 2003 to 2007

Table 3 Year on year change in the regional distribution of feature film production in the UK, 2003 to 2007

The regional distribution of feature film production maps almost exactly onto the regional distribution of VAT-registered businesses engaged in motion picture activities (production, distribution, exhibition) (see Table 4). London, the South East, and the East accounted for 75.82 per cent of production companies in 2007 with to 67.69 per cent of UK productions shooting in these regions in that year. The Spearman rank order coefficient for the regional distribution of production and production companies in 2007 is 0.8882. London’s status a ‘global city-region’ (Sassen 2001; Scott et al. 2001) is also relevant in accounting for its ability to attract productions in a global film market. These three regions are also dominant in distribution and exhibition. Consequently, they will exert considerable influence over production in other regions as production centres at the local and/or regional level are dependent upon external financial and creative decisions that are beyond their control (Robins and Cornford 1994, Coe and Johns 2004). As Robins and Cornford (1994: 235) have noted:

The forces shaping the industry remain beyond the control and influence of local actors. The agenda is shaped by the activities of large media companies, and local or regional production industries can only struggle to adapt to the adverse conditions of this environment.

This places regional producers in a difficult position: the selling of the UK’s regions is dependent on establishing their uniqueness in a competitive market place and requires flexibility in policy formation but the UK film industry is controlled from London and its surrounding regions. The decentralising impulse of New Labour’s regional film policies must be balanced against the concentration of filmmaking activities in one part of the country that enables the UK to be globally competitive.

Table 4 VAT-based enterprises (SIC 2003) in the UK motion picture industry, 2007

The level of a region’s autonomy was determined by identifying those productions which were based in a single UK region only, and the results are presented in Table 5. An ‘autonomous production’ is defined as a film which was produced in a single UK region only, irrespective of any production activity that may have taken place outside the UK (e.g. in the home country of a co-production partner). The autonomy of a region can be used as an index of its interconnectedness with the rest of the UK film industry.

Table 5 Regional autonomy of UK motion picture production

From Table 5 it can be seen that London has a much higher proportion of autonomous productions that other southern regions, and this is to be expected: as the centre of the UK film industry London has the greatest number of productions and dominates the surrounding regions. The East and South East have more productions than the other regions but fewer of these are autonomous, and this may be accounted fro the presence of the major British studios (Shepperton, Pinewood, Leavesden) in these regions and their proximity to London. Films produced in the UK (and especially incoming films to the UK) appear to use these studio faculties and shoot on location in London. In general, the number of autonomous productions increases with distance from London. Northern Ireland stands out as being distinct from the rest of the United Kingdom, with nearly three-quarters of films to shoot in the region being autonomous.  As 11 of the 15 films to be produced in Northern Ireland were either co-productions or inward features (see Table 2) this suggests that the regions connections beyond the UK (and most obviously to the Republic of Ireland) are of more significance than its connections to the rest of the British film industry. However, as can be seen from Table 4, there were no distribution companies in Northern Ireland in 2007 and only a small proportion of the national total outside south eastern England. Regional autonomy of production should not be taken to imply separateness from the UK film industry, when in fact there is a high level of dependency in other sectors of the film industry.

Notes

1. http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/ukfilms, accessed 4 June 2009.

References

Coe, N.M., and Johns, J. (2004) Beyond production clusters: towards a critical political economy of networks in the film and television industries, in Power, D. and Scott, A.J. (eds) The Cultural Industries and the Production of Culture. London: Routledge: 188-204.

Redfern, N. (2007) Defining British cinema: transnational and territorial film policy in the United Kingdom, Journal of British Cinema and Television 4 (1): 150-164.

Robbins, K. and Cornford, J.  (1994) Local and regional broadcasting in the new media order, in Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (eds.) Globalisation, Institutions, and Regional Development in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 217-238.

Sassen, S. (2001) The Global City: New York, London, and Tokyo, second edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Scott, A.J., Agnew, J., Soja, E., and Storper, M. (2001) Global city-regions, in Scott, A.J. (ed.) Global City-Regions: Trends, Theory, Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 11-30.