The Everyday in Visual Culture Slices of Lives (François Penz, Janina Schupp)

THE EVERYDAY IN VISUAL
CULTURE
This book explores how the comparative analysis of visual cultural artefacts, from
objects to architecture and fction flms, can contribute to our understanding of
everyday life in homes and cities around the globe.
Investigating the multiple facets of the everyday, this interdisciplinary collection
generates a new awareness of everyday lives across cultures and challenges
our traditional understanding of the everyday by interweaving new thematic
connections. It brings together debates around the analysis of the everyday in
visual culture more broadly and explores the creation of innovative technological
methods for comparative approaches to the study of the everyday, such as flm
databases, as well as the celebration of the everyday in museums. The volume is
organized around four key themes. It explores the slices of everyday lives found in
Visual Culture (Part I), Museums (Part II), the City (Part III) and the Home (Part
IV). The book explores the growing area of the analysis of everyday life through
visual culture both broadly and in depth.
By building interdisciplinary connections, this book is ideal for the emerging
community of scholars and students stemming from Visual Culture, Film and
Media Studies, Architecture Studies and practice, Museum Studies, and scholars
of Sociology and Anthropology as well as ofering fresh insights into cutting-edge
tools and practices for the rapidly growing feld of Digital Humanities.
François Penz is Emeritus Professor of the Department of Architecture and a

fellow of Darwin College, University of Cambridge. Following his monograph
Cinematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture (Routledge 2018),
he is currently working on a new book, The 100 Films That All Architects Should
See (Routledge).
Janina Schupp is the SOUTHWORKS Career Development Fellow in Digital

Humanities at Jesus College, University of Oxford and an Afliated Lecturer in
Architecture and Moving Images at the University of Cambridge. She is also
a documentary flm producer and held fellowships at the Library of Congress,
Camargo Foundation, and Nanjing University.
THE EVERYDAY IN
VISUAL CULTURE
Slices of Lives
Edited by François Penz and Janina Schupp

Cover image: Slices of Lives @ Emma Penz,
acrylic paint on paper, 24cm x 32cm
First published 2022
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, François Penz and Janina Schupp;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of François Penz and Janina Schupp to be identifed as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Penz, François, editor. | Schupp, Janina, editor.
Title: The everyday in visual culture : slices of lives / edited by François
Penz and Janina Schupp.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifers: LCCN 2021051830 (print) | LCCN 2021051831 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367619718 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367619695 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003107309 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Life in art. | Manners and customs in art.
Classifcation: LCC NX650.L54 E94 2022 (print) | LCC NX650.L54
(ebook) | DDC 701/.03—dc23/eng/20220224
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051830
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051831
ISBN: 978-0-367-61971-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-61969-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-10730-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003107309
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Dedicated to Frederick Baker (1965–2020)
CONTENTS
List of fgures x
List of contributors xiv
Foreword by Yung Ho Chang xviii
Introduction 1
François Penz and Janina Schupp
PART I
Slices of everyday lives in visual culture 11
1 Early flm and the construction of everyday life on screen 13

Ian Christie
2 Televising the quotidian: BBC Arena’s The Private Life

of the Ford Cortina (1982) 30
Michael Hrebeniak
3 Everyday practices and lived spaces of refugee children

on YouTube 40
Gul Kacmaz Erk and Işıl Baysan Serim
4 The arts of noticing (toward an experimental archive

of everyday life) 58
Ben Highmore
viii Contents
PART II
Slices of everyday lives in museums 69
5 The Museum of Everyday Life 71

Clare Dolan
6 The Museum of Ordinary People 85

Lucy Malone
7 Everyday life in a heritage village: flm as a process

of research and engagement 103
Mark Thomas and Suzanne MacLeod
8 Mapping narrative and everyday life in the museum 117

Tom Duncan
PART III
Slices of everyday lives in the city 131
9 Imagining the present 133

Julian Lewis
10 Contingencies of the everyday: screen representations

of Tokyo in 1958 146
Alastair Phillips
11 “Made in Hong Kong”: the (re)production of publicness

in the cinematic urban topography of contemporary
Hong Kong 158
Zhuozhang Li
PART IV
Slices of everyday lives in the home 173
12 CineMuseSpace: a cinematic exploration of the minor

magic of everyday life 175
François Penz, Janina Schupp, Maureen Thomas and
Matthew Flintham
Contents ix
13 Indian cinema as a database for socio-energy behavior

in chawls 199
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Minna Sunikka-Blank, Ronita Bardhan
and Janina Schupp
14 Domestic moods: mood catchers and makers 213

Felicity Atekpe
Index 226
FIGURES
1.1 Paul’s Blackfriars Bridge (1896) has been regarded as a “record” of

trafc on this London bridge, although the variety of passers-by
suggests careful preparation. 14
1.2 Dramatizing the life of the city became a new literary genre
early in the nineteenth century. Charles Dickens launched
his career with a collection of his journalism, Sketches by Boz,
illustrated by George Cruickshank in 1836. 16
1.3 Far from being an unstaged scene, Lumière’s La Sortie de l’usine
was flmed at least three times between March and July 1895,
with signifcant variations. 19
1.4 The onlookers in Lumière’s Street Dancers (1896) include the
manager of their show then running at the Empire Theatre in
Leicester Square. 22
1.5 This printed program for Paul’s nightly show at the Alhambra
Music Hall in August 1896 provides rare evidence of actual
screening practice at the time. 24
1.6 The diference between lived and screen realities quickly
became a comic subject, as in Paul’s The Countryman and the
Cinematograph (1901). 26
2.1 The Cortina marque with “enough performance and polish to
satisfy the most extroverted executive”. 31
3.1 Issa. 47
3.2 Hamze. 47
3.3 Rostislav. 48
3.4 Hiba. 49
Figures xi
5.1 Above: The Museum of Everyday Life – “embarking on our mission

of glorious obscurity”. Below: The New England Barns Found
Objects Collection, Museum of Everyday Life; both photographs by
Gabriel Levine. 74
5.2 The Great Hall, which houses the museum’s Permanent
Collection. Prominent in the foreground is the museum Bear,
on permanent loan from Jonathan Berger, the Mirror Dress by
Machine Dazzle, and the Safety Pin Dress, by the museum’s
tireless Fabrications Team. 81
5.3 Right: the Museum of Everyday Life’s workshop is a “judgement
free zone”. Left: often the Community Work-Weekend days
end spontaneously with a shared potluck meal. 82
5.4 A sign in the vestibule reads: “It is our hope that the museum
will, in the coming centuries, continue to be a residing-place of
wonder, an asylum for ideas, a room for the artist, a home for
the wanderer. Welcome home . . .” Inset: as visitors leave the
museum, they are invited to fll out a short survey. 83
6.1 My Late Mother’s Future Work (2017). 88
6.2 Hip Trip of Brighton. 89
6.3 MOOP’s frst exhibition at The Spire, Brighton (2018). 91
6.4 The Diaries of Mary Booth, Clair Morrow (2018), an exhibit at
MOOP’s frst exhibition. 92
6.5 Dear Punk Princess, Bridget Prince (2018), an exhibit at
MOOP’s frst exhibition. 93
6.6 MOOP exhibit created in collaboration with Miss Represented
(2018). 94
6.7 MOOP exhibit created in collaboration with RISE (2018). 95
6.8 MOOP exhibit created in collaboration with PACT (2018). 96
6.9 MOOP: JOURNALS – MOOP’s traveling, participatory
collection of journals. 98
7.1 Opening workshop in the School of Museum Studies,
University of Leicester. 106
7.2 Valerie and Steve. Film still by Soup Collective. 110
7.3 Port Sunlight cofee morning. Film still by Soup Collective. 111
7.4 Colin at home. Film still by Soup Collective. 111
7.5 Grey at home. Film still by Soup Collective. 112
7.6 Model of Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight Museum. Film
still by Soup Collective. 113
8.1 VISCHERING CASTLE EXHIBITION. The exhibit
about bellringing and time keeping is on the right-hand side.
Photograph Phillip Obkircher/Duncan McCauley. 124
xii Figures
8.2 NARRATIVE DIAGRAM. Diagram of the exhibition visit as

flmed. The recorded everyday moments are on the top row. 125
8.3 VISCHERING CASTLE EXHIBITION. Historical bed
exhibit with the painting of a count. 125
9.1 Borough High Street improvements project, on site
(commenced 1997). 137
9.2 Borough High Street improvements project, Catch and Steer
(drawing 1996). 137
9.3 Park House hotel and housing, West Ham Lane, Stratford
(completed 2018). 139
9.4 Frampton Estate in Hackney, new housing and community uses. 141
9.5 West Croydon public realm and transport interchange
improvements (completed 2017). 143
9.6 London imagined; a sketch for the Mayor of London to bring
the public realm to the forefront of London (2018). 145
11.1 List of selected flms. 163
11.2 Film spectrum of urban space in Little Cheung: a) formal urban
plan; b) everyday life. 164
11.3 An overview of the flm spectrums of selected Hong Kong flms. 165
11.4 Dancing scene in The Way We Dance (Adam Wong Sau
Ping, 2013). 166
11.5 The general decline of spatial appropriation after 2004. 169
12.1 Mon Oncle – the tip of the iceberg: agent, source and product
of history. 178
12.2 Akerman’s flm, Jeanne Dielman, beside Neufert’s Architects’ Data. 180
12.3 Images showing successively Descola’s four ontological
categories: a sculpture for animism/a painting for naturalism/
a bark painting for totemism/a painted mask for analogism. 182
12.4 Time-based annotation analysis example in Eternity and a Day
(Angelopoulos, 1998). 185
12.5 Supercuts 1: Maintenance. 191
12.6 Supercuts 2: Maintenance. 192
12.7 Penz and Schupp, A Catalogue Raisonné of Everyday Life Activities
(2020). 194
12.8 Sample pages from A Catalogue Raisonné of Everyday Life
Activities (Penz and Schupp, 2020). 194
12.9 Manchester’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA)
in August 2019. 195
13.1 Views of the chawl in Lalbaug Parel. 204
13.2 The chawl in Lalbaug Parel. 205
13.3 List of the flms analyzed in the CineGenus project. 207
13.4 Public domain in the “BDD chawls” in Mumbai. 208
13.5 Household technology observed in the flm scenes. 209
Figures xiii
13.6 Short documentary flms made by the residents (left) and an

animation “A Room in Mumbai” (BBC iPlayer; right). 211
14.1 Morning light (photographer: Ioana Marinescu); Shower detail,
cast glass by Jef Bell (photographer: Ioana Marinescu); Everyday
landscapes by the sea (photographer: Mariana Bassani); Nocturne
(photographer: Ståle Eriksen). 219
CONTRIBUTORS
Felicity Atekpe is the director of Professional Practice at The Bartlett, UCL,

having examined and taught extensively at various schools of architecture. She
is also the founder of White Table Architects, a UK-based practice in sustainable
urban design, architecture interiors and landscape through the enjoyment of the
everyday.
Ronita Bardhan is Assistant Professor of Sustainability in the Built Environment at

the University of Cambridge. She works on data-driven design to inform energy
and health in low-income communities in the changing climate. Bardhan couples
architectural engineering, AI, and machine learning with social sciences to provide
sustainable built environment solutions.
Yung Ho Chang is a founding partner and principal architect of Atelier Feichang

Jianzhu (FCJZ) based in Beijing and Professor of the Practice at MIT, where he was
the head of the Architecture Department from 2005 to 2010.
Ian Christie is a flm and media historian, occasional critic, exhibition curator, and
broadcaster. A fellow of the British Academy, he teaches at Birkbeck, University
of London and was Visiting Professor at Gresham College 2017–2021. His work
on Robert Paul led to a book, a graphic novel, and an exhibition seen in London
and Bradford in 2019.
Clare Dolan is an artist and intensive care unit nurse living in Northeastern Ver-
mont, a former puppeteer with the Bread and Puppet Theater, and creator of The
Museum of Everyday Life. She is a specialist in picture-story performance (cantasto-
ria) and cofounder of Banners and Cranks, the frst international American festival
devoted to this performance form.
Contributors xv
Tom Duncan is an architect and museum designer. He is a founding partner of

the studio Duncan McCauley working for clients such as the Victoria and Albert
Museum and the Berlin State Museums. He combines professional practice with
teaching and research at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester.
Gul Kacmaz Erk is a senior lecturer in architecture at Queen’s University Belfast,

Northern Ireland, UK. She was a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and
UCD and taught at Philadelphia University, TUDelft, and Izmir University of
Economics. Her research interests include cinema and architecture in the city and
architecture and forced migration.
Matthew Flintham is an artist and writer exploring speculative relationships

among flm, architecture, power, and place. He has an MA in cultural studies from
the London Consortium and a PhD in visual communications from the Royal
College of Art and is currently a lecturer at the University of the Arts.
Ben Highmore is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. His

most recent books are The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s
Britain (Yale University Press) and Cultural Feelings: Mood, Mediation, and Cultural
Politics (Routledge), both published in 2017.
Michael Hrebeniak is Lecturer in English at Magdalene College Cambridge and

Convenor of the New School of the Anthropocene. His book on the Poetics of
BBC Arena will be published by the BFI in 2023, and he has written widely on the
Beat Generation, jazz, ecopoetics, cinema, photography, and the 1968 uprisings.
He is also a psychogeographical flmmaker.
Julian Lewis is an architect, cofounder, and director of East architecture, landscape,

and urban design. He is a design advocate for the Mayor of London and sits on
several local authority design review panels. Julian has taught internationally since
1992 including as Visiting Professor at Mendrisio Switzerland, Honorary Fellow at
Nottingham, and External Examiner at Cambridge.
Zhuozhang Li completed his PhD thesis at the Centre for Architecture and the
Visual Arts (CAVA), University of Liverpool, on the cinematic urban analysis of the
(re)production of publicness in contemporary Hong Kong. His research is estab-
lished at the intersection of urban studies, visual cultural studies, and critical spatial
theories.
Suzanne MacLeod is Professor of Museum Studies at the School of Museum

Studies, University of Leicester. She is Codirector of the Research Centre for
Museums and Galleries, which undertakes socially engaged collaborative research
with cultural organizations. She is author of Museums and Design for Creative Lives
(Routledge 2021).
xvi Contributors
Lucy Malone is Cofounder and Curator of the award-winning Museum of Ordinary

People. Lucy also works as a freelance curator, researcher, artist, and guest lecturer.
Her research interests are archival practice, memory, materiality, grief and loss,
autoethnography, and practice-based research.
François Penz is Emeritus Professor of the Department of Architecture and a fel-

low of Darwin College, University of Cambridge. Following his monograph, Cin-
ematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture (Routledge 2018), he
is currently working on a new book, The 100 Films That All Architects Should See
(Routledge).
Alastair Phillips is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Warwick. He is

the coeditor (with Hideaki Fujiki) of The Japanese Cinema Book (BFI Publishing
2020) and editor of Screen.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha is author of the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (with Paul

Willemen, 1994/1999) and Indian Cinema from the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood
to the Emergency (2009) and cocurator of part of Century City: Art and Culture in the
Modern Metropolis at the Tate Modern (2002).
Janina Schupp is the SOUTHWORKS Career Development Fellow in Digital

Humanities at Jesus College, University of Oxford and an Afliated Lecturer in
Architecture and Moving Images at the University of Cambridge. She is also a doc-
umentary flm producer and held fellowships at the Library of Congress, Camargo
Foundation, and Nanjing University.
Işıl Baysan Serim is an Istanbul-based architect and researcher teaching in archi-

tecture at Bahçeşehir University and editor of Sinetopya. Işıl researched at Yeditepe
University and taught at Bilgi and Medipol University. Her research interests
include cinema and architecture and transdisciplinary knowledge production via
social theory, political philosophy, urbanism, and migration.
Minna Sunikka-Blank is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture

at Cambridge University. Her research uses participatory flm-making as method
to understand women’s everyday lives and energy use in low-income housing in
India and South Africa. She is Director of Studies and Fellow in Architecture at
Churchill College, Cambridge.
Mark Thomas’s work spans documentary, immersive, and installation-based out-

puts, working with clients ranging from Suzanne Lacy and Elbow to the Sci-
ence Museum and the BFI. His work has been screened at the NFT, IDFA, and
SFMOMA. Mark divides his time between teaching at SODA, MMU, and his
work with Soup Collective.
Contributors xvii
Maureen Thomas is a screenwriter, story-architect and former Professor at the

Norwegian Film School and Head of Screen Arts at the National Film and Televi-
sion School UK, and has researched spatially organized narrative and screen drama-
turgy as Senior Research Fellow, Churchill College, Cambridge and codirected the
Cambridge MPhil and PhD in architecture and the moving image.
FOREWORD
A loop
Yung Ho Chang
Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) is a flm that I feel I have seen but
never did. I read about it in Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Architecture of Image (1999).
With the help of the few stills in that book, I have imagined over and over again
the famous seven-minute nonstop last scene. Although by no means accurate, this
visualization exercise in my mind’s eye is not difcult for me and is in fact familiar;
it resembles very much the way we architects would always imagine when design-
ing the spaces of our architecture: fy out of a window, loop around an open space,
and go back in.
This book, The Everyday in Visual Culture: Slices of Everyday Lives, edited by
François Penz and Janina Schupp, is generated from the conference Penz and his
team organized at Cambridge University in 2019 and in which I participated.
Studying the structure of this publication, it seems to me, even more so than the
conference, that it may ofer a similar cinematic experience to the one in The Pas-
senger. Laid over the discourse, one can mentally construct the themes and papers as
consecutive frames of scenes: starting from the visual culture, meandering through
museums, traveling around the city, and ending up at home, while the thread
through this intellectual maze is the quotidian bits and pieces or slices of lives.
My comparison of flm, architecture, and literature might be too literal or forced;
however, when urban life is the subject of concern, an interdisciplinary approach is
the way to treat its multifaceted and intertwined nature, as demonstrated in Penz’s
research project. These three disciplines form a ring, in which life can be observed,
documented, described, and perhaps even redesigned. The relationship of the three
elements is dynamic. Sometimes, flm and literature together produce the narrative
and architecture is the animator, like in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Rear Window,
although, after second thought, maybe narratives too can animate architecture.
Foreword xix
At other times, a text can be taken out of context and become a piece of lit-
erature on its own, as in Alain Resnais’s adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ script in
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), in which the female and male protagonists repeat
with of-screen voices the following lines:
HE: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.

SHE: I saw everything. Everything.
To me, this conversation may as well happen among the three felds in question
here, after a little rewriting:
I saw everything in the city.

No, you saw nothing (because you have not yet walked the neighborhoods).
I saw everything in the city.
No, you did not (because you have not yet read its stories).
I saw everything.
No, you didn’t (because you never lived there, neither bought groceries or
did the laundry).
With the last line, we have circled back to where we began – everyday lives, as
I am writing at my kitchen table at home. I hope that this little mimicry sums up
the spirit of this book, as well as the conference and the research project, however
tenuously.
INTRODUCTION
François Penz and Janina Schupp
The events that unfolded in 2020 have been a massive disruption to our everyday
lives. As millions were stuck at home under the impact of a global pandemic, the
everyday rose to the surface – it became hard to be blind to our daily gestures
and routines – there was no escape from the quotidian. We also became acutely
aware of our environment as we had time on our hands to “interrogate our small
spoons and wondered what was underneath our wallpaper?”.1 Although we were
living an extraordinary situation, paradoxically it was the triumph of the infra-
ordinaire.2 While our streets, museums, and ofces were largely empty, our homes
had become even more of a “cockpit”, where increased chafng and rubbing of
our bodies onto its fabric speeded up the traces of its inhabitants molded into its
interiors.3 During times of crisis, our everyday gestures also begin to shield us from
threatening events; the most mundane and repetitive side of our lives becomes reas-
suring. In such situations, “the constant exchange with the set of daily appearances
surrounding us” becomes comforting – “often they are very familiar, sometimes
they are unexpected and new, but always they confrm us in our lives. They do so
even when they are frightening”.4 The most familiar activity perhaps to gain an
unexpected renewal of attention associated with fear during this period of uncer-
tainty was the act of washing our hands. As guidelines encouraged us to repeat
this gesture ad infnitum, we gave it a specifed duration, engrained a technique of
gestures, and even began to adorn it with musical soundtracks. Suddenly, the act of
washing hands became a defned performance set to the tune of “Happy Birthday”
or other 20-second songs devised by experts and the public alike. An abundance of
videos, signage, and even a shortage of consumer products emerged from our new-
found attention to this cleansing routine. We began to focus on every detail of a
mundane activity that would have gone by unnoticed in normal times. It may take
a while for the everyday to subside back to its minor status and for our blindness
DOI: 10.4324/9781003107309-1
2 François Penz and Janina Schupp
to the ordinary to return. No matter if consciously perceived or receding into the

background, the everyday remains the backbone of our lives; it is life itself.
The hope for this anthology is to celebrate the everyday for years to come –
across all forms of circumstances, times, and cultures. At the root of this enterprise
was the conference Slices of Everyday Lives (Cambridge, 2019), which was the fnal
act of the AHRC-sponsored research project A Cinematic Musée Imaginaire of Spa-
tial Cultural Diferences (CineMuseSpace). The project aimed to generate a novel
understanding of societal diferences in the usage of architecture, experience of
space and everyday activities within the home by unlocking culturally signifcant
architectural records folded away in the flmic medium. What Lefebvre refers to as
the “minor magic of everyday life”5 has long been celebrated and was central to the
project and to this anthology’s endeavor to reveal the many facets of the everyday,
not just in architecture but in visual culture more broadly. The resulting book is
dedicated to Frederick Baker (1965–2020), a flmmaker, digital artist, and scholar,
who recognized the importance of everyday rhythms across his body of works.
Poor health prevented him from doing so, but Frederick was to attend the event
from which this anthology is drawn to address the relevance of the everyday dur-
ing periods of great upheaval6 – his talk would have been even more relevant as we
entered the new world of COVID-19 just a few months later.
Visual culture has produced an unprecedented archive of audio-visual records
of everyday practices in diverse domestic environments, constituting a highly valu-
able resource for the study of lived spaces. This edited volume explores how the
comparative analysis of visual cultural artifacts, from objects to architecture and fc-
tion flms, can contribute to our understanding of everyday life around the globe.
It is a highly interdisciplinary collection of chapters calling on several felds within
the arts and humanities, in particular, architecture and urban studies, anthropol-
ogy, sociology, museum studies, history of art, flm and media studies as well as
the digital humanities. Such a wide range of dispersed approaches creates a new
discursive formation pertaining to the everyday “object”. It allows for new layers
of knowledge to be added and created. As a volume, it challenges our traditional
understanding of the everyday by interweaving new thematic connections. Surf-
ing at the boundaries of other disciplines can be liberating – by bringing together
material cultures, architecture, and museums, with the immaterial world of the
moving image and the digital humanities, new meanings and novel understandings
emerge. The volume is organized around four key themes. It explores the slices
of everyday lives found in Visual Culture (Part I), Museums (Part II), the City
(Part III) and the Home (Part IV).
Part I: Slices of everyday lives in visual culture

Central to the frst theme is the moving image – cinema, television as well as
YouTube – all being arts of recording the everyday. As agent, product, and source
of history,7 the moving image archives are a way to preserve and rekindle col-
lective memories. Films, especially if shot on location, allow for the study of
Introduction 3
everyday life situations that closely coincides with real-life situations. As noted
by Kracauer,
Films tend to explore this texture of everyday life, whose composition varies
according to place, people, and time. So they help us not only to appreciate
our given material environment but to extend it in all directions. They virtu-
ally make the world our home.8
Moving images are a formidable reservoir of documentation, some being recorded

unwittingly but some of it deliberately as argued by Godard “During the course
of the flm – in its discourse, its discontinuous course, that is – I want to include
everything, sport, politics, even groceries. . . . Everything can be put into a flm.
Everything should be put into a flm”.9 This frst theme is a contribution to defn-
ing what “everything” might mean from the point of view of the everyday.
We start with the beginning of cinema in Ian Christie’s chapter, which carefully
charts the status and history of everyday life in early flms. Christie frst discusses
how the notion of the everyday life was already present in literature – for example
with the so-called panorama literature and how early flm beneftted from cross-
fertilization with the other arts. In the second part, Christie casts doubt on the
generally accepted notion of early flms as an accurate representation of sponta-
neous everyday life. Through this careful historical analysis, Christie forces us to
reevaluate preconceived ideas about early flms. By also revisiting early flms’ recep-
tion through writing and reports of the time, he opens a dialogue between the then
and the now – a most useful addition to our understanding of how the portrayal of
everyday life in visual culture has evolved over time.
From early cinema, we leap forward to the documentary format in the
1970s–1980s. In his chapter, Michael Hrebeniak explores how the documentary
flm approach of BBC’s Arena format managed to evoke and encapsulate the quo-
tidian culture surrounding the appearance and boom of Ford’s Cortina vehicle.
Arena, which debuted in 1975, brought about an innovative mode of documen-
tary flmmaking that critically engaged with the emerging crises confronting the
general population at the time. Through an analysis of the nonlinear textures and
assemblage techniques utilized in The Private Life of the Ford Cortina (Nigel Finch,
1982), the chapter reveals how Arena captured the cultural shifts of its time by
producing a unique mediation of the everyday through an auteuresque application
of cinematic techniques – all while engaging viewers around the everyday object
of the car.
Bringing us to present times and the growth of online video platforms, Gul
Kacmaz Erk and Işıl Baysan Serim’s chapter asks what we can learn from YouTube
as an archival platform about the role of architecture in the lives of refugee children.
It does so in part through the lens of Foucault’s “media dispositive”,10 adapted here
to the audio-visual medium. The authors point out that the widespread power
of YouTube forces us to change our abstract notion of “refugee” into a human
being. Crucially, the authors demonstrate that the everyday portrayed here is far
from being ordinary, as the children are removed from their original homes – the
everyday practices of refugee children become a form of heterotopia, where the
former everyday and the refugee situation are like binary oppositions. This chapter
is a poignant example of how new and dramatic forms of everyday lives are docu-
mented through moving images around the world.
Ben Highmore frst recounts the experimentation at the heart of the mass-
observation ideal, reminding us that it enthusiastically embraced the latest scientifc
procedures and recording technologies (flm and photography particularly), with a
view to create a great repository of everyday material culture, including smells and
sounds. In a second part, Highmore considers “living history museums”, usually
open-air sites displaying now-obsolete objects of past everyday lives – linking in
with the theme of the following section. In the penultimate part, Highmore pon-
ders more generally on the value of studying the everyday and argues that, through
the arts of noticing, the everyday, which usually escapes, is being revealed. Finally,
he argues that flm and photography have had a privileged role in this, precisely
because they are seen to be indiscriminately recording just about everything, from
the weather to groceries – often unwittingly, passively. In conclusion Highmore
encourages us to adventurously “embrace the experimental, to open ourselves up
to new passivities, new procedures for registering an everyday that we don’t already
know in advance”.
Part II: Slices of everyday lives in museums

The second theme focuses on the preservation of the humble everyday through
museum practices. We here specifcally move away from the traditional idea of a
“Museum”(with capital m) toward the potential of grassroots and creative approaches
to generate a “museum” of and for the ordinary being. At the center stands the
idea that everyday life has value – no matter the ofcial, historical importance of
the person. Each life story of the quotidian deserves to be preserved and holds the
potential to inspire. In particular, we here delve into new creative approaches to
document and share these personal stories and their associated objects in innova-
tive ways, from alternative museum spaces and events to participatory flmmaking
and the documentation of how we continue to carry and utilize our everyday life
experience even when we move inside the spaces of traditional “Museums”.
This reimagination of the role and scope of museums frst takes us to the Museum
of Everyday Life in Vermont, USA. In her chapter, Clare Dolan, the museum’s
founder and “Chief Operating Philosopher” explores how museum practices can
be refocused and redefned specifcally through the quotidian. In the frst part of
her chapter, we are guided through a poetic exploration of everyday objects as
recorders of human stories. The second half of the chapter then introduces us to
the philosophical drivers of the museum’s creation. Dolan further explores the ways
in which spatial confgurations, exhibition curation, and public engagement activi-
ties can actively be utilized by grassroots museums to creatively involve and beneft
local and wider communities.
Introduction 5
At thousands of miles distance, similar motivations created the Museum of Ordi-

nary People – a pop-up museum based in Brighton, UK founded by Lucy Malone
and Jolie Booth. In her chapter, the museum’s cofounder Lucy Malone takes us
on a personal journey from the museum’s roots to the impact of its approaches
in the future. Her chapter explores the museum’s motivations, approaches, and
efects through a range of examples from their emotive exhibits. At the core of
the museum stand collaborative and facilitatory approaches that create accessible,
connecting, and healing spaces to generate social change. Malone also takes us on a
tour of other initiatives that produce new forms of activism through a reinvention
of museum practices.
Following in this vein, Suzanne MacLeod and Mark Thomas in their chapter
narrate a flm-led, practice-centered research project developed in the Research
Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG) at the University of Leicester in part-
nership with National Museums Liverpool (NML), the residents of Port Sunlight
and the artistic Soup Collective. This project was part of CineMuseSpace and aimed
at engaging and disseminating flmic research on the everyday to a much broader
public. The chapter carefully recounts the creative, research, and participatory pro-
cess with the residents of Port Sunlight that led to the making of a flm. It refects
on how new perspectives on everyday life were gained by allowing cameras into
their homes and into their lives. This is a good example of opening up the possi-
bility of new forms of engagement with museums as the participatory flmmaking
process broke through the formality of the Gallery and ofered up new spatial and
social forms of relations.
In the fnal chapter, we fnd ourselves revisiting the spaces of “Museums” but now
with a renewed attention to everyday life. Tom Duncan, researcher and exhibition
designer, in his chapter explores how visitors experience the narrative of exhibitions
through an inseverable connection with their own everyday life. Via the tracking of
visitor experiences at Vischering Castle, a heritage site and museum experience, he
investigates how our own life shapes the narratives we read from exhibitions. Com-
ing full circle, the section hence ends on the notion that our individual stories and
everyday lives transcend and infuse even the stories of traditional “Museums”.
Part III: Slices of everyday lives in the city

In the third theme, we zoom out to the scale of the city, a constantly shifting and
provisional space, where neither the built environment nor its use are fxed in eve-
ryday life. Methods to grasp, represent, analyze, and understand the evolving quo-
tidian urban environment are here the focus of our attention. By exploring modes
of representation and audio-visual accounts of cities, we attempt to delineate the
place of new developments in the context of existing urban fabrics; we navigate
the experience of the resulting urban shifts, and fnally investigate the opportunities
these urban changes open up in everyday life for the contestation of the status quo.
We begin our urban trip in London, where Julian Lewis, Cofounder and Direc-
tor of East architecture, landscape, and urban design, brings us a chapter that is
akin to a love letter to the unloved parts of the city. A world made of a mixture
of “recreation ground, a car park, and a suite of buildings of varying densities and
massing built in the 1940s, 1960s, and 1980s” – familiar London settings that we
barely notice. But he – and his architectural and urban practice, East – pay attention
to them on our behalf. East’s interventions are delicate and well judged, mindful
of the everyday life within which they operate. High-Streets are evoked as “a long
thread, unevenly laced with beads, gems and charms”. Lewis’s design sense oper-
ates within the “chiaroscuro of everyday life . . . where life is an anarchy of light
and dark”11 – and yet manages to make perfect sense of it, no doubt agreeing with
Venturi’s much-quoted “is not Main Street almost all right?”12
As we move between cities around the globe, in Alastair Phillips’ chapter we
encounter the rapidly evolving everyday life in the city of Tokyo. Through the
lens of a triptych of Japanese flms released specifcally during the single year of
1958 – Ozu Yasujirō’s Equinox Flower/Higanbana, Imamura Shōhei’s Nishi Ginza
Station/Nishi Ginza ekimae, and the collectively made flm, Tokyo 1958 – we inves-
tigate the shifting urban experience under advancing economic rationalization. As
the quickened pace of modernity and post-war economic growth redefned the
quotidian across this urban space, the medium of cinema captured the complexity
of the urban experience in the world’s largest city at the time. The targeted isola-
tion of this specifc, spatio-temporal slice of everyday life here enables one to assess
the past leading up to it, to understand the practices of its present, and to trace its
impact in later times.
While providing a snapshot of cities at a specifc point in time, the examina-
tion of flmic data also reinforces that cities are ever-changing, which opens up
new opportunities to challenge how spaces are used and by whom. This aspect is
explored through the city of Hong Kong by Zhuozhang Li, who examines the eve-
ryday appropriation of spaces in Hong Kong via the medium of cinema. Here the
fuidity between public and private spaces is in focus, revealing the delicate tension
and blurred boundaries inherent in spaces that are conceived top-down through
strategic planning and then clash with everyday practices. As the chapters in this
section reveal, our built environments are ever-changing, constantly bringing with
them forces that shape our everyday existence, but, within this game of evolution,
opportunities also open up to challenge, reinvent, and redefne our urban everyday.
Like the fragmented, simultaneous shifts in the urban fabric, everyday life is made
up of innumerable, distinct fragments that can never be grasped into one single
defnition of experience. This diversity of everyday lives and pushes-and-shoves
between built environment and inhabitation is what constitutes the city.
Part IV: Slices of everyday lives in the home

This last section concentrates on the home, where the quotidian is at its most vis-
ible; as expressed by Lefebvre “how profound is everything involving the house,
the ‘home’ and domesticity, and thus everyday life”.13 Given that the everyday
originally evolved as a branch of cultural studies, philosophy, and sociology, it was
Introduction 7
at odds with the material culture of architecture, and architects came to it via the
“discovery of the ordinary” with the As Found concept, connecting the ordinary
with architecture, and other art forms. The As Found concept is attributed to archi-
tects Alison and Peter Smithson,14 who stated that “the architecture of the next step
is in pursuit of the ordinary and the banal does not mean that it has lost sight of
its objective. Ordinariness and banality are the art source for the new situation”.15
This statement is still valid, and the three chapters in this section explore domestic
environments as inspirations for new and contemporary situations, in search for the
extraordinary in the ordinary and the banal.
The chapter by François Penz, Janina Schupp, Maureen Thomas, and Matthew
Flintham explores the AHRC-funded project A Cinematic Museum of Spatial Cul-
tural Diference (CineMuseSpace) that is at the core of this edited collection. Focus-
ing on the everyday activities within the home, the project produced a cinematic
ontology of spatial cultural diferences and similarities through a selection of rep-
resentative flms from both the Western “naturalism” tradition (Europe/USA) and
from the Eastern “analogism” tradition (China/Japan) – a distinction based on
Descola’s anthropological approach to images from diferent cultures.16 The chapter
further explores the dissemination strategy developed by the project via automated
flmic “supercuts”, the publication of “A catalogue raisonné of everyday life activi-
ties”, and a range of exhibitions in China and England.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ronita Bardhan, Minna Sunikka-Blank, and Janina
Schupp then transfer CineMuseSpace’s novel methodology to the feld of energy
studies in the Mumbai “chawls” in their chapter. Following an evocation of how
flms crucially preserve the chawls as sites of memories, the second part of the
chapter highlights how a targeted keyword ontology was created to identify energy
usage related to everyday activities across a flmic sample pool, focusing on the
chawl’s living room and the courtyard. In total 19 flms were annotated, revealing
the use of technology ranging from kitchen implements to consumer gadgets. The
chapter demonstrates how a cinematic spatial ethnography enables one to penetrate
the domestic intimacy of the Mumbai chawls in a way that no architect or ethnog-
rapher would be allowed to enter, highlighting the importance of arts and humani-
ties research in mediating the often highly technical approach to energy studies.
As we stay within the theme of spatial ethnography and the value of flm, we
turn our attention onto the creators of buildings themselves. Felicity Atekpe’s chap-
ter brings us into her auto-ethnographic refection on her own working methods
as an architect for her practice. Uncovering the poetics in the ordinary involves
several stages. Discussions on “spaces” requires thinking of a room within a room
concept – and the layering of space. Concentrating on “light” involves being aware
of our circadian rhythms and being moved by the light at the beginning and end of
the day, the importance of dawn and sunrise in relation to the house’s orientation.
With “material” we should consider treating what we touch everyday diferently
than other things that make up a room. As for “landscape”, it is the need to honor
our most profound relationships between ourselves and nature, by refecting on
the passing of the seasons and the changing light. Finally, “atmosphere” is the most
elusive of the fve indicators explored in this chapter. This is where flm images
become crucial as a means to evoke the material elements of architecture combined
with the immateriality of memories, colors, sounds, and afects, to truly bring out
the magic in the everyday.
Overall, this anthology presents an interdisciplinary voyage across the many
slices of everyday lives found in the diverse objects, containers, recordings, and
traces produced through the ordinary act of living. As we navigate around the
globe, between case studies from diferent disciplines, and travel from urban to
domestic scales, we become ever more aware of the simple joys of life and the
impact of its disruptions. As with any trip, we are limited to only a few excursions
in this volume, and far more land lies to be discovered in the world that is the
everyday. Through this edited collection we hope to make a frst foray into seeing
the common mundane acts underlying our existence via a variety of angles, as well
as to celebrate the multiple permutations that have emerged in the everyday across
cultures.
Notes
1 After Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (London: Penguin Classics, 2008), 209.
2 Ibid., 208.
3 After Walter Benjamin and Rolf Tiedemann, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA and
London: Belknap, 1999), 20.
4 John Berger, Why Look at Animals? (London, New York and Toronto: Penguin Books,
2009), 9.
5 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 2014), 293.
6 Abstract as submitted by Frederick Baker:
The History Radar and the Everyday during the Annexation of Austria 1938: this
paper addresses the relevance of the Everyday during periods of great upheaval and
turmoil, such as the frst 24 hours of the annexation of Austria by the Nazis between
18.00 on the 11th of March and 18.00 on the 12th of March. In this situation, the
operation of the normal repetitive events like the opening and closing of shops, the
holding of religious services, football leagues, and the normal running of transport
services become a matter of escape for those on the losing side and a symbol of
power for the ascendant regime. This microstudy of 24 hours in the life of Vienna in
1938 will give an insight into the fne web of interactions that weave the discourse
of the Everyday into a day that is far from normal.
This will be done with the presentation of a new digital tool developed by Fred-
erick Baker and team in Vienna to recreate the annexation of Austrian as a live event.
This History Radar places the Everyday in its true context to the extraordinary polit-
ical and military events that were driving the change of power that day and night in
1938. The History Radar has won the European Commission Europa Nostra award
for Cultural Heritage dissemination and is now part of the digital exibitions in the
Austrian Museum of History “Haus der Geschichte Östereich”(HdgÖ)”.
7 Marc Ferro, “Film as an Agent, Product and Source of History,” Journal of Contemporary
History 18, no. 3 (1983): 357–64.
8 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1960), 304.
9 Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard: Critical Writings, ed. Jean Narboni and Tom Milne,
Cinema Two Series (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), 239.
Introduction 9
10 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed.
Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
11 György Lukács, Soul and Form (London: Merlin, 1974), 152.
12 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture / Robert Venturi (Lon-
don: Architectural Press, 1979).
13 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 516.
14 Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger, As Found: The Discovery of the Ordi-
nary British Architecture and Art of the 1950s: Independent Group and New Brutalism (Zürich:
Lars Muller Publishers, 2001), 8.
15 Ibid., 141.
16 Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2013).
PART I
Slices of everyday life
in visual culture
1
EARLY FILM AND THE
CONSTRUCTION OF EVERYDAY
LIFE ON SCREEN
Ian Christie
“People from 1896 in everyday motions, and here we are watching”

One of 191 YouTube comments on Blackfriars Bridge1
In autumn 1898, the English pioneer flmmaker Robert Paul announced that he
was turning his back on subjects taken from everyday life – “Trains, Trams and
Buses”, as he disparagingly described these – for a new phase of “animated pho-
tography” production.2 Henceforth he would exploit the new medium’s “capacity
for producing BREATHLESS SENSATION, LAUGHTER AND TEARS” with
a series of staged story-flms. And through the combined eforts of a team of crafts-
men and performers assembled at his new studio in North London, he was able to
ofer 80 of these, which he guaranteed would “rivet the attention” of spectators.
What was Paul saying goodbye to in 1898? We might call it the “demonstration”
or “novelty” phase of moving pictures, lasting from approximately 1895 to 1898,
which has indeed appeared to ofer “slices of everyday life” to later spectators. The
following account of the Lumière “frst flm” is typical of an anachronistic view
common today:
What La Sortie de l’Usine shows us is life, simple life, everyday life, with-
out efect, without special efects, crying out “truth” despite the absence of
color and above all of sound. The Lumière cinematograph thus heralds the
triumph of realism in the future history of cinema. However, this natural
simplicity does not exclude a certain form of “staging”, that is to say here of
preparation, which is an even more fundamental given for the development
of cinema.3
Here the original flm has been conscripted into a powerful teleological narra-
tive, which casts Lumière and Georges Méliès as the founding fathers of cinema,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003107309-3
14 Ian Christie
representing “realism” and “fantasy”. The fact that La Sortie was carefully restaged
over several months is reduced to conceding that it was “prepared”; and the issue
of how the Lumière and other early flms were actually presented – generally with
an accompaniment of live music, or phonograph accompaniment, or spoken intro-
duction and even sound-efects – is also elided, in order to cast it as preserving for
us a vision of “simple everyday life”.4
We can fnd a similar attitude in comments on an early Robert Paul flm, Black-
friars Bridge, made a year later in mid-1896 and currently presented online by a
London tourism organization as “a fascinating record of trafc on the bridge with
pedestrians curious about the presence of the camera”, when there is good reason
to believe it was carefully staged.5
But before considering these cases in more detail, it may be useful to review
briefy the status and history of “everyday life” as a frame of reference. This is very
obviously a debatable concept, one that is likely to mean diferent things to difer-
ent commentators, often without any need to specify further what is meant. As the
sociologist Erving Gofmann observed: “To speak . . . of ‘everyday life’ . . . is merely
to take a shot in the dark . . . a multitude of frameworks may be involved or none
at all”.6 But even if there is today considerable academic debate and controversy
FIGURE 1.1 Paul’s Blackfriars Bridge (1896) has been regarded as a “record” of trafc
on this London bridge, although the variety of passers-by suggests careful
preparation.
Early flm and the construction of everyday life on screen 15
around the term, I want to suggest there are also two historical perspectives relevant
to the creation and reception of the flms of 1895–1896.
One of these was the burgeoning of new literary genres in the mid-nineteenth
century, dramatizing the life of the city in essentially nonfctional terms. Walter
Benjamin coined the phrase “panorama literature” in his study of Charles Baude-
laire, evoking the rash of cheap publications designed to be sold in the streets of
Paris, likening these to the “plastic foreground of the panoramas and their anec-
dotal form”.7 In France, the new fashionable form was the “physiology” detailing
“types that might be encountered by a person taking a look at the marketplace”.
Soon, Benjamin observes, “the physiology of the city had its turn” and eventu-
ally the nation and all its inhabitants. Such “physiologies” were intended to be
innocuous, uncontroversial in an era of looming political censorship; and they gave
birth to the better-known concept of the fâneur, as celebrated by Baudelaire in his
famous essay on Constantin Guys, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1865).8 For such
a “passionate spectator”, likened by Baudelaire to “a mirror as vast as the crowd
itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its
movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life”, it would be impossible to be
bored in a crowd.9
Contemporary with the Paris of the arcades and the feuilletons, there were paral-
lel developments in many European countries during the century. Edgar Allan Poe’s
1840 story “The Man of the Crowd”, set in London, was quickly translated and is
now recognized as the prototype of the modern urban mystery (an “X-ray of the
detective story”, in Benjamin’s evocative phrase).10 Even earlier, Charles Dickens
had launched his career by contributing a series of anonymous “Sketches by “Boz”
to a range of magazines in the early 1830s, which were subtitled as “illustrative of
Every-day life and Every-day people” when published as a collection in 1836.
Benjamin cites Dickens’s complaint that “my fgures seems disposed to stagnate
without crowds about them”.11 More systematically, the journalist Henry Mayhew
profled “the London poor” in a series of articles for the Morning Chronicle, eventu-
ally published as four substantial volumes, illustrated with engravings in the 1860s.
And in 1880, Anthony Trollope, already famous for his “Barsetshire” novels about
English provincial life, would enter this expanding market with his profles of Lon-
don Tradesmen for the Pall Mall Gazette.
Meanwhile, visual representation of everyday life had accompanied, and indeed
often cross-fertilised, its literary and journalistic coverage (Dickens’ Pickwick sto-
ries, which became his frst novel, were originally commissioned as captions to
illustrations). Constantin Guys, the subject of Baudelaire’s essay, had worked exten-
sively for the pioneering Illustrated London News before returning to Paris to portray
its social variety. And from 1869, The Graphic competed with extensive illustration
of its news and features, often employing notable artists, such as Luke Fildes and
Hubert von Herkomer. As wood-block illustration was superseded by half-tone
reproduction of photographs, the periodical reading public of the 1880s and 1890s
was thoroughly accustomed to seeing “the very form and presence of events as they
transpire, in all their substantial reality”, as the Illustrated London News had promised
16 Ian Christie
FIGURE 1.2 Dramatizing the life of the city became a new literary genre early in the
nineteenth century. Charles Dickens launched his career with a collection
of his journalism, Sketches by Boz, illustrated by George Cruickshank in
1836.
as early as 1842.12 And in addition to such abundant printed material, there were
both projected photographic lantern slides and stereographic images widely avail-
able to ofer even great immediacy.
None of this is to deny the impact of moving pictures from 1894 onward, as
seen frst on the Kinetoscope; or the enthusiastic response to pioneering projected
shows during 1895. If anything, it is to underline that moving pictures reached
audiences that were well prepared for a further degree of “life-likeness”, having
witnessed rapid progress in recent decades. And, as we will see, the choice of early
subjects made by both Lumière and Paul refected this climate of expectations.
But there is also another historical perspective to bear in mind: namely that of
subsequent changing attitudes toward the frst subjects shown. As cinema devel-
oped rapidly during the early twentieth century, becoming mass entertainment
after approximately 1910, neither the public nor the industry showed any interest
in preserving early flms. This resulted in the majority of all early flms being lost –
current estimates suggest an average of 20% surviving – with the Lumière catalogue
very much an exception, due largely to the company having opted out of the com-
mercial flm industry and preserved its archive.
On the rare occasions they were seen or remembered, this was likely to be as
objects of amusement or derision. The Studio des Ursulines in Paris, one of the
frst cinemas devoted to flm as avant-garde art, ran a regular feature “Ten minutes
of pre-war cinema” during the 1920s, which apparently provoked mirth among its
fashionable audience.13 One of these, the young director René Clair, would later
muse on such lack of respect for the recent past, refecting on what it would mean
for contemporary work seen in the future.14 In Britain, with few if any opportuni-
ties to see early flm, Virginia Woolf would write in 1926 about flm seeming “at
frst sight simple, even stupid”, before listing typical newsreel subjects and refect-
ing on them “having a quality which does not belong to the simple photograph
of real life”.15
Later in this tantalizing essay, she sets up a contrast between the clumsiness of
literary adaptations and early flmmakers seeming
dissatisfed with such obvious sources of interest as the passage of time and
the suggestiveness of reality. They despise the fight of gulls, ships on the
Thames, the Prince of Wales, the Mile End Road, Piccadilly Circus.
Almost alone among inter-war commentators, Woolf implied that early flm por-
trayed an “unexpected beauty . . . life as it is when we have no part in it”, which
was subsequently overlaid by “enormous technical profciency”, while awaiting
the discovery of “some secret language which we feel and see, but never speak”.
The history of recovering flm’s earliest years has yet to be written, but it largely
dates from the years after World War Two, when flm archives began to take stock of
what materials had survived and to make copies of these on the new nonfammable
“safety” flm stock. Two circumstantial factors would leave their mark on this process.
One was that most early prints were copied onto black-and-white stock, even if they
had survived in colored prints. And the other was that early flm’s low frame-rate was
routinely disregarded, leading to flms being projected – and crucially transferred to
video for use on television – at “sound speed”. This would give rise to what came
to be accepted as the inherent “jerkiness” of early flm – a mark of its primitiveness.
Apart from these material issues, the post-war period would see a succession
of critical and theoretical paradigms adopted within the emerging feld of Film
Studies that prioritized “progressive” aspects of early flm practice: essentially those
18 Ian Christie
that anticipated the development of narrative editing. Not until the 1978 FIAF
Brighton Congress, which assembled a large array of surviving pre-1906 flms for
viewing, were the conditions created for a nonteleological assessment of early flm.
There were also a number of other developments during the last decades of the
twentieth century that would afect attitudes toward early flm. Growing interest
and expertise in nineteenth-century photography – and in the history of pre-flmic
“optical devices” – led to a more nuanced understanding of the work of flm pio-
neers, including those “workers of the eleventh hour” who had not previously
been canonized.16 And, perhaps most important of all, the emergence of home
video formats – and ultimately of sharing and streaming platforms – would lead to
the wide difusion of what had previously been a rare archival commodity. Much
of the entire surviving corpus of early flm is now freely available for all to view
online and continues to generate a constant stream of commentary, much of which
is as nostalgic as it is historically uninformed.
The illusion of real life

With these perspectives in mind, let us turn to the issue of early flms portraying –
or capturing “movement caught live” – as the Lumières would claim in their origi-
nal Cinématographe patent.17 There may be no question that the frst cameras were
recording the “live” scene before them. But it seems doubtful that this was spon-
taneous or unrehearsed. More commonly, early “test” subjects were intended to
address some technical concerns. For instance, the frst flm taken by Birt Acres and
Robert Paul in 1895, known as “Incident at Clovelly Cottage”, shows a woman in
black and a man entirely in white outside the entrance to a house. We can surmise
that this was designed to include extremes of tonal contract, to test what would be
visible on viewing – in this case on a Kinetoscope.18
In the case of what has been commemorated as the “frst flm” of the Lumières,
La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon, we now know that this was flmed at least three
times, between March and July 1895.19
The location was the Lumière photographic factory and the subjects its employ-
ees, making this already something of a commercial advertisement. The frst version
may have been – or was perhaps suggested by – employees’ normal “departure”,
although given the bright sunlight this is unlikely to have been at the end of the
working day. More likely it was prepared, with the mass of workers moving swiftly
at a signal, to ensure that as much movement was captured on the short length
of flm used. Already, “direction” is apparent: all the workers exit either to left or
right, with only one woman coming diagonally toward the camera. This version
was apparently shown at early demonstrations of the Cinématographe to profes-
sional audiences in spring and summer 1895. But its shortcomings must have been
apparent to Louis Lumière, as an experienced photographer, even if he was facing
the new challenge of composing in duration as well as within the pictorial frame.
Hence the two reshoots, in which the workers appear in their Sunday best, appar-
ently after attending Mass, presumably on their day of work– and again disperse
FIGURE 1.3 Far from being an unstaged scene, Lumière’s La Sortie de l’usine was
flmed at least three times between March and July 1895, with signifcant
variations.
to right and left – with one woman clearly steering her companion in the agreed
direction. However, the third version not only has better contrast but includes sig-
nifcant temporal “framing”, with the factory gates seen to open and close, while
some foreground “business” involving a cyclist and the dog appears in all three
versions.
The more we examine these three extant versions, helped by their repeat-
ability online and our experience of “reading” flmed scenes, the more apparent
their purposeful organization becomes. Similarly, we fnd the same attention to
spatial and temporal parameters in other Lumière “demonstration” flms.20 The
blacksmith being handed a glass of wine after his labors and the naughty boy
being punished by the gardener are both “completed” events, while the two army
clowning subjects, La voltage and Le saut a la couverture, both present rounded per-
formances, not unlike the vaudeville acts flmed for Edison in his Black Maria –
subjects that would have been known to the Lumières. Photographic congress
attenders disembark briskly from their cruise in a diagonal line, approaching the
camera and exiting the frame both to right and left, with many dofng their hats
to the operator. And in La baignade, a more informal sequence of boys advance
away from the camera along a platform to dive into the sea. The Lyons city street
scene Place des Cordeliers may appear the least structured, open to the variety
20 Ian Christie
of city-center trafc, yet this pivots around a passing horse-drawn tram as its
main “event”. Even Le repas de bébé turns out to be symmetrically structured by
Auguste ofering food to his infant daughter, while his wife pours herself a cup
of cofee.
None of this attention to composition in developing a new form should be
surprising. The Lumières were seasoned professionals in photography, and Louis
would devote his later life to continued research, into developing a natural color
photographic process and a means of transferring the already familiar stereoscopic
illusion into flm.21 Yet the original corpus of flms, made mostly by Louis Lumière
in 1895–1896, have now become a touchstone for the artless capture of “everyday
life”, as noted earlier.
The Lumière vues would quickly become relics of an early approach to creating
flmed subjects, as other producers entered the market. Moreover, that market had
not been initially one for “flms”, but rather for apparatus. The Cinematograph,
Edison’s Kinetoscope, and soon Paul’s Theatrograph were all expensive engineered
machines, which were either luxury items for rich amateurs, or capable of being
operated to enable the recoupment of investment. “Subjects” to attract paying
customers were therefore necessary but were not initially the goal of the manufac-
turers. The Lumière organization soon delegated their production to a number of
travelling operators. And when a “theatrical” market developed, somewhat unex-
pectedly, the showmen’s programme became an essential organizing structure for
these brief “slices” of contemporary life.
Among the “inadvertent pioneers”, Robert Paul was an electrical instrument
maker when he embarked on a moving picture sideline to his main business in
1894. Initially commissioned to produce replicas of Edison’s Kinetoscope – the
device that had also sparked Antoine Lumière’s interest – Paul became frst a manu-
facturer of these viewing machines and then a producer of subjects to support
their exhibition.22 In partnership with a photographer, Birt Acres, during the early
months of 1895, they produced at least 14 flms to supplement the stock of Edison
titles. In some respects, these cover a similar range of subjects to the Lumières’
early production, with a greater emphasis on “national” events such as the Derby
horse-race and Oxford and Cambridge boat-race. Four are “performances”, by
dancing girls, a “Lightning cartoonist”, boxing kangaroos, and dancing bears, and
two are “genre pieces”, a comic shoeblack working in the street and a carpenters’
shop – this last no doubt inspired by Edison’s blacksmith scene, like the Lumières’
Les Forgerons. Signifcantly, all three of these would show the workers enjoying a
drink after their labors.
Two of the Paul-Acres Kinetoscope subjects are exceptional, with one enjoying
an unusually long career. “Arrest of a Pickpocket” (April 1895) shows a skirmish,
as two men catch and hold a struggling pickpocket, and is by far the most violent
of all early scenes staged for the moving picture camera.23 Two months later, waves
breaking over a pier at Dover would make a striking sea picture that remained in
Paul’s catalogue well into 1896 and was acclaimed as the highlight of Edison’s frst
projected show in New York in April of that year.24
Unlike many of the Lumière exhibitions, we have no details of Paul’s programs

for the early part of 1896 and comparatively few of his flms from this period have
survived. But one that has repays close study: Trafc on Blackfriars Bridge (June 1896)
was commended in Paul’s early lists for showing “beautiful detail”. And, thanks
to its survival, we can still appreciate the detail of the vehicles and passers-by that
populate it.
In this context, the frst question that arises must be whether it presents a spon-
taneous, unrehearsed view of pedestrian trafc on the bridge? A modern tourism
website, Visiting London, describes it online as “a fascinating record of trafc on
the bridge with pedestrians curious about the presence of the camera”.25 Here
again, we fnd the assumption that an early street flm will ofer a spontaneous
“record”, when to a more skeptical eye the sheer number and rhythm of pedes-
trians that follow the flm’s early wagons and omnibuses suggests a more care-
fully organized scene. No fewer than 11 pedestrians are seen to pass on the near
pavement in just 36 seconds, with 5 looking very deliberately “to camera”, and
the other 6 as pointedly looking away.26 The passers-by also seem to represent a
sample of Londoners “balanced” by age, gender, and class. Of the two young boys,
one looks confdently to camera, while the second, near the end, is completely
immersed in reading an illustrated paper as he walks. A confdent woman in dark
formal dress walks alone, ignoring the camera, followed by a fashionably dressed
couple, of whom the man looks to camera, while his companion ignores it. Next,
two “city types” intersect as they walk in diferent directions, while an older man
appears between them and is the only fgure in the flm to stare intently at the
camera, looking back over his shoulder.
Looking at the camera is indeed a familiar trope of almost all early flms taken
in public places, so what is immediately striking about Blackfriars Bridge is that so
few of its subjects do so – suggesting that they may have been briefed or “directed”
accordingly. Equally striking is the brisk pace at which all move, apart from the
elderly man looking back, and the seeming choreography of entrances and exits.
Like the Lumière Sortie, this packs a considerable amount of varied and almost
rhythmic bodily movement into a short duration, making it a suitably modern-
ized procession of London “types” in the tradition dating back to Dickens’ Sketches
by “Boz”. Unfortunately, we have none of Paul’s other street flms of this period,
except part of On Westminster Bridge, which has been reanimated from a Filoscope
copy and is now believed to include the fgure of Paul himself, wearing a straw
boater and looking back over his shoulder toward the camera.27 If this is cor-
rect, it may connect with a “silent” self-referential dimension of Blackfriars Bridge.
The camera points north, showing in the background on Victoria Embankment
a building with a steeply pitched roof and small spire. This was the then new City
of London school, which Paul had attended as part of the frst cohort of pupils to
use this new building in the 1880s. We might therefore see in the flm a discreet
homage, through London’s dense haze, to his alma mater.
Just as Louis Lumière was discovering the parameters of his new medium in
1895, so Paul was pioneering a new way of representing a traditional subject in
22 Ian Christie
Blackfriars Bridge. “London bridge scenes” were already a well-established pictorial

genre, invariably emphasizing their typical density of trafc, as in Gustav Doré’s
1872 image of London Bridge and similar graphic works.28 A photograph from
the 1890s follows this convention, showing London Bridge densely packed with
horse-drawn vehicles.29 Yet Paul’s Blackfriars favors pedestrians over trafc, and in
this it bears some similarity to Gustave Caillebotte’s famous Pont de l’Europe (1878),
although without the painting’s distinctive exaggerated perspective. What flming
brings to the scene is a sharp sense of serial individuation, which is rarely present in
paintings or in early street photographs, where a small number of fgures give scale
to the urban spaces. Here, the procession of passers-by is the subject: the old man
who looks quizzically toward the camera, the boy lost in his reading, the prosperous
couple who cruise past, exuding a sense of entitlement. And this focus on individu-
als among the urban crowd also occurs in the few other street flms we have from
1896, including the Lumière Street Dance in Drury Lane, taken in February 1896,
when their show opened at the Empire Theatre of Varieties in Leicester Square.30
Although the girls dancing on a street corner are the ostensible focus, the gather-
ing group of onlookers becomes as much part of the scene, serving to animate it
further. And, thanks to recent scholarship, we can identify at least one of these as
Felicien Trewey, the impresario responsible for overseeing Lumière presentations
in London.
FIGURE 1.4 The onlookers in Lumière’s Street Dancers (1896) include the manager of
their show then running at the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square.
Clearly the frst cinematographers understood from established photographic

practice that their subjects were more striking when flmed at close range, with
relatively few fgures in frame. And as stereograph photographers had learned to
compose their images “in depth”, with separation between near and distant planes
to enhance the stereoscopic efect, so the frst flm cameramen knew – or quickly
learned – that fgures needed to be separated from backgrounds and that diago-
nal movement across the feld enhanced the quasi-stereoscopic efect of animated
photography.31
We can also see how these lessons soon carried over into flming in more exotic
situations, as in a surviving flm from the Egyptian series that Paul commissioned
in early 1897, Women Fetching Water from the Nile, in which a line of women with
pitchers on their heads fle past.32 Although we know all too little about how
programs were made up and seen in 1896–1897, a rare exception is the printed
program from Paul’s nightly show at the Alhambra Music Hall in Leicester Square,
dating from August 1896.33 If this is indeed the sequence of titles, we can make
some deductions about what was proving popular among these very short subjects,
compiled into a c.20-min program. Streets, boating, children, sports events – and
the tentative beginning of fction flmmaking – pioneered in Paul’s The Soldier’s
Courtship as early as April 1896, at the suggestion of the Alhambra manager.34
But although Paul made a decisive shift into fctional, dramatic production from
1898, he did not abandon “scenes of everyday life”, and his catalogues would swell
with street scenes from most major cities in Europe, as well as a new hybrid genre
of fctionalized flms built around incidents staged in the suburban streets around
his studio. In the stop-action “trick flm” An Extraordinary Cab Accident (1903), a
man is apparently knocked down and killed by a cab in a Muswell Hill suburban
street.35 But when passers-by intervene and he is declared dead, the man suddenly
“revives” and runs of with the lady he was originally talking to. Paul’s 1903 Christ-
mas catalogue declared this to be “realistic, exciting, and containing nothing of an
objectionable nature”.
A ‘period eye’ on early flm

We wonder, inevitably and perhaps increasingly amid contemporary digital media
developments, what contemporaries made of this new arrival, which has led to sev-
eral texts from 1896 becoming standard references. One in particular, by the Rus-
sian Maxim Gorky, then a journalist and emerging short-story writer, has become
canonical, widely reprinted.36 Shorn of its circumstantial and cultural context, this
is no less difcult to interpret than Woolf ’s essay of 30 years later. Gorky framed
his report on witnessing a flm show at the annual Nizhni-Novgorod fair with
an elaborate comparison between the monochrome images shown in silence and
contemporary Symbolist painting, like a “visit to the kingdom of shadows”. The
Paris street scene that Gorky describes must be the Champs-Elysees, dating from
April 1896, which has children playing in the foreground and pedestrians thread-
ing through the carriages.37 But what has attracted most attention over the years is
24 Ian Christie
FIGURE 1.5 This printed program for Paul’s nightly show at the Alhambra Music Hall
in August 1896 provides rare evidence of actual screening practice at the
time.
his vivid description of a train that “speeds straight at you. . . [likely to] turn you
into a ripped sack of lacerated fesh and splintered bones”. Even though Gorky
admits that this is but a “train of shadows”, which stops and discharges its convivial
passengers, his melodramatic imagining of a train crashing into the auditorium has
served to feed the myth that early spectators were alarmed by Train Entering the
Station at La Ciotat.38
Gorky’s highly fctionalized account of a “frst encounter” ended with a lurid
evocation of likely pornographic subjects to come, inspired by the show’s setting
in a reproduction of a Parisian café-concert known to operate as a brothel. It may
be the least authentic of all early responses to flm, despite satisfying later expecta-
tions of a dramatic epiphany. More typical were the two Paris newspaper notices
of 30 December 1895, which hailed “the illusion of real life” (Le Radical) and “life
itself, movement taken from life” (La Poste), the latter adopting a phrase commonly
used of artists “working from life”.39 However, an early 1896 response by the Paris
theatre director Jules Claretie made an interesting distinction.40 “When the scene
is staged [composé], for example when two friends quarrel over a newspaper article,
the sense of absolute truthfulness, of reality, disappears”. The conclusion he drew is
that “animated photography must be taken from life without posing” [pris sur la vie
sans pose]. “With any sign of preparation, goodbye to the illusion”.
This issue of creating an illusion of everyday life would continue to resonate
through both early responses to animated photography and the beginnings of
explicitly “staged” production. An essay, published in Britain only weeks after mov-
ing pictures made their public debut in London in February 1896, predicted the
prospects for animated photography, describing it as showing “life moving with-
out purpose, without beauty, with no better impulse than a foolish curiosity . . .
it proves the complete despair of modern realism”.41 But this still-unidentifed
critic was proved wrong. Film would not join forces with the Naturalism that
“O. Winter” despised in art: it would quickly develop a narrative grammar and
generic structure of its own, cross-fertilised by the contemporary popular arts of
photography, cartooning, and stage performance. “Everyday life” would continue
to be a staple element but “with a diferent reality from that which we perceive
in daily life”, as Woolf put it, what might be called a heightened, intensifed, or,
more broadly, stylized reality. And the diference between lived and screen realities
would quickly become a comic subject for Robert Paul in his The Countryman
and the Cinematograph (1901), with its smock-clad yokel cavorting before a screen,
attempting to interact with a succession of flmed scenes before the screen collapses
and reveals a projector and projectionist.42
I have suggested that that the “reality” or “everyday life” long admired in early
flms from the “demonstration phase” of cinema was selected and constructed or
staged according to prevailing models in photography and social reportage. “Eve-
ryday life” was already a popular genre in the literary and pictorial arts of the fn
de siècle and moving pictures were able to remediate its appeal in a technologically
novel fashion. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin proposed the concept of remedia-
tion to explain how a recurrent pattern in modern culture has been new media
“reforming or improving” their predecessors.43 Instead of “fxing stillness”, La Poste
26 Ian Christie
FIGURE 1.6 The diference between lived and screen realities quickly became a comic
subject, as in Paul’s The Countryman and the Cinematograph (1901).
was quick to note, photography could now “perpetuate the image of movement”.
The discourse that greeted animated or moving photography in 1895–1896 is
replete with references to images that “come to life” (Gorky), encouraged by the
Lumière presentation trope of starting each flm as a still image that then begins to
move. But all early moving picture media served to create what Bolter and Grusin
term “transparent immediacy” or the capacity to make viewers “forget the pres-
ence of the medium . . . and believe [they are] in the presence of the objects of
representation”.44
While the testimonies of “frst viewers” remain valuable, they also need to be
understood in the fuller contexts in which they appeared. To abstract them as
fragments of “evidence” is to ignore what in a diferent context the art historian
Michael Baxendall called “the period eye”, referring to the visual skills and shared
culture that shaped contemporary responses to the ffteenth-century Italian paint-
ing.45 We may see in a gallery today the “same” Botticelli or Bellini painting that
its original viewers saw, but Baxendall’s point is that there is much cultural context
we lack – however much we may feel the images “take us back” to the Floren-
tine or Venetian Quattrocento. The Lumière workers leaving the Lyons factory
and the pedestrians crossing Blackfriars Bridge do indeed give us a vivid sense of
connection with particulars of the world of the 1890s, all the more so due to the
considerable interval that now separates us from that time. But they were never
naïve “slices of everyday life”; and the expectations we bring to our viewing, on
very diferent apparatus from that of 1896 and in very diferent worlds, are inevi-
tably far removed from those of their original creators and audiences. Crucially,
these flms were once new and exciting – as demonstrations of Virtual Reality may
appear today – while for us they are now quaint and nostalgic, subsumed in cat-
egories such as the “Belle Epoque” and “Victorian London”, as evidenced by the
quantity of online commentary and reaction that accompanies them.
Perhaps Benjamin’s distinctive technique for dealing with the evidence of the
past, in assembling the materials for his never-to-be-completed Arcades project –
or in the memory images assembled for his Berlin Childhood circa 1900 – may point
toward ways of better understanding “early flm in the digital era”.46 In his chapter
on the Kaiserpanorama in the latter work, Benjamin made clear that this automated
stereo-viewing attraction was already an anachronism when he encountered it as a
child and immersed himself in its images of distant places. He evokes the fantasy of
believing he might have visited the Cours Mirabeau in Aix and also the vain hope
that one could exhaust the splendors of each stereograph before the machinery
cut it short. His delicate dialectic of mediation and memory seems highly relevant.
We have the luxury of being able to “visit” Lyons and London repeatedly, for just
40 seconds. But we also need to bear in mind the strictures of both Benjamin and
Baxendall on believing that this ofers any simple vade mecum or time travel.
Notes
1 Blackfriars Bridge (Robert Paul, 1896), 211, 854 views, 191 comments (at 25.03.2021).
BFI channel, www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-5Ts_i164c&ab_channel=BFI. This flm is
also posted on many other YouTube channels, most versions deriving from the BFI
video R. W. Paul. Collected Films, curated by Ian Christie, 2007.
2 See Ian Christie, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema (Chicago: Chicago Univer-
sity Press, 2019), 167–9.
3 Jean Pierre Carrier, “L comme Lumière Louis,” Le cinéma documentaire de A Z (2019),
accessed March 23, 2021, https://dicodoc.blog/2019/08/27/l-comme-lumiere-louis/
4 Thierry Lecointe, “La sonorisation des seances Lumière en 1896 et 1897,” 1895 Mille
huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze, no. 52 (2007).
5 Blackfriars Bridge, VisitingLondonGuide, accessed March 23, 2021, www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Ig-8pSOYNNg&ab_channel=VisitingLondonGuide.
6 This quotation from Gofman’s Frame Analysis (1974) serves as an epigraph to a review
article by Nick Coudry, “Everyday Life in Cultural Theory” (review article),” European
Journal of Communication 18, no. 2 (2003): 265–70, http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/17653/1/
Couldry_Everyday_life_review_2003.pdf
7 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire. A Lyric poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans.
Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1973), 35.
8 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life / Charles Baudelaire (London: Penguin,
2010).
9 Ibid., 37.
10 Ibid., 48.
11 Ibid., 49.
12 Quoted in “History of Periodical Illustration, North Carolina State University, Digital
Humanities, https://ncna.dh.chass.ncsu.edu/imageanalytics/history.php
28 Ian Christie
13 Jean-Jacques Meusy, Ecrans français de l’entre-deux-guerres, vol. I (Paris: AFRHC, 2017),

232–7.
14 René Clair, Cinéma d’hier, cinéma d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 155–6.
15 Virginia Woolf, “The Movies and Reality,” The New Republic, August 4, 1926, 309.
16 Laurent Mannoni, Le grand art de la lumière et de l’ombre: archéologie de cinema (Paris: Edi-
tions Nathan, 1995). English trans. Richard Crangle, University of Exeter Press, 2000.
17 “Une simple caméra capable de prendre la vie sur le vif et de la projeter à son tour”. This
text has acquired an ofcial status, repeated in a French Government commemoration
of the frst public presentation of moving pictures to a paying public. 28 décembre 1895:
Première projection publique du Cinématographe Lumière au Grand Café de Paris.
www.gouvernement.fr/archivesgouv
18 See Peter Domankiewicz, “Whatever Happened at Clovelly Cottage?” talk given at Kings
College Silent Film Symposium, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=dumCY01Eo
VM&ab_channel=WilliamFriese-Greene. See also: Christie, Robert Paul and the Origins
of British Cinema, 26–9.
19 What is known about the production of individual Lumière subjects is detailed in L’œuvre
cinématographique des frères Lumière, an online catalogue edited by Manuel Schmalstieg,
based on Michelle Aubert and Jean-Claude Seguin, La production cinématographique des
frères Lumière, 1996, accessed February 23, 2021, https://catalogue-lumiere.com/.
20 The initial Grand Café program had two clowning routines, flmed at troop encamp-
ments La Voltige and Le Saut a la couverture, but it did not include Train Entering Station at
La Ciotat or the Card-Players, later to become signature subjects.
21 The Lumières launched their Autochrome process in 1907. For a concise overview,
see https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/autochromes-the-dawn-of-colour-
photography/ Louis Lumière demonstrated his successful 3D process in 1935–6. See
Miriam Ross, 3D Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3.
22 It now appears that the Kinetoscope presentation Lumière saw in Paris may have been
by the same Greek-American entrepreneurs who commissioned Paul to manufacture
machines for them in London. See Georgiades, Who’s Who in Victorian Cinema, www.
victorian-cinema.net/georgiades.php
23 I have commented on this as an example of the rowdiness in English behavior previously
noted by foreign observers. See Christie, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema, 66.
24 Ibid., 27–9.
25 Blackfriars Bridge, VisitingLondonGuide, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ig-8pSOYNN
g&ab_channel=VisitingLondonGuide
26 In 2019, I made a video advertising my lecture on Paul for Gresham College, with
the camera placed where Paul’s would have been. The small number of “chance”
passers-by is notable. See “London’s First Filmmaker,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=
hTCUKO2TF1U&t=1s. Paul also mentioned this location as the scene of his frst abor-
tive attempt to flm with Acres in 1895, which may have motivated his return to the
same scene.
27 See On Westminster Bridge at www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrt08d1QPUk&ab_
channel=FilmsbytheYear. The Filoscope was a fipbook device, patented by Henry
Short, a friend and associate of Paul’s, from which several other flms were also “reani-
mated” for the BFI Collected Films DVD.
28 Gustave Doré, On London Bridge, 1872. See www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/
dore/london/7.html
29 Photochrome print Collection, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_
Bridge,_London,_England-LCCN2002696930.jpg
30 Lumière Catalogue, https://catalogue-lumiere.com/danseuses-des-rues/
31 Like many of the pioneer generation, Louis Lumière hoped that moving pictures could
be stereoscopic, and many systems and patents were proposed in the late 1890s. However
stereo projection proved a major problem, which Lumière did not solve until 1936.
32 Women Fetching Water from the Nile (Henry Short, 1897), https://player.bf.org.uk/free/
flm/watch-women-fetching-water-from-the-nile-1897-online
33 Reproduced in Paul and the Origins, 80.

34 Ibid., 65.
35 An Extraordinary Cab Accident (1903), www.youtube.com/watch?v=c00r3pHmTVM&
ab_channel=ViragnuYouTube
36 For instance, in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and
Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988),
25. Gorky’s phrase has also provided a title on several occasions, as in Simon Popple
and Colin Harding, In the Kingdom of Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema (London:
Cygnus Arts, 1996).
37 L’œuvre cinématographique des frères Lumière, no. 115.
38 The alleged “panicking spectators” of the Lumière Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat has given
rise to a large and continuing volume of discussion. For an overview, see Martin Loiper-
dinger and Bernd Elzer, “Lumière’s Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth,” The
Moving Image 4, no. 1 (2004): 89–118. doi:10.1353/mov.2004.0014.
39 For these and many other early responses to early flm shows, see Daniel Banda and José
Moure, eds., Le Cinéma: Naissance d”un Art (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), 39–41.
40 Ibid., 43
41 O. Winter, “The Cinematograph,” The New Review, May 1896, 507–13. This text was
discovered by Stephen Bottomore and is most conveniently reproduced on Luke McK-
ernan’s website Picturegoing at https://picturegoing.com/?tag=o-winter
42 Paul’s flm is only partly preserved, with its end missing, although a remake by Porter
for Edison, Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902), is more complete. It is possible
that Paul’s flm was inspired by one of the books of “sketches” mentioned earlier, in this
case James Spilling’s Giles’s Trip to London, frst published in 1872, in which a Norfolk
farm laborer marvels at the attractions of the metropolis, including a visit to a “camera”
or Camera Obscura. Facsimile edition of the 1896 edition, Jarrold Publishing, 1998.
43 Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999), 59.
44 Ibid., 272.
45 Michael Baxendall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy. A Primer in the Social
History of Pictorial Style (Oxford University Press, 1972).
46 The Passagenwerk or “Arcades project” was never completed, but his extensive research
and material have been published. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard
Elland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). See
also Benjamin, Berlin Childhood circa 1900, trans and ed. Carl Skoggard (Portland: Publi-
cation Studio, 2010).
2
TELEVISING THE QUOTIDIAN
BBC Arena’s The Private Life of the Ford
Cortina (1982)
Michael Hrebeniak
A ski run in Italy, a supermarket manager in Luton, a sandwich bar in Lon-

don EC2, Arena opens the bonnet of the Ford Cortina, Britain’s most popu-
lar, most stolen, and most misunderstood car. “Dagenham dustbin”? “Poor
man’s Rolls-Royce”? In the year that may well see the end of a legend, some
of the motoring public, including Sir John Betjeman, Tom Robinson, Alexei
Sayle, Sir Terence Beckett and Magnus Magnusson take apart the Ford Cor-
tina: Life and Works 1962–1982. Lighting cameraman JOHN HOOPER,
Associate Producer ANTHONY WALL, Director NIGEL FINCH.1
Carried in the language of gusty bravado that characterized Radio Times listings of
the era, the BBC thus announced a new Arena documentary, The Secret Life of the
Ford Cortina, for broadcast on 30 January 1982. Its subject was the contemporary
saloon vehicle that had moved through fve marks from 1962 before fnally ceasing
manufacture 20 years later. This was the UK’s most popular car of the 1970s with
more than 2.8 million models eventually sold. The Cortina had originally been
aimed at buyers of the Vauxhall Victor and Morris Oxford, superseding common
post-war associations of car ownership with industrial muscularity and tweedy uni-
versity towns with the exotica of Cortina d’Ampezzo, the Italian ski resort that
hosted the 1956 Winter Olympics. As an early publicity stunt several Cortinas
would be flmed being driven precariously down its bobsleigh run, piloted by the
dream speedster in every motorist and safely inured against hostile topographic
contour.
The established mystique of unlimited individual mobility through car owner-
ship was thereby given a further investment of the glamour of continental high-life,
newly accessible through package-deal holidays. Accordingly, the frst brochure for
the Mark I featured simulations of passport stamps, photographs of parasols on sun
terraces, car boots full of elegant suitcases, sunhats and wicker-covered fasks of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003107309-4
Televising the quotidian 31
FIGURE 2.1 The Cortina marque with “enough performance and polish to satisfy the
most extroverted executive”.
Chianti. (After disingenuously professing not to recognize the car in the flm’s latter
stages, the Poet Laureate, John Betjeman, ruminates over the word “Cortina”, not-
ing that it sounds “a bit foreign, a bit South American and not quite human”.) The
saloon’s strategic positioning within a lifestyle orbit would extend to the Mark IV’s
unlikely previewing in the 1977 James Bond flm, The Spy Who Loved Me (Gilbert,
1977), further reinforcing automobile culture’s tangled relations with unaccount-
able asocial power through proximity to lethal communications technology in the
eyes of the prospective male buyer.
The Secret Life of the Ford Cortina was aired just six months before the end of
the car’s production and its replacement by the new Ford Sierra, spurring a south-
westerly migration of British consumer imagination. The program makers had
already signaled a major breech with the documentary flm genre, initially for-
mulated through the 1930s as a tool of social knowledge that ofered a suppos-
edly transparent refection of the world via images that were rationally organized,
persuasive and conforming to experience from the perspective of power. In his
preface to the 1929 Soviet flm, Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov had cel-
ebrated his “flm of facts” with its “international language of things” that forged an
optical connection between workers within a universal circulation of energies shot
32 Michael Hrebeniak
through their nervous systems. By mid-century this stance had accelerated into
the spectacular economy of attention of the newsreel, using a fuid and immersive
syntax designed to communicate fear and hysteria.
With the emergence of the Arena strand in 1975 under stewardship of series
editors Nigel Finch, Anthony Wall, and Alan Yentob, the facticity of the docu-
mentary would be dramatically invaded by the techniques of contemporary art.
While the documentary could be more traditionally regarded as a stable referent
in the space of discourse, Arena engaged with the networked nature of contempo-
rary epistemic pressures to create a distinctive poetics of the televisual essay. This,
of course, takes place within an era marked by the enhanced visibility of ongoing
crises brought about by Britain’s anxious redefnition in face of its lost imperial
power and the hemorrhaging of its sovereignty to the European Union, alongside
ancillary pressures of globalization, the social violations of Thatcherism, and the
slow collapse of the Soviet Union.
The subjects of Arena’s programs were framed by the UK’s concomitant revo-
lutions in cultural identity and demography. In refusing distinctions between the
popular and the learned, Arena interrogated models of sanctioned taste inherited
from Matthew Arnold that still dominated broadcasting and actively led the com-
prehension of these changes to television audiences peaking at nine million. Along-
side more canonical fgures such as T.S. Eliot, Luciano Pavarotti, Samuel Beckett,
Marc Chagall, and Orson Welles, Arena generated the frst serious televisual exam-
inations of cultural presences such as Louise Bourgeois, Bob Marley, Poly Styrene,
Cindy Sherman, and Bill Shankly, alongside trail-blazing engagements with the
themes of material culture, such as the Chelsea Hotel, Elvis Presley’s diets, the cul-
ture of corporate prize giving, and the multiple versions of Frank Sinatra’s capitalist
Internationale, “My Way”, which engaged a mass audience with the full diversity
of international cultures.
Arena’s program styles refected the radicalism of their subjects, which were
located inside complex forms of mediation rather than settled chronologies of
events, dates, and personalities. This comprised nothing less than a performative
demonstration of the cultural shifts that it mapped, efectively revolutionizing
the genre’s aesthetics of putting “truth” on display. Whereas documentary flm
might more typically simulate a text through the unfurling of discrete images
in a linear sequence, Arena’s flms were laden with metadata, unbidden asso-
ciations, and diversions, which laid bare the mechanics of its form. A direc-
tor’s lens could be commonly trained upon the apparatus of mass mediation
with flms shot from within and among cinematic interiors, reveries over fax
machines, overheard conversations, ear-wigged telephone calls, quoted news-
paper reports, audio-visual clips accrued from cathode ray tubes, and snatches
of radio broadcasts, none of which conventionally lent themselves to forms of
televisual pleasure.
The program’s cutting together of new and historical footage was particularly
revolutionary. Whereas the documentary’s conventional use of archival mate-
rial suggested a transference of the displaced event into the present as a means
of reinforcing a seamless continuity, Arena’s directors treated the screened past as

a “haunting”: a palimpsest of spectral traces or disruptive diegeses. The upshot
was the cultivation of a televisually literate audience, unusually alert to representa-
tions that could be classed as “metamorphic”, to call on Jacques Rancière’s term
for destabilizing images that acknowledge difering modes of data assimilation, as
opposed to the “ostensive” documents of mere presence or testimony.2
Such features were crucial to Arena’s engagement with the complex, overlap-
ping practices of the everyday and its various forms of afective apprehension. In
Species of Spaces, published one year before Arena’s self-constitution, George Perec
asked:
How are we to speak of the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common,
the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual common
things? How to track them down, how to fush them out, wrest them from
the dross in which they are mired, how to give them meaning, a tongue, to
let them, fnally speak of what it is, who we are?3
A century of innovation prior to the 1960s had established the everyday as a

common currency of the fne arts avant-garde, testifying, in turn, to modernity’s
vast loss of cultural scale and its arrival at the fnal stage of Giambattista Vico’s
recurring cycle (ricorso) of three ages: the divine, the heroic, and the human.4 But
the mass medium of television had been inextricably associated with the quotidian
and the commercial from its beginnings. With its origins traceable to the 1890s
nonnarrative cinematography of festive events and workers leaving factories, as shot
by the likes of Robert Paul in London and the Mitchell & Kenyon company in
Blackburn, the resulting flms were exhibited to its self-same subjects in fairground
booths under the slogan “Local Films For Local People”. These actor-spectators
were essentially positioned both inside and outside the everyday, as Lefebvre defnes
this elusive condition, collapsing together observation and participation.
If such an experience is comprised of an undiferentiated and unnoticeable
“fow” – coincidentally Raymond Williams’ term for the peculiarly ceaseless and
fattening register of network broadcasting as simultaneous “technology” and “cul-
tural form”5 – then the question of representation is particularly vital in consider-
ing how to arrest, extract, and scrutinize its constituent parts, in order to bring
to light what lurks below the threshold of the understood and the seen. Arena’s
response was to deploy the same aesthetic approach to its subject matter, regardless
of whether it was experimental or quotidian, by tracing the constellational efects
subsequently unleashed across the cultural plane.
For the program’s producers the spatial procedures of high modernism ofered a
repertoire of formal devices for registering the barely noticed world that inevitably
seems at once planned and disjunctive, new and familiar. The incursion of cin-
ematic techniques culled from auteurs such as Jean-Luc Godard and Akira Kuro-
sawa, Brechtian text-card intrusions, and free acts of borrowing from disciplines
beyond the televisual, most notably the stylistic aporias purloined from beat poetry
and jazz, conceptualized Arena as medium and sensation rather than mere narra-
tive. Its editing strategy would court serial juxtaposition and diversion, rather than
dialectical progression, its favored technique being that of the derive. The focus thus
approximated a temporal drift across cultural spaces without seeming purpose: a
principle of unfettered mobility strikingly consistent with the subject matter under
scrutiny. And its attentional tactics recalled the Russian Formalist principle of defa-
miliarization inside collage, the need being to disturb those nonstriated surfaces of
everyday perception, not as shock but as a means of afording critical appreciation,
sensual delight, and the accidentally “marvellous” of André Breton’s core valoriza-
tion from Le Manifeste du Surréalisme of 1924.6
As a consequence, Arena’s formulation of vernacular experience embraced not
only material objects but also those local and fuid codes of posture, gesture, and
interaction, named “the ensemble of techniques of the body” by Marcel Mauss
in 1934,7 wherein cultural practices are embodied in physical motion and skills
and in the fashioning of bodily surfaces – hairstyles, spectacles, make-up, jewelery,
clothing – that the screened image is best placed to document and archive. Here the
Ford Cortina serves as an aperture – not only for considering the shape of everyday
life and the automobile’s role as the central organizing device of the twentieth-cen-
tury built-ecology – but also the “system of socially learned dispositions, skills, tastes
and ways of acting that are often taken for granted”, which Bourdieu defned as
the “habitus” that operates beneath the level of ideology to “produce the human”.8
The subject of the Cortina also serves to integrate concerns of industrial pro-
duction, toxic pollutants, communications technology, the semiotics of class and
fashion, the question of physical prowess through prosthesis – Marshall McLuhan
noted that “man [sic] does not enter a car; he puts it on”9 – and shifts in temporal-
spatial awareness. The flm acutely grasps the contemporary depiction of the body-
car as vehicle for the urban performance of hyper-masculinity: a carapace for the
displaced libido refected in the egregious sexism characterizing the Cortina’s mar-
keting campaigns, which were evidently designed to compensate for – or perhaps
reinforce – latent male anxieties over the loss of authority within changing patterns
of industrial labor. As Henry Lefebvre contended, the singularity of the everyday
event reverberates with social and psychic desire, as well as with the structures of
global and national exchange.10 The levels of the technical, the social, and the eve-
ryday then interfuse in this great symbol of modernity, which the flm reveals as
an apparatus of weltanschauung that is avowedly not predicated upon literacy. This,
in turn, attests to Michel de Certeau’s wariness over any bid to translate the quiv-
ering oscillations of lived experience into written inscription, which might serve
only to enforce their taming and disciplining into the protocols of ethnography
or sociology.11 Only the forging of new interdisciplinary forms of engagement, as
registered here in Nigel Finch’s unique approach to data gathering and assembly,
might actively complement the patterning of the everyday within the interstices of
given models of knowledge.
This is not, then, a question of rarefying the commonplace through the assign-
ing of fetish value but of fnding new performative modes of confrontation within
complex cultural processes. Building upon Dada’s precedent of dispersing fxed and
unitary categories, Arena’s corpus of some 700 flms cuts across discursive decorum
in a test of representational possibility. These programs are vigorously heteroglossic,
accommodating all kinds of aberrant intrusions into the documentary form, which
is now grounded in an awareness of the materiality of representation and the kinds
of counter-intuitive comprehension that only art might produce. This is aforded
in The Secret Life of the Ford Cortina by fusions of choice and indeterminacy; poetic
devices such as overextended takes, sudden ruptures, tableaux, and nonillustrative
music; a lingering over balletic lines of Cortinas weaving through country estates;
poetry recitals (unremittingly awful in the main); a seemingly gratuitous lack of
action; and the refusal of a conventional subjectivity that, if anything, is assigned
more routinely to the object of the car or, at best, its half-man/half-Cortina owner,
via the prolonged gaze of the camera.
Such efects disrupt any illusion of an unmediated reality upon which the tra-
ditional documentary ostensibly reposes. In so doing, it testifes to Maurice Blan-
chot’s notion of the everyday, which exhibits an “absence of qualities” beyond
cognition and, instead, “displays an energising capacity to subvert intellectual and
institutional authority”. It is “inexhaustible, unimpeachable, always open-ended
and always eluding forms or structures”.12 The flm’s engagement with the cul-
tural eddies surrounding a mass-produced machine elude any sense of a locatable
teleology or ideological stance and jettison all claims to exhaustive meaning. Of-
cial and popular cultures from the 1970s and 1980s are instead cast into a swarm
of cross-referencing. Scenarios are assembled in such a way as to encode and
celebrate an existential provisionally. The ensuing editorial cuts literally did not
have to happen in this supposedly defnitive way. The temptations of middle-class
sneering and Warholian cynical indiference alike are displaced by a nonjudgmen-
tal curiosity with regard to cultural practices, which are often underscored by
palpable skill, as seen, for example, in the car auctioneer’s performatively limpid
oratory.
The flm leaps around the iconic settings of the British automobile landscape –
suburban streets, garages, motorway fyovers, showrooms – for its settings. The
concrete underworld of an aerial bypass frames the design-historian, Stephen Bay-
ley’s, McLuhanesque deconstructions of the Cortina’s index of social status, intercut
with commentaries from the Ford Motor Company boardroom about the preda-
tory apparatus of customer profling within a proudly gendered discourse. “Ninety
percent tend to be male”, discloses a marketing executive, “holding managerial
responsibility and earning more than the national average”, his shot segueing deftly
into archive footage of a human hunting satire. Prior to this we chance upon a sim-
ulation of the popular 1970’s BBC quiz show, Mastermind, with Magnus Magnus-
son reconjuring his own illusionistic framework inside the world of documentary
with the alternative comedian and “Automobile Sociologist”, Alexie Sayle, in the
contestant’s chair. Sayle’s clownish gait, cockney wide-boy persona, and edge-
of-psychosis fury earthed within a body that continually threatens eruption from
within his tortuously pinched suit – serves as the flm’s coordinating device across
scenes, which include an in-character consultation with the ex-armed robber, John
McVicar, over the Cortina’s special propensity for ramming security vans.
A modish suburban couple then read out their love-letter to Ford’s directors
about their use of the Mark III as a marital prosthesis, while commemorating
100,000 miles of service, their illustrative Kodak-Colorplus snaps, integrated brown
furniture and clothing ensemble, and uneasy deportment on a sofa for the inter-
view serving as a gestalt for the historicized particularities of the body’s domestic
techniques and rhetoric.
We then witness the Ford Cortina Owners’ Club gathering at “Rally Control”
and its choreographies of prize-giving: men with arms crossed holding detailed
technical discussions over exposed engines with interminable levels of purposeless
waiting and the occasional shots of implausibly compliant wives and children.13
Men in deckchair footage dominates. This performance of consumer fetish adora-
tion is accompanied by the recording of a Palestrina magnifcat, such daring fssures
being typical of Arena’s asynchronous strategy of audio-visual dissociation. The
focus then swerves to a company pool car overseer for dozens of traveling sales-
men, who explains that the generous size of the Cortina is vital to the image of
his company, while drawing attention to the ratio of the car’s luxury gradations to
the strata of managerial pay-grades. Various stylized scenarios of subcultural male
display then emerge, hovering between lived and dreamed experience with foot-
age of customized bodies and rebuilt engines “beftting the psychological as well as
functional requirements of the young male”, to quote a Ford executive-clinician.
Close attention is also necessarily paid to the conspicuous Thatcherite male
bling of gold jewelry, logo’d schmutter and the permed, highlighted hair charac-
teristic of the emerging generation of terrace casuals unhappily hitched to the
ownership of Cortinas,14 their interiors adorned by fufy seat covers and oversized
dice suspended from rear-view mirrors to simulate the surfaces of furry animals,
indicative, too, of the era’s unspoken understanding of car as a primary site for
fugitive sexual encounter. Within a few minutes a recording of the fanfare from
Richard Strauss’ Thus spoke Zarathustra – inextricably associated in that era with
televised coverage of the Apollo space-exploration mission and, by implication,
the transgression of species limits – underscores the opening of a garage door on
a suburban housing estate to reveal a comically overendowed Mark III shrouded
in dry ice, its owner speaking of his narcissistic pleasure in seeing refections of
himself in plate glass while driving through urban environments, and the word
“SATISFACTION” inscribed in burning capitals upon car hood and boot. “It’s
really nice”, he explains.
In each instance the commodity code is rehearsed and then dynamically dis-
rupted through the program’s cutting strategy. This extends to the dated critiques
of egregious sexism within contemporary automobile marketing, as confgured by

the image of women in mechanics’ overalls draped louchely over the bonnet of a
Cortina in a heavy-handed satire of trade show practices: arguably an emulation
rather than a critical interrogation. Ditto the bizarre interview with the porno-
graphic actress, Fiona Richmond, in a Cortina passenger seat, ofering an obliquely
feminist critique of the shocking levels of chauvinism fostered in a 1971 television
advertisement for the new Mark III, while dressed herself in a revealing negligee.
Such scenarios illuminate the mass media’s intensifying meta-engagement with its
own misogyny and should be productively historicized as such.
More positively a young black Londoner is flmed servicing a Mark II outside
his Brixton garage against the sound of reggae from his portable cassette player, the
music radiating synchronically from inside the shot to signal agency rather than
overlaid patronizingly from without. It is perhaps important to note that televised
images of young black men in British urban environments in 1982 carried almost
exclusive connotations of alienation and threat. (Shots of the previous year’s Brix-
ton riots had been widely transmitted and subjected to constant repeats in news and
documentary broadcasts.) Across print media second-generation Caribbean immi-
grant teenagers were uniformly confgured as folk devils, frequently expelled and
decanted into “educationally subnormal” schools, stopped and searched under “sus
laws” adapted from Section 4 of the 1824 Vagrancy Act for the crime of walking in
a street. But here we see a skilled mechanic, participating in mainstream consumer
culture – he proudly declares that he has owned three Mark IIs and a Mark I – and
speaking knowledgably of the Cortina as the “black man’s Rolls Royce” and driv-
ing a top of the range Mk II model, albeit with a bashed front wing and a replace-
ment boot panel of a diferent color.
The representation of these signatures of civic performance combines realism
and heightened, even theatrical, levels of image-making and sound. The overall
efect is of a performative sociological cross-section of the Cortina’s orbit: a com-
pendium of part-vanished cultural practices and a museum of the ephemeral, the
transitory, the marginal, and the in-between. These encounters are the stuf of
the recent past, but we experience them as seemingly ancient, once they – and the
lives and social relations that they incubated – begin to pass into memory. This
arguably fulfls Walter Benjamin’s call in “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the
European Intelligentsia” (1929) for a mode of “revolutionary experience, if not
action” from an adjustment of seeing within the condition of the ordinary.15 The
binaries of public and private life necessarily shatter in what Maurice Blanchot
terms “moments of efervescence – those we call revolution – when existence is
public through and through”.16
Not only the Ford Cortina but the entire transactional economy of those com-
monplace environments and forms of behavior that the car mediates are efectively
historicized and politicized within the program’s contested screen space. Jacques
Derrida’s observation that there can be no archive without “consignment in an
external place which assures the possibility of memorisation, of repetition, of
reproduction”,17 remains particularly salient to a popular medium expressly con-

cerned with the quotidian but too often derided as feeting and disposable. Nigel
Finch’s flm can therefore be regarded as a commemoration of cultural imperma-
nence via the very medium of ephemerality. What results is not only a unique
record of civil practices but a primary document in and of itself: one that registers a
valorization of a utilitarian device that was destined to disappear and a hymn to cul-
tural memory that resists the ever-accelerating junking of mass-produced objects
into scorned obsolescence.
Notes
1 Radio Times, January 30 – February 5, 1982.
2 Jacques Rancière, “Naked Image, Ostensive Image, Metamorphic Image,” from Le Destin des
Images (Paris: La Fabrique, 2003); trans. Gregory Elliott, The Future of the Image (London
and New York: Verso, 2007), 23.
3 Georges Perec, Espèces d’espaces (Paris: Galilée, 1974); trans. John Sturrock, Species of
Spaces and Other Pieces (London and New York: Penguin, 1997), 8.
4 Giambattista Vico, La Scienza Nuova (1725); trans. Jason Taylor and Robert Miner, The
New Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 45–8.
5 Raymond Williams, Television. Technology and Cultural Form (1974; reprinted London:
Routledge, 2004), 86.
6 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 14.
7 Marcel Mauss, “Les Techniques du corps,” Journal de Psychologie, no. 32 (1934); reprinted
in Mauss, Techniques, Technology and Civilisation (Oxford and New York: Berghahn,
2006), 86.
8 Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit,
1979); trans. Richard Nice, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Boston,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 14.
9 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT,
1994), 112–4.
10 Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne (Paris: L’Arche, 1947), trans. John Moore,
Critique of Everyday Life (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 57.
11 Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, I. Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1974); trans.
Stephen Rendall, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University
of California, 1984), 23–5.
12 Maurice Blanchot, “L’Homme de la rue,” Nouvelle revue franḉaise, no. 114 (Paris,
June 1962); reprinted as La Parole quotidienne, in Blanchot, L’Entretien infni (Paris:
Gallimard, 1969); trans. Susan Hanson, “Everyday Speech,” in Yale French Studies, no. 73
(1987): 34–5.
13 Anthony Wall reported to the author in September 2020 that the program makers
received a dozen letters following the transmission, all of which complained about the
lack of attention accorded to the Ford Cortina’s technical features.
14 An interlude in Nigel Finch’s Arena flm, Ligmalion: A Musical for the Eighties (1985),
which orbits a unique combination of narrative drama and social-realist documentary
on the theme of extreme class mobility, dealt expertly with this contemporary subcul-
ture in the form of a fctionalized gang – the “Greater London Casuals” – and its vil-
lainous “taxing” of expensive designer threads. Alexei Sayle again featured, this time in
Joel Grey-esque form as Master of Ceremonies at the “Cabaret John Bull”. A prescient
moment in the emerging national imaginary.
15 Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” trans.
J. S. Underwood, in One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2009), 227.
16 Maurice Blanchot, “L’Homme de la rue,” Nouvelle revue franḉaise, no. 114 (Paris,
June 1962); reprinted as “La Parole quotidienne,” in Blanchot, L’Entretien infni (Paris:
Gallimard, 1969); trans. Susan Hanson, “Everyday Speech,” in Yale French Studies, no. 73
(1987): 12.
17 Jacques Derrida, Mal d’Archive: Une Impression Freudienne (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1995);
trans. Eric Prenowitz, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago, 1998), 111.
3
EVERYDAY PRACTICES AND LIVED
SPACES OF REFUGEE CHILDREN ON
YOUTUBE
Gul Kacmaz Erk and Işıl Baysan Serim
What comes into your mind when you hear the word “refugee”?
Is it the image of someone from Africa or the Middle East in a camp?
Is it a refugee you know in person? Do you have a refugee friend?
Through the montage of a second of Lily’s life every day, a YouTube video entitled
Most Shocking Second A Day made for British charity Save the Children in 2014,1
and its 2016 sequel,2 portray how Lily’s life changes from a happy nine-year-old
Londoner to an English refugee without a family in Germany. The birthday theme
that takes her back to her “normal” life is a potent display of the memory of “then
and there” brought into the unpleasant “here and now”. As her daily experiences
and lived spaces change from her family home to an emergency shelter outside
London, the countryside in France (that she reached on an illegal boat), and fnally
a makeshift welcome center in Germany, so does Lily. With more than 100 mil-
lion views, this fctional story told in about three minutes by creative agency Don’t
Panic is a “translation” of the lives of millions of displaced children from Syria, Ven-
ezuela, or elsewhere. Following the release of the frst video, Don’t Panic stated,
“Our solution was to tell a story that would bring the realities of Syria home, and
to do it we combined the one-second-a-day and photo time-lapse formats to create
a new way of showing an ordinary girl’s world falling apart in just a year”.3 Seeing
Lily, a middle-class white girl who could have been the viewer’s own child or the
viewer themselves, is the most compelling aspect of the videos. Similarly, watch-
ing everyday videos of actual forcefully displaced children online helps change the
abstract notion of “refugee” into a human being.
More than a million refugees arrived in Europe within a few months in 2015.4
According to UNHCR data, Germany has almost 1.5 million refugees and asylum
seekers, mainly from Syria, and the United States has almost 1.2 million. How-
ever, developing countries host most (85%) refugees. Uganda, for instance, hosts
DOI: 10.4324/9781003107309-5
Everyday practices and lived spaces 41
1.4 million people, mainly from South Sudan. By the end of 2019, almost 34 mil-
lion people worldwide had fed their homeland, two thirds of whom are from fve
countries: Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Myanmar (Burma).
(The number includes 5.6 million Palestine refugees but excludes 45.7 million
internally displaced people.) The number of forcefully displaced people has almost
doubled in the 2010s. In addition, fewer people can return and resettle because of
ongoing war or confict. A 2019 UNHCR report declares that 1% of the world’s
population (79.5 million) is forcefully displaced, and 40% (estimated 30–34 mil-
lion) of displaced people are minors.5
As of March 2021, a quarter of the Syrian population, over 5.5 million people,
have moved out of their country. There are 5,601,695 registered Syrian refugees
worldwide. That is like displacing everyone out of Scotland or Finland. More than
3.6 million registered Syrians have started living in Turkey since 2011.6 (Syrians in
Turkey do not have refugee status, rather they are under “temporary protection”.)
The number of Syrians in Turkey exceeds 3.9 million with asylum seekers. Imag-
ine everyone in Berlin or Dubai moving to Britain. That is what is happening in
Turkey – the country hosting the highest number of refugees globally. The recent
situation in Venezuela is similarly alarming. UNHCR estimates that more than
5.5 million (5,577,077) Venezuelans have left their country since 2017, the major-
ity feeing to Colombia and Peru.7 Yet again, most displaced Venezuelans do not
have refugee status. Afghanistan, on the other hand, has an ongoing refugee crisis.
Currently, more than 2 million (2,215,445) Afghan refugees live in survival mode
in Pakistan, Iran, and other countries.8
“Climate change and natural disasters can exacerbate threats that force people
to fee within their country or across international borders. The interplay between
climate, confict, hunger, poverty and persecution creates increasingly complex
emergencies”.9 UNHCR’s statement shows that refugee numbers are likely to rise
in the upcoming decades. In fact, it is anticipated that more and more people will
have to leave their homes (and possibly homelands) because of disasters caused by
“the triple planetary crisis – climate, nature, and pollution”.10 Whether they per-
ceive it as permanent or temporary, refugees sharing the same nationality stay in
their host countries for an average of 26 years.11 And, needless to say, the planetary
crisis will increase the already high number of forcefully displaced children living
in urban and rural areas as well as refugee camps in a country other than their own.
Be it the streets of a busy metropolis or a UN-operated camp, these places, often
close to borders, hardly serve as an appropriate permanent home for the youth. In
“Place-making, Settlement and Well-being”, migration expert Robyn Sampson
and urban anthropologist Sandra Giford acknowledge that:
Resettled young people with refugee backgrounds have lived much of their
lives in places of danger and insecurity, often devoid of opportunities for
engaging in the important and normal activities and tasks of childhood and
adolescence. Place-making in spaces of persecution, fight and asylum seek-
ing is fraught with social tension and violent confict. Social, cultural and
42 Gul Kacmaz Erk and Işıl Baysan Serim
political connections, as well as connections to place, are intentionally and

unintentionally destroyed.12
In this context, the question put forth here is: what can be learned from YouTube as
an archive about the role of architecture in the lives of refugee children? The chapter
outlines an analysis of videos from diverse YouTube channels concentrating on the
everyday practices and lived spaces of minor refugees in camps and cities in countries
other than their homeland. Carried out with videos commissioned by intergovern-
mental organizations, news channels, and not-for-proft organizations between 2014
and 2019, the study uses flmmaking to understand and analyze the architectural and
urban needs and challenges of young refugee populations in diferent parts of the
world. By proposing audio-visual recording as a media dispositif to disseminate the
refugees’ public and private spaces in their new environment and their stories that
take place in these spaces, it aims to be a step in defning some of the misconceptions
around these young members of the society, breaking down some of the barriers
and, in the long run, a step toward dialogue and celebration of diversity.
Representation of refugee children in visual culture

New communication and visual technologies enable and urge expedited “social,
emotional, and economic connections locally and globally and facilitat[e] changing
forms of migration”.13 Using visual media forms to represent refugee children is
particularly a powerful way of addressing the viewer. A crucial question is linked
to “how children use media” that appears to be inextricable from the social, cul-
tural, spatial, and temporal contexts of “viewing, production, and subsequent social
exchanges”.14 Research focusing on children’s relationship with new media shows
that they are no longer passive recipients but active users of adaptation and media
literacy in respect to their socio-cultural contexts and emotion-oriented needs.15
As YouTube videos show, smartphones as an indispensable operational “multime-
dia tool” play a signifcant and decisive role in their daily activities wherever they
have to live – in a camp, city, or on the road – in relation to security, social con-
nections, and integrations, since “their use has shifted from merely making phone
calls to surfng the web, checking emails, taking photos”, shooting videos or even
flms and “updating social media statuses”.16 Therefore, global platforms like You-
Tube play a central role in the everyday lives of refugee children, “especially in
the formation and maintenance” of social and local connections and integrations
(institutions, family, friends, the neighborhood), as well as “global and transnational
identities”.17 YouTube is also a medium where children share their emigration and
immigration experiences. At the core of this, there is a question: as deployed in
the visual culture – or rather as a media technology capable of transmitting a range
of moving images – how do YouTube videos construct and represent the reality of
lived experiences and everyday spaces of refugee children?
About ten years before YouTube was launched in 2005,18 art historian Hal Fos-
ter published an article entitled “The Archive without Museums”.19 Foster draws
attention to the growing academic discourses on visual culture and its new condi-
tions that have emerged through the theoretical, aesthetical, institutional, techno-
logical, political, historical, spatial, and temporal events at the end of the twentieth
century. He interrogates “the discourse of visual culture”, which might have relied
on “techniques of information to transform a wide range of mediums into a system
of image-text-a database of digital terms” through YouTube.20 According to Fos-
ter, the new relations between mediums – such as architecture, photography, flm,
video, music, and media – invoke the concept of archive, a term that philosopher
Michel Foucault uses to defne “the system that governs the appearances of state-
ments as unique events”.21 The theoretical framework for the concept of archive
was ambiguously propounded in Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge, where he
has written that statements are “the frst law of what can be said”.22 By archive,
Foucault has not alluded to a set of documents or things – which should be kept
and preserved given cultural signifcance – but more precisely the system of even-
tuality of discourses.
Since “contemporary information technology has radically changed our under-
standing of and relationship to archives”, people “experience archiving tech-
nologies daily through the interface of computers, at home and/or at work”.23
Historically, archives have been the memory space (arkheions) of the political/
administrative power, however “with the advent of new sound and image surveil-
lance technologies, the modern, electronic archives have become highly efcient
tools for individual and social control”.24 Therefore, as an “analytical and systematic
concept”, archives indicate “historically embedded institutions . . . that register,
store, [process,] and provide data about populations and nations”.25 It also signifes
“a singular space that can be experienced aesthetically”; thus, the archive is a dia-
gram of a socially, institutionally, and historically constructed space.26
The relationship between YouTube as a social network and the concept of
archive evokes novelist Jorge Luis Borges’ short essay entitled “The Analytical Lan-
guage of John Wilkins” about the encyclopedia of a Chinese empire.27 Referring
to Borges in The Order of Things, Foucault points out the arbitrary and uncanny
juxtapositions of the things that constitute the content of the encyclopedia and the
inextricable link established between knowledge and power.28 Thus, the archive
might also be analyzed from the viewpoint of spatio-temporal technologies by
which “populations were governed and fows of persons, information, goods and
live stock were controlled” and distributed.29 It is “the idea of accumulating every-
thing”, writes Foucault, “in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes . . .
all aesthetic preferences . . . the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself
outside of time”.30 However, the new “audio-visual archive, [which] is not merely
an administrative tool”, interferes with one’s personal space and private sphere
through computers, tablets, smartphones, CCTV, and other gadgets.31
This is what YouTube ofers in terms of media forms, categories, functions, and
events intermingled with education, entertainment, games, flm, documentary, and
animation, all competing with each other to be “liked”. YouTube’s “digitally pro-
duced, reproduced and distributed material” that forms a large part of the archive
of visual culture has many “potentialities for producing knowledge – so called

statements” about the everyday.32 By overcoming the gap between image and text,
discourse and practice, visible and invisible, said and seen, past and future, the
archive becomes a technology and “does not only refer to the registration of the
events [of the everyday], but also to the devices and measures” that Foucault calls
dispositif (apparatus).33
This concept was initially used for flm and video as productions of audio-visual
media and commodities to be exchanged.34 Thus dispositif frst appeared within the
scope of flm studies, even before Foucault, in the work of philosopher Jean-Lous
Baudry in 1970.35 For Baudry, the sense of any visual object and the process of
viewing the subject, both real and virtual, are constructed ideologically due to the
technical bases of flm/video. The “mechanics of actual process and production of
making the flm”, which “afect the representation of the subject”, imply an ideo-
logical matrix.36 Other scholars have also set forth the epistemological potential of
the ispositive to grasp the complexity of media forms concerning their technical,
sensorial, and intellectual dimensions.37
In his discussion of old and new [digital] forms of media, Markus Stauf remarks
that “ ‘amateurs’ idiosyncratic use of technology and the rather ephemeral con-
nections between technologies and practices (which used to be dynamic on the
fringes of established media) seem” to be a key element of all media.38 Dispositif,
as a complex net of “particular arrangement of technologies, bodies and visualities
(or of machinery, spectator and representations)” refect the cultural matrix, per-
ceptual qualities, strategic spatial and temporal events of any media environment.39
Thus, the system of immanent relations of visual culture within the interplay of
elements, which constitute and transform culture (social relations, subjectivities,
viewers, institutions, the social body, forms of communication), is identifed as
“media dispositif ”.40
For Foucault, all these, at frst, form a feld of forces acting upon a technologi-
cal, institutional, social, legal, etc. context and environment: “What I try to pick
out with this term is, frstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of
discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, admin-
istrative measures, scientifc statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic
propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid”.41 Evidently dispositif
refers to a strategic scientifc-administrative technology that constructs the space of
social practices and governs the daily life of modern individuals, corresponding to
T.S. Elliot’s question: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is
the knowledge we have lost in information?”42
These crucial “relationships between information, knowledge and truth/wis-
dom”43 is what Foucault states in his theoretical interrogation: “Knowledge linked
to power not only assumes the authority of ‘the truth’ but has the power to make
itself true”.44 Thus power is taken to a network of “diferential relations” that pro-
duces “identities, forms of individualization, orders of the visible and the sayable,
strategies for the regulation of a politically manageable life of populations”.45 In
other words, dispositif, on the one hand, reveals “the moving substrate of force
relations”, “which by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power,

but latter are always local and unstable” and that, on the other hand, reinforces “the
representation of power” that stems from their strategies.46 As mentioned earlier,
media dispositif is “the correlative constitution of a feld of knowledge”, that of the
abstract mechanism of “power relations” implies how masses are manipulated and
controlled by media images. Thus, a human being is simultaneously transformed
into a subject and an object via power relations.
For philosopher Giorgio Agamben, dispositif signifes the forces that manage,
control, and restrict behavior, actions, and thoughts of the living beings “in a way
intended to be useful”, through a set of praxis, knowledge, measurements and
instruction. Not only does dispositif indicate the certain institutional and discur-
sive spaces that appear as isolated, confned or/and concentrated such as prisons,
camps, schools, barracks, and factories but also everyday techniques/technologies
like architecture, games, war, navigation, pen, computers, smartphones, video,
and flm.47 As Foucault states power “reaches into the very grain of individuals,
touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their dis-
courses, learning processes and everyday lives”.48 Thus, the meditations on power
and visualizing the spaces of the events reveal the set of heterogeneous relations
of media dispositive – as such flms, documentaries, videos, multimedia, and VR
projects – which, since 1895, designates and displays the architecture of the every-
day. Besides, in “a visual assemblage and a luminous environment”, as philosopher
Gilles Deleuze explains, “A system of light and a system of language are not the
same form, and do not have the same formation”.49
The proliferation of refugee camps and “camp-like situations” in which “the
division between private and public suspend” indicates the disintegration of spaces
and society “in the state of exception”.50 They are also the matrix spaces “where
Foucault’s ‘juxtaposition of incompatible spaces’ occurs”.51 Hence camps and camp-
like streets and neighborhoods are designed as a panoptic dispositif, an architectural
diagram capable of controlling and monitoring of the bodies in any frame of space
and time. For that reason, these places, on the one hand, are not only part of the
built environment that enclose and confne the refugees but also a jural discourse,
along with a series of practices on body, time, and space.
By connecting to “a physical hardware media device, such as a computer, tab-
let, smartphone etc., composed of fber optics, signal processors, servers, etc., in
order to be accessed in the frst place”,52 YouTube holds an immense moving
image archive of refugee children’s everyday spaces. It is a borderless and egalitarian
spatio-temporal realm providing information, knowledge, and wisdom about these
physical spaces through the visibility and exposure of young refugees and their
everyday lives. As a media dispositif, YouTube’s infrastructure, in which technology
and social interface are inseparable, highlights contemporary modes of (re)produc-
tion and (re)presentation of refugee settlements, which imply mediatic, cultural
and juridical forces of visual technologies. As W.J.T. Mitchell shows, these images,
particularly in the digital realm of YouTube, form “a complex interplay of visuality,
apparatus, institution, discourse, physical bodies, spaces, and places”.53
Everyday spaces of migrant minors

“Originally home meant the center of the world not in a geographical, but in an
ontological sense . . . everything that made sense of the world was real: but the
surrounding chaos existed and was threatening, but it was threatening because it
was “unreal”. Without a home at the center of the real, one was not only shel-
terless, but also lost in non-being, in unreality. Without a home everything was
fragmentation. . . . Emigration does not only involve leaving behind, crossing
water, living amongst strangers, but also, undoing the very meaning of the world
and – at its most extreme – abandoning oneself to the unreal . . . to emigrate is
always to dismantle the center of the world, and so to move into a lost, disori-
ented one of fragments.”
John Berger 54
When a child is taken away from home, where they perform their daily practices,
they may lose their center of existence, anchor, sense of reality. As they move to
a new place and try to move on, they would need to recreate a safe space within
the chaos and a real relationship with the world. They may or may not regain their
anchor or put the pieces together. A glimpse of the new homes of such displaced
children are framed in various videos that can be found on YouTube. Regardless of
why they are made, these “everyday videos”, as we call them, can be a benefcial
dispositif to understand the everyday practices and lived spaces of minor migrants and
to identify their architectural needs to trigger a relationship between the refugee
and their new home/new reality as well as between these newcomers and the locals.
Christina Georgiadou asks: “What is the value of bringing to light and studying
individual cases of refugees who are creatively trying to cope with the conditions of
their lives?”55 Why is it worth studying everyday videos? How could they help bet-
ter understand the refugee situation in the context of children? (1) Everyday videos
encourage identifcation; they break the barriers between us and them by showing
others’ daily lives and spaces. At the end of the day, we are not that diferent. (2)
Everyday videos prevent generalization or typifcation; they show that refugees are
human beings; the person in the video who gets on with their life could have been
you or even your child. (3) Everyday videos enhance familiarity; they show that
refugees are not victims but people who want to get on with their lives in a dif-
fcult situation. (4) Everyday videos demonstrate the parallels between the refugee
children’s challenges, preferences, and desires as well as the things that make them
happy and help them settle in a new place.
If “the medium is the message”,56 as an audio-visual media platform, YouTube is
an archive, and refugee videos on YouTube are open to critical reading from vari-
ous angles including political, social, cultural, linguistic, cinematic, architectural,
and urban. This section goes into the details of everyday videos available on You-
Tube that portray the lives and lived spaces of four refugee children. As UNHCR
Innovation Engagement Ofcer Lauren Parater explains:
I don’t think it is easy for everyone to comprehend the changes imposed on

someone’s life once they’ve become displaced. Luckily there are tools that
can create a capacity to understand what another person is experiencing.

Film has proven to be one of the most efective methods to create a sense of
empathy and compassion.57
FIGURE 3.1 Issa.
Issa’s Everyday Video – Sitting on the foor and facing the crowd passing by, Issa plays
his plastic fute on Istiklal Street. He does not really follow a tune, rather his small,
dirty fngers glide over the buttons. Occasionally an adult puts some change in the
box laying in front of him. We follow Issa (whose name means Christ) until dark in
the center of Istanbul as he plays his instrument, ofers his fruit to the cameraper-
son, loses his fute to the police, walks around with other children, and fnally falls
asleep on the minibus on the way home. Issa is one of the half-a-million Syrians
who now live in Istanbul (Figure 3.1).58
Issa’s story was told, like Lily’s, in 2014 by photojournalist Joe Duran for news-
based television channel CNN, viewed more than a million times, and is not an
exception. Turkish and now Syrian child labor exist in Istanbul. Some of them have
homes to go back to. Issa seems like one of them, as he would not spend money
to take the minibus otherwise. The need to earn a living (and possibly support
his family), lack of education and support, and language barrier are some of his
problems in his new country. This is a survival story in a metropolis of more than
15 million. Issa knows his way around the streets of Istanbul. He is aware of who is
friendly and who is not. He does not annoy the national lottery vendor and keeps
away from the police as much as he can. He has his social network.
FIGURE 3.2 Hamze.

Hamze’s Everyday Video – A little Iraqi boy welcomes the viewer to Idomeni
Refugee Camp in Greece close to the North Macedonian border; his current
home is a tent at the edge of the European Union. Hamze takes us through shared
camp life. The gaps between the tents that he runs through are his streets and play-
ground. He lives by the railway that takes him nowhere. Abandoned train cars are
turned into temporary accommodation. Food is shared in the open air. He is there
with his father; they left their family back in Mosul (Figure 3.2).59
This story entitled Refugee Life: Through a Child’s Eyes was told for Operation
Blessing – a US-based, religious, nonproft organization – and viewed more than
110 thousand times. Hamze does take over the camera at some point, however,
it is clear that the whole video, similar to Issa’s, is scripted. The fact that Hamze
speaks English although he is very young earns the viewer’s sympathy. He is lucky
to be with his father in a community he is accepted in, is he? He has a few toys,
some friends, and most importantly hope, which is about settling in Germany and
reuniting with his mother and sister.
FIGURE 3.3 Rostislav.
Rostislav’s Everyday Video – Unlike Hamze, Rostislav, who is from Minsk in

Belarus, has arrived at his desired destination. In Montenegro, he and his mother
have settled in with support from the community of Bar. Just like many other
Western kids, he spends time at home in his bedroom and living room studying,
dining, playing, and at school and football practice. He likes Japanese anime and
would like to be a detective. He has a “normal” life of an ordinary boy. Does he,
though? His daily experiences and spaces may have improved, but he looks as if he
carries the burden of his past life and of being ripped of from his home, family,
and friends. The camera stages a so-called spontaneous encounter with a friend on
the street, but we know from his mother’s words that he does not have close friends
though he has been there for two years; it must be hard for an 11-year-old to go to
school with 10-year-olds (Figure 3.3).60
In this video made for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and
viewed almost 20 thousand times, “then and there” is long gone; Rostislav is “here
and now” living in Lefebvrian space/time. Henri Lefebvre links the production
of everyday space and time to the production of daily life.61 How this is achieved
however gets complicated in the impossible-to-fully-control context of a forcefully

displaced child. The narrator in a CBC News video about the settlement of a Syr-
ian family of ten in Canada says: “Feeling like they belong or actually at home takes
time and there are setbacks. . . . It is one thing to fee for your life, it is something
else entirely to learn how to live again”.62
FIGURE 3.4 Hiba.
Hiba’s Everyday Video – Hiba Nabulsi felt powerless when others died around
her in Syria, on the infatable boat she got on in Turkey and at the Greek border
with barbed wire. She tells her onerous journey through drawing. She is a ten-
year-old in the Refugee and Migrant Reception Center in Gevgelija close to the
Greek border in North Macedonia. She talks about her past, present, and future,
that she misses her home, family, and friends she left behind. She misses her brother
who was killed in the war. School takes up most of her time. Hiba wants to be an
English teacher and bring happiness to children. “All kids deserve a good life”, she
says (Figure 3.4).63
Historian Brian Ladd states, “We think of riots, foods, earthquakes, or tropical
storms as devastating to a city, but total war is far more thorough”.64 That was the
case for Hiba who fed war-torn Syria and for now found safety in a Balkan camp.
In three minutes, she tells her story for UNICEF USA, which is viewed 1.4 mil-
lion times. Like Hamze, who is a few kilometers away, in Greece, she has a positive
attitude; it is the older children, the adolescent refugees who more commonly feel
hopeless, depressed, or even suicidal.
The everyday is about the ordinary, but, when detached from their ordinary set-
tings and ordinary lives, the everyday practices and lived spaces of refugee children
gain a surreal dimension. Nothing is ordinary about being in a camp like Hiba or
working on the streets of an alien city like Issa. The ordinariness and banality of
the everyday disappear when one looks into the spaces and lives of refugee children
via the lens of the camera. The everyday and the refugee situation are like binary
oppositions; the former is normal and customary, the latter abnormal and excep-
tional; the former is expected and familiar, the latter unforeseen and unknown.
In Kindred, Octavia Butler portrays the story of African slavery in America before
the civil war in the early nineteenth century via the everyday practices and lived
spaces of the ancestors of a female writer/time-traveler.65 Without labelling them
as slaves, she portrays black people not as a plantation community but distinctive
individuals with unique personalities, lives, and stories that, to some extent, they
control. This deliberate choice – bringing the everyday into the story – helps
the prevention of victimization of her characters and enables the reader to per-
ceive them as human beings. Indeed, representing social interactions in lived space
and time may be a benefcial way to untangle such difcult subjects. Butler’s and
YouTube videos’ representations of the everyday highlight the distinction of each
human being and the value of human life.
By defnition, everyday videos of refugee children are a strategic apparatus or
dispositif for the stakeholder. By linking two individuals via the video, the refugee
and the viewer, ideally on an emotional level, the commissioning organization
aims to legitimize their position by creating awareness about the refugee crisis in
the embodiment of a child’s everyday practices/spaces and to convince the viewer
to donate money and spread the word. It can be argued that this motive of the
commissioner removes the everydayness of these videos. A second reason for the
loss of the everyday is that, as a mediated medium, the video turns the child’s daily
routine (which is “not too bad” because of the NGO) into a performance that is
staged, framed, shot, and then montaged. The strongest reason, however, is that a
so-called typical day of a refugee child lost its ordinary-ness when they left the land
on which they were born. These were not – and were never meant to be – their
daily practices.66
As Anna Sigfried Gronseth puts forth, “migrants carry with them fragments
of the familiar and known, while simultaneously being confronted with new and
unknown life-worlds”.67 The smartphone, in this context, is a new medium for dis-
placed people for coping with daily life challenges by getting access to public and
private services including health, education, and legal aid. That is enabled through
social media networks and other online platforms, such as Facebook, WhatsApp,
Messenger, and Instagram, providing support for communication and visualization
(to more than one billion people each month) via text messaging and video calling
as well as photograph, information, and video sharing/viewing.68 Google, similarly,
is a media provider company with multiple accomplished online platforms/appli-
cations including Google Search, Google Maps, Google Cloud, Google Play, and
YouTube developed for (re)search, navigation, transportation, storing/archiving
data, music, flm, making videos, communication, dating, socializing, pornogra-
phy, shopping, and gaming, in short, facilitating everyday life in (virtual and physi-
cal) space and time. Ultimately, they form the corpus of media dispositif that has “in
some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or
secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings”.69
Researchers who investigate everyday media use of refugee children point out
that, although most minors do not own personal devices, they are familiar with
the previously mentioned and other media apps.70 Young refugees mostly use their
parents’ devices for being “interconnected and linked to the internet” that “pro-
foundly altered the structure and operation of ” their “spawning a proliferation of
media platforms (from websites to games to mobile devices)”.71 In this way chil-
dren “transform from passive viewers to active users who not only consume but
also generate content”72 and gain media literacy.73 A smartphone, beyond being a
communication tool, is of capital importance in terms of the sustainability of eve-
ryday life and even becomes a condition of social existence, somewhat a survival
apparatus in precarious situations. As media dispositifs enter daily aspects of life,
refugee children’s everyday tools and environments are “becoming ‘smart’, moni-
toring, transmitting and analyzing individual and aggregate data”, as they continue
“communicating with each other using embedded sensors connected over wired/
wireless networks”.74
Thus, it can be argued that the media practices of refugee children inherently
relate to their social and cultural integration in the multicultural environment of
camps or of host cities. As they search for their (new) identities between “the walls,
the barbed wire, the controlled gates, [and] the armed guards”,75 techno-visual
devices may allow them to “remain connected at all times, and across all physical
spaces”.76 Every touch to the screen is a new social space-in-fow, which makes
the world smaller in the eternal hyper-connectivity77 and enables shaping as well
as being shaped by media dispositifs. “So the screen is, on the one hand, a central
element in the topology of the dispositif; on the other hand, it has to become invis-
ible”, as media scholar Frank Kessler says, “because otherwise the dispositif and the
mode of communication it implies – fctional, documentary, educational, etc. –
cannot function properly”.78 Hereby, the screen, and YouTube as a dispositif and
archive, become a social interaction surface that can produce new discourses and
practices – information, relations, behaviors, experiences, habitual patterns, desires,
rules, and lifestyles.
Focus on the representation of the everyday lives of refugee children on You-
Tube digital dispositif asserts that the concrete reality within which refugees live is
central to their “naked life”.79 It is critical to think of the “production of naked
life”80 through the link among media ispositive, refugee children, and their everyday
spaces, because, as political technologies, media dispositifs create an “ideal-typic
social frame” of “everyday ritualized action with media technologies” that enable
one to “produce, maintain, repair and create a shared social reality” or construct.81
Foucault has revealed how individuals or populations are regularized by those who
represent sovereignty in everyday life.82 However, their visual narratives, which
provide a strong humanitarian rhetoric form, are immanent in “power-knowledge
relations”83 by means of spatial, social, institutional, political, and economic dis-
courses and practices. Whether naked life is spatially deployed in a camp or else-
where,84 humans are transformed into both a subject and an object of the network
of power relations through the dispositif. As anthropologist Liisa Malkki has noted,
videos objectify the subject and predominantly portray how the viewer expects to
see.85 Issa’s, Hamze’s, Rostislav’s, and Hiba’s videos refect this “humanitarian inter-
vention”,86 that of the very notion of humanity’s function to extend the production
of naked life beyond camp borders or any designated space.
“The so-called new humanitarianism of the late twentieth century”, writes
political scientist Jenny Edkins, is “deeply implicated in the production of sovereign
power”.87 As for the twenty-frst century, contemporary humanitarian approach,
which is coded, conveyed, transmitted, and represented by YouTube and other

dispositifs and online archives, is formed through the in-fow, mobile practices of
“control societies” and “informational mode of production”.88 In this sense, though
media archives and dispositifs have a productive power through video, flm, music,
etc., they seem responsible for the creation and manipulation of subjectivity, daily
habits and life practices.
This approach should not be read as humanitarian interventions being disre-
garded or rejected within the scope of this study. Undoubtedly, calling attention to
those heart-wrenching and expressive videos that carry multiple meanings, archival
and spatial memories – about parents, homeland, village, milieu, school, interiors,
play, stories, narratives, disruptions, culture, and “other daily landmarks” – is criti-
cal.89 By giving a voice to refugee children, these videos earn the public’s approval,
and such attempts need to be supported. Otherwise, in their “permanently tempo-
rary camps”, in sociologist Zygmund Bauman’s words, they are “an obstacle and a
trouble; inside that place, they are forgotten”.90
Five-hundred hours of audiovisual material is uploaded on YouTube channels
every minute.91 Their professed mission “is to give everyone a voice and show them
the world”.92 YouTube appears to have resourcefully “taken on the broader space
where social meaning and cultural value take form”.93 Since it is the “world’s largest
archive of moving images”,94 a digital archival space, and “in the public mind, it is
not simply an archive but an ideal form of archive”,95 any manifestation of refu-
gee children in the form of moving images could unprecedentedly form a social
and cultural platform for navigation, appropriation, and reference annotation. As
the most favored video sharing platform with the most extensive moving-image
archive online, YouTube enables volunteering refugees to make their voices heard
and their lives visible. Via media dispositifs, these refugees gain a voice. Merely with
a video recording device – usually a phone – and internet connection, they can
publish personal videos on YouTube, which may attract the attention of millions
(or none). YouTube is known for its user-friendly interface, which is actively used
by two billion people on a monthly basis.
The convenience of YouTube is also preferred considerably for professional
and semi-professional video productions of nonproft organizations such as UN
and UNICEF since the work can have a noticeable efect on the world outside
camps and refugee circles. These organizations often commission videos of care-
fully selected young refugees. As expected, watching the everyday lives and spaces
of forcefully displaced children who might be in need or in good shape (before or
after receiving the organization’s support) creates publicity. These everyday videos
vary from pure fction to oral histories, video essays, and news footage taken during
disasters with no editing. Depending on the purpose of the video and the intension
of the funder, the lives, conditions, and everyday spaces of refugees are represented
in diverse ways.
Aiming for “a representation of human beings, instead of creating a representa-
tion of ‘victims of forced migration’” is signifcant and could be achieved via media
dispositifs – young refugees’ videos.96 The audience of everyday videos needs to read
between the lines rather than get carried away with the narrative. What are the
children’s daily lives like? What do they do every day? Where do they sleep? Who
do they live with? Are they in a camp or in the city? Is that their fnal destination,
or are they on the road trying to get to elsewhere like Germany or the UK? Do
they work or go to school? Do they have a social network? Issa works on the street;
for now, Hamze and Hiba live in refugee camps while Rostislav goes to school with
locals and has a home. Issa falls asleep on the bus, Hamze sleeps in a tent, Hiba in
a container, and Rostislav in his own bedroom, and yet he seems lonelier than the
other younger refugees.
Right to life, freedom, security, equality, justice, and privacy are among basic
human rights articulated in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration.97 While
these concepts are easier to defne for long-term members of society, they are
more complicated for new minorities who are forced to leave their homeland. The
situation of displaced children in a host country is linked to understanding their
everyday practices and lived spaces. Everyday videos are important and efective in
this process. For a few minutes, dispositifs take the viewer to where these people
live. Filming the lived spaces of young refugees helps them spread the word and
helps their audience to understand what is going on in the world and in the lives
of people, particularly children in need. “Their stories are unique and exceptional,
being their own, but at the same time they are common”.98
Foucault has implied that dispositif enables questioning of the politics of space
and identity because it reveals that self-understanding does not need to be domi-
nated and/or defned by power. This may indicate that resistance for social exist-
ence, which is the key force for the right to everyday life, is possible for refugee
children. Media dispositif in this context becomes an important strategical apparatus
in terms of raising awareness for the modes of resistance (and organization) in the
everyday practices and lived spaces of refugee children.
Notes
1 Don’t Panic, “Most Shocking Second a Day,” shared March 5, 2014, Save the Children,
video, 1:33, www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBQ-IoHfmQ.
2 Don’t Panic, “Still the Most Shocking Second a Day,” shared May 9, 2016, Save the
Children, video, 1:56, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKDgFCojiT8.
3 Lauren Parater, “7 Videos Guaranteed to Change the Way You See Refugees,” UNHCR
Innovation Service, shared June 2015, www.unhcr.org/innovation/7-videos-guaran
teed-to-change-the-way-you-see-refugees.
4 Kaja Kuhl and Julie Behrens, “Spaces for Migration: Architecture for Refugees,” Archi-
tectural Design 88, no. 4 (July 2018): 86–93.
5 “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2019,” UNHCR, accessed December 14,
2020, www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2019.
6 “Syria Regional Refugee Response,” UNHCR, last modifed March 24, 2021, https://
data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria.
7 “Response for Venezuelans,” UNHCR, last modifed March 5, 2021, https://data2.
unhcr.org/en/situations/platform.
8 “Afghanistan Situation,” UNHCR, last modifed December 31, 2020, https://data2.
unhcr.org/en/situations/afghanistan.

2020, www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2019.
10 “The Triple Planetary Crisis: Forging a New Relationship between People and the
Earth,” UNEP, shared July 14, 2020, www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/
speech/triple-planetary-crisis-forging-new-relationship-between-people-and-earth.
2020, www.unhcr.org/576408cd7.pdf.
12 Robyn Sampson and Sandra M. Giford, “Place-making, Settlement and Well-being:
The Therapeutic Landscapes of Recently Arrived Youth with Refugee Backgrounds,”
Health and Place 16, no. 1 (January 2010): 116–31.
13 Liesbeth de Block and David Buckingham, “At the Crossroads of Childhood, Media,
and Migration,” in Children and Migration: At the Crossroads of Resiliency and Vulnerability,
ed. Marisa O. Ensor and Elzbieta Gozdziak (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 54.
14 David Buckingham, Children Talking Television: The Making of Television Literacy (London:
Falmer Press, 1993).
15 “Home Is Where the Heart Is: Family Relations of Migrant Children in Media Clubs
in Six European Countries,” delivered February 11–12, 2004, CHICAM: Children in
Communication about Migration, www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/4750041/
home-is-where-the-heart-is-family-relations-chicam; de Block and Buchingham, “At
the Crossroads,” 56–8; Marisa O. Ensor: 24 and Diane M. Hofman: 36 in Ensor and
Gozdziak, eds., Children and Migration.
16 Nilüfer Narli, “Life, Connectivity and Integration of Syrian Refugees in Turkey: Surviv-
ing through a Smartphone,” Questions de Communication 1, no. 33 (2018): 269–86; 273.
17 de Block and Buckingham, “At the Crossroads,” 54–5.
18 YouTube was registered as a website on 14 February 2005. An 18-second video entitled
“Me at the Zoo,” known as the frst YouTube video, was shared on 23 April shortly
before the public launch in May. Google bought YouTube in 2006.
19 Hal Foster, “The Archive without Museums,” October 77 (1996): 97–119.
20 Ibid., 97.
21 Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2001 [1969]), 129.
22 Ibid.
23 Knut Ove Eliassen, “Archives and Heterotopias,” Kunstjournalen B-post 1 (2010/11).
24 Ibid.
25 Knut Ove Eliassen, “The Archives of Michel Foucault,” in The Archive in Motion: New
Conceptions of the Archive in Contemporary Thought, ed. Eivind Rossaak (Oslo: Novus
Press, 2010), 1–21:1.
26 Johannes Schlegel, “Michel Foucault: Discourse Theory and the Archive,” shared
July 16, 2016, www.hsozkult.de/event/id/event-80329.
27 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” in Other Inquisitions
1937–1952 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993 [1952]).
28 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York:
Routledge, 2001 [1966]).
29 Eliassen, “The Archives,” 11.
30 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” in Heterotopia and the City. Public Space in a Postcivil
Society, ed. Michiel Dehaene and Lieven de Cauter (London: Routledge, 2008), 20.
31 Eliassen, “Archives and Heterotopias”.
32 Dag Peterson, “Archives and Power,” Ephemera Critical Dialogues on Organization Journal 3,
no. 1 (2003): 26–49, http://ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/fles/pdfs/3-1ephemera-
feb03.pdf.
33 Eliassen, “The Archives,” 11 (Foucault 1978, 1980).
34 Frank Kessler, Notes on Dispositif [work in progress], 2007, www.frankkessler.nl/wp-
content/uploads/2010/05/Dispositif-Notes.pdf, and Mark Coté, “What is a Media
Dispositif? Compositions with Bifo,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 35, no. 4 (2011):
378–86. See also Frank Kessler, “The Cinema of Attractions as Dispositif,” in The Cinema
of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,

2007), 57–69.
35 Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Efects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film
Quarterly XXVIII, no. 2 (Winter 1974/5 [1970]): 41.
36 Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus,” Camera Obscura 1 (1976 [1975]): 104–26.
37 For instance, Thomas Elsaesser, “The New Film History as Media Archeology,” Ciné-
mas: revue d’études cinématographiques [Cinemas: Journal of Film Studies] 14, no. 2–3 (2004):
75–117.
38 Markus Stauf, “What Kind of Dispositif are Media?” in Materializing Memories: Dis-
positifs, Generations, Amateurs, ed. Susan Aasman, Andreas Fickers, Joseph Wachelder
(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 68.
39 Ibid., 69.
40 Ibid.; Coté, “Media Dispositif.”
41 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed.
Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980: 194).
42 T. S. Eliot, “The Rock,” in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (Boston: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1991).
43 Ibid.
44 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage
Books, 1977), 27.
45 Marc Rölli, “Deleuze as a Theorist of Power,” Coils of the Serpent Journal for the Study of
Contemporary Power 1 (2017): 19.
46 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction (London: Penguin
Books, 1978), 93.
47 Giorgio Agamben, “What is a Dispositor? [Quel Est Dispositif?]” (lecture transcript by
Jason Michael Adams) (2005), https://eclass.upatras.gr/modules/document/fle.php/
ARCH213/Agamben%20Dispositor.pdf, and Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus?
And Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 14.
48 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 30.
49 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
1988), 32.
50 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1998), and Dehaene and de Cauter, Heterotopia and the City, 5.
51 Marco Cenzatti, “Heterotopias of Diference,” in Heterotopia and the City, ed. Dehaene,
M. and De Cauter, 84.
52 Leo Hansson Nilson, “Inevitable Algorimages: The Necropolitical Infrastructure of
YouTube’s Digital Dispositif,” Master’s thesis, Stockholm University, 2019, 6.
53 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995).
54 John Berger, And our Faces, my Heart, Brief as Photos (New York: Vintage, 1984).
55 Christina Georgiadou, “Towards a ‘Re-envisioning of the Everyday’ in Refugee Stud-
ies,” in Being Human, Being Migrant: Senses of Self and Well-Being, ed. Anne Sigfrid Gron-
seth (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013), 116–38: 116.
56 Marshall Mcluhan, The Medium is the Message (London: Penguin Books, 1967).
57 Parater, “7 Videos.”
58 Joe Duran, “The Littlest Flutist, Syrian Refugee Boy,” shared November 21, 2014,
CNN, video, 2:29, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fs7zA5xW7o.
59 “Refugee Life: Through a Child’s Eyes,” shared July 12, 2016, Operation Blessing,
video, 2:59, www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkkVnQEB1mE&t=4s.
60 “Mother and Son Safe in Montenegro,” shared April 23, 2019, UNHCR, video, 2:28,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Mr3FcSZo2M.
61 Henri Lefebvre, Production of Space (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991 [1974].)
62 “Struggling to Adapt: One Syrian Refugee Family’s Story,” CBC News: The National,
shared May 30, 2016, video, 18:25, www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CFYoJQKM7A.
63 “Hiba’s Story: Ten-Year-Old Syrian Refugee,” shared November 28, 2016, UNICEF
USA, video, 3:03, www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QVmXX62_H0.
64 Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press, 1997), 176.
65 Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (New York: Doubleday, 1979).
66 Curiously, the commissioner does not choose children who were born in a camp or a
host country.
67 Gronseth, Being Human, 2.
68 Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram have 2.7, 2.0, 1.3, and 1.2 bil-
lion active users per month, respectively, according to “Most popular social networks
worldwide,” surveyed 19 October 2020, Statista, www.statista.com/statistics/272014/
global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users.
69 Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, 14.
70 Liane Rothenberger, Ahmed Elmezeny and Jefrey Wimmer, “ ‘YouTube helps us a
lot.’ Media Repertoires and Social Integration of Iraqi and Syrian Refugee Families in
Germany,” Revue française des sciences de l’information et de la communication 17 (Septem-
ber 2019), http://journals.openedition.org/rfsic/6857; Elisabeth Eide, “Mobile Flight:
Refugees and the Importance of Cell Phones,” Nordic Journal of Migration Research 10, no.
2 (2020): 67–81.
71 Kathryn Montgomery, “Children's Media Culture in a Big Data World,” Journal of Chil-
dren and Media 9, no. 2 (2015): 266–71.
72 Ibid.
73 Sonia Livingstone, Children and the Internet (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009); Dafna Dem-
ish, Children and Media: A Global Perspective (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 5.
74 Montgomery, “Children's Media.”
75 Zygmund Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2004), 78.
76 Sonia Livingstone and Monica E. Bulger, “A Global Agenda for Children’s Rights in the
Digital Age,” Journal of Children and Media 8, no. 4 (2014): 317–35.
77 Dragana Kaurin, “Space and Imagination: Rethinking Refugees’ Digital Access,”
UNHCR Innovation Service: Digital Access, Inclusion and Participation (April 2020), www.
unhcr.org/innovation/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Space-and-imagination-rethink
ing-refugees’-digital-access_WEB042020.pdf.
78 Frank Kessler, “The Screen and the Concept of Dispositif-A Dialogue,” in Screens, ed.
Dominique Chateau and José Moure (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016),
264–71.
79 Bauman, Wasted Lives, 74.
80 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 42.
81 Stefen Lepa, “The Media Dispositif as a Middle-Range Concept for Integrating
Empirical Research on Mediatized Worlds,” Comparative Media Systems: Audience Trans-
formations Postgraduate Course and Research Conference (IUC-CMS, 2013), Inter University
Center, Dubrovnik, Croatia.
82 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980),
221–2.
83 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 106–7.
84 Richard Ek, “Giorgio Agamben and the Spatialities of the Camp: An Introduc-
tion,” Geografska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 88, no. 4 (2006): 363–86.
85 Liisa H. Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistorici-
zation,” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 3 (1996): 377–404.
86 Ibid., 377.
87 Jenny Edkins, “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistiction and the Camp,” Alternatives 25,
no. 1 (2000): 3–25.
88 Nilson, “Inevitable Algorimages,” 4.
89 Michel Agier, Aux bords du monde, les réfugiés (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), 94.
90 Bauman, Wasted Lives, 78.
91 Susan Wojcicki, “YouTube at 15: My Personal Journey and the Road Ahead,” shared
February 14, 2020, YouTube Ofcial Blog, https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/
youtube-at-15-my-personal-journey.
92 “About,” YouTube, accessed December 14, 2020, www.youtube.com/about.
93 William Uricchio, “The Future of the Medium Once Known as Television” in The
YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: National Library
of Sweden, 2009), 24–39.
94 Pelle Snickers, “The Archival Cloud,” in YouTube Reader, 292–313.
95 Rick Prelinger, “The Appearance of Archives,” in YouTube Reader, 268–57.
96 Georgiadou, “Re-envisioning the Everyday,” 118.
97 “United for Human Rights,” accessed December 14, 2020, UHR, www.humanrights.
com/what-are-human-rights/videos/born-free-and-equal.html.
98 Ibid., 123.
4
THE ARTS OF NOTICING (TOWARD
AN EXPERIMENTAL ARCHIVE OF
EVERYDAY LIFE)
Ben Highmore
Everyday life: between continuity and obsolescence

In June 1937 Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge, writing under the collective
name of Mass-Observation, published a 64-page pamphlet that informed the pub-
lic of a new collective project of anthropology-at-home. The pamphlet acted as a
recruiting drive to encourage ordinary people to participate in a project to “collect
a mass of data based on practical observation, on the everyday life of all types of
people”.1 There was something febrile and clamorous in the way that the authors
described some of the projects that they were going to undertake under the banner
of Mass-Observation. Alongside the mass of observations made by volunteers the
following were noted in a single short paragraph:
The work of the professional scientist helps to give us a more rigorous objec-
tivity. So also can the use of scientifc instruments of precision. Photog-
raphy, flm technique, sound recording, and physiological tests by experts
will provide a check on our observations. We shall collaborate in build-
ing up museums of sound, smell, food, clothes, domestic objects, advertise-
ments, newspapers, etc. We shall build up fles dealing with problems of
assimilation – the practical difculties of an observer in entering a new envi-
ronment. He [sic] should be able to hear records of dialects which are strange
to him. He should be about to fnd in a “feld wardrobe” the necessary outft
of clothing for efective assimilation.2
It is an over-stufed paragraph written by two young men (24 and 25 at the time)
who were clearly in a hurry. It breathlessly lurches from an enthusiastic embrace of
the latest scientifc procedures and recording technologies (flm and photography
particularly), to imagining a great repository of everyday material culture (which
DOI: 10.4324/9781003107309-6
The arts of noticing 59
included smells and sounds), and fnally ending up with a library of regional and
(presumably) class identities that would allow observers (marked as male in the text,
though the majority of observers were women) to go unnoticed as they go about
their observing. I will need to come back to some of this – to the massive ambition
of compiling an archive of the everyday through objects and images, recordings
and testimony, through science and poetry – but for now I want to ask: why this
feverish urgency?
By June 1937 it was clear to anyone paying attention that Europe was on the
brink of large-scale international military confict. War had already erupted in
Spain and Ethiopia, and Germany was preparing for total mobilization. For the
writers of Mass-Observation the everyday world of habits and routines was poised
on the edge of obliteration. The fascist threat that was stalking Europe put day-
to-day life in jeopardy: “we are all in danger of extinction from such outbursts of
atavism”.3 For Mass-Observation everyday life was both precarious and a subter-
ranean world of unknown qualities and quantities. While the mass media (newspa-
pers and radio) were happy to talk confdently about what the population thought
and felt, it was evident that there was no mechanism for this population to know
itself as an intimate and sensate collective consciousness. Mass-Observation wanted
to be that mechanism.
Mass-Observation weren’t alone in focusing on everyday life at a moment of
danger. In the midst of a previous war the social historians Charles and Marjorie
Quennell produced a series of popular “everyday thing” books aimed at children.
They articulated their reason for this series in the preface to a new collection of
books on everyday life which began in 1922:
This little book has come into being as a result of another that we wrote, and
illustrated, between 1915 and 1919. It was intended for boys and girls, and
we called it a History of Everyday Things in England. An attempt was made to
draw the eyes of our readers away from the Destruction which was to the
fore in those days, and to present instead a picture of all the care and trouble
which had gone to the Construction of the everyday things that were being
destroyed.4
It is perhaps obvious to notice that the everyday world becomes newly interesting,
comforting and valued at a moment when radical and murderous discontinuity
surrounds you. It is a reaction that isn’t quite captured by the term nostalgia: it
is something more anxious, something that is apprehended more adequately by
the vernacular metaphor of “holding your breath”; pausing, taking stock, holding
on during a moment of anxiety. What had been taken for granted becomes both
precarious and precious, fragile and sustaining. War is an obvious incentive to take
stock of all that might be about to be lost. George Orwell famously wrote about
“the pub, the football match, the back garden, the freside” as well as a national
population who “are inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their wages will
permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes, and use probably the foulest language in the
60 Ben Highmore
world”, and described this ordinary, everyday world with a degree of tenderness,
while “highly civilized human beings are fying overhead, trying to kill me”.5
But if war and the threat of war throws the taken-for-granted-ness of every-
day life into stark relief, then perhaps this is because it represents something of
the feeling that accompanies everyday life during peacetime but in a condensed,
intensifed form. Isn’t the feeling of modernity also pervaded by a sense of fragility?
That sense that continuity and constancy are more fragile than they seem might
be a characteristically modern feeling. For the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre,
everyday life was a historical category that emerged alongside forms of industriali-
zation and intensive modernization. Everyday life for him was premised on a feel-
ing of both continuity and discontinuity, tradition and the disruption of tradition,
constancy and obsolescence:
The everyday imposes its monotony. It is the invariable constant of the varia-
tions it envelops. The days follow one after another and resemble on another,
and yet – here lies the contradiction at the heart of everydayness – everything
changes. But the change is programmed: obsolescence is planned. Produc-
tion anticipates reproduction; production produces changes in such a way as
to superimpose the impression of speed onto that of monotony. Some people
cry out against the acceleration of time, others cry out against stagnation.
They’re both right.6
What Lefebvre highlights is an ambiguity around the experience of everyday

modernity that can feel simultaneously hectic and monotonous, something neatly
captured in the title of a recent book on new media: Updating to Remain the Same.7
The sort of anxious boredom associated with so many jobs, where striving to keep
on top of change does little to alleviate the sense that nothing changes (and cer-
tainly not for the better), is a feeling common to many in a society that Lefebvre
once named as “the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption”.8
Ambivalent feelings of comfort and disquiet surround the everyday when it
becomes an explicit object of attention. Exhibitions of everyday life, for instance,
often have an uncanny atmosphere around them as we look at the paraphernalia
of everyday life emptied out of the one thing that seems to characterize its every-
dayness: its lively ongoing-ness. Rooms recreating the period looks of “ordinary”
families such as you fnd in the Gefrye Museum in London (whose period rooms
were originally established by Marjorie Quennell between 1935 and 1941) have
a ghostly quality to them, as though they have somehow escaped the usual tem-
poralities that beft the everyday.9 Photography and flm collect the incidental and
unremarkable even when they are really seeking out the remarkable event, at the
same time when they look to capture the fat actuality of life the image can take
on the look of a crime scene.10 The everyday seems to be stored everywhere – in
museums, in archives, in books – this is an everyday that seems superabundant,
ubiquitous, overwhelming. Yet it is an everyday transformed, altered – sometimes
denuded, sometimes mystifed.
Museums and mausoleums of everyday life

One of the most vivid symptoms of the mixed feeling of continuity and obsoles-
cence of the everyday is the “Folk” museum (also known as the “Living History
Museum” or the “Open-Air Museum”). The concept of an open-air site dedicated
to the display of everyday material culture of newly obsolete ways of life – or ways
of life on the verge of obsolescence – took root in Scandinavia at the end of the
nineteenth century. Sweden’s Skansen museum in Djurgården, Stockholm, which
opened in 1891, became a model for open-air museums across Europe and North
America, though Norway’s Norsk Folkemuseum is generally taken as the oldest
example of the open-air living history museum as it incorporates displays going
back to 1881.11 The Open-Air heritage museum took of in the twentieth century
and can be found in most countries in the Global North as well as a growing num-
ber in the Global South.
In Britain examples of Living History Museums include: Beamish, the Liv-
ing Museum of the North, in County Durham; The Rural Life, Living Museum
in Surrey; Weald and Downland Living Museum in Sussex; St Fagan’s National
Museum of History near Cardif; and the Highland Folk Museum, Newtonmore,
in the Highland council area of Scotland. The conventions of the Living History
Museum usually include a set of historic buildings (often ones that have been
moved, rebuilt, and restored to their original state) and a set of traditional prac-
tices that are recreated and performed in a historically authentic manner (four
milling, coppicing, dry-stone walling, and so on), with original (restored) tools
and machinery. Open-Air museums difer in scale and quality: the well-known
museums attract huge numbers of visitors and consequently deploy large numbers
of people (many of whom are amateur historians and volunteers) to recreate activi-
ties such as food preparation from the past; smaller museums (often family run)
use stationary models to “perform” tableaux behind Edwardian shop windows, for
instance.
The uncanniness of arriving at these living museums by car and with mobile
phone in hand and immersing yourself in a day-to-day world where such ordi-
nary technologies were unimaginable sits alongside the ambivalent atmospheres
that such places generate. On the one hand there is the feeling of a salvage culture,
where rich cultural practices have been rescued from oblivion; on the other hand
a sense that the visitor is involved in a ritualistic mourning of a bygone age, while
celebrating the present as a time that can re-present the past to us in such an enter-
taining and “modern” manner.12 The temporal uncanniness of the Living Museum
is a foundational part of its function. The narratives that undergird the ethos of the
museum are premised on both the lucky-fnd and the sense of something about to
be lost forever. For Frank Atkinson, the founder of the Beamish museum, the goal
of creating a living history collection was precisely to “collect everyday material,
from a specifc community, on a vast scale before it was too late”.13 The sense of
being “too late” is not dissipated because we can see the material remains of a way
of life that has been saved: the feeling of belatedness remains nonetheless and is
62 Ben Highmore
often intensifed when a cultural practice exists within living memory. The sense
of a museum as simultaneously a mausoleum fnds its zenith, ironically, in the living
museum.
Techniques and technologies of noticing

The Living History Museum can be treated as a modern “art of noticing”. By that
I mean that a process of reevaluation had to take place where something outmoded
and relatively worthless was “noticed”. Noticing in this way is a key to how we
think of the everyday as a subject for refection, for contemplation. If everyday life
is what usually goes unnoticed, the act of noticing it is key both to it becoming an
object of attention and to its ontological transformation (from the unnoticed to the
noticed). Living Museums might need to take their place alongside a host of other
“noticings” that characterize a peculiarly modern mode of registering the everyday.
This would include the work of modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia
Woolf where a concerted efort is made to notice both the intricate details of the
daily as well as the seemingly arbitrary fows of consciousness; anthropologists and
folklorists studying everyday life so as to notice the patterns of routine life and the
stories that accompany them; certain types of “art”; photographers and flmmakers
who fnd value in the discarded, the quotidian, or the incidental: all could be seen
as taking aspects of life that were of little interest or were actively ignored as being
unworthy of attention and making them something worth noticing.14
These arts of noticing are techniques that produce distinctive efects. For
instance, when Frank Atkinson started collecting obsolete tools and machinery in
the 1950s and 60s, the objects themselves were undergoing change. These objects
were transitioning from being useful and valued tools to becoming abandoned,
discarded rubbish.15 They were losing value as new implements were replacing
them or when entire activities were being replaced by new ways of making things.
In noticing their value for a Living History Museum, Atkinson’s collecting activity
was transforming them from rubbish into something else: not their original value
but a simulation of this value, an example of heritage, of a lost everyday life. As her-
itage objects, they might still maintain their functionality as a tool but now within
a recreated scenario where they are performing the role of exemplars. The heritage
object is both a ghost object and a meta-object.
It is worth noting that, before Atkinson started collecting bits of machinery
and old shop interiors and such like, he went around the north of England flm-
ing and photographing working practices that were falling into obsolescence. Film
and photography from the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth
century constitute an explosion of techniques and technologies for noticing eve-
ryday life. Film and photography have had a privileged role in the arts of notic-
ing, perhaps because they are seen to be indiscriminate: focal depth aside, the
light sensitive plate or strip of celluloid pays as much attention to the grain of a
piece of wood as it does to the wrinkles on someone’s face. The indiscriminate
“capturing” of photography and other mechanical forms of recording became the

aspect most associated with the everyday. In a parallel to this, Frank Atkinson’s col-
lecting was also indiscriminate: he collected everything associated with northern
daily life. These technologies are distinct for their ability to indiscriminately absorb
and notice details that are not those necessarily intended by the photographer. This
aspect of “machinic noticing” is sometimes commented on in the plots of movies,
perhaps most famously in 1966 flm Blow-Up (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) where
the photograph possibly witnesses a murder than the photographer didn’t see but
also in flms such as Smoke (dir. Wayne Wang, 1995) where a habit of photograph-
ing the same scene each day “captured” the recently deceased wife of one of the
characters.
We should be wary of setting too much store in the work of mechanical repro-
duction to bring about a situation in which the unpropitious matter of the every-
day can become something that matters, that has value. As Jacques Rancière puts it:
According to the logic of the esthetic regime of art, in order for photography
or the cinema to belong to art, their subjects frst had to belong to art. Every-
thing that could be taken in by a glance had to have been already susceptible
to being something artistic; the insignifcant had in itself to be potentially art.
The rupture of the system of the system of representation was frst brought
about by what was so ineptly called “realism”; this “realism” held that not
only was everything that was represented equal, but also that there was an
inherent splendour to the insignifcant.16
For him the aesthetic regime of art is an ethos within representation where social
hierarchies are challenged by a form of attention that can (potentially, at least)
ascribe as much value to rotten apple as to a piece of fne jewelery, as much signif-
cance to the life of a pauper as a prince. But even if we follow Rancière’s injunction
to have a greater sense of determinism than one based on technology, it would be
hard not to see lens-based technologies as having an extensive efect on altering
how we envisage the apprehending of everyday life as a subject of interest.
The camera as a technology of noticing exists far beyond the physical tech-
nology of lens-based recording. Throughout the twentieth century it has been a
powerful metaphor for other arts of discriminate and indiscriminate noticing. Most
famously it was used by the novelist Christopher Isherwood as a way of framing
his approach to a form of literary reportage that he was developing at roughly the
same time that Mass-Observation was announcing its project. Isherwood could
begin his novel Goodbye to Berlin (which was a collection of previously published
observational reports about his life in Berlin in the 1930s) by stating that: “I am
a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording
the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing
her hair”.17 This sense of passivity is important here; it is the basis for the lack of a
priori discrimination that might bring with it all sorts of preordained evaluation. If
64 Ben Highmore
everyday life is what is not yet known, then a passivity toward it might name a form
of empathetic listening, a mode of open sensitivity and unassumingness.
For Mass-Observation the camera was also a useful metaphor for describing a
form of observation, but here the sense of passivity, of total indiscriminate looking
is ofered as an “ideal” that in the feld of human behavior is impossible to attain.
In Mass-Observation the voluntary, untrained observers were thought of as being
like cameras, but a peculiar type of camera:
The Observers are the cameras with which we are trying to photograph con-
temporary life. The trained Observer is ideally a camera with no distortion.
Mass-Observation has always assumed that its untrained Observers would be
subjective cameras, each with his or her own individual distortion. They tell
us not what society is like, but what it looks like to them.18
This sense of a mass of distorting cameras that can pick up a sense of the world, not
because they are passive recipients of experience but because they are registering
everyday life while being in the “thick of it” so to say, is not a complaint about
the lack and limits of these observers. These are not faulty cameras. The subjec-
tive cameras are valuable precisely because they are feeling cameras that react, that
can be bruised, upset, belittled, made fearful, depressed, can get excited and loose
interest. These are cameras that are often vulnerable, sometimes egotistical, occa-
sionally bigoted, emotionally responsive, and often socially opinionated. For Mass-
Observation you needed these kinds of cameras if you wanted to fnd out what the
everyday world felt like from the inside. This was not a position of asocial solipsism
that could throw its hands in the air and say “everything is subjective”: rather it
was a dedication to mass-feeling, to the sociality of afect, to the belief that feelings
were social, through and through. The Mass-Observation project was dedicated to
a notion of the collectively subjective: a multiperspectival orchestration of reactions,
senses, positions, and feelings.
Toward an experimental archive of everyday life

Writing in 1959 on the topic of “Everyday Speech” the critic and philosopher
Maurice Blanchot claimed that “whatever its other aspects, the everyday has this
essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes.”19 It is worth restating Blanchot’s claim
here if only to defate that contemporary sense that everything, perhaps most sig-
nifcantly everyday life, is knowable if only we can audit enough people, if only
we have the right algorithms, if only enough people can provide the requisite
“feedback”. The everyday, as a topic for refection, belongs to an empirical tradi-
tion but not necessarily a positivistic one. The empirical, lest we forget, is the realm
of experimentation, of feeling a way toward something. The fact that the real, the
daily, fnally exceeds our grasp might be the very basis for an empirical science.
Why would we search out the everyday if we didn’t already feel it was beyond
our reach? But this realm of experimentalism doesn’t need to take as its values the
“exhaustive” or the “rigorous”: it might want to instead champion the inventive,

the feet-footed, the resourceful.
Blanchot’s epistemological modesty and the idea that the everyday exceeds our
ability to capture it is echoed in Michel de Certeau’s experience of going to a Liv-
ing History Museum in North America:
Was it fate? I remember the marvellous Shelburne Museum in Vermont

where, in thirty-fve houses of a reconstructed village, all the signs, tools, and
products of nineteenth-century life team; everything, from cooking uten-
sils and pharmaceutical goods to weaving instruments, toilet articles, and
children’s toys can be found in profusion. The display includes innumerable
familiar objects, polished, deformed, or made more beautiful by long use;
everywhere there are as well the marks of the active hands and labouring
or patient bodies for which these things composed the daily circuits, the
fascinating presence of absences whose traces were everywhere. At least this
village full of abandoned and salvaged objects drew one’s attention, through
them, to the ordered murmurs of a hundred past or possible villages, and by
means of these imbricated traces one began to dream of countless combina-
tions of existences.20
De Certeau’s perspective is one that refuses to treat the Living Museum’s rendering
of everyday life as an adequate representation of daily life of rural workers. But this
is neither a source of criticism nor of pessimism. Far from it: de Certeau’s descrip-
tion of the Shelburne museum is nothing if not gleeful, and the “presences of
absences” are seen as a capacious invitation to enlarge our imaginative engagement
with the past. For de Certeau there is no privileged access to the everyday and
no proper method for capturing it, primarily because the everyday is a realm that
doesn’t answer to the proper, to propriety. But instead of this stymieing the quest
for everyday life, it opens up seemingly endless possibilities. In the two volumes
of the “Practice of Everyday Life” project Michel de Certeau and his collaborators
Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol take their materials from observation, from memory,
from novels (by Marguerite Duras, Robert Musil, Georges Perec, and so on), from
flms (Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, for instance), from interviews (often with
neighbors and friends of friends), from linguists and sociologists, from philoso-
phers and anthropologists.21 Viewed from the perspective of the social sciences the
project would seem to lack a basic distinction between primary and secondary
evidence or any attempt at ethnographic rigor. Speculative description is interlaced
with the testimony of others, narrative accounts with fables and sayings.
The fulsome dismissal of what could be called a positivistic-realist epistemol-
ogy is a position that we are familiar with from generations of critical accounts
of how anthropology, for instance, represents its subject. It found its most vivid
form in post-structuralism’s critique of “presence” and might appear today as a
position whose sell-by date is passed. Yet what distinguishes Michel de Certeau’s
epistemological doubt from a general ethos of post-structuralism is that it ofers
66 Ben Highmore
something of a liberation. Far from reducing attempts to register the experiential

realm of the daily, de Certeau’s oeuvre suggests another route. If the full accounting
of everyday life is an impossibility, then two paths appear distinctly fruitless: one
would be the endless critique of all those people, from novelists to social scientists,
who are out there attempting to register lived-experience, on the grounds that
their task is ultimately unsuccessful (as if they didn’t know that already, as if a novel
could ever exhaust the excess of the everyday); the other would be the search for
a fully adequate or scientifc registering of the everyday as a requirement for study-
ing it. If the value of absolute adequacy is jettisoned, the study of everyday life is
liberated from two fruitless tasks. In its place attention can be redirected toward a
more experimental approach. It is this experimental orientation that I think Mass-
Observation were starting out from.
I began this chapter by drawing attention to Mass-Observation’s desire to build
up “museums of sound, smell, food, clothes, domestic, objects, advertisements,
newspapers, etc.”. Such a museum was never created by Mass-Observation. What is
left behind from the original project that continued from 1937 into the 1950s and
was picked up again at the start of the 1980s is a mass of paper – copious reports,
descriptions, alongside some photographs and drawings and the occasional painted
scene. It is an extraordinary archive of thoughts and feelings.22 Is it more or less able
to capture and convey the energies and dissipations of everyday life than a store of
material culture that had been imagined in 1937? Michel de Certeau and Mau-
rice Blanchot’s warnings that the everyday escapes capture is as relevant to a paper
archive as it is to a material museum.
Across the formats for registering the daily we don’t fnd epistemological full-
ness and presence (a scientifc repository where the everyday can once and for all be
fully known) but traces, synecdoches, fragments. This is not a situation calling for
our sorrow. The fragments of the everyday are often charged fragments that need
to be kindled and nurtured and then detonated by linking them, by narrating them,
by orchestrating them. The outmoded pieces of farm machinery are able to convey
a sense of material working life more adequately than an advertisement publicizing
the original piece of machinery. Yet adverts tell us about aspiration, about drives
and dreams. As Cliford Geertz once said, “rocks on the one hand and dreams on
the other – they are things of this world”.23 We cannot aford to limit our studies to
the one over the other. Everyday life doesn’t simply fall on the side of the endlessly
practical and realist. It is also a site of desire and afect. Of wanting a better life. Of
magical thinking and pessimism. Of anxiety and glee, and the monotony of keep-
ing on with keeping on. If exhaustiveness and epistemological fullness are fruitless
goals, we might be better of recognizing that loss and escape are a constitutional
aspect of what everyday life is. Instead of trying to overcome this as an inadequacy
of our studies, it might actually be a key to increasing our imaginative capacities
as we try to register the everyday. To use the “countless imbricated traces” of our
experimental archives of the everyday (Museums, Mass-Observations, and all those
other arts of noticing) one might be able to “dream of countless combinations of
existences”. It might encourage us to embrace the experimental, to open ourselves
up to new passivities, new procedures for registering an everyday that we don’t

already know in advance.
Notes
1 Mass-Observation, Mass-Observation [written by Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson]
(London: Muller, 1937), back cover.
2 Ibid., 35.
3 Ibid., 11.
4 Marjorie and C. H. B. Quennell, Everyday Life in the Stone Age (Everyday Life Series – 1),
3rd ed. (London: B. T. Batsford, 1945 (1st ed., 1922)), vii. For an account of the Quen-
nells see Laura Carter, “The Quennells and the ‘History of Everyday Life’ in England, c.
1918–69,” History Workshop Journal 81, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 106–34.
5 George Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn” [1941], in The Collected Essays, Journalism
and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 2: My Country Right or Left 1940–1943 (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, 1970), 78, 74.
6 Henri Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,” Yale French Studies, no. 73 (1987): 10
7 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 2017).
8 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch
(New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1984), 68. The book was published in France
in 1968.
9 On the Gefrye Museum see, Julia Porter and Sally MacDonald, “Fabricating Interiors:
Approaches to the History of Domestic Furnishing at the Gefrye Museum,” Journal of
Design History 3, no. 2/3 (1990): 175–82.
10 This was Walter Benjamin’s description of the work of Eugène Atget’s photographs of
Paris. See Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,
and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2008), 27.
11 See Paul Oliver, “Re-Presenting and Representing the Vernacular: The Open-Air
Museum,” in Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms
in the Age of Tourism, ed. Nezar AlSayyad (London: Routledge, 2001), 191–211. See also
Sten Rentzhog, Open-Air Museums: The History and Future of a Visionary Idea (Östersund:
Jamtli Förlag, 2007).
12 For an argument that Beamish’s account of the past acts to bolster an understanding of
the present form of post-industrialism as “progress” see Ryan S. Trimm, “Taking You
Back: Region, Industry and Technologies of Living History at Beamish,” European Jour-
nal of Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2012): 528–46.
13 Frank Atkinson quoted in Jenny Brown, “Frank Atkinson and the Founding of Beam-
ish,” Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 22 (2009): 122.
14 See for instance: James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969 [frst published
in 1922]); Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Vintage, 2016 [frst published in
1925]); Marc Manganaro, ed., Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990); Martin Gaiger-Smith and James Lingwood, The Epic
and the Everyday: Contemporary Photographic Art (London: South Bank Centre, 1999).
15 See Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (London:
Pluto Press, 2017 [frst published in 1979]).
16 Solange Guénoun, “An Interview with Jacques Rancière: Cinematographic Image,
Democracy, and the ‘Splendor of the Insignifcant’,” Sites: The Journal of Twentieth-
Century/Contemporary French Studies revue d'études français 4, no. 2 (2000): 253.
17 Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (London: Vintage, 1998), 3. [frst published in
1939]
18 Mass-Observation, First Year’s Work 1937–38 (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1938), 66.
19 Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech” [1959] Yale French Studies, no. 73 (1987): 14.
68 Ben Highmore
20 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2011), 21.
21 Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume
Two: Living and Cooking, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1998).
22 See the website www.massobs.org.uk/
23 Cliford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Fontana Press, 1973), 10.
PART II
Slices of everyday lives
in museums
5
THE MUSEUM OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Clare Dolan
I. Introduction: this is love

The Museum of Everyday Life lives inside each of us, a vast and echoing cabinet of
curiosities, every minute of every day flling our endless drawers and cases with new
additions to the permanent collection. Every object in the Museum of Everyday Life
holds a multiplicity of meanings inside itself. No object is too small to merit our
deep attention. Even a simple household match hums with danger and hope. When
we strike it, for a moment we hold between fnger and thumb the Promethean gift
of Possibility. Each match is a tiny revolution, a promise of radical transformation.
The match reminds us that all objects in some way come from the human body.
Just as the design of the match accommodates the requirements of the thumb and
forefnger that must be able to grasp it (and the shapes of cup handles and bowls,
for example, mirror the human hand) – we fnd too that the bowl and the cup and
the match echo the very shape of human hunger and thirst, the body’s need for
heat, the eye’s requirement for light in order to see. Every object in our Museum of
Everyday Life speaks to the body – amplifying it, extending it, the way an echo in a
deep canyon empowers a whisper.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003107309-8
72 Clare Dolan
Sentience is our great burden and our great gift. We are self-aware, so we know
what we know about living inside a body, that it is constantly changing: one min-
ute it is thirsty, the next minute needing food, it has aches and pains, it farts and
belches, it can carry us places, experience ecstasy, sleep and wake from sleep. But
despite all of these abilities, it is never large enough, permanent enough, or beauti-
ful enough to satisfy our sense of self. Belying their status of apparent insignifcance,
the humble, mundane objects of everyday life toil away endlessly to unburden us of
the vast problematic contingencies of the body.
Even as they engage in endless dialogue with the body, these objects of daily life
also faithfully record our attentions and ministrations: the upholstery on the arm of
a couch is worn smooth by caressing elbows; the chipped corner of a lacquered box
is carefully glued back into place; a favorite wallet is creased and cracked by being
opened and closed countless times. These things bear the proof of the lives we have
led, the things we have done. They remember us.
Because our bodies are not large enough or beautiful enough or permanent
enough. Feelings come and go. And we are lonely.
The Museum of Everyday Life 73
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a characterist is either one who

depicts a character or one who employs magical symbols.1 Institutional muse-
ums, so odiously bound up with the task of refecting state power or articulat-
ing national identity, are holy, sanctifed, unapproachable places trafcking in
arbitrated, mediated experience. The Museum of Everyday Life is the opposite
of the institutional museum. The Museum of Everyday Life is a characterist, who
carries her possessions on her back, inhabits temporary spaces, is always on the
move.
A gift from a lover, a family heirloom. A note, a paperclip, a pocket knife, a

picture frame: in the Museum of Everyday Life a million invisible threads are tied to
our fngers, ears, lips, and eyes, which are tied to every object, which are tied to the
lips, ears, fngers, eyes, and hearts of other people. The web is invisible. The object
is seen, can be picked up and cradled.
This is real: the shiver we feel when we see a staircase in an old building worn
soft in the middle, the proof of thousands of climbings and descents – the way the
object holds evidence of us in itself, forever.
74 Clare Dolan
FIGURE 5.1 Above: The Museum of Everyday Life – “embarking on our mission of glorious
obscurity”. Below: The New England Barns Found Objects Collection, Museum
of Everyday Life; both photographs by Gabriel Levine.
This is love: the infnite, obscure collection of the museum of everyday life,
whispering its secret knowledge to our bodies, ofering its compassionate afor-
dances to the fragile breast, the hungry belly, the achingly sentient heart.
II. An idea, a sensibility, a wish

Currently anchored on the edge of a pond, on Route 16, in a remote, rural corner
of Northeastern Vermont, the physical manifestation of the Museum of Everyday Life
grew out of the following questions: what would it be like to imagine a museum
that looked like a giant cabinet of curiosities, but flled with perfectly familiar
objects rather than exotic ones, an institution dedicated to deteriorating objects
of no monetary value but of immense ordinary-life consequence? And how might
it be possible to create massive participatory collections of objects in a way that
illuminates the back and forth dance, the essential, vibrant relationship between
ourselves and the material world? A museum whose purpose is a heroic, slow-
motion cataloging of life, whose slogan is “embarking on our mission of glorious
obscurity”.
As the museum’s founder and “Chief Operating Philosopher”, I hope to
describe how the museum came to be and how I believe it functions. I approach
this with a bit of caution, because it would be untrue to suggest that my coher-
ent and consistent personal vision led seamlessly to the formation of this project.
Rather its evolution has been somewhat haphazard, and its continued life involves
the energy, talent, and participation of many people other than myself. In the
beginning, however, the museum was simply an idea, a sensibility, and a wish.
Early on, I approached its creation mostly in a spirit of fun, wanting to play with
the alluring vocabulary of museums (vitrines, pedestals, frames, wall texts, dio-
ramas, etc.) while simultaneously mocking the high seriousness and expense of
these institutions. I started by writing a manifesto and making declarations about
what a museum “should” be. But as I became more and more absorbed in under-
standing the actual mechanisms of arrangement and display, I began to understand
more deeply the uncanny power of these ordinary objects. It became clear that
the homemade museum could be a real tool for transforming one’s relationship to
one’s life.
Objects have secret powers that are not easily understood. But in our noisy
world of electronic culture, what draws so much of our attention is virtual and
bodiless, existing in 2-D on the ubiquitous screen. And what captures our atten-
tion is also what is extraordinary – paintings that sell for millions of dollars, movie
stars who marry princes, natural and man-made disasters. In this context, the
secret powers of the ordinary object can appear to be mufed, smothered. Until
the next hurricane. Until the lights go out and we are left surrounded by things
that do not plug in, that require no electricity to exercise their power. Things
that connect us to other people by their very physical properties, their uses, their
histories.
The Museum is devoted to celebrating this special power, in a way that encour-
ages ordinary people to refect on their understandings of themselves in relation
to these objects. The Museum has three components: 1) The Museum of Everyday
Life Exhibitions and Collections, comprised of the categorization, arrangement, and
display of actual physical objects; 2) The Museum of Everyday Life Philosophy Depart-
ment, involving the production and publication of theoretical writing, and 3) The
Museum of Everyday Life Performance Department, which involves the creation of
events that unfold through time, such as object-centered performances (which we
call puppet shows).
76 Clare Dolan
In addition to a robust and ever-expanding permanent collection, our annual

special featured exhibits have explored ordinary objects such as the pencil, the
safety pin, the mirror, the toothbrush, the match, locks and keys, bells and whis-
tles, mirrors, scissors, and dust. These exhibits look at the objects in-depth,
tracing their origins and additionally examining their life throughout history in
relation to all kinds of human experience. Visitors to the museum are introduced
to the collections and exhibitions in the Raymond Roussel Memorial Vestibule,
which houses the New England Barns Found Objects Collection, an ever-expanding,
community-curated archive. Just beyond the vestibule, the museum’s Great Hall
houses the permanent collection comprised of the best elements of all of the
previous years’ special exhibitions. The back portion of the museum is devoted
to the Special Exhibition Hall, which houses the annually rotating special featured
exhibit.
The museum is housed in an old dairy barn, a setting that situates it frmly
in the context of quotidian rural life – the past evidence of daily farming chores
coexisting with or adapted to the museum’s displays. The ramp to the hay loft
serves as the museum’s vestibule, the broad barn board siding is left exposed in
many places and adorned with exhibition displays, pieces of defunct farming
machinery serve as frames, pedestals, or mounting devices for displayed objects.
The ramshackle exterior hints at the hardscrabble existence of Vermont’s small
family farms, echoing the scores of other decaying dairy barns peppering the
landscape, but for the surprising fact of a giant toothbrush rearing up impossibly
in the grassy strip between the barn and the road and a hand painted “open” sign
futtering from a pole jutting out toward passing trafc. The space is unsupervised,
operating on a self-service basis, with signs directing visitors to the light switches
and soliciting donations next to a drop box by the front door. Often there is sim-
ply no one else around. The random lone visitor approaching the dark entryway
hears just the scrape of the weathervane rotating in the wind atop the barn roof
or the drip of moisture from the eves, or perhaps a dog barking in the distance.
The building sits close up against a rural highway, crouched at the edge of a pond
on one side, at the edge of a feld on the other, in the middle of nowhere. It is an
in-between space, failing to conform to the standard expectations of “museum”,
or that of “barn” – no longer farm, not quite museum, more like a mirage. “What
is this place?” one imagines passersby asking as their cars whiz past. Only some of
them stop to fnd out.
The architecture of the space – and the way the exhibits ft inside of it – force
certain bodily relationships onto the objects on display, demanding certain atten-
tions. As part of 2018’s exhibition featuring locks and keys, for example, a locked
door with a key hanging next to it led into a small room tucked under the eves
at the edge of the barn. Inside, shadows played across a gentle jumble of objects:
three locking suitcases stacked in a corner, a couch, a shelf holding a shot glass and
a bottle of whiskey, a diary and its key. A recording of Billie Holiday singing “gonna
lock my heart and throw away the key”2 played faintly from an invisible speaker. This
was the “secrets room”. Visitors entered, crouching a little to avoid scraping their
heads on the sloped ceiling, drawing close to the objects in order to see them in
the dim light. The couch invited sinking into its pillows, and a wall text suggested:
The locking diary gives us a place for recording experience and keeping it
safe. This is a fundamental tenant of having agency – envisioning oneself as
an empowered protagonist in the vast narrative of the world, and being able
to protect that vision. We invite you to sit and write an entry in this small
communal museum diary, which will become the continually evolving story
of us, here inside the museum of everyday life.3
The couch, the shadows, the sloped ceiling, the faint music, all worked to draw the
visitor in and close, to conjure a feeling of conspiratorial interiority, encouraging
a very particular sort of contemplation (and interaction with) the diary and its tiny
lock and key.
Even as the architecture and displays draw viewers into the “world” of objects,
other elements of the museum repeatedly return attention back to the self, fore-
grounding and centering the individual’s experience and inviting intervention.
Interruptions in the physical space (turning a corner, entering a separate nook or
a booth or closet) and breaks in the rhythm or fow of information, allow visitors
to pause, to reassess, to intervene, or to impose their own narrative into the larger
story of the particular object that is the focus of the exhibition. In the 2017 Bells
and Whistles exhibition, a long wall crowded with a series of small bells and accom-
panying texts turned an abrupt corner, giving way to an open space – a “listening
area” containing several pillows arrayed on the ground. Here visitors were encour-
aged to stop and sit, close their eyes, turn inward, listen to the sounds of the exhibi-
tion, and refect. Tinklings and tootings from various other parts of the exhibition
occasionally peppered the silence, and an ambient recording of tolling church bells
from around the world played at intervals in the space. In an exhibition about
scissors, adjacent to a display of 1930’s barber tools used by Cliford Elmer Schall
of Greenfeld Indiana, visitors came upon an empty, inviting barber’s chair. A set
of haircutting scissors, thinning shears, and comb stood ready. Many visitors suc-
cumbed to the allure and gave each other impromptu haircuts, creating new scissor
stories alongside the old. Even the price list in the museum’s “Commodity Center”
(which declares that a museum t-shirt costs “1 million dollars or everything in your
pockets”) forces the visitor to pause for a minute of self-refection and take inven-
tory of what he/she carries around each day, prompting once again the questions:
What objects populate my life? What’s my relationship to all of this stuf?
Often, in the Museum of Everyday Life, the traditional curatorial voice of author-
ity gives way to a multiplicity of voices, as wall texts are sometimes superseded
by hand-written notes from the donators of displayed objects. In the permanent
collection, next to a display featuring weapons made from toothbrushes by prison
inmates, hangs an example of the round-handled, stunted plastic toothbrush now
designed to prevent such creative weaponization. This toothbrush is mounted
below a note scrawled on a crinkled piece of paper: “Hi Clare, I hope the jail
78 Clare Dolan
toothbrush makes it ok to Vermont. I snucked [sic] it out of jail in my legal mail. PS

I’ll see you in the summer. Nashua Street Jail, Sufolk County, Boston. Feb 2013.
xo David”. The presence of the note snaps the viewer’s attention from the more
distanced and neutral discourse on prison toothbrushes provided on the printed
and laminated wall text and redirects it to the immediacy and specifcity of the real
human relations surrounding the object. Scholarly authority gives way to gritty
individual story, as the viewer is left to speculate about the identity of the jail
inmate, the reason for his incarceration, and his relationship to the museum curator.
From the beginning, I have referred to the Museum of Everyday Life as a “grass-
roots museum experiment”, and indeed, an expanding community of people par-
ticipate in the museum in an ever-evolving variety of ways. The subject of the
annual special exhibition is announced each February, when calls for participation
go out to local newspapers, radio and community TV stations, and on social media.
An intergenerational and international cross-section of people respond to this call.
Most often people write ahead of time, describing an object they would like to
contribute to the exhibit or an idea for a display they would like to create. A con-
versation then ensues between the museum and the contributor, as they zero-in on
the particulars of how and in what way the display might ft into the design of the
larger exhibition. Sometimes things simply appear in the mail or on the museum
doorstep, without advanced warning. Not every ofered contribution will make it
into the exhibition – space is limited, the exhibition is carefully curated, and some
objects just do not ft in, which is made clear in the public calls for participation.
However, more often than not, the contributions shape and direct the evolution
of the exhibition design, which is constantly shifting, expanding, contracting, and
transforming in response to the participation.
During the month of May, the museum hosts open community work weekends.
These are opportunities for anyone interested to join in a wide variety of curato-
rial and exhibition installation activities. The majority of those who participate in
the work-weekends belong to the local rural community of neighbors – everyone
from middle-aged farmers to teenagers, moms with their kids, local artists, and the
random passer-by. The museum’s workshop declares itself a “judgment free zone”,
in which everyone is encouraged to learn and engage with the tools, try out new
skills, and participate in all the diferent activities involved in mounting an exhibi-
tion. We construct the exhibition space and design the displays specifcally to make
use of the materials on hand and what can be scavenged, traded for, found locally,
or borrowed – afordable, ordinary stuf. Emphasis is on simple and ecological tech-
niques that draw on the skills and experience of the participants as much as possible.
But often project designs blossom from the inventiveness of inexperience – non-
professionals hammering away at a task otherwise outside of their normal scope of
practice. Mistakes and do-overs are not frowned upon but expected.
Participation in these community work-weekends has steadily grown over the
years and now includes a group of dedicated core participants who return consist-
ently year after year. Often these workdays end spontaneously with a shared pot-
luck meal. In addition, neighbors, musicians, scholars, and performers donate their
time to perform at the annual museum opening celebrations and at various events
throughout the year. The sprawling and extremely varied ways that people gather
and interact around the central activities of the Exhibitions and Collections Department
of the museum speak to a central feature of this vision of what it means to be a “grass-
roots museum”. Fostering open participation in the collection and curation, design
and construction, performance and celebration of exhibitions creates a unique kind
of public gathering space. In an underserved rural environment, this space serves as
a much-needed supplement to the traditional gathering spaces of church, sporting
event, fairground, movie theater, and restaurant. As communities become energized
and engaged in the making of exhibitions that foreground the ordinary, they recog-
nize themselves not just as consumers but as generators of culture.
In contrast, the work of the Philosophy Department is less about exuberant, messy
participation and more about the slow percolation of ideas and the production
of manifestos, meditations, and small booklets. The manifesto form exemplifes
writing-as-action, serving as an additional way to put into practice theoretical
explorations of ordinariness and everyday life. The Philosophy Department’s “Roach
Manifesto”,4 for example, begins by depicting the life of a roach as unremarkable,
miserable, and inconsequential. The features of this lowly positioning (as depicted
in the manifesto’s opening lines) include a smallness associated with invisibility,
obscurity, and even repulsiveness: “The roach is small and disgusts you”, the mani-
festo proclaims. “It hides in dark cracks and feeds surreptitiously at your deserted
tables. You like to pretend that roaches do not even exist, at least not in your
house”. However, by carefully enumerating the superior survival skills and incred-
ible resiliency of roaches and drawing parallels to the roach-like existence of “all of
you who are tired of waking up every morning with your mouths flled with the
taste of time cards”, the manifesto turns the abjection of obscurity upside down. In
the fnal paragraph, a rallying cry exhorts:
Now is the time for playfulness inside of seriousness. Now it is time to take
advantage of dark cracks, to take delight in stagnant water, eat the tiny grains
of salt left behind by others. Now we must re-write our predicaments in the
heroic scripts of insects. Now is the time of the roach!
Each time the word “Now” appears, it is set in successively larger type, in an urgent
visual punctuation that decorates the bottom half of the single-page manifesto, a
joyous, triumphant revision of ordinariness.
The Philosophy Department also produces “Object Meditations” – brief deep
dives into a single ordinary object. These object meditations serve as the intro-
ductory wall text to the yearly special exhibition that always focuses on a single
particular object. Placed at the entrance to the Special Exhibition Hall, the object
meditation sets the stage for the exhibition to come, laying out the territory to be
explored. These meditations not only trace the material histories of the objects, but
they also open up the entire range of afective responses to these quotidian things
by considering the web of relations, associations, and narratives generated by them.
80 Clare Dolan
The “Dust Meditation”,5 produced the year that the special exhibition featured
that ubiquitous substance, opens with a recitation of dust’s material provenance:
Dust coats every surface in our homes, congeals in our nasal passages, foats
across continents, settles onto the ocean foors, and rains down from the sky
as a diaphanous reminder of the origins of the cosmos. The Bible places it
at the start and the fnish of everything, and science agrees: it is now under-
stood that without a thick cloud of dust stars cannot form. More than one
hundred tons of space dust falls to earth every day. But what could be more
ordinary than dust?
The meditation then moves from consideration of dust’s materiality, ending instead
with its afective resonances:
Watching dust slowly circulate in a shaft of sunlight can be melancholy or

transcendent, depending on the moment and the thoughts in our head. Per-
haps this is because dust is essential, a basic ingredient in everything. Per-
haps, when the sun suddenly illuminates these tiny particles of life, we see
ourselves from a distance for a second, we feel ourselves fying apart into a
million pieces, and then, inevitably coalescing again.
In this way, the meditations are very diferent from the authoritative interpretation
found in the introductory texts of conventional museum exhibitions. The medita-
tions are discursive musings serving as a kind of emotional doorway into the visual
displays that follow.
The Philosophy Department also administers a philosopher-in-residence program,
which runs during the summer months. Residents live in a modest apartment in
the back of the museum, work on individual projects, and collaborate with the
museum each in a unique manner designed by the resident. A certain kind of
toughness is required of these Philosophy pioneers, who tolerate a very rustic living
space (the unheated, one-room apartment does have a mini-fridge, a stove, shower,
and running water, but shares its composting toilet with the museum proper) and
are asked to lend a hand in museum upkeep and chores. In return, the museum
community ofers engagement, lively exchange, and the space and encouragement
to indulge in leisurely thinking and productive daydreaming.
The Performance Department of the museum recognizes that ordinary objects also
infuence the essential gestures of everyday life. We consider how the twist of a
wrist or small movements of the thumb and forefnger, micro adjustments of the
hand or eye, are shaped by our interactions with quotidian objects. Sometimes
these gestures and the ways that they change feel quite trivial: at one time tilt-
ing one’s head to the side and lifting a shoulder was instantly recognizable as the
motion we all made to cradle a phone to our ear when our hands were busy. For
those raised with cellphones and earbuds this gesture has disappeared with little
FIGURE 5.2 The Great Hall, which houses the museum’s Permanent Collection. Prom-
inent in the foreground is the museum Bear, on permanent loan from
Jonathan Berger, the Mirror Dress by Machine Dazzle, and the Safety Pin
Dress, by the museum’s tireless Fabrications Team.
fanfare and few sequelae. In other cases, essential, repeated quotidian gesture seems
linked to important bodily states, complex social relations, and political dynam-
ics. The Performance Department uses these Everyday Gestures as points of entry for
object-centered shows that address complex themes.
The Performance Department specializes in “picture-story recitation” or Cantas-
toria, a performance form built around paintings, which serve as the central “per-
forming objects” in the show. The museum’s Cantastoria performances, such as
Instructions for Winding A Watch and 70 Seconds, explore the way that these small
ordinary gestures can be assembled and resonate with deep, sometimes delightful,
sometimes devastating consequences. In Instructions for Winding A Watch (inspired
by a text by Julio Cortazar6), the movements involved in winding a watch give rise
to playful and melancholy ruminations on mortality. In 70 Seconds, the paintings
spotlight and magnify the gestures made by a police ofcer and an African Ameri-
can man during a routine trafc stop on an ordinary day and the series of disastrous
actions that follow.
These explorations of everyday life are by necessity messy, anarchic, and fre-
quently inconsistent. The combined eforts of the Philosophy, Performance, and
82 Clare Dolan
FIGURE 5.3 Right: the Museum of Everyday Life’s workshop is a “judgement free zone”.
Left: often the Community Work-Weekend days end spontaneously with
a shared potluck meal.
Collections departments circle around and around the mysteries of how ordinary
people ft into the world. What is our place here? What matters?
As visitors leave the museum, they are invited to fll out a short survey by complet-
ing sentences such as “I would visit the museum again (Always/Sometimes/Never)”
and “What really caught my eye was ______”. There is space to suggest subjects for
future exhibits and to share thoughts on what might be improved. Close to the bot-
tom of the page, a prompt reads: “The exhibit made me feel ______”. This seems
ftting. The realm of feelings is the ultimate location of the museum’s engagement
with its community; the operations of the museum are situated in the world of what
is felt. The thrill of connection and discovery also paves the way for thoughtful con-
templation and analysis, as viewers digest the layers of information communicated by
the museum’s careful juxtapositions of text, settings, and objects. As it makes visible
the web of relations between people and ordinary objects, the Museum of Everyday
Life also reacquaints people with what it means to be ordinary, an ordinariness that
is elegant, useful, individual, precious, and dear. It is, fnally, an expression of love.
FIGURE 5.4 A sign in the vestibule reads: “It is our hope that the museum will, in the
coming centuries, continue to be a residing-place of wonder, an asylum for
ideas, a room for the artist, a home for the wanderer. Welcome home . . .”
Inset: as visitors leave the museum, they are invited to fll out a short survey.
Notes on Images in the Introduction

All photographs by Clare Dolan unless indicated otherwise.
5.1 The exterior of the Museum of Everyday Life at night, photograph by Gabriel
Levine.
5.2 Giant Safety Pin, from the museum’s permanent collection, fabricated by the
author; Giant Scissors, by Vermont sculptor Martin McGowan, outside the
museum entryway; Giant Toothbrush, by Vermont sculptor Martin McGowan,
outside the museum entryway.
5.3 The Piano Garden, outside the museum entryway.
5.4 Plow Blade and Child’s Shoes, part of the New England Barns Found Objects
Collection.
84 Clare Dolan
Notes
1 Characterist, n. in OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), https://www-oed-
com/view/Entry/30648
2 Billie Holiday, “I’m Gonna Lock My Heart”, 1938, track 14 on Billie Holiday and Her
Orchestra – 1937–1939, The Classics Chronological Series, 1991 Compact Disc.
3 Wall Text, Special Exhibitions Gallery, Locked Down! Keyed In Locked Out! Keyed Up!,
Museum of Everyday Life, Glover, Vermont.
4 Clare Dolan, Roach Manifesto (Glover, Vermont: Museum of Everyday Life Philosophy
Department Publications, 2010).
5 Clare Dolan, Dust Meditation (Glover, Vermont: Museum of Everyday Life Philosophy
Department Publications, 2015).
6 Julio Cortazar, Cronopios and Famas, trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Pantheon Books,
1969).
6
THE MUSEUM OF ORDINARY PEOPLE
Lucy Malone
Museum defnitions traditionally determine museums as “neutral places”,1 but that

neutrality has been thrown into question. As places of authority they have histori-
cally privileged the recording of certain lives and experiences over others, result-
ing in a singular, limiting narrative. This isolates and excludes people, leading to a
dislocation of connection, diminished empathy, and a lack of fair representation of
lived histories. This needs to shift for a wider range of people to see themselves,
their lives, and their experiences displayed, valued, and understood. It is therefore
important to create museums where the voices present in collections and exhibi-
tions are plural, representative, and inclusive. Addressing silences and increasing
feelings of connection and belonging helps us as a society to take the frst steps in
a reparative cultural process.
There are a number of new museums that acknowledge the power of “the
museum”. Organizations that understand that they do not just refect but actively
create culture and that to reclaim that space – to disrupt existing hierarchies – is to
use the museum as an agent for social change. One part of this shift, this awareness,
is thinking about what is being recorded, as well as how. Recording and collecting
the ordinary, relatable objects of the everyday is part of this new movement.
I am the cofounder of the Museum of Ordinary People (MOOP), an emerging
museum that actively works in this way, using the everyday to engage audiences,
supporting and empowering people to tell their own stories through facilitation,
collaboration, cocuration, and creative practice. Throughout this chapter, I will
share the model that we developed to create the museum and its collections, along-
side examples of our powerful emotive exhibits, in order to describe the nature of
our participatory, facilitatory praxis. I will also share case studies of other museums
including The Museum of Homelessness and The Museum of Transology to further
illustrate the power of change within the emerging canon of new museum practice.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003107309-9
86 Lucy Malone
The making of MOOP

The Museum of Ordinary People (MOOP) is a pop-up museum based in Brighton
that was developed by myself and cofounder Jolie Booth. The concept for the
museum began in 2017, with our frst exhibition being held at The Spire (an arts
venue in Brighton) as part of the 2018 Brighton Fringe Festival. At the time that
Jolie and I met, I had just fnished a project working with my mother’s archive:
My mother (Bridgette Malone) was an artist, sometimes before being a mother,
sometimes inspired by being a mother and always inspired by the everyday, by
objects, and by the world around her. At times we didn’t have anywhere to live
or only beans on toast to eat. But there was always art. When my mother passed
away, I inherited all of her belongings, including her sketchbooks, photographs,
and papers, amongst everything else. These items had been largely left hidden away,
stored at her friend’s barn. I could not face them, but when I began to heal they
still sat there and I began to think about them more and more.
I had this wealth of material, a collection of documents, these dusty fading
papers, that held within it my mother’s story, her vision, her way of seeing. I wanted
to, needed to, create something with them, to honor her in some way and save her
tangible memory from decay. I had researched existing archives, particularly search-
ing for archives that took collections by artists, and, more importantly, collections
by female artists. These were very few and far between, and all asked questions in
their applications about “success”. Success is an interesting term for an artist. If you
base that on sales, my mother was not a “successful” artist. Bridgette Malone was
a single parent, on a low income, having to work hard alongside making her art.
But if you base that on art being her life and Artist being her identity, then she was
wildly successful.
In order to challenge the silence and absence of female artists in history; the
lack of women’s artwork in museums; the lack of or one-sided representations of
working-class women, single parents, mother-artists and the pervasive story of a
nuclear family; in order to add to the narrative of real experience and challenge
exceptionalism in institutions, I decided to create an archive where there was none.
I was studying for a BA in psychosocial studies and, for my dissertation, decided
to create an archive, autoethnography, and exhibition of my mother’s belongings
and art practice. As the idea developed, I realized that our relationship and familial
connection was a hugely signifcant element of this project. My theoretical pro-
cess began to explore loss, grief, and the value of objects left behind by a family
member. My work examined the relation between memory, maternal loss, and the
belongings a person leaves behind and considered the additional dynamics of those
belongings being a body of artistic work.
Exploring the fragments of her life, ordering, categorizing, sorting, brought her
to life again. It brought memories of our relationship, of her voice and her way
of seeing to the forefront of my mind. Susan Hiller explains her working through
of objects in the Freud Museum collection as understanding “what the resonance
might be for [her]”.2 My practice developed this notion, frst by understanding
The Museum of Ordinary People 87
each object’s connection personally and artistically and also in the way in which
I immersed myself in the object’s history, responding by creating artistic reactions
to the themes I encountered. The “working through” became a way of healing and
of learning that these everyday objects carry weighted layers of meaning.
Throughout this process three key things emerged:
1. Whilst looking through her sketchbooks and lists, I observed that recipes for
“the best” roast potatoes were written on post-it notes haphazardly stuck to
paint recipes. In shopping lists gouache paint sat next to mayonnaise, as though
each was an ingredient in the same recipe. The domestic and the creative lived
side by side, echoing the nature of my mother’s own existence; artist/parent –
coexisting. The domestic and creative parts of her life, intrinsically woven
together.
2. Whilst “working through” I began to realize how performative this pro-
cess was. At times I felt I was mirroring her work, performing her practice.
I cleared the space in the same way, prepping for work as she had. My clothes
became covered in paint, my hands adopted her mannerisms. By immersing
myself in her belongings, her artwork, I brought her to life within me. This
embodied practice allowed me a greater connection to the objects and to her
story. The embodied approach added to the understanding, the depth, and the
knowledge that the process produced.
3. During this process I kept encountering random objects, and I could not
comprehend their relation to, or understand their value to, my mother. Items
such as broken plates wrapped carefully, little plastic bags flled with fragments
of old wallpaper, each with a title i.e. “Rees Campion, one day”, bits of old
hardened paint. Old paint stirrers, thick with years of paint, cut in slices to
expose the paint layers like rings on a tree. I placed all of the items that per-
plexed me in the corner of the studio on a set of shelves. These damaged,
everyday objects were at once familiar but also alien in their meaning, uncanny
as Freud would say. One day, whilst looking through a box of lists, I came
across one that was titled and underlined “Future Work” and every single
object that was on those shelves was on that list. I realized that these objects
comprised her next exhibition, her next series of work. I began to research
through her sketchbooks, and, using what I found alongside my knowledge
and embodiment of her practice, I fnished those pieces of work, turning the
once confusing objects into artworks. This is what I displayed at the My Late
Mother’s Future Work exhibition (Figure 6.1).
These key discoveries added to a realization of the power of the ordinary object to
tell stories, teach us, and hold memories. It showed me the power of these objects
through a diferent lens. The feedback from those who viewed this work revealed
a connection people had felt with the objects and my mother’s story. It made me
understand the emotive power that displaying these objects can have and that this
power can lead to connection and belonging.
88 Lucy Malone
FIGURE 6.1 My Late Mother’s Future Work (2017).
During the period that I was exhibiting this work, a friend suggested I attend
a walking tour of Brighton, led by theatre producer, Jolie Booth. The Hip Trip of
Brighton tour (Figure 6.2) was archival-based, following the life of a woman called
Anne Clarke, telling her story while walking the streets of Brighton.
In a personal interview with myself, Booth describes how she moved into a
squat in central Brighton in the early 2000s and, upon opening the door, came
across a home, left as if frozen in time. Booth says: “The furniture was gone, but the
ornaments, clothes, letters, diaries, photos and music, all the personal possessions of
a human being were there”. She kept hold of the diaries and letters she found for
years, not knowing what to do with them but not being able to throw them away.
Years later, she returned to read these diaries and letters and uncovered the tragic
story of Anne’s life.
It was a story tinged with loneliness, addiction, and an untimely end. A personal
story, a hard life, a lived female experience, one that is real, relatable, and often
left untold – Booth recognized the need for such a story to be told. Anne’s story
on a greater level also told the story of counter-culture Brighton in the 1960s to
1980s. Realizing that recording Anne’s story preserved both an intimate and cul-
tural narrative.
After the walking tour, Jolie and I got talking and realized there were strong
parallels in our work. We were both working with collections that told stories of
women. Everyday stories that would not normally be recorded in history books or
FIGURE 6.2 Hip Trip of Brighton.
make it into museums or archives. We recognized that, on an everyday level, the

lives of Bridgette Malone and Anne Clarke were both important, with valuable,
female narratives to share. They had stories to tell that not only represented their
own experience but told the story of a wider culture. We were both working with
the objects they left behind. As the artist Ilya Kabakov states, these things are not
just objects but: “Grouped together, bound in folders, these papers comprise the
single uninterrupted fabric of an entire life”.3
Making a museum
Jolie and I discussed how people had been repeatedly telling us that they identi-
fed with our work, that they saw their own experiences refected back at them.
People would say that they had their own collections that told someone’s story but
90 Lucy Malone
that they did not know what to do with them. Jolie shared her idea of making a
“museum of ordinary people” and I knew this was the perfect next step for our
shared desire to create a platform for these stories.
We began the process of starting the museum by exploring our beliefs. We
wanted to make a new kind of museum that considers the magic and mundanity
of everyday life in a complex, engaging, and dynamic way. Understanding and
acknowledging the diferences in our experiences but also the connections that we
fnd with one another, celebrating the ripples that we all leave behind.
Could we ofer a space to not only share those stories but also to empower and
facilitate? Not to direct but to cocurate? To disrupt hierarchies and rewrite narra-
tives? We decided to create a pop-up museum for the 2018 Brighton Fringe Fes-
tival and hold an exhibition at The Spire, an old church that now is an arts venue.
The only remaining question was, what to exhibit?
We reviewed the processes and methodologies we had both previously used. We
had both learnt from the objects Anne and Bridgette had left behind and used crea-
tive mediums and practice to explore the themes prevalent in the collections. We
considered how we could adapt these methods to facilitate others to do the same
in order to tell their own stories.
We developed a model and formulated a series of workshops. Designing them
to be as accessible as possible, with no prerequisite for any previous artistic or aca-
demic experience necessary to take part. The workshops would be held over an
eight-week period and involve a mixture of theory and practice. We ofered an
inclusive program, with guest speakers and a focus on sharing thoughts and ideas to
create a safe space – in the frst group session, we collaboratively designed guide-
lines to foster that environment.
We published a call-out in order to fnd local people that had a collection of
objects that told a story about someone’s life, and we had an amazing response.
We met as many people as we could, asking them about their collections, talking
through the workshop process and what to expect, as well as examining the ethi-
cal considerations of their specifc collections. We then selected nine people based
on the variety of their stories as well as their personal readiness to deal with their
collection.
Throughout the workshops, we explored the objects in their collections through
writing, reading, playing, and sharing. We spoke about material culture, curation,
archives, collections and museum practices. We started a daily writing practice
to allow people to record their emotions and thoughts when working with their
collections, and we learned creative skills as ways of playing or working with their
collections – including performance, creative writing, photography, collage, dis-
play, and exhibition making.
The process resulted in participants fnding space to share, forming friendships,
and gaining a sense of accomplishment about their work. In a lot of cases this also
meant feeling they had honored the memory of the person whose collection they
were caretaker of. The participants’ feedback revealed how the work and space
were both reparative and healing. Each participant then created an exhibit based
FIGURE 6.3 MOOP’s frst exhibition at The Spire, Brighton (2018).
on a combination of the themes that had emerged during the process, the elements
that were important for them to share and the artwork they had produced. This
culminated in each participant creating a stand-alone installation displayed in our
pop-up museum (Figure 6.3), two examples of which are explored in the follow-
ing images.
Wandering around a car boot sale, Clair Morrow came across a collection of
approximately 30 diaries in a vintage handbag. Clair felt she had to rescue these
diaries. They were very small, quite ordinary “day diaries” ranging from 1962
to 1992. When she began to read them, she found simple daily entries of hair
appointments, what was on the television that night, interspersed with cultural
occurrences, the death of Elvis, the 1970s London IRA bombings. As Clair read
these diaries, she also discovered more: a love afair with a married man and, tragi-
cally, Mary’s diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis and her demise from this disease. This
story had synchronicities with Clair’s own life, having just been tested for the same
disease due to a hereditary condition in her own family.
Clair felt that she needed to share Mary’s story. This life lived and these dia-
ries, so carefully kept and written in for 30 years, deserved to be protected. Clair
took part in the MOOP workshops and developed a beautiful, moving piece (Fig-
ure 6.4). The diaries were exhibited in an open bureau, set in a living room. Visi-
tors could sit at the desk, take up a pair of headphones, and hear a layered audio
piece with Clair reading sample entries from the diaries, slowly building toward the
last years of Mary’s life. This piece worked on so many levels. Physically inhabiting
the ordinary space of the living room situated the listener. It could have been any of
our living rooms, any of our chairs. The audio took you on a journey and power-
fully led you through the simple entries to learn about Mary’s life.
One of our most enquired about pieces in MOOP’s frst exhibition related to
a collection of letters. Bridget Prince had been a 15-year-old punk in the 1990s
when her school asked her to write to a soldier fghting in the Gulf War. The
staunchly antiwar Bridget struck up an unlikely connection with him that grew as
92 Lucy Malone
FIGURE 6.4 The Diaries of Mary Booth, Clair Morrow (2018), an exhibit at MOOP’s
frst exhibition.
their correspondence continued. Through his letters, you see the care and the con-
nection that grew, against the odds. Bridget produced an installation that showed
her 15-year-old bedroom juxtaposed with that of the Gulf desert where the soldier
was writing from, visually split by the letters highlighted and hung ready for the
audience to read while in the middle of the space (Figure 6.5). These artefacts
were not only a collection of personal letters but a collection that recognized these
alternate experiences in the 1990s as something culturally relevant.
In addition to these pieces developed with our participants for the frst
MOOP exhibition, we also worked with three local organizations to develop
installations that shared the experiences of their communities. The frst of these
was Miss Represented – a collective of young women that produce powerful art-
work to explore their own life experiences and incite change. They created a
FIGURE 6.5 Dear Punk Princess, Bridget Prince (2018), an exhibit at MOOP’s frst
exhibition.
thought-provoking and gentle piece of participatory work about worries and

support (Figure 6.6).
We also worked in partnership with domestic violence charity RISE to create
an exhibit that communicated the experience of people who had sufered domestic
abuse (Figure 6.7). We exhibited a jar of keys, placed alone on a plinth. At frst
glance, this was just a jar of keys, but when you read the exhibit blurb, you saw
that each key was “deposited by a woman fnally saying goodbye to her old life and
home, and taking a step away from her abuser”.
With PACT (a Brighton-based adoption charity), we curated an exhibit of items
that were purposefully donated by adoptive parents, children, and social workers,
who had been asked to submit an object that was signifcant to them during the
adoption process. We wanted to tell a real, lived story of that journey (Figure 6.8).
The exhibit included simple objects, for example a packet of Ariel washing pow-
der displayed with the caption: “My child found it easier to move from their foster
home to their new permanent home when their clothes smelt the same, at least one
thing wouldn’t change for them”.
All of these diferent exhibits discussed earlier contributed to our successful
exhibition that ran for a week and attracted hundreds of visitors. The incredible
94 Lucy Malone
FIGURE 6.6 MOOP exhibit created in collaboration with Miss Represented (2018).
feedback received resoundingly confrmed that the work was relatable, emotive,
and connecting.
Objects
As is evident, the everyday is at the core of what we do. Why? Quite simply
because everyday objects are relatable and evocative; the substance that our lives
quietly revolve around. Miller illustrates this beautifully, stating: “Objects make
people. Before we can make things, we are ourselves grown up and matured in the
light of things that come down to us from previous generations”.4
By exhibiting these often-overlooked objects, we expand what objects and nar-
ratives are considered valuable and why. We disrupt traditional curation and sup-
port the decolonializing of museums by ofering an alternative fraught cultural
FIGURE 6.7 MOOP exhibit created in collaboration with RISE (2018).
history by displaying objects with noncomplex histories but with social, cultural,
and evocative value and relevance. Everyday objects of this nature accrue layers of
memory and meaning, as well as creating connection and belonging through rec-
ognition. Turkle explains:
We fnd it familiar to consider objects as useful or aesthetic, as necessities or

vain indulgences. We are on less familiar ground when we consider objects as
companions to our emotional lives or provocations to thoughts.5
When you put an object into a museum, in a case or vitrine, when you – “museumify”
it, you elevate it. The museum setting here is seen as equally important to the
resultant dialogue as the presence of the ordinary object. E-J Scott, Founder of the
Museum of Transology (MoT), when speaking about the MoT collection in a private
96 Lucy Malone
FIGURE 6.8 MOOP exhibit created in collaboration with PACT (2018).
interview with myself, takes this further stating that the refection of the glass in a
museum display case refects the viewer directly onto the object, stating:
You are looking through and transposing your own self onto the object, so
this further reinforces the idea that me, and this object, and the person who
this object is about all are sharing something in this moment.
Scott then expands on why the connection between viewer and object is improved
when ordinary objects are displayed:
Everyday objects hold a unique power in their ability to disrupt preconceived

misconceptions that underpin discrimination. Take the Museum of Transol-
ogy. You come into a recognised museum holding certain ideas about trans
people instilled by the media, but you stumble into the MoT exhibition
by chance because it is on display in that public museum. You see a regular

lipstick in the glass case – not Chanel or Yves Saint Laurent – but a regular
lipstick from Boots. You see it and think, I have one of those, or my sister
has one of those, or I remember my mum had one of those. . . [and] . . . for
that moment your recollection is entirely involuntary. As a human being, you
cannot control that, you cannot stop it from happening and so before you can
remember that you hate trans people, you have something in common with
trans people, and so it acts as an agent of disruption.
MOOP momentum
Since our launch exhibition in 2018, MOOP has gained momentum. We have
run talks and events with themes such as “The Future of Museums” and “Social
Action”, as well as producing an event for the 2019 Brighton Fringe Festival called
MOOP:STORIES, which responded to feedback that our audiences wanted to
know more about the participants and each of their personal synchronicities and
relation to their collection. We worked with participants to reimagine their exhib-
its into new formats, including performance, audio-video pieces, and talks, thread-
ing in their own stories to the narrative and individual work. We then shared them
in a series of evening events based around three themes; “Found”, “Connection”,
and “Legacy”. MOOP:STORIES has since become a tool for outreach, taking our
project to new areas, connecting with potential participants who have collections,
and showing what can be done with them.
In 2019, we released a project called MOOP:JOURNALS, which involves
sending out plain journals to participants around the UK. We ask people to add
a story of an everyday object that is signifcant for them in their life. They can
explore this object as creatively as they wish; adding images, stitch or collage, for
example. They then send this journal to the next participant. In this way, we are
sharing stories across the UK. We are challenging both the accepted notions of
“a collection” and “a museum”. Until a notebook is full, we do not know what
is inside and cannot control the exhibition or curate the narrative. It is a way of
subverting power and control, as well as improving accessibility to museums by
taking a museum collection into the home, directly to the people who want to
see it.
MOOP now has a board of trustees. We developed our “MOOPIFESTO” in
a nonhierarchical workshop, where the museum’s audience, participants, trustees,
and volunteers came up with themes they felt were important for us to form and
direct our practice and ethos. This workshop also defned our ethical and sustain-
able guidelines and so collaboratively created and directed our practice. We believe
in a model of horizontal, nonhierarchical, facilitatory praxis and in equipping peo-
ple with the tools to speak for themselves.
We are currently developing our rapid response archive, Collecting Contemporary
Culture. Initiated in 2019, this part of our museum understands the importance of
collecting history as it happens. This collection so far includes stories and objects
98 Lucy Malone
FIGURE 6.9 MOOP:JOURNALS – MOOP’s traveling, participatory collection of

journals.
collected by our volunteers at 2019 Brighton Pride, ephemera from 2019 London/
Brighton Extinction Rebellion protests, 2020 Black Lives Matter protest placards
and photography, and our These Times project – a collection of more than 50
physical and digital journals, photographs, and video diaries relating to participants’
everyday experience during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The emerging canon

Museums have authority. They are spaces that frame, identify, and solidify the mes-
sages we, our country, our culture wants to share and to teach, what history “says
happened”, what truths are recorded. Museums give value to identity and experi-
ence. This has been used to limit, to defne, and to overpower; however, it can also
be used to subvert, to challenge, and to empower.
Orhan Pamuk, curator of the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, in his modest

manifesto for museums expresses that, “The measure of a museum’s success should
not be its ability to represent a state, nation or company, or a particular history. It
should be its capacity to reveal the humanity of individuals”.6
ICOM, The International Council of Museums, are in the middle of a dispute about
the defnition of museum, with the new (hopeful) defnition causing much outrage.
The new defnition claims that museums should be “democratising, inclusive and
polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures”.7
At MOOP we see the museum as an active and generative space, responsive,
creative, and participatory, and we are not alone. We sit alongside many other
emerging organizations that are utilizing the power of creating a new museum to
share traditionally overlooked experiences, to educate, to pluralize narratives, and
to rewrite history as a multivoice space. Later I share some current examples of this
practice that situates The Museum of Ordinary People within the emerging canon of
new museums, while considering the museum itself as an agent of – and site to
enact – social change that expands and supports the value and impact of the every-
day object and record of everyday narratives.
The Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb opened in 2010. It is a museum
that collects objects from the public that relate to real stories of past loves, heart-
break, and romantic relationships that have ended. The collection is powerful, sad,
emotive, and funny, but, most of all, it makes you feel that you are not alone. It
records the nature of contemporary love, relationships, and experiences, whilst also
uniting us in one of life’s most inevitable and enduring experiences.
The Museum of Homelessness was created in 2015, developed by people with
direct experience of homelessness. They state that they “created a museum based
on a social need”.8 A “community driven, social justice museum”.9 Their remit is
to raise awareness of homelessness and give space to voices and lived experiences
that are traditionally not shared. They are consciously seeing the power of the
museum model to enact change, as well as to develop connections, evocatively
stating that, “Together we fnd hope in deeply divided and difcult times”.10 In
2020 The Museum of Homelessness team created The Museum of the Home Ofce, a
new street museum to call for an end to the hatred, poverty, and destitution caused
by Home Ofce policies and the targeting of vulnerable people by far-right activ-
ists, stating “Until we get our own building, you can fnd us on the street”.11 The
Museum of Homelessness has made waves. Its practice not only confronts govern-
mental issues, but also promotes homeless artists and works with people who have
experienced homelessness. They don’t claim that their work is activist but instead
posit it as common sense.12
The Museum of Transology (MoT), a powerful and emotive project, initially ft into
a cupboard. Originally displayed in The Marlborough, a queer venue in Brighton
in 2014, it is now the largest collection of trans-related objects in the UK. The
collection was recently shown at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery (2017–2019)
drawing an unprecedented visitor number from LGBTIQ+ demographics and
beyond and is now homed permanently at the Bishopsgate Archives in London.
100 Lucy Malone
In a personal interview with myself, Founder E-J Scott explains the motivation to
create the MoT:
Richard Sandell says that the trans tipping point was 2014, so that is a really
good way of locating this spike in the spectacularization of trans lives in the
media. It also is a good way of locating a shift in the nation’s understanding
of the parameters of gender.
. . . but in response, museums (not least because they are massive machines)
weren’t reacting to this monumental moment in social history – potentially
as signifcant as the third wave of feminism in its progression of gender poli-
tics – by rapid response collecting. They weren’t collecting this monumental
shift in gender awareness, and seemed either disinterested or incapable of
capturing this moment in time.
. . . So I felt like as a historian, and a museum practitioner, and then in
my personal life a trans person, it was up to me, with these three entwined
understandings motivated me to take action. I felt compelled to build a
collection that halted the erasure of transcestry and prevented historians in
100 years’ time relying on the same materials we use to look for gay men
in the past – legal records, medical records, media reports, none of which
include our own voices. It had to be archivally robust enough to save the
voices, not just the objects.
E-J asked people to send in objects that were important to them, explaining their
signifcance in a caption. The tags and objects are archived as one object; both must
be kept and displayed together ensuring the voice and the narrative stays true to
the person originally telling the story. During our interview, when I ask: “Why
produce a museum?”, Scott states:
To rob the sector of the hierarchy or the status that is attached to museums
as institutions, and re-appropriate that power by putting it into the hands of
the donors of that collection. It both challenges and harnesses the heritage
sector’s authority, whilst simultaneously empowering a misrepresented and
underprivileged community that is invisible within that sector to engage
with that sector.
The MoT collection is powerful, emotive, raw, and evocative. The valuing
of these objects, seemingly used and ordinary but also extraordinary and loved,
full of layers of meaning, elevates people’s experiences and creates a presence and
impact that could not be achieved through words alone. The cultural hegemony
that mainstream curatorial control has over how we view the narratives of the past
is essential to diversify from if we wish to have the opportunity to learn from the
full range of human experience, particularly from those groups of society that have
been maligned, discriminated against, ignored, and repressed. Museums like the
MoT are so important as they allow for a complex, nuanced, and lived experience
to be shared and learned from. So often history is told through limited voices,
those “in power” allowing for little or no progress to be made against regimes and
limiting practices. For progress to be made, the status quo must constantly be chal-
lenged, and museums ofer a unique opportunity to disrupt, evolve, and promote
alternative narratives.
Driven by a need to initiate change; raise awareness; amplify; pluralize; empa-
thize; connect; and educate, the previous examples illustrate the power of what
“museum” making can do. We may not all have a permanent building, but we are
disrupting existing museums, bringing a fresh approach, being adaptive and quick,
recognizing a need for engagement and resonance. Starting from scratch, making
a new museum provides us with the opportunity to reevaluate the parameters.
Big institutions come with baggage, but outside of that constraint we can begin
anew, embracing challenges, providing space to redefne our shared and lived nar-
ratives, to celebrate our intimate and personal stories and to foster connection and
empathy.
The next step

Through this chapter I have given examples of projects that actively understand the
value of lived experience and everyday objects as tools to celebrate the magic of
everyday experience. The wealth of emerging museums developing this practice
and style of work, the raised levels of engagement, positive feedback, and resonance
with participants and audiences confrms that this mode of working is successful. In
a time where traditional museums are fghting against their own histories, it is clear
that new museums – and new working methods that accurately portray our society
by amplifying less-heard voices – should be embraced.
Perhaps the next step is for large institutions to work with these smaller alter-
native organizations to share resources, to fairly share ideas, and to help create a
symbiotic dialogue that progresses cultural representation to a place appropriate for
our times, starting with shifting the balance of power in our exhibitions and creat-
ing a space for all of society to fnally have its say and be seen as valid, beautiful, and
inspirational inside and outside our hallowed curated museums. This is the wonder
of the everyday, the meaning that the ordinary enriches us with.
Notes
1 “Join The Movement,” accessed March 24, 2021, www.museumsarenotneutral.com
2 ‘ “From the Freud Museum,” Tate, accessed March 24, 2021, www.tate.org.uk/art/
artworks/hiller-from-the-freud-museum-t07438
3 Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1996).
4 Daniel Miller, Stuf (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 53.
5 Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects. Things We Think With (Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 2007), 5.
6 “A Modest Manifesto For Museums,” The Museum Of Innocence, accessed March 24,
2021, https://en.masumiyetmuzesi.org/page/a-modest-manifesto-for-museums.
102 Lucy Malone
7 “ICOM Announces The Alternative Museum Defnition That Will Be Subject

To A Vote,” ICOM, accessed March 24, 2021, https://icom.museum/en/news/
icom-announces-the-alternative-museum-defnition-that-will-be-subject-to-a-vote/.
8 “Activism, Homelessness and a New Kind of Museum,” Museum ID, accessed March 24,
2021, https://museum-id.com/activism-homelessness-new-kind-museum/.
9 "About Us,” Museum of Homelessness, accessed March 24, 2021, https://museumof-
homelessness.org/about/.
10 Ibid.
11 “Street Museum Every Week on Thursdays,” Museum of Homelessness, accessed
March 24, 2021, https://museumofhomelessness.org/2020/09/08/streetmuseum-launch
ing-on-10-september/.
12 “Activism, Homelessness and a New Kind of Museum,” Museum ID, accessed Novem-
ber 30, 2020, https://museum-id.com/activism-homelessness-new-kind-museum/.
7
EVERYDAY LIFE IN A HERITAGE
VILLAGE
Film as a process of research and
engagement
Mark Thomas and Suzanne MacLeod
Introduction
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), CineMuseSpace:
A Cinematic Musée Imaginaire of Spatial Cultural Diferences was led by a team in the
School of Architecture, University of Cambridge with research teams at the Uni-
versity of Leicester’s Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG) and the
School of Architecture at the University of Nanjing. By looking at representations
of lived spaces in flm – as a form of “spatial ethnography” in which flms make
visible “how we live, love, work and sleep in buildings” – and exploring the ways
in which specifc spatial elements such as doorways or windows were lived, the
project would generate new insights into everyday ways of being in space that were
culturally specifc. Through the creation of a database of cinematic images from
flms representative of the Western “naturalism” tradition (Europe, USA) and the
Eastern “analogism” tradition (China, Japan), the aim of the project was to enable
the cross-cultural study of everyday spaces and activities (eating, sitting, bathing,
cleaning) and explore the ways in which our cultural experiences might impact on
the way in which we conceive of, inhabit, and design, everyday space.
A key component of CineMuseSpace was a desire to engage architects, designers,
policy-makers, and broader publics with the concepts and fndings of the research,
an aspect of the project that would be developed through a series of public-facing
exhibitions. Experiments with flm in the gallery space also related to RCMG’s
ongoing research interest in modes of physical and social museum engagement
with the potential to embed museums more frmly in our everyday lives, that is,
forms of museum work and design that might enable groups and individuals to
draw museums and their resources into the web of social relations that comprise
their lived experience. As a route toward this, the project involved partnerships
with three cultural organizations, National Museums Liverpool (NML), the Centre
DOI: 10.4324/9781003107309-10
104 Mark Thomas and Suzanne MacLeod
for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA) in Manchester, and the Art Museum of
Nanjing University of the Arts in China, with very diferent approaches taken
toward the project with each partner. In Nanjing, members of the Cambridge
research team worked with a group of students to explore the project concepts and
generate a series of pop-up exhibitions and at CFCCA; new content taken directly
from the core research was added to an already planned exhibition called Future
Cities: Technopolis and Everyday Life.
This chapter focuses on the approach taken at National Museums Liverpool
where, in the context of a socially engaged and driven museums service, the deci-
sion was made to move away from the presentation of flm to an audience and to,
instead, explore flmmaking itself as a process of engagement and as a mechanism
for drawing attention to and understanding more about everyday spatial practices.
The focus for the project would be Port Sunlight, a decision taken by the NML
team based on their initial understanding of the CineMuseSpace project and what
was practicable within the organization. An early example of a garden village that
draws on ideas from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Aesthetic and
Arts and Crafts movements, Port Sunlight is a heritage village close to Liverpool.
It was founded in 1888 by William Hesketh Lever and his brother to house the
workers at their soap factory, Lever Brothers (now Unilever). Set in 130 acres of
parkland and gardens and a conservation area since 1978, today Port Sunlight con-
tains over 900 Grade II-listed buildings and is home to Unilever, a trans-national
corporation employing 2,300 people in manufacturing, research and development,
and in its global IT hub. The village, landscape, and most of the heritage buildings
are now managed and run by Port Sunlight Village Trust, except for the Lady Lever
Art Gallery, which is managed by National Museums Liverpool. Around 300,000
visitors come to the village each year to see key landmarks such as Christ Church,
Lady Lever Art Gallery, the war memorial and Leverhulme memorial, and to enjoy
the open spaces and eclectic period architecture.
Between March and September 2019, the research team – comprising RCMG,
Soup Collective, residents of Port Sunlight, PSVT, and NML – worked together to
explore the emergent database of flms produced by the core CineMuseSpace team,
refect on life in a heritage village, and make a flm of their own. What followed
was a fascinating experimental project revealing of the potential of flm as a mecha-
nism for both scholarly research and meaningful museum engagement. The project
generated new insights about everyday life in a heritage setting of great signifcance
to the participants and researchers and resulted in a form of museum engagement
that reached far beyond the themes and content of CineMuseSpace to build new
relationships and understanding between residents and project partners and open
up new orientations toward Lady Lever Art Gallery. In a project about physical
built forms and life that built on questions of the production of space through life
or by design and recognition of the way our built environments can both stife
and enhance life, Port Sunlight turned out to be the most inspired of choices. The
project drew to the surface the emotional lives of residents as well as some of the
anxieties behind the marketed image of Port Sunlight and generated a process of
Everyday life in a heritage village 105
relationship building that resulted in moments of deep human signifcance of great

interest to both researchers and museum makers.
Space, flm, and everyday practices

CineMuseSpace was underpinned by a sophisticated understanding of both the built
environment and cinema. In terms of the built environment, the project drew
on a rich lineage of writers on space and everyday life, including Henri Lefeb-
vre, Georges Perec, and Gaston Bachelard, whose ideas have been key in locating
architecture as the spatial language of society and the medium through which life
is lived and relationships to self, others, and environment are shaped. A perspec-
tive that works to draw the quotidian into view and seeks to draw attention to the
everyday use of space – the small ways in which we inhabit, use, and are shaped by
specifc spatial forms as part of our complex lives – such a view of space and expe-
rience has great signifcance for the study and design of museums and the ways in
which museums and galleries, as part of the contemporary social landscape, might
fulfl their roles as public spaces dedicated to the living of life.1 Put diferently, such
knowledge might better enable us to ask how museums might operate beyond their
conventional distanced and distancing forms and, instead, be produced in ways that
draw them into the webs of social relations that comprise our complex everyday
lives.
In terms of cinema, Lefebvre emphasized the eforts that cinema had made “to
get closer to the ‘lived’, to eliminate the arbitrary transpositions of the everyday, to
grasp ‘what is extraordinary within the ordinary’, and ‘the signifcance of the insig-
nifcant’”.2 Film here was understood as an untapped archive of everyday spatial
practice with the potential to reveal, for architects and planners, the lived realities
of specifc spatial forms across cultures.
In RCMG, all of these ideas spoke to a lineage of practice-centered research
undertaken in the Centre. Seeking to reshape museums and their potential to sup-
port and bear a wider range of relationships and opportunities for experience than
those evident in the majority of cultural organizations and often focused around
a specifc social issue or theme, RCMG had developed a fexible and adaptable
method for collaborative, practice-centered research comprising deep engagement
with the specifcs of the cultural institution, the collaborative exploration of the
research puzzle with the organization, and a process where questions were worked
through by the whole research team rigorously and, importantly, in practice. The
methodology was recognized as having great potential to harness the CineMuseSpace
research toward a deeper understanding of museum space and experience. As a
research team, RCMG liked the idea that the Cambridge research might generate
understanding of how our cultural conditioning means that we inhabit and expe-
rience space diferently, and we wondered how this understanding might inform
aspects of museum making – how might that knowledge itself shape the commu-
nication and experience of the research to broader constituencies, and how might
it inform broader processes of museum making?
An opening workshop: moving beyond research

dissemination
The Port Sunlight project emerged from a two-day workshop to mark the start of
the formal collaboration with the UK-based cultural partners in July 2018. Intended
to actively counter conventional notions of research dissemination and common
conceptions of museum space as a potential site for the sharing of research gener-
ated in the academy and to generate, instead, a partnership approach to knowledge
production, the Workshop provided an opportunity for the Cambridge team to
share their emergent research fndings – at this stage they had developed their
protocols and were partway through the analysis of hundreds of flms – and for the
cultural partners (NML and CFCCA) to talk about their organizations, their audi-
ences, ongoing programming, and desired social impact. For the RCMG team, in
addition to providing an opportunity to generate a dialogue and ideas in the space
between the research and specifcs of the cultural organizations, the workshop
provided an opportunity to share with partners the notion of practice-centered
research and, based on earlier RCMG projects, its methodology for co-working
and the generation of new insights in and through museum practice. Approached as
a dialogue and with a determination to hear all voices and generate equitable rela-
tionships, over two days we worked through a series of choreographed activities to
FIGURE 7.1 Opening workshop in the School of Museum Studies, University of

Leicester.
draw out themes from the Cambridge research, explore the themes in the context
of NML and CFCCA and their audiences, and develop, through a collaborative
process, an idea for where and how the research might be of relevance.
At this stage we were still thinking very much along the lines of gallery-based
exhibition and interpretation. We were excited by the challenge of utilizing the
core project research to enhance the work of our museum partners. We wanted to
explore how the research might enhance the work of the museum partners and play
a role in generating new visitor experiences. With one of our partners, CFCCA,
our prior sense of how the research would progress unfolded as anticipated; the
workshop process enabled us to make links to a planned exhibition theme, and
preliminary plans were developed to utilize the research from CineMuseSpace to
enhance the planned exhibition. With one or two changes, these plans were taken
forward in what would become the Future Cities: Technopolis and Everyday Life
exhibition at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA) in Manchester
(2 August to 19 October 2019).
For colleagues from National Museums Liverpool, however, the workshop pro-
cess was less straightforward. If the academic ideas behind and focus of CineMuseSpace
resonated strongly with the approach to research and a curator-led exhibition pro-
gram at CFCCA and sat comfortably within the Future Cities theme, in the context
of National Museums Liverpool, possibly the UK’s most socially engaged museum
service, the research had less interest in and of itself, and the team’s focus shifted to
questions of how the research might support the aims of NML to diversify its pro-
gramming and deepen its links with local partner organizations and communities.
All conversations pointed toward the appropriateness of Lady Lever Art Gallery in
Port Sunlight as the location for the exploration of the research and toward some
kind of participatory project. Director of Art Galleries and Collections Care, San-
dra Penketh, recognized that CineMuseSpace and its emphasis on space and people
could bring “an interesting edge to what we’re doing at the Lady Lever Art Gallery
and support the work that we’re doing with Port Sunlight Village Trust and the
local community”.3 In an organization absolutely rooted in and focused on place
and where building deeper relationships with local audiences and partners was of
highest priority, utilizing flm as a process to understand more about life in Port
Sunlight and in order to deepen relationships between Lady Lever Art Gallery and
local organizations and residents was recognised as holding great potential. With
little detail agreed on about how the project would progress, a decision was taken
to make a flm of our own, to generate a creative and participatory process, draw-
ing on the concepts and themes of CineMuseSpace and in full partnership with the
residents of Port Sunlight, through which new insights about everyday life in a
heritage village might be produced and shared. How, we asked, might flm and a
CineMuseSpace-style exploration of the relations between the built environment
of Port Sunlight and the lived experiences of residents open up engagement with
the research but also, even more importantly, within and among the residents and
institutions of Port Sunlight?
A workshop structure
Rather than utilizing flm as an archive, the process of making a flm was harnessed
to explore with residents their experiences of and relationship to the heritage vil-
lage, providing new perspectives on contemporary life and, at the same time, devel-
oping and evolving relationships between the organizations involved with Port
Sunlight (NML, PSVT) and the community. The flm was developed through a
creative and participatory process that relied on the active involvement and col-
laboration of residents as well as the partner organizations (Lady Lever Art Gallery
and Port Sunlight Village Trust). Filmmaker Mark Thomas from Soup Collective
(http://soupcollective.co.uk/) was commissioned to develop the flm collabora-
tively with the community and the partners and also to bring a strong creative
direction to the flm. Utilizing the PSVT website for announcements and Bridge
Cottage (the community Hub and one-time home of Lord Lever and his family)
as a space for meetings, the team began to talk publicly about the project and to
encourage residents to get involved. Residents were initially recruited through the
Trust, via letter drop, email, social media, and the village notice board. Claire Bates
(Community Engagement Ofcer, PSVT) also used her connections within the
community “to try and encourage them to take part in this, and explain to them
what it was all about”. The team worked hard to attract a diverse range of residents
from diferent backgrounds and stages of life. Because the focus was on people’s
everyday experiences, getting the community’s support and buy-in for the project
was essential: as Mark explained, “it’s a big ask to get to people’s homes in the frst
place”.
Once contact was made, a series of semi-informal workshops was held with
residents to build relationships, generate a dialogue about the ideas behind the
CineMuseSpace project, forge a shared understanding of the purpose of the flm,
and begin to facilitate conversations about life in Port Sunlight that might feed the
flmmaking process. Workshops were facilitated by Suzanne MacLeod (Workshop
1) and Mark Thomas (Workshop 2 and 3).
• Workshop 1 provided a space for residents and colleagues from Port Sunlight
Village Trust to meet the research team and for the team to introduce the project
and test out the idea of working together to make a flm. The second part of the
workshop encouraged residents and representatives from the Village Trust to share
their experiences of life in Port Sunlight. Participants were asked questions about
what it was like to live and work in the village, to get, as resident Colin described
it, “a good rounded view of what life was like”. Those interested in remaining
involved in the project at the end of the workshop flled out contact sheets so that
Mark could make contact about flming and plans were made for Workshop 2
• Workshop 2 focused on flm. Utilizing a series of resources drawn directly
from the CineMuseSpace database, Mark shared some of his ideas about flm with
the residents. A number of flms created by Soup Collective were explored as inspi-
ration. Discussions focused on what participants enjoyed about the flms as well as
what they disliked. Wide ranging clips from the CineMuseSpace database generated
discussions around daily routines and the realities of life in Port Sunlight. At the
end of the workshop, dates were set up for initial flming of participants in their
homes
• Workshop 3 focused on spatial cultural diferences and comprised a session at
the Lady Lever Art Gallery to explore (often idealized) representations of everyday
life on objects and in paintings from China and Europe. The workshop was sup-
ported by Amy Barnes, a researcher from the University of Leicester with expertise
in Chinese collections.
Through the workshops, a number of recurring themes became apparent. Resi-
dents and colleagues from the Village Trust commented on or told stories that
revealed the tension between the formality and “rules” of living in a heritage vil-
lage and the lived experience of Port Sunlight. Similarly, the contrast between the
image of Port Sunlight projected externally and the realities of the physical spaces
occupied by residents as part of their daily lives emerged as a consistent point of
discussion. As the workshops progressed and the group began to settle, attention
moved to flming – with no script or specifc sense of what we would produce,
Mark began the flmmaking process with residents.
Making the flm: documentary as performance

The flmmaking process asked that Port Sunlight residents allow cameras into their
homes and into their lives. Seven residents expressed an interest in doing this, and
all of them stayed with the project throughout, becoming the focus for both the
research and the flm. As a mechanism for easing the strain of allowing a flmmaker
into their own personal space and lives, the flmmaking began with camera-free
group and individual discussions, allowing space and time to build conversations
started in Workshop 1 around the notion of home, spatial awareness, and life within
a heritage village. As part of this process, participants created audio “walks” through
the home, which sparked conversations around the diferent layouts of their houses;
residents were equally interested in explaining the layout of their own homes and
fnding out about the other participants’ homes and the diferences between them.
The one to one interviews brought out distinct, personal narratives around
themes of identity, isolation, community, and privacy. Echoing conversations in the
workshops, upkeep was a key theme, and the confux of pride in being part of such
a model environment and the anxiety of maintaining it. The distinction between
public and private came up in a number of ways across the conversations with all
residents navigating, in one way or another, how to maintain a sense of the per-
sonal in a public environment. In the wider perspective of living within a heritage
community there is, arguably, an understanding on the part of the residents that
they are on show to some extent. There is a sense of spectacle, in being part of the
makeup of the village, and as a resident within Port Sunlight you are consenting to
the public eye from the busloads of tourists that arrive daily. The status and legacy
of Port Sunlight invites a form of implied behavior – of pride in the community,
the upkeep of the communal spaces and, by extension, the home. Within this there
FIGURE 7.2 Valerie and Steve. Film still by Soup Collective.
is also an aspect of performance, of being part of a theatrical experience that plays

out daily. As one resident Steve pointed out:
it’s terrible I know to say this but one can feel superior. No I mean I don’t
mean that badly but when people actually stop you and say “Do you live
in the village?”, “What’s it like?”, which they do all time. Yeah. I love that.
This sense of theatre did inform the approach to the flming and, arguably, the
willingness of the participants to be involved. Valerie, a retired resident, became
a vital part of the flmmaking process through her energy and commitment, and
it was this awareness of the heritage and the romanticism of Port Sunlight that
Valerie brought to her own flming scenarios, bringing a distinct sense of author-
ship within her own environment and willingness to share her interests, activities,
and opinions.
The analogy of the theatre can be drawn on further, with the notion of the pre-
sented and the hidden from the public eye. The fronts of the houses, windows, and
gardens are resonant of the pros arch, framing the life lived, both historically and
in the present time, whereas the rear gardens, yards, and some communal spaces
are largely deemed “backstage”. Activities such as drying clothes, DIY, and home
exercise are all the preserve of backstage, evident on any walk around the alleys,
communal garage areas, and quadrants that join the backs of the houses. The flm
explored this with a number of the residents. One participant, Kathryn, recognised
this split identity, comfortable in greeting tourists who are, at times, literally at her
front door as she exits onto a prominent façade of the village, while her yard is very
much a private space, used for washing, bins, and a miniature tranquillity garden
complete with painted façade, wind chimes, and ornaments.
Following the initial flming in peoples’ homes, additional visits were made to
flm “set” sequences, sometimes asking residents to reenact the everyday actions
they had flmed the frst time. On arriving at her home to begin flming, Valerie
had prearranged a series of domestic activities including preparing a bread maker
and all the ingredients. Much discussion ensued around the processes – bread-
making included – that we would capture within the home, with Valerie “blocking”
FIGURE 7.3 Port Sunlight cofee morning. Film still by Soup Collective.
FIGURE 7.4 Colin at home. Film still by Soup Collective.
the action; both director and performer within her environment. This enhanced
awareness of personal domestic routines extended to many of the residents, with
participants willingly reenacting their own routines down to the fne minutiae.
Positions of keys, where coats hang, how doors are opened all became areas for dis-
cussion, ensuring the camera captured the true intent and execution of the action.
Moments where the flming consisted of capturing the residents at rest – read-
ing, sitting, watching TV – needed time to allow for the participants to settle in,
to overcome the sense of conspicuousness that the quiet and space can sometimes
invite. Equally less-visible aspects of life warranted an even greater sense of trust
between the participant and the flmmaker. Colin, a regular contributor during
the meetings and interviews and a key participant within the flming, agreed to
the capture of his shaving routine. Again, there was a sense of authorship to the
process, with Colin blocking the route to the bathroom and the various stages of
the process (how the door is pushed, how the light is switched on) before flming
commenced. These points within the flming often felt the most intimate both to
participant and flmmaker and required a strong sense of commitment on the part
of the participants, testament to their engagement over the duration of the project.
The unearthing of historic rituals and routines, unpicked during workshops
with the residents, the RCMG team, and the Lady Lever collections, allowed the
participants to refect on their own routines ahead of flming while also investigat-
ing how these actions are rendered within the collections. The theatrical came
into play again here, drawing on examples ranging from Ladies Maid Soaping Linen
by Robert Henry Morland (1716–1797) to The End of the Skein by Walter Denby
Sadler (1854–1923), often depicting romanticized takes on the mundane and the
everyday, something that resonates deeply within the Port Sunlight community.
For Valerie there was a sense that the flming process and resulting output allowed a
continuation of the legacy of Port Sunlight as a model example of community, with
her sense of pride evident throughout. Her own documentation of the Unilever
factory gardens – images she takes every year and passes on to the grounds keepers
for posterity – is testament to this, as is her pride in wanting to showcase her own
front garden during the flming process, adding to the archives of the future.
The flmmaking process invited participants to refect on their own routines and
rituals. In the case of Hannah and her son, Grey, it allowed a space to consider what
activities they would typically do together on an evening. This awareness of shared
activities, from cooking to playing board games and computer games through to
putting the bins out and eating tea, provoked a sense of refection from Hannah, a
notable warmth and pride through considering the small familial rituals and activi-
ties that form part of the everyday. For the flmmaker, being able to capture this
was a privilege, capturing a recreation of a typical evening that shifted, over the
duration of the flming, from the performed to a more natural state, less aware of
the camera as the evening progressed.
The initial edit process mirrored aspects of the CineMuseSpace database approach,
using metadata to log scenes with keywords detailing actions, routines, and archi-
tectural details. From this point a series of single screen sketches were created
around key characters, actions, and spatial architecture, allowing time and space in
the edit for connections to emerge. The edit duties were split between Mark and
another editor from Soup, Maretha Ilves, bringing in another viewpoint to intuit
key moments and sequences from the volume of captured material. Movement,
framing, environments, and sound all came into play, with the diegetic soundtrack
from the bell ringers, the organist, and the choir gathering being key starting points
for sequences and scenarios to develop. The two-channel approach to the piece
allowed a sense of play to emerge around the residents and their environment,
using the diptych format to allow interplay between parallel characters, visitors,
FIGURE 7.5 Grey at home. Film still by Soup Collective.

and residents, and, at times, a sense of collectivism and shared experience within
the domestic routines and environments.
Some of the sketches were shared with the participants during the workshops
while the fnal flm was still in production. These excerpts were shown in conjunc-
tion with clips and scenes from some of the flms referenced by the CineMuseSpace
team such as An Autumn Afternoon (Ozu, 1962) and Happy Hour (Hamaguchi,
2015). Seeing depictions of themselves and their friends and neighbors in this con-
text helped to instill a sense of confdence and enthusiasm to continue, while also
refecting on the nature of performance – watching back their “work” and ofering
comment on their individual performances.
The screening: an outpouring of emotion and

research in action
The flmmaking process culminated in a celebratory event at the Lady Lever Art
Gallery where the flm was premiered on 10 September 2019 to an audience of
around 100 people, including participants in the flm, residents of Port Sunlight,
and the partner organizations. Purposefully staged to draw attention to the physi-
cal setting of Lady Lever Art Gallery and Port Sunlight more broadly, the even-
ing began with a reception in the spectacular Rotunda gallery. Anticipating the
experience of residents arriving at the gallery, the team at Lady Lever had opened
the south doors, creating a rare opportunity to approach the gallery through the
formal gardens and in the process drawing new attention to the physicality of the
art gallery by encouraging the performance of approaching and entering the gal-
lery along the grand boulevard. In line with the emphasis in the flm on the eve-
ryday routines and rituals of life in Port Sunlight, the change in orientation and
welcome generated a great sense of occasion. Following the reception and prior to
the screening of the flm in the Main Hall, Professor Francois Penz and Dr Janina
Schupp presented the fndings of the wider CineMuseSpace project. At the end
of the evening, following the screening, the research team and flmmaker Mark
FIGURE 7.6 Model of Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight Museum. Film still by
Soup Collective.
Thomas joined Suzanne on stage for a conversation with the audience about flm,
architecture, and everyday spatial practices.
During the screening itself, there was a mood of anticipation, an expectation
from the audience made up largely of the participants from the flm and their
families of seeing yourself and friends in much the same way Mitchell & Kenyon
screenings took place at the turn of the twentieth century. Whoops of recogni-
tion were audible throughout, and the chat that followed the screening provided a
platform for the audience to respond to the flm and the process. Hannah, one of
the lead participants from the project, brought up the concept of home and how,
through the flm, she had come to recognize Port Sunlight as a home for her son,
something she had not felt for herself due to a change in personal circumstances.
This personal refection on the process of engagement with the flm – the consid-
eration of routines, relationships, and rituals within the home – and the subsequent
viewing of the results depicting a vibrant, familial environment was a valuable out-
come, ofering up the critical space for participants outside of the academic realm
to engage with notions of everyday spatial practice within the home.
The signifcance of linking refections on everyday spatial practices in the village
and the process of flming and reenactment with the collections in Lady Lever Art
Gallery through the workshops emerged slowly for all involved. Residing in the
gallery in paintings and on so many precious objects and elevated in status as a result
were so many representations of everyday spatial practices, the mundane activities
of everyday life that we take for granted but that comprise our real lives and link
so frmly to our intimate sense of self and relation to others. The full signifcance
of these links became evident during the screening in the Gallery setting. In an
environment of such deep signifcance to all involved and from where a shared
conversation about the importance and value of the lives of residents emerged, the
screening transformed into a mass outpouring of emotion for the place, the people,
the experience of living there – in all its complexities – and the process of making
a flm together.
Conclusion
The decision to make rather than show flm in Port Sunlight opened up the pos-
sibility of active engagement and creative potential amongst all project partners –
residents, research partners, and cultural partners. Moving far beyond research
dissemination, the exploratory and experimental process of making the flm drew
the everyday actions and signifcance of Port Sunlight to the surface for participants
and led to an intimate look at a very special place and the people that live there,
revealing the juxtaposition between a busy visitor attraction and a place that is also
home to its many residents and is shaped through their everyday routines. It drew
attention to the emotional, as well as the routine practical and functional lives of
residents and how this was played out in spaces that are protected as heritage assets.
The experience proved insightful and deeply personal for all involved. A project that
pushed all participants to think beyond their usual roles – as conservator, as flm-
maker, as resident, and as participant – and through which a process of deep refec-
tion and exchange was facilitated, the project was revealing of the potential of flm as
both a research process that delivered signifcant new insights about life in a heritage
village and a form of museum engagement that enabled new relationships with, and
opportunities within, Lady Lever Art Gallery and Port Sunlight Village Trust.
Most signifcant here were the deep and powerful relationships generated
through a careful process of collective learning, refection, conversation, and flm-
making. Inspired by a database of flm clips from fction flms and frmly focused
on everyday life in a heritage setting, the process celebrated and accentuated the
mundane, the ordinary, and those aspects of life that are often assumed insignifcant
but that actually connect, as they do for all of us, to intimate feelings of belonging
as well as loss and loneliness. Whilst some residents took great personal enjoyment
from continuing the performative aspects of life in a heritage visit, others were
surprised by the new understanding generated by the collaboration – for Hannah,
in particular, everyone involved was struck by her honesty in realizing that her own
lack of connection to the village was more than compensated for in the home and
sense of place and love she had been able to provide for her son.
For the cultural organizations, the project generated new awareness of the need
to priorities close, personal, and everyday relationships with village residents. For
the Port Sunlight Village Trust in particular, the flmmaking process prompted
refections on sustainability and how they can do their best for the community of
Port Sunlight as they plan their work for the future. Seeing the emotional responses
of residents and the impact of living in a heritage environment on their lives has
supported the team at the trust to become more aware of the emotional lives of
residents. These discussions point to the value of projects such as CineMuseSpace
for design decisions in the future. PSVT will draw on the flm and the intimate
view of everyday life and humanity it ofers as they move forward with their plans
for the village.
In terms of Lady Lever Art Gallery and museum and gallery space more broadly,
the learning from the project was rich. Prior to the project, NML voiced their
desire to grow its relationships with residents and with other local organizations
such as Port Sunlight Village Trust. The gallery, exquisite and unique, is a jewel in
the crown of Port Sunlight and a must-see for the majority of tourists who visit
the village. For many residents, however, the Gallery forms more of a backdrop
to their lives that are lived out in the other village spaces such as their homes and
communal spaces like Bridge Cottage. By actively opening up the possibility of
new forms of engagement with and orientations toward the gallery, the flmmaking
process broke through the formality of the gallery and ofered up new spatial and
social forms and relations that could, if taken up, inform its future. Finding their
full form during the screening, the project revealed the potential for the gallery to
play a much fuller part in the lives of residents and provided evidence of the spatial
and social reorientations required for such an endeavor.
Notes
1 Suzanne MacLeod, Museums and Design for Creative Lives (London: Routledge, 2020).
2 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 2 (London: Verso, 2014).
3 RCMG, CineMuseSpace: Exploring People’s Experience, and Understanding of, Everyday Space
(Leicester: RCMG, 2020), fle://uol.le.ac.uk/root/staf/home/s/sm100/Downloads/
CineMuseSpace%20Final%20Report.pdf
8
MAPPING NARRATIVE AND
EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE MUSEUM
Tom Duncan
Through my experience as a museum designer and as a museum studies researcher

it has become evident that the design of narrative carried out by the design team
and curatorial team often remains at an abstract level and perhaps without suf-
fciently engaging with what the visitor might experience. There is a wealth of
literature and an active community of researchers exploring the interconnected
areas of architecture and design in museums, narrative theory, and embodied visi-
tor experiences. Particularly valuable are the two volumes Museum Making: Narra-
tives Architectures, Exhibitions1 and The Future of Museum and Gallery Design: Purpose,
Process, Perception2 that give a broad investigation of contemporary thought behind
processes in designing museum exhibitions. Narrative concepts drawn upon for
this research include scales of narrativity,3 ideas about measuring levels of narrativ-
ity in diferent environments, and textural narratives4 seeking correlations between
text and the space of the museum. Discussing phenomenology and the relationship
between the visitor and their environment, the narrative exhibition is considered
as both narrative and embodied.5 Ariane Karbe, for example, draws on narrative
in the medium of flm by investigating the technique of creating suspense in Hol-
lywood flms and how this can potentially be applied to the design of museum
exhibitions.6
The recognition of visitors not as an abstract mass of public but as individ-
ual active interpreters7 has infuenced and encouraged visitor research as a means
of understanding more about visitors’ experience in the museum. Lisa Roberts
observed that narrative experienced by the visitor is often considered by museum
professionals to be something personal and therefore not part of the museum’s
scope for research. She discusses a potential reticence in museums acknowledging
a separate visitor narrative due to an unwillingness to admit that visitors will be at
DOI: 10.4324/9781003107309-11
118 Tom Duncan
least partly taking the meaning-making process into their own hands and therefore
removing narrative responsibilities from curators and the exhibition design team.8
[F]or the most part, however, attention to visitors’ values, goals, and current
knowledge has largely been driven by interest in improving the transmission
of the museum narrative; the visitor’s narrative, while acknowledged, contin-
ues to be regarded as something private, accidental and therefore beyond the
scope of museum attention and practice.9
Roberts acknowledges that their individual character and the way visitors navigate,
engage with, and interpret content leads to their individual construction of nar-
ratives. The research of this chapter accepts there are inevitable diferences in the
narrative experienced by the visitor compared with the narrative “designed in” by
the exhibition team. It therefore sets out to explore and explain the emergence of
these diferences with the following two key principles: frst, the spatial context of
the exhibition is not only a place for narrative to be interpreted but also a place
where everyday moments of life unfold. Second, the objects displayed do not sim-
ply relate to the narrative of the exhibition – they also represent society as a whole
and the life of the visitor prior to their visit.
Recent examples of research investigating the visitor’s experience of exhibition
narrative include for example a technique of self-observation in dialogue as used
by Jona Piehl and David Francis in their analysis of the Defning Beauty exhibition
at the British Museum.10 Through visiting the museum both on their own and
in dialogue with each other, their approach acknowledges the exhibition in its
entirety as “narrative text” although in their analysis they separate the disciplines of
the interpretive texts and the spatial-visual experience of the exhibition. The par-
ticipant observation method is used by François Penz in his analysis of the Musée
de Quai Branly in his “narrative layers as discursive formation” hypothesis11 where
“narrative text” is constructed out of diferent narrative layers. Eileen Hooper-
Greenhill and Theano Moussouri, for their investigation of visitor interpretive
strategies at Wolverhampton Art Gallery,12 carried out an extensive research pro-
ject where data was generated through accompanied visits to the gallery. Daniel
Schmitt carried out research where the visitor was equipped with a mini camera,
and the results of the 30-minute tour were then watched together with the par-
ticipant, and this interview was also flmed. He takes the theory of the course of
experience by Theureau as an approach to the analysis of the visitor experience
centered on the categorization of experiences rather than the categorization of
publics.13
For the visitor research on which this chapter is based, visitors were approached
and asked whether they were willing to wear a camera to record their visit. Three
visitors agreed to participate in the research, and the flm material generated by
these volunteers was analyzed and used to create diagrams to understand more
about their choices, as well as the sequencing, timing, and rhythm of their visit.
The analysis of the flm material and follow-up conversations helped to build
Mapping narrative and everyday life 119
knowledge about the visitor’s engagement with the content and narrative of the
exhibition. Through on-site research with visitors in the context of theoretical
research it is possible to develop new understandings of the potential intercon-
nectedness of everyday moments of the visitor’s experience within the exhibition
narrative.
Interpreting narrative
Discussing narrative and its relationship to story, the structuralist philosopher
Gérard Genette describes how narrative or narrated discourse can only be such
when it tells a story. Also, narrative is only discourse when the narrative is told to
someone: “As narrative it lives by its relationship to the story that it recounts; as
discourse, it lives by its relationship to the narrating that it utters”.14 The distinction
between narrative and story is important for understanding how narrative can difer
when story remains the same. According to Chatman, the transposability of story
from diferent media is a strong argument for understanding narrative as a structure.
For example, the narrative of a book can be transferred as the narrative of a flm
where the story remains the same. “Story is the content of the narrative expression,
while discourse is the form of that expression”.15
Drawing on Chatman’s distinction between story and narrative, the story that
is the content for the design of the narrative in an exhibition, is the same story (at
least in theory) as that witnessed by the visitor in their experience of the exhibition
narrative. Diferentiating between story and narrative, Abbott describes how story
has its own length of time and a sequence of events that continue chronologically
from the earliest to the latest. Stories always go in one direction, but narrative dis-
course can go in any temporal direction the creator wishes.16 Although an exhibi-
tion narrative is created by curators and designers, because of the choices open to
visitors as they navigate the spatial qualities of the exhibition, they also play a role
in the design of the temporal direction of the narrative discourse.
The psychologist Jerome Bruner describes humans as narrative beings. In his
paper The Narrative Construction of Reality,17 Bruner suggests that “we organize
our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of
narrative – stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on”.18
Bruner suggests that narrative is an integral part of everyday life. He also claims that
narrative is not only the means by which we organize the world and communi-
cate our experiences but that narrative is also a means of shaping the lives we live:
“[F]or just as our experience of the natural world tends to imitate the categories
of familiar science, so our experience of human afairs comes to take the form of
the narratives we use in telling about them”.19 Bruner is implying that narrative is
not only a means of recording and recounting our lives but also an active process
of understanding and making meaning of our surroundings. As Bruner suggests,
the way that humans perceive and make sense of the world means that humans are
hardwired for narrative,20 that humans look for narrative in order to make sense of
things that happen around them.
120 Tom Duncan
Under the heading “Hermeneutic Composability”, Bruner21 suggests a poten-

tial diference in meaning expressed in writing a text and meaning interpreted by a
reader. Citing the philosopher Charles Taylor, he describes how, in trying to estab-
lish a reading of a whole text, we make readings of individual expressions, where
each individual expression only has meaning in the context of other expressions
and ultimately in the context of the whole:
[W]e are trying to establish a reading for the whole text, and for this we
appeal to readings of its partial expressions; and yet because we are dealing
with meaning, with making sense, where expressions only make sense or not
in relation to others, the reading of partial expressions depend on those of
others and ultimately of the whole.22
The oscillation between the interpretation of a part of a text and that of the whole
is the process the reader, visitor, or viewer goes through in order to make mean-
ing out of a narrative experience. This cyclical process of understanding, moving
between the parts and the whole, and of interpreting and reinterpreting has also
been described as a “hermeneutic circle”, a term coined by the central thinker of
the hermeneutic tradition, the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer.23 The
contemporary philosopher Paul Kidder interprets Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle as
a process of constant revision, “revising one’s sense of the whole as one grasps the
individual parts, and revising one’s sense of the parts as the meaning of the whole
emerges”.24
Discussing the interpretation of narrative in the museum and in particular the
role of objects, Eileen Hooper-Greenhill considers Gadamer’s interpretive process,
looking from the whole to the detail and back again, where the view of the detail
contributes to the understanding of the whole and vice versa.25 In the context of
the museum, she argues that the museum object is the detail and the whole is the
whole of society, both present and in the past. In the process of interpretation, the
visitor draws on what they already know combined with new information drawn
from the object in order to create meaning.26 She suggests that these patterns are
formed by individual visitors in their construction of meaning, by combining their
foreknowledge – inherent in their “entrance narrative”27 – with an openness for
new information. Hooper-Greenhill also adds that in the museum experience the
hermeneutic circle is never closed but always remains open to change, implying
that meaning is never static but rather dependent on the emerging understanding
of the relations between the parts and the whole.28
Taylor suggests that, as with Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle, the individual
expressions or small narrative fragments only make sense in combination with other
expressions and in the context of the whole text. Following Hooper-Greenhill’s
theory on viewing an object in a museum, the visitor is potentially confronted with
an interpretational confict because the object they are viewing is both part of the
exhibition narrative and part of society as a whole. In other words, in their eforts
to understand an object in a museum, the visitor has more than one “whole” to
consider: the relation of the object to the overall exhibition narrative and its rela-
tion to the world beyond the exhibition. This situation suggests a more complex
process of interpretation and understanding. For example, the relationship of the
object to that of the visitor’s view of society may well overshadow the relationship
of the object to the museum exhibition narrative. A second hermeneutic circle is
therefore suggested, potentially bypassing or overwriting the exhibition narrative.
By contrast, in more precisely defned narrative forms such as theatre, cinema, or
literature, there are two distinct diferences in the experience of interpretation.
First, there is typically a clearer association between the parts of the narrative and
the whole, as the discourse remains more tightly contained within the framing
of the narrative work. Second, the viewing/reading experience also tends to be
more isolated, typifed by the role of the flm viewer shut away from society within
the “black box” of the movie theater. On the other hand, the typical museum
experience is comparatively less contained, with many more opportunities for the
intrusion of everyday life into the visitor’s concentration on the exhibition narra-
tive. Indeed, museum visitors are often invited to draw directly on their own life
experiences and prior knowledge in their interpretation of museum objects, so
museum narratives are inherently much closer to real life, with stronger connec-
tions to society both past and present.
The visitor in an exhibition environment is therefore both a body navigating
space within a more or less everyday context, and, at the same time a participant
in the process of interpreting an exhibition narrative. The overlaying of these two
activities within the experience of a museum visit therefore requires the two levels
of narrative analysis explored in the frst part of this chapter: theories of consciously
constructed narratives such as flms and works of literature, alongside ideas of nar-
rative as a subconscious tool of meaning-making in the experience of everyday life.
It is the complex and potentially contradictory relationships between the narrative
world and the everyday world that the following piece of visitor studies research
sets out to explore.
Methodology
The methodology is a qualitative research approach as described by Jennifer Mason
and is not only about collecting data but also about generating data.29 Through
the words and recollections of the visitors and the analysis of the video footage,
the qualitative approach makes it possible to see a version of the visit. The strategy
behind the seeing is not to compare the narratives of design and experience but
rather to understand more about the complexities and possibilities of the visitor
experience in the museum and how this knowledge can be applied to the design.
The on-site research took place at the permanent exhibition in the historic rooms
of Vischering Castle designed by the studio Duncan McCauley.30 Initial research
in April 2019 involved structured discussions with visitors directly after their exhi-
bition visit, and a second on-site research carried out in August 2019 involved
equipping visitors with a clip-on camera, which recorded flm and audio of their
122 Tom Duncan
visit. On return of the camera following the visit, a structured discussion took
place to generate further data and to support or cross-reference the flm material.
The research accepts that visitors behaved in a more controlled manner because
they were aware of carrying a camera and were perhaps more conscientious in
their engagement with the exhibition content than they might have been without
a camera.
In this research by following the frst-person gaze with a wearable camera, flm
material assimilates choices made and priorities taken by visitors during their visit.
The camera records how they move through the space and which objects arouse
their interest as well as documents their interactions with friends and partners. The
flm material reveals the participants’ position and dwell times, as well as giving a
good idea of their activities and gaze direction. Structured discussions following
the visits confrm details and give depth to the fndings of the analysis of the flm
recordings. The analysis of the flm material was mapped on to a timeline to form a
diagrammatic representation of the visitor’s experience of the exhibition narrative.
Marie-Laure Ryan emphasizes how the production of graphical representations of
narrative is not only a way of recording narratological knowledge but also a way
of generating it.31 For this research the diagrammatic representation is focused on
what Ryan has referred to as the temporal dimension of narrative.32 The diagram-
ming of the way the visitor experiences the exhibition focuses on a representation
of content over time. The horizontal axis represents the time of the visitor in the
exhibition, and the vertical axis is divided into diferent media making up the nar-
rative “text” of the exhibition. Overlayered are individual highlights or memorable
moments experienced by the visitor, giving a dramatic structure to the temporal
qualities of the visit. The diagrams, made with a flm editing software, show the
larger rhythmical sections or rooms of the exhibition in contrast with smaller inter-
pretive moments of reading a text.
Through the diagrams it is possible to analyze the way the visitor navigates
content and the time the visitor spends with individual objects, graphics, or details.
The process of diagramming the visit revealed the presence of activities that were
not part of a planned narrative. These “everyday moments” are part of the visit,
and this research investigates to what extent they could be described as a part of the
exhibition narrative as experienced by the visitor.
Visitor research analysis

The frst visitor to wear the camera, Mr. G, had a particular reason for visiting
Vischering Castle as his grandmother had worked in the castle as a housemaid at
the beginning of the twentieth century. His personal connection to the subject
meant he engaged thoroughly with all the content and exhibits and spent over an
hour in the exhibition. The flm material shows Mr. G is involved in the content;
however, his wife is visibly more enthusiastic. She often imagined Mr. G’s grand-
mother working in the spaces and brings this up in conversation as they are moving
through the castle rooms. Mrs. G repeatedly photographed pieces of the exhibition
including texts. As Mr. G waited for Mrs. G, he would return to relook at objects.
For example, in the frst room he returned to the display case with the swords three
times, twice alone and once encouraging Mrs. G to have a look at them with him.
In the discussion after the visit, Mrs. G was more communicative. Asked about the
highlights of their experience, Mrs. G referred to information about the establish-
ment of an archdiocese and a state parliament and her second highlight was the
presentation of a historical bed.
Mrs. G’s experience of the exhibition was shaped by the information she had
of her husband’s grandmother. The experience of being in the castle allowed her
to imagine her grandmother-in-law working with and coming in contact with the
furniture and architectural features, such as freplaces. Her internal storyline that
she brought with her to the exhibition infuenced the way she saw and interpreted
the exhibition content. Her personal experiences, emotions, and memories33 of
her husband’s grandmother become entwined with the narrative of the exhibition:
I saw his grandmother everywhere. You have to know I have been a school
teacher for forty years for classes one and two (fve and six year olds). And
as a teacher I had to tell stories in a painterly fashion. I can’t remember
everything but . . . there is a beautiful stove and a beautiful bed. There she
had to shake everything. And the beautiful cupboard, there she took out the
beautiful clothes.34
The main narrative in the exhibition is focused on the castle and its inhabitants;
however, a secondary narrative gives a wider historical context of happenings and
changes in the world at the time. I asked Mr. and Mrs. G how they interpreted this
secondary narrative and whether they understood and diferentiated this narrative
from the story of the castle:
I integrated it into the main story of the castle. It was clear to me that these
happenings were not directly related to the castle but to the time of the castle.
I thought that was great. There was something about Galileo Galilee and his
world view, it is clear to me that it is not from Muensterland but from Italy.
But it was the time.35
Mrs. G was able to recognize the content giving a wider historical context and not
directly related to the narrative of the place and its inhabitants. One of Mrs. G’s
highlights was from this section, an exhibit about the ringing of bells to mark the
passing of time. She explains how having grown up in a rural area it is something
she is familiar with, and she is appreciative of a detailed description of the historical
context of timekeeping: “We come from the countryside and know this ringing
of bells”.36
Discussing the entrance narrative of the visitor, Doering and Pekarik describe
the role familiarity plays in the enjoyment of the visitor: “[T]he most satisfy-
ing exhibitions for visitors will be those that resonate with their experience and
124 Tom Duncan
FIGURE 8.1 VISCHERING CASTLE EXHIBITION. The exhibit about bellringing

and time keeping is on the right-hand side. Photograph Phillip Obkircher/
Duncan McCauley.
provide information in ways that confrm and enrich their view of the world”.37
The ringing of bells is familiar to Mrs. G. through her memory and everyday life.
She has a connection to the content about the use of bells as a way of marking
time in the middle ages. She can interpret the text and images and interactive and
associate directly to the village where she grew up. Falk and Dierking claim that a
museum visitor is much more likely to visit a museum if they are somehow familiar
with the content.38 In the case of Mr. and Mrs. G, the personal relationship to the
place through a member of their family creates anticipation for their visit and a
desire to engage thoroughly with the content.
The diagram (see Figure 8.2) represents their visit to the exhibition over
time. The colored bands at the bottom show the diferent rooms or sections of
the exhibition. The row directly before this reveals the time spent looking at
objects and their labels. Before this are the main room or story graphics with text
and illustrations. The next row shows the time spent reading small text graph-
ics describing the former use of the rooms and their renovation. Before this is
the time spent with digital media and digital interactives. The top line, labeled
everyday moments, records happenings by Mr. and Mrs. G in the exhibition that
are not part of the planned exhibition narrative but are part of their experience
of the exhibition.
In the discussion I asked Mr. G if they had any conversations outside of the
theme of the exhibition. They could not recall any: “We spoke mostly about life at
the castle with his grandmother as the focus”.39
FIGURE 8.2 NARRATIVE DIAGRAM. Diagram of the exhibition visit as flmed.

The recorded everyday moments are on the top row.
FIGURE 8.3 VISCHERING CASTLE EXHIBITION. Historical bed exhibit with the
painting of a count.
However, in the analysis of the flm material there is a moment where Mrs. G
takes a photograph of Mr. G in front of the historical bed and a short conversa-
tion ensues: “[M]y hair is not good. If I look bad in the photo then it’s your fault.
Where should I stand now? Next to the Count? That one has been dead long
before I was born”.40
126 Tom Duncan
The total time they spent in the exhibition was one hour and four minutes. Of
this, 21 minutes were spent with digital media and interactive elements, 16 minutes
looking at objects and reading object labels, 9 minutes reading room texts, for 14
minutes Mr. G was on the move and not looking at one thing in particular, and
3 minutes are recorded as everyday life moments. Although not plannable in the
design process, the conversation is strongly linked to the objects and the interpreta-
tion of their meaning. These few minutes of interaction are part of Mr. and Mrs.
G’s experience of the exhibition narrative. The bed and the painting of the Count
become part of their everyday activity, just as their conversation becomes part of
their narrative.
Discussing narrative in the exhibition, a second participant, Ms. M, describes
how there was not really an overall narrative but rather a series of rooms presenting
diferent themes about the castle: “I didn’t understand the exhibition as having a
narrative. It was more like diferent aspects of the castle, in each room something
particular. With an audio guide it might have been more like a narrative”.41
The complex story of the castle and its inhabitants over several hundred years
means there is a lack of continuity between the characters of the exhibition nar-
rative. For example, the Bishop of Cologne appears at the beginning and does not
reappear, or Lambert von Oer who was put in the iron collar does not appear later
in the narrative. Ms. M experienced the exhibition as a series of “aspects of the
castle”, and, although they were connected by the place of the castle, she did not
recognize them as forming a narrative. One of her highlights was a map that she
had seen in another museum previously, creating a connection to a memory of a
previous activity.
A third visitor to carry the camera, Ms. B, had a diferent approach to her visit;
she imagined herself in the position of an inhabitant of the castle. This was verifed
both in the discussion after her visit and also her dialogue with friends recorded on
flm during her visit. She was reading and questioning content, but the priority in
her dialogue was placing herself in the time of the castle. In the discussion follow-
ing her visit she emphasized how much she would like to see a real dungeon and
she also expressed a desire to see more authentic objects from the time of the castle:
“I would like to see more authentic furniture . . . and also objects representing their
clothes . . . so I can see the life size, that’s just me”. Along this theme she also added:
“It would be nice to have a time machine and just go back for one day to see how
it really was back then”.42
Ms. B spent more time immersing herself in the atmosphere and refecting on
architectural details. She imagined what it was like to live in the past, through
experiencing frst-hand the objects displayed and the authenticity of the place.
Refections
Through the analysis of flm material from the visits, the process of diagramming
the representation of diferent activities over time, such as reading a text panel or
interacting with digital media, includes moments of everyday activities that are not
part of the narrative “designed in” by the exhibition team. The recording of the
visits and the reduction in the diagramming to individual activities reveals varia-
tions and complexities of narrative as experienced in the exhibition, for example
Mrs. G taking a photograph of Mr. G and the ensuing conversation. Applying
Taylor’s thinking about the interpretation of literature to the exhibition narrative,
the research proposes that everyday moments have a relationship to the meaning
of other narrative expressions43 within the exhibition, as well as to the expected
meaning of the narrative as a whole. If the overall experience of the exhibition
is considered a narrative experience and it is accepted that within this there are
moments, such as gazing out of a window, talking to a friend, or taking a photo-
graph, these moments are not interpreted by the visitor as disjointed or separated
because they take place within the spatial and narrative framework of the exhibi-
tion. The research suggests that these moments of everyday activities, occupying a
piece of time within the overall narrative, also become part of the visitor’s experi-
ence of narrative in the exhibition.
Considering Roberts’ identifcation of a reticence by museum professionals to
recognize that visitor experiences are not confned to the “designed in” narra-
tive of the exhibition team,44 this research suggests that a broader understanding
of narrative as experienced by the visitor could be benefcial for creative design
processes. The acceptance of everyday activities as part of an exhibition narrative
could inspire designers to rethink how to include moments of refection, interac-
tion, and communication as part of the exhibition narrative rather than considering
these moments as something that belongs outside of the experience of narrative in
the exhibition.
The second main argument of this research is that the everyday world outside
of the exhibition narrative plays a role in the visitors’ interpretation of individual
objects. The theoretical consideration of a second cyclical interpretive process,
where the visitor relates the meaning of objects or exhibits to their life, both past
and present,45 outside of the narrative construct of the exhibition is recognizable
in the example of Mrs. G discussing the exhibit about bells and time keeping. She
does not relate this fragment of the exhibition narrative to the whole of the exhibi-
tion narrative but rather to her world outside of the exhibition. Acknowledging
this active process of interpretation and the recognition that the hermeneutic circle
in the exhibition is never closed but always dynamic46 could drive new considera-
tions for the design of narrative in exhibitions.
Conclusion
Regarding the openness and undefned nature of the experience of narrative in
a museum exhibition, the term “visitor narrative” is potentially misleading as it
implies narrative experienced by the visitor as complete and universal. Terminol-
ogy to describe the narrative experience in the exhibition that is more dynamic and
less restrictive is required. The term “narrative processes” implies active interpreta-
tion; it is not referring to one narrative but acknowledges diferent experiences
128 Tom Duncan
between visitors and between visits and includes moments of refection and con-
versations as an integral part of their exhibition visit. Accepting visitor “narrative
processes” as dynamic and at least partly separate from a “designed in” narrative of
the development process could liberate the design of exhibitions from potentially
unnecessary formal narrative or spatial restrictions.
Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle is a valuable model for considering the com-
plexities of active processes of interpretation between fragments of narrative and
the expectations of a whole narrative. Hooper-Greenhill’s theory that individual
objects, as expressions of narrative, do not only relate to the whole narrative of the
exhibition but also to a wider understanding of life and society is well substantiated
by the responses in the research of visitors to objects in the exhibition. The every-
day moments within the museum visit are also not just any moments but are bound
to the narrative context of the exhibition. As Bruner has pointed out, narrative
is an active process of understanding and making meaning of our surroundings.47
Recognizing an active component of interpretation on behalf of the visitor where
the everyday, both inside the exhibition and as a world outside the narrative, could
be an impulse for creative design processes.
Notes
1 Suzanne Macleod, Laura Hourston Hanks and Jonathan A. Hale (ed.s), Museum Making:
Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).
2 Suzanne Macleod, Tricia Austin, Jonathan A. Hale and Oscar Ho Hing-Kay, eds., The
Future of Museum and Gallery Design: Purpose, Process, Perception (London and New York:
Routledge, 2018).
3 Tricia Austin, “Scales of Narrativity,” in Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibi-
tions, ed. Suzanne Macleod, Laura Hourston Hanks and Jonathan A. Hale (London and
New York: Routledge, 2012), 107–18.
4 Laura Hourston Hanks, “Writing Spatial Stories; Textural Narratives in the Museum,”
in Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions ed. Suzanne Macleod, Laura
Hourston Hanks and Jonathan A. Hale (London and New York: Routledge, 2012),
21–33.
5 Jonathan Hale, “Narrative Environments and the Paradigm of Embodiment,” in Museum
Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions ed. Suzanne Macleod, Laura Hourston Hanks
and Jonathan A. Hale (London and New York: Routledge, 2012): 192–200.
6 Ariane Karbe, “The Fear of Popcorn: Drawing Inspiration from Hollywood for Curat-
ing Suspenseful Exhibitions,” in The Future of Museum and Gallery Design: Purpose, Process,
Perception, ed. Suzanne Macleod, Tricia Austin, Jonathan A. Hale and Oscar Ho Hing-
Kay (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 317–27.
7 Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, “Studying Visitors,” in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed.
Sharon Macdonald. Blackwell Companions in Cultural Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell
Pub, 2011), 362–76.
8 Lisa C. Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum (Wash-
ington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 140.
9 Ibid.
10 Jona Piehl and David Francis, “Untangling Exhibition Narratives: Towards a Bridging
of Design Research and Design Practice,” in The Future of Museum and Gallery Design:
Purpose, Process, Perception, ed. Suzanne Macleod, Tricia Austin, Jonathan A. Hale and
Oscar Ho Hing-Kay (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 225–38.
11 François Penz, “Museums as Laboratories of Change: The Case for the Moving Image,”
in Museum Without Walls, ed. A. Dalle Vacche (New York: Palgrave Publishers, 2012).
12 Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, Theano Moussouri, and Emma Hawthorne, Visitors’ Interpre-

tive Strategies at Wolverhampton Art Gallery (Leicester: Research Centre for Museums and
Galleries and University of Leicester, 2001).
13 Daniel Schmitt, “Describing and Understanding the Experience of Visitors,” in Visiting
the Visitor: An Enquiry into the Visitor Business in Museums, ed. Ann Davis and Kerstin
Smeds (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016), 55–70, here: 67.
14 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1980), 29.
15 Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1978), 23.
16 Ibid.
17 Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 1
(1991): 1–21.
18 Ibid., 4.
19 Ibid., 5.
20 Hale, “Narrative Environments and the Paradigm of Embodiment.”
21 Bruner, “The Narrative of Construction of Reality.”, 7.
22 Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in Interpretive Social Science:
A Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Berkeley AND London: University of California Press,
1979), 25–72, here: 28.
23 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Joel Weinsheimer, and Donald G. Marshall, Truth and Method
(London and New York: Continuum, 1990), as referred to in Paul Kidder, Gadamer for
Architects, Thinkers for Architects Vol. 8 (New York: Routledge, 2012), 3.
24 Kidder, Gadamer for Architects, 3.
25 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (London et al:
Routledge, 2000), 5.
26 Ibid.
27 Zahava D. Doering and Andrew J. Pekarik, “Questioning the Entrance Narrative,” Jour-
nal of Museum Education 21, no. 3 (1996): 20–3.
28 Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture,
29 Jennifer Mason, Qualitative Researching, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2002),
30 The author is a founding partner of the architecture and design studio Duncan McCau-
ley together with Noel McCauley. The studio is specialized in planning and design for
museums and heritage sites.
31 Marie-Laure Ryan, “Diagramming Narrative,” Semiotica 165, no. 1/4 (2007): 11–40,
here: 17.
32 Ibid.
33 Doering and Pekarik, “Questioning the Entrance Narrative,” 20.
34 Mrs G, interviewed by the author on 30/08/2019.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Doering and Pekarik, “Questioning the Entrance Narrative,” 20.
38 John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking, The Museum Experience Revisited (London and New
York: Routledge, 2013), 93.
39 Mrs G, interviewed by the author on 30/08/2019.
40 Mr G, interviewed by the author on 30/08/2019.
41 Ms M, interviewed by the author on 31/08/2019.
42 Ms B, interviewed by the author on 31/08/2019.
43 Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man.”
44 Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative.
45 Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture.
46 Ibid., 118.
47 Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality.”
PART III
in the city
9
IMAGINING THE PRESENT
Julian Lewis
The city exists

The territory that we design into is there before we start. But what is it? The
existing condition is not a fxed fact, but it is real. In everyday experience, every-
thing around you is changing, growing or dilapidating, being added to or removed
from. Views, colours, materials, sounds are too complex in variety and quantity to
perceive evenly or with any equivalence. Depending on what you are doing there
and who you are, you might not notice the colour of the roofs or the make of the
passing car, or you might be struck by the tonal continuity of the brickwork or the
bright refections of trees in rainy windows. Signs may leap to your foreground if
you are looking for a shop, or a still-open park gate may put a spring in your step
as you arrive at twilight. Yet, after your walk, having moved within it, you have
experienced a slice of the city, and if required you could no doubt recall a few
special details and highlights. Georges Perec puts it well when he writes: “I like
my town, but I can’t say exactly what I like about it. I don’t think it’s the smell.
I’m too accustomed to the monuments to want to look at them. I like certain
lights, a few bridges, café terraces. I love passing through a place I haven’t seen for
a long time”.1
It is sometimes difcult to enter into this sensory kaleidoscope as an architect
and engage with it. This is partly because, although human senses are good at syn-
thesising the general city into a complex and rich experience, clients and consult-
ants involved in design and construction tend not to use the senses as a means by
which to assess the value of the city. Instead, the profession often refers to what is
known in the jargon of urban planning as context to assess and convey the quantity
and elements of the place. Context is a familiar convention used to document
urban conditions, often employing an evidence-based mapping of footprints, uses,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003107309-13
134 Julian Lewis
and routes to construct an anatomy of a place or site. But though useful for con-
veying certain layers of information in proving the suitability of urban proposals at
planning stages, this kind of mapping is too weak and neutral a tool to mine the
raw vitality of the diverse and combined qualities of an area and fails to address time
as a human component in experiencing the city. More precise tools are needed to
identify such urban heterogeneity.
When we design, it is possible to engage with the city environment not as a
closed image but as an open condition that only comes into being upon observa-
tion. Observing the city requires dynamic reading. Careful methods of represen-
tation are required to do this, such as photography, written notes following site
visits and dialogue with colleagues, drawings that respond to untested thoughts,
plans that scope the shape of a site, and sketches that respond to the place and the
experience of being there. Such forms of representation often contain moments of
proposition within the documentary. By imagining the present, the complexity of
the city can become vivid and compelling by describing architectural ideas about
the situation as-found.
Building on a site means redesigning what exists next to it and the resulting
urban constellation is what should hold our interest. Above all, we must be alive to
the fgures, spaces, and their relationships that hold spatial signifcance. Artists are
sometimes better at this than architects. Look at Lee Friedlander’s photographs of
New York, or Jason Orton’s of East London. Each in their own way manages to
refect qualities of the city that are open enough for others to experience, whilst
being precise in their viewpoint. They do not preach or tell stories, but they do
take a position.
Over the years, architectural and urban practice East has engaged with places
in ways that enable architecture to be informed by the city scale and to take an
urban perspective in all aspects of design. This is because we see the urban role
in architectural design as integral to social value. We are interested in achieving
good results with economy and manage our design urges alongside the infuences
of other players in the process of delivering urban change. Because cities form the
environment for everyday life, we judge where to provide foreground and when to
design into the background.
The following slices of text expand on this approach of working with and within
the city. Captioned images provide project examples by East to further illustrate
what is meant by imagining the present.
Wild mesh
Cities have changed over the last 60 years in ways both sublime and shocking. In
London, Rotterdam, São Paulo, and Paris, to name just a few, the process by which
city clients and their designers threw layers of infrastructure and ambitious housing
projects across and into the existing urban fabric was often propelled by a profound
Imagining the present 135
disregard of place coupled with an enviable clarity of purpose: a simple aim to

deliver singular projects for new futures on behalf of the whole city.
But cities don’t get improved as a whole, instead they get worked over, inter-
rupted, and displaced, creating urban structures, economies, and social fabric that
are diverse and fractured. Big ambitious projects often have unintended conse-
quences at their edges, giving rise to unplanned relationships with ignored back-
grounds. Their drive for a singular future has given way to the various demands of
the city’s complex history, texture, and social-economic layering, rawly exposed
around unplanned edges.
In London, these edges are part of a wild mesh that constitutes a vast hidden
landscape in full view. It can be found where masterplans clash, where Boroughs
join, where streets roam, where the geometry of a twentieth-century road greets
the footprint of an eighteenth-century pub. Iain Sinclair’s peregrination around
the acoustic footprint of the M25 documented in his book and also in Chris
Petit’s flm, London Orbital, describes a special example, but this is only one of the
more emblematic of the extraordinary catalogue of spaces that constitutes Lon-
don’s biggest asset. These are the areas where complex relationships exist, usually
unnoticed, between unalike conditions created for diferent purposes. Unique
places that provoke the imagination. They are not about the future, and, as they
are rarely properly identifed, they barely exist in the present. They are the spaces
between buildings, structures, and facades that resist typological identity. Look
out of your window now, and you will see it; that part that was never drawn in
plan or elevation; that view, that gap, that colour. Ugly? Beautiful? Neither word
says it.
In flm, the combining of the near and the far in editing is often essential
to drama and narrative. By contrast, although anyone walking through the city
could appreciate the fact that it is possible to trip over a paving stone at the same
time as viewing a skyline, architecture is seldom designed with such diferent
scales in mind. Yet the city that exists is rarely constrained to the middle distance,
when experienced in movement. This is largely because so much of it has not
been designed or has been designed by many people, to diferent briefs, time-
scales, and budgets. The efects of this are often surprising, creating unexpected
situations. Scale can become signifcant in terms of spatial relationships, rather
than dimensions. It is possible for a door handle, for example, to be experienced
as a landmark (just think of the Royal Festival Hall door handles, with their civic
welcome) and for a 200m-long Georgian façade to sit as a backdrop to life on
the street.
It feels as if we might beneft from appreciating the city as complex rather than
singular and accept it more often in its imperfect state of unevenness rather than
wish it were diferent. We could even try to see specifc urban contexts; each dif-
ferently perceived depending on your scope of view, as lucky to encourage the
potential to design with generosity.
136 Julian Lewis
Stringy
There is an advantage to looking more closely at the diferences that go to make
up our familiar environments. It means that, when we design, we do not have to
try to complete anything, and it also means that we already have a lot to work
with when making decisions about form, presence, image, and identity. The ways
in which this might happen are specifc to urban structures in each city. In New
York, the survey framework mapped across the eighteenth-century landscape of
a largely unpopulated Manhattan Island set an agenda for development to grow
within a vast grid, with architectural design parameters guided and managed per
plot. Streets matured only over time as the buildings combined. Today, within a
substantially flled city latticework, it is the exceptions to the grid that have started
to be reconsidered. These include the successful and well-documented High Line –
which reuses spaces formed between railway infrastructure and the streets– and the
ecological sanctuary of Inwood Hill Park, which retains a shape and wild value
untamed by the grid.
Conversely it was the many long and often straight Roman roads laid down for
soldiers, pilgrims, and other travellers that connected London’s far-reaching land-
scape with other cities and towns. London’s High Streets have developed around
these routes, and, as we know, they have struggled in recent years to maintain a
good balance of retail uses, further challenged by the assault on public space that
has been one of the hallmarks of the COVID-19 pandemic.
So, what happened to the High Street? For various reasons, they have often
become clustered around centres or decamped to covered arcades. There has been
some confusion around the distinction between town centres and streets, often
because there is a perception that, unless you make a destination into a round-
shaped centre, people will not travel to it or know where it is. In this way the
primary asset of High Streets, their length, has been ignored. In addition to this,
uses have become too similar and the liveliness of the High Street too dependent
on cheap shops. But if we consider not just the centres but the entire length of
High Streets there is ample potential to accommodate other uses and amenities
such as play space, food production, workspace, ofces, sport, recreation, cafes and
restaurants, training and community uses, green spaces, exhibitions, nurseries, and
other social uses, including shops, all of which could enliven a much longer, much
more stringy High Street.
Think of a long thread unevenly laced with beads, gems, and charms. Each part
can function separately and look diferent, but they are all connected. In the same
way, the side roads, yards and other adjacent spaces that connect residential com-
munities to High Streets could ofer potential for social reinvigoration if the routes
that hold them together are given priority. High Streets could be viewed as destina-
tions for all the reasons that you might wish to visit a park or gallery; for pleasure,
education, social vitality, health, and recreation as well as retail uses, and they are
already there, available at any part along their length.
FIGURE 9.1 Borough High Street improvements project, on site (commenced 1997).
FIGURE 9.2 Borough High Street improvements project, Catch and Steer (drawing 1996).
One of East’s frst projects was to design improvements to Borough High Street,
for Southwark Council, in anticipation of the new millennium and alongside the
opening of the new Tate Modern gallery at Bankside. The project opened a fresh
window onto the city we thought we already knew well, vividly revealing London’s
138 Julian Lewis
living complexity. Particular to the exercise was a focus on managing impulses to

overdesign, in other words, to respond to the vague design brief to improve the
High Street in ways that resisted improving everything. By looking closely, we
documented what existed, without presuming merit or value.
Through photography, dialogue, and care in drawing it became possible not
only to curate a precise unevenly scoped design response to the project but also
to communicate a quality of splicing-in in using drawings intended to represent the
place as we saw it, sometimes unchanged. One drawing we made – using scalpel,
photocopies, tracing paper, and tape – precisely collaged together proposals of play-
ers changing the High Street, including London Underground, Network Rail,
developers, and East’s own scope. Caught in a moment between documentary and
proposition, this so-called Catch and Steer drawing expressed a desire to remain
open to the situation before enacting judgement in design.
Good relationships
The future is always somewhere else, and yet we must continue to plan the city.
Perhaps this is an impossible paradox, though it ofers something fascinating and
useful. Cities can never be fully planned or completed, and the open nature of the
combinations of buildings in varied proximities, with ever incomplete relationships
that invite new readings, invites new ways to act in time.
The complexity of the city is a resource that awaits engagement, a good thing
to marshal for social beneft. But this complexity, full of richness and heterogenous
qualities, uses and buildings never planned together, has become problematic rather
than interesting for the developers and collective landowners who seek change.
New developments in recent years driven by dismayingly ruthless fnancial aims
have increasingly homogenised the city through an unwillingness to accommodate
physical complexity, preferring replacement over reuse. The public city has disap-
peared behind a suite of individual projects, each taking advantage of the city loca-
tion but at the expense of the urban opportunity for its inhabitants.
Imagining the city that exists involves combining two seemingly divergent –
although they are in fact complementary – positions. Looking carefully and openly
at what exists, with neutrality and without judgement, enriches what is perceived.
At the same time a critical perspective on what urban and architectural relation-
ships might mean in this context is fundamental in understanding the value of the
city for social use. The imaginative role in this sense; through thinking, drawing,
and dialogue, recasts the as-found as proposition.
More than anything, this is about designing into the city with precision in ways
that can be shared, that support social interaction, including the provision of places
where you do not have to spend money to reside. With critical thinking, it is pos-
sible to fnd ways of enriching our collective human relationships with the spaces,
objects, infrastructure, and uses that make up the urban landscape.
Whilst the architectural product must have something to ofer the city, the archi-
tectural value of the design cannot reside only in the building itself, because it is the
setting, the situation, that helps enable architecture to be experienced in time and space.
This means that, for architecture to give something valuable, it must take responsibil-
ity for the efects it creates with other parts. It means making good relationships with
other buildings in space to bring an outward-looking dimension to the architecture.
FIGURE 9.3 Park House hotel and housing, West Ham Lane, Stratford (completed 2018).
In Stratford, East designed a new building that took account of various scales
and characteristics of the place and sought to make clear relationships with the
unremarkable and varied urban condition surrounding the site. The intention was
to take the place at face value, to treat it with respect, and to fnd qualities that
ofered more than might be initially expected, in the context of a new relationship
provided by the new building.
The building holds a mix of uses, including apart-hotel and residential units,
community facilities, a gym, a café, and a restaurant. The design is placed within a
familiar setting in London: a recreation ground, a car park, and a suite of buildings
of varying densities and massing built in the 1940s, 1960s, and 1980s.
We responded to this everyday setting with the kind of care reserved for more
historic parts of London deemed of merit because of historic signifcance and
received conventions of quality. The building looks around itself at all faces, not just
at the street front but at the slacker spaces; the backs.
The north façade seeks to engage with the council-owned green space by pro-
viding openable doors to the space. At the third foor, a semi-public terrace is
provided to enable visitors to view the city at the mid-height of the building; a
140 Julian Lewis
vantage point level with the tops of the trees and a pleasurable spot to appreciate
the park, street, green, and city mix. The roof matches the height of the 1960s slab
as a sign of companionship.
To the south, a 1980s three-story terrace of housing makes a weak corner to
the street. A positive relationship is sought by refecting the mass and height of
the block to form a new street. Chamfering the corner encourages pedestrian and
cycle access past a residential entrance. One-way mirrored windows play with the
windowed elevation behind which cars access the car park, whilst allowing refec-
tions of pedestrians to be superimposed.
To the west, adjacent to an informal space defned by car parking and back gar-
dens, the block is shaped on plan and steps back in elevation. The grid of the large
windows softens in elevation slightly by becoming misaligned by a few bricks each
foor, creating a backdrop that corresponds to the surrounding loose urban struc-
ture. The window cills project more deeply, enlivening the brickwork with more
shadows. The building places emphasis on its shape to provide architectural quality.
At the eastern park face the building is allowed to take on a New York hotel-like
quality in image and presence, acting up to the mature trees and the deep green of
the recreation ground. The cills and windows are fat to the façade. The windows
are large, at the top getting larger.
The only detailing we allowed ourselves was to use two mortar colors: red
opposite the park, the rest a grey/buf. The efect is mixed in the eye, creating two
brick colors.
The roof terrace is slightly shifted in plan to bring some tension with the align-
ment of the building below as if distorted to align with the incredible views across
the Olympic Parklands and the broader city horizons. At the ground plane, we
pulled the building back from the ownership line to widen the public footway
and enhance the legibility of the canopied main entrance as well as the entrances
at the other sides of the building. At the ground, a concrete plinth responds to the
sloping ground and concrete car park, providing some measure of scale and local
topography. The concrete holds windows and doors and is designed to be seen
close up and touched; fecks of brick in the mix redden and texture the concrete
and suggest some continuity with the brick envelope of the building and other
buildings around.
Everything is spatial
Because the city is not limitless, space is signifcant. Not just in terms of quantity –
for the facility of living together in proximity – but because human experience can
only happen in space, moving through light, between edges, across thresholds, and
into streets. Everything in the city is spatial. It is therefore the relationship between
fgures and spaces; where architecture resides, where it matters most.
Some artists have found ways to present objects meaningfully in space a rich
source of investigation. Donald Judd took care in measuring perceived space with
objects at a human scale within the epic landscape of the Texan desert. Alberto
Giacometti made sculptures of people that used particular intensities of form
and proportion to reveal the weight and human signifcance of space pressing in
on and around them. In Ed Ruscha’s project Every Building On The Sunset Strip
in 1966, the photographs of a series of building elevations that are presented to
show the facades and spaces between a whole street of buildings as equivalent
in importance show more about the nature of the Sunset Strip than the build-
ings themselves. Georgio Morandi painted still lives of vases and other vessels in
arrangements that evoked social groupings, with forms and tones rendered in
specifc and subtle ways that held the fgures of the objects and spaces in states of
compelling ambiguity.
These ideas are not only about space. Whilst being precise in their formal
scope, they are interested in the experience of being in the world, and, in this way,
they also address time. Architect Philip Christou has said that maintaining some
uncertainty during the short span of the design process is important as it allows
for the design to develop slowly in a way that is detectable in the quality of the
completed building. “The ambiguous quality of the sketch, and of the solid and
void in the sketch, is just the essential part. . . . The other parts will be developed
in time – things can change and be drawn in. Because it’s not so fxed, maybe
there is a way that the built architecture can be not so fnite”. And in the words
of Philip’s long-term partner and architect Florian Beigel, ‘It’s neither this nor
that – it’s both”.2
FIGURE 9.4 Frampton Estate in Hackney, new housing and community uses.
142 Julian Lewis
Our architectural projects are always constrained in some way, whether by

budget, space, or time. We fnd this liberating because it afords us a chance to
focus on how we can make the best use of what is available. At Frampton Estate in
Hackney, new housing and community uses designed by East for Hackney Council
will reanimate the existing urban structure, defned by large courtyards and streets
surrounded by substantial brick bars and blocks of 1950’s LCC housing. Whilst the
scale of these existing buildings is singular and bold, with a tectonic identity cre-
ated through repetition and a simple material palette, there is a complementary and
straightforward delicacy to the layers of steelwork comprising balconies and bal-
ustrades. Our architectural response takes pleasure in fnding ways to join in with
this open urban structure of varied scales and material texture. The new buildings
are designed to join into the setting of the Estate, using strong forms geared less
toward asserting themselves as objects and more toward engaging with the streets
and spaces they animate, enriching the urban ensemble as a whole. Other archi-
tectural decisions are informed by qualities of repetition, formal expression, and
clarity in public and private access. Clear ideas about public and private spaces are
delivered at the larger courtyard block, where the private spaces are materially dis-
tinct from the public. The oval courtyard is accessed through passageways, leading
to a contained space open to the sky that feels protected and inviting, light in tone
and material, and embellished with a shared steelwork oval deck access layering. By
contrast the brick public outer facades are muted in expression to provide a shared
background to all streets surrounding the block. At the ground foor, blank walls
invite playful activity engaging with the adjacent street made inaccessible to vehi-
cles, with good overlooking provided at the frst and upper foors.
The new spatial and material relationships are informed by architectural and
urban decisions intended to reanimate the public spaces and streets for community
uses. This is about using a collage-like approach to the place that we see not just
as providing continuity of the urban situation but as a stimulant to urban life that
helps provide choices for social activity.
Civic edges
These ideas may sound academic, but space is real. For anyone walking through a
street, it doesn’t take long to come up against the edges of the city. The pedestrian
experience in cities is largely defned by limits obstructing access and views across
territories of diferent ownership. These edges are often designed around hermetic
determinants such as security, structural resistance, ownerships, or material expedi-
ence in construction. They are rarely designed to be looked at or experienced, and
often they are only there to stop things happening. Fences, railings, walls, guarding,
and even buildings comprise a very large blind spot in the popular discourse on
contemporary urban design. Yet it is these bounded edges where spaces are often
formed, where one condition meets another, and where diferences speak the lan-
guage of the living city. Space runs out, and the city must work hardest at its limits
to ofer ways for civic and architectural identity to be experienced.
FIGURE 9.5 West Croydon public realm and transport interchange improvements
(completed 2017).
In West Croydon, for a project designed by East for the Council, it became
clear that the scope of the project comprised almost nothing but edges. The
wall of the church car park adjacent to the bus station. The fence of the rail-
way station that bounded the strip of footway. The shopfronts and commercial
curtilages.
East made a drawing that viewed these unpromising edges and strips as unavoid-
able and therefore intrinsic to the spatial identity of the place. We noticed how the
image of Croydon had been undervalued in many ways, and we communicated
our approach around a notion of Croydonness, which was a shorthand term we used
to capture a shared feeling of what was valuable about the place, without always
knowing what, exactly, it was that was shared.
The linear and extended nature of the boundary treatments ofered an oppor-
tunity for scenographic generosity. So we widened the footway and made a giant
hoop-top planted mesh station fence framed around an image based on the vulner-
able arched Victorian shopfronts nearby.
In the footways, we celebrated the civic identity of the place by using the stand-
ard streetscape palette of materials – but in two tones – to provide a striking cheq-
uerboard pattern within the limited footway space. To further accommodate the
realities of everyday maintenance, we designed the paving to be tolerant of being
mislaid. The intention to preplan failure into the laying of the paving was inspired
by a photograph by artist Richard Wentworth of a poorly, though beautifully, laid
chequer-tiled kitchen foor.
144 Julian Lewis
At the church wall, we placed a concrete Rose Window to dramatise the deep
space of the car park and make visible the larger Rose Window at the Church
façade. Each of these boundaries became a positive threshold to other spaces, using
a public scenography that resisted telling a story but that allowed enough Croyden-
ness within its imagery to bring a place-specifc spatial clarity and positive image to
these town-centre edges.
Public foreground
If there is one thing that connects the projects we have worked on over the years
and provides the essential ingredients for cities to work, it is the need to bring the
value of publicness into the foreground of architecture.
Public spaces are often still thought of in terms of simple types, such as squares,
streets, and parks, but, as has been mentioned earlier, there are many more ways
to shape a public city, and, furthermore, it is the relationship between the public
spaces and uses that makes a city feel inviting and accessible. Some of this already
exists, even if unnoticed, and some of it needs to be made to happen through cast-
ing collective imaginations across the city fabric, alongside new developments and
projects.
It seems increasingly necessary to enhance the status of the public city beyond
the limiting idea of spaces between buildings and towards an anticipatory infra-
structure that leads on shaping and infuencing urban change across the section of
the city as well as the plan. More than this, it should use time as an available urban
asset; starting now, rehearsing potential, testing uses, anticipating the future with
what can be imagined today.
Strengthening the role of the public realm in statutory and local authority policy
terms would encourage all those involved in regenerative growth to embed their
proposals in the city in ways specifc to the nature of each proposed development.
This would bring the public realm forward as a leading component of the value of
each project.
In addition to helping guide individual players to deliver on an expanded role
for public space, a strategic perspective would move the scope of opportunities for
social vitality beyond individual sites and across the wider shared city. It would help
assert the primary role of public space as an infrastructure aimed at facilitating the
metropolitan potential of urban life.
Such a strategy would be able to say “the public realm is here; let’s enrich it”.
Or, to say it more strongly, the public realm is where the city lives.
FIGURE 9.6 London imagined; a sketch for the Mayor of London to bring the public
realm to the forefront of London (2018).
This drawing presents a condensed image of London’s city environment with an

extraordinary rich and diverse condition. It was made as a manifesto for bringing
the public realm to the foreground of the city, designed to catch the attention of
the Mayor of London. As in the real city, the drawing imagines a range of build-
ing typologies, existing, new, and emerging, with diferent uses, from residential,
industrial, community, leisure, and infrastructure. In black ink, a radically exten-
sive public realm is drawn across the city fabric, showing how public space could
become deeply enmeshed within the city, anticipating and shaping the buildings
that come later. The drawing is a kind of brief – a visual provocation – for an
enhanced policy and public realm manifesto for London.
Notes
1 Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, “The Town” (London: Penguin Classics,
2008) page 63.
2 Philip Christou and Florian Beigel – Searching for the Essential; Article by Louis Maye,
[Architecture Today, AT 310, October 2020].
10
CONTINGENCIES OF THE EVERYDAY
Screen representations of Tokyo in 1958
Alastair Phillips
Tokyo is a place that resists any sense of enduring stability. The French geographer
Augustin Berque defnes it, for example, as “an urban composition in which the
very contingency of the arrangement of the [city’s] – highly autonomous – parts,
might be said to generate the cohesion of the whole”.1 Berque’s play between frag-
mentation and unity – or perceptual oscillation between the locality of a discrete
neighborhood and the idealized image of a fnished map – is in many ways typical
of much discussion of the Japanese capital in that it points to an ongoing problem
of defnition concerning the general scale and duration of the metropolis. But,
suggestively, in terms of emphasizing the specifc question of provisionality, Berque
also hints at some aspects of Tokyo discourse that might in fact be generative in
terms of thinking about the relationship between the everyday spatio-temporal
rhythms of the city and their on-screen representation during both the heyday of
Japanese flm production and the nation’s postwar economic recovery.
How does one make sense of a city that initially appears to resist any genuine
kind of fxity? One way might be to pursue a spatial approach that respects the
material coordinates of the city’s topography. In his infuential study of the Japanese
capital, Hidenobu Jinnai suggests that despite the city’s long history of confagration
and destruction – the most egregious examples in the twentieth century being the
Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 and the USAAF frebombing of 1944–1945 – the
geographical framework of the city has lasted in terms of a “complex intersection
of plateaux and valleys”.2 This has not only had signifcant repercussions for the
organization of Tokyo’s recurring navigational and architectural features; it has also
determined the social composition of everyday life in the city with the social elite,
be they samurai, diplomats, or senior ofcial and businessmen, located among “the
high city’s hills and clifs, winding roads, shrine groves” and the commoners, small
businesses, craft workers, and farmers placed amongst “the low city’s canals and
bridges, alleyways and storefront planter pots, and crowded entertainment centers”.3
DOI: 10.4324/9781003107309-14
Contingencies of the everyday 147
A second method, one taken by Henry D. Smith, would be to privilege a more

historical or palimpsest-like approach that assumes an intersectional layering of
discursive social experience. Following the opening up of the city to the world
during the Meiji period (1868–1912) and a widespread program of civic renewal
and infrastructural development, for example, the post-earthquake city of the late
Taishō (1912–1926) and early Shōwa eras (1926–1989) redefned itself in terms of
the accelerated rhythms of modernity. The new patterns of middle-class consump-
tion culture – or bunka seikatsu – especially in the expanded sakariba or bustling
shopping and entertainment districts such as the Ginza, was discussed by some,
such as the prominent journalist Ōya Sōichi, in terms of a directionless escapism.
Smith argues that, in this instance, Tokyo was now seen an untrustworthy place
now existing “wholly in the moment” and “freely accepting of modern change”.4
In the midst of all this, importantly, was the ongoing, shifting, and fowing tempo-
rality of ordinary everyday life, something increasingly being documented in the
very flms that mass audiences focked to at cinemas located in these new centers
of urban experience.
A third, more integrated, approach to the question of understanding Tokyo as a
site of everyday activity would be to meld these topographical and socio-historical
perspectives together and consider the city more as a modern text that may be read
in both spatial and temporal terms. This method is certainly visible in the pioneer-
ing ethnographic work of Kon Wajirō and Gonda Yasunosuke who, writing in the
1920s, understood the modernizing public sphere of the Japanese capital to be the
quintessential site for what the historian Miriam Silverberg has called “the con-
struction of a historically grounded and historically conscious culture constituted
by the practices of daily life”.5 Kon and Gonda were cultural ethnographers – the
latter especially fascinated by the exhibition of the moving image – who framed the
city and its culture in diferentiated experiential terms that were not just germane to
a broader sociological understanding of the class and gender dimensions of moder-
nity but also the more precise ways in which the city became produced as a modern
place that existed conterminously in both space and time. As Harry Harootunian
has pointed out in his discussion of the work of the urban literary scholar Maeda
Ai, itself heavily infuenced by Kon, it is fascinating to observe how these acts of
descriptive cultural defnition were also determined simultaneously by a realization
of what was increasingly no longer there. To read the city cartographically, to see
it in relation to a set of knowledge about the precise location of various streets and
sites of commerce and entertainment, thus also means to acknowledge the histori-
cal disappearance of a “claim to autonomy promised by the older division of labor
between town and country”. As Harootunian puts it succinctly, “Concern for the
maintenance of the division between city and countryside appeared precisely at
the [very same] moment [that] the new metropolitan cities [of Japan] embarked on
their expansion and colonization of space” beyond their traditional boundaries.6
With this in mind, this chapter will propose an unusually synchronic approach
to the screen representation of Tokyo’s urban everyday by looking at three flms
made within the single year of 1958: Ozu Yasujirō’s Equinox Flower/Higanbana,
148 Alastair Phillips
Imamura Shōhei’s Nishi Ginza Station/Nishi Ginza ekimae, and the collectively
made flm, Tokyo 1958. 1958 was a transitional year for both the Japanese flm
industry and the wider culture of the nation as a whole. It represented a high-water
tidemark for cinema admissions and a wider consolidation of the social and mate-
rial consequences of Japan’s postwar high growth economy. As such, it provides a
useful vantage point from which to assess how Japanese cinema sought to medi-
ate the complexities of contemporary urban experience at a time of accelerating
rationalization on the part of city authorities. These flms, two commercial and
one experimental, clearly address the subject of the Japanese capital in a number
of strikingly diferent – but also similar – ways. The focus on one single year will,
for example, enable a more close-up view of the provisional character of Tokyo
that Berque identifes. It will demonstrate the ways in which the cinematic city of
Tokyo continuously came into being within the specifc conjugation of the space
and time of everyday life and the distinctive spatio-temporal coordinates of the flm
frame. In particular, it will present a sense of how Tokyo’s emergence at the time
as the largest city in the world was both a matter of rigid planning and contingent
experience. But, more than this, it will also point to the value of identifying one
particular temporal mark in the fow of Tokyo’s history that allows one to simul-
taneously look back at the city’s recent past, examine some of the more contested
intricacies of the urban present, and anticipate some of the consequences of these
facets that would only later become apparent in the future decade to come.
Before turning to the substance of the flms in question, what then of the gen-
eral subject of the Japanese capital in the 1950s? The decade witnessed the intensi-
fcation of the urbanization of the country with approximately one million people
a year leaving the countryside for cities such as Tokyo and Osaka.7 This was accom-
panied by a signifcant infrastructure program that not only entailed the reconstruc-
tion and development of industrial plants but also private and public investment
in urban road and rail transportation that signifed this new potential for mobility.
Japan’s powerful construction industry accounted for 30% of all national spending,
therefore enabling a fundamental shift in the material fabric of city life.8 In 1956,
the Japanese government famously declared in a white paper that “the postwar” was
now fnally “over”, thus defning both the emergence of the new “high growth”
(kodo seicho) economy and an increasing emphasis on letting go of the travails and
negative associations of the past in favor of a bright modernity defned by collective
national enrichment and personal material prosperity.9
It would, however, be a mistake to render a smooth and linear account of the
everyday lived experience of Tokyo’s residents during this period of the kind rep-
resented by Kimura Shōhachi’s Tokyo hanjōki (Report on the Prosperity of Tokyo),
published in 1958.10 William Kelly, for example, cautions against a governmental
or corporate narrative modeled in terms of a “rising middle-class homogenisa-
tion”.11 Political economists, bureaucrats, and urban planners may have emphasized
the virtues of the “ultimate ‘managed society’ (kanri shakai)”, but, as Kelly points
out, what in fact distinguished “the social order of middle and late Shōwa” was
“the absence of a strong center” based neither on “elite coercion nor negotiated
consensus”. The social sphere of 1950s Japan may well be “better described as co-
optive, complicit and contested”.12 All urban modernities stay uneven, and unfn-
ished and display multiple tonalities within the everyday interaction and experience
of ordinary city life. The neighborhood Tokyo of traditional community neighbor-
hoods (machi), local shopkeepers, and back lanes (roji) thus continued to coexist
in a porous fashion, all of which remained visibly present in contemporaneous
cinematic representations of the daily workings of the capital.
The year 1958 nonetheless represented the condensation of a number of new
and signifcant social trends in relation to everyday life especially in terms of the
greater visibility of a renewed – and at the same time emergent – middle-class
consumer culture. This culture may not only be defned in terms of the acquisi-
tion of the so-called three S’s, senpūki, sentaku, and suihanki (electric fan, washing
machine, electric rice cooker), for the urban home; it may also be considered in
relation to the greater visibility of the capital as a symbol of progressive value.13 The
rising phenomenon of domestic tourism, especially to cities such as Tokyo, was for
instance articulated by the fgure of the female tour guide who specifcally featured
in flms that year such as Tokyo Bus Girl/Tokyo no bus girl (Sunohara Masahisa) and
Yamamoto Kajirō’s Shirley Yamaguchi vehicle Tokyo Holiday/Tokyo no kyūjitsu.14
Most signifcant of all, though, was the completion in October of Naitō Tachū’s
Tokyo Tower in Minato-ku that came to symbolize the modernity of the postwar
capital on a public level and was soon incorporated into the neighborhood mise
en scène of flms such as Tokyo Tower at Twilight/Tasogare no Tokyo Tawā (1959).15
Tokyo Tower was, of course, designed to service mass communication, and it is
important to note that 1958 also represented the high watermark of the commer-
cial heyday of Japanese cinema. In 1958, there were a total of 1 million television
sets in people’s houses. Just over ten years later, however, that fgure had risen to
22 million, and cinema admissions had fallen to just 300 million.16 This tension
between both looking back and looking forward in terms of popular cinematic
practice informs the context for the frst two flms under discussion.
Ozu Yasujirō’s Equinox Flower, released in September 1958, is a light social com-
edy largely set in Tokyo. The plot of the flm revolves around the various incon-
sistent interactions between the middle-class businessman and family patriarch
Hirayama Wataru (Saburi Shin) and a number of younger women in his family,
social, and professional life when it comes to the pressing question of marriage.
Of these predicaments, the most signifcant is that of his oldest daughter Setsuko
(Arima Ineko), who has recently announced to her father and mother Kiyoko
(played splendidly by Tanaka Kinuyo) that she intends to marry the young ofce
worker Taniguchi (Sada Keiji) and move with him to the city of Hiroshima.
Equinox Flower was Ozu’s frst color flm for Shōchiku. He made the critical
decision to choose Agacolor over Kodak Eastmancolor or Fujiflm with its sub-
sequent emphasis on the deep tonalities given to the reds that are prominently
signaled in the flm’s mise en scène. These reds, recurring in numerous images in
the form of domestic and commercial artefacts from the urban everyday, allude to
the specifc form of crimson amaryllis that gives the flm its seasonally relevant title.
Social and generational transition lies at the heart of Equinox Flower, and this is at
least partly mediated through the flm’s spatial and temporal apprehension of the
Japanese capital. It is thus signifcant that the flm’s frst prominent word both seen
on screen and heard on the soundtrack is “Tokyo”. The fact that this occurs at the
heart of the city on the platform at Tokyo station simultaneously announces both
the specifc matter of departure occurring within the diegesis and the wider sense
of coming and going that makes up much of the rest of the flm’s organizational
structure.
All this to-ing and fro-ing can be read in terms of the particular predicaments
faced by both the older and younger members of the Hirayama family, especially
when it comes to the various arrivals to and departures from the home on the
part of the main daughter in question, Setsuko. But Ozu also laces this web of
disenfranchisement and disappointment with a vivid sense of a much wider social
sphere that is, for the most part, represented through the construction of the city
achieved by Hamada Tatsuo’s set design. Only a few relatively minor exterior still
shots of Tokyo such as the station, the hospital, and the street outside the family
home intervene within the overall tightly controlled visual structure of the flm.
These quotidian spaces, which include the ofces of Hirayama and his colleagues,
the Luna and Wakamatsu bars, as well as separate fats in the Ginza area and in
Suginami (where Setsuko’s fancé lives), are all managed in a remarkably consistent
fashion. In each case, they are repeatedly introduced via a set of horizontal and
vertical axes that show both the length of a corridor or passageway in long shot
and the activity of various personages moving from left to right or vice versa at the
rear of the frame. In one sense, this is an economic means of communicating some
of the density of everyday social activity that comprises life in the modern capital,
and it is certainly worth noticing the fdelity with which Ozu’s flm transcribes the
visual details of ordinary city life within each image, but, in another sense, also due
to the flm’s organization of plot duration, the overall efect is of repeated dispersal
and fragmentation.
The version of Tokyo that we receive in Equinox Flower is thus a city in which
no one person is placed in a position of cognitive authority regarding the spa-
tial contours of the capital. Characters do repeatedly signal the socio-geographical
relevance of a particular person – it’s important to know, for example, that the
scheming Mrs. Sasaki’s (Naniwa Chieko) latest candidate for her daughter Yukiko’s
hand in marriage comes from Tsukuji (a more working-class location than the
rather well-to-do Hirayama family mansion on the hill in Azabu) – but the flm
generally makes much of the gaps in knowledge that characters have in terms of
understanding where everybody is and what everybody does in the course of the
flm’s narration. The city becomes the means not so much of defning an organic
awareness of shared spatial knowledge but instead its opposite: a growing certitude
that one of the consequences of postwar modernity has been the fragmentation of
urban life into specifcally gendered and generational patterns in which people are
in fact separated from each other in just the same way that the Hirayama family are
never quite seen together within the same frame.
This conjunction of a shared and disconnected awareness of the city and its
environs matters to the ways in which Equinox Flower also makes sense of the dis-
tinctiveness of the capital in relation to other regional cities. If the flm begins with
a train in Tokyo, it ends with a train journey taking Wataru from the old capital of
Kyoto to the new postwar world of Hiroshima where his daughter and her husband
now live. In fact, the comings and goings of almost all the main characters that are
conveyed by a repeated mise en scène of doors closing and opening are also reiter-
ated by a wider sense of movement that demonstrates both the gravitational pull of
Tokyo as a metropolis and an apprehension that Japan’s urban modernity has always
been constructed in a relational sense. We learn, for instance, that Taniguchi used
to work with Wataru’s subordinate Kondo in the Kyushu city of Hakozaki. The
flm briefy shows the Kyoto inn that Mrs. Sasaki manages, and we are told in the
course of an exchange about the virtues of another one of her daughter’s suitors, a
pharmacist from Osaka, that the city, Japan’s second largest, “is on its way up”. In
short, the Tokyo of Equinox Flower is a site of multifaceted fuidity and generational
fux.
Nishi Ginza Station was the second of three “B” flms that Imamura Shōhei made
for Nikkatsu in 1958 at the beginning of his directorial career. The studio largely
saw it as a commercial property in order to capitalize on the success of the Hawaiian-
Japanese singer Frank Nagai’s song “Let’s Meet in Yurakucho”/“Yūrakuchō de
aimashō” released the previous year. The title song, an invitation to both the pro-
tagonists and the audience to meet in front of the Nishi-Ginza subway station in
Tokyo, signals an intention to link the two melodies as the latter was but one block
away from the more down-to-earth Yūrakuchō district, famous then, as now, for
the popular drinking stands and eating places of Gādo-shita set underneath the
railway tracks that take trains into the hub of nearby Tokyo station.
If Ozu’s and Imamura’s flms both begin and end with images of the central sta-
tion district of modern-day Tokyo, they could not be more diferent in terms of
their textual operations and felds of social representation when it comes to their
actual depiction of daily urban life. In 1958, the world of the Ginza had recovered
both its prewar level of commercial density and prosperity and its role as a symbol
of aspirational consumption and leisured urban modernity. Nishi Ginza Station on
Tokyo’s central upscale Marunouchi subway line had opened at the end of 1957
and was emblematic of this transition. Instead of the highly composed visual graph-
ics of the studio-bound city at night in Equinox Flower, we thus see a denser and
more freeform image of the nocturnal city that is shot mainly on location.
Despite its profoundly regressive sexual politics, the flm posits a number of
issues relevant to Imamura’s projection of contemporaneous discourse about the
modernization of Tokyo. As such, the flm’s visual construction conveys a more
local set of tensions between surface and depth relevant to the daily experience of
Tokyo’s modernity at this key moment of social transition. A closer look at the role
of Nagai and his titular musical number at the flm’s beginning is instructive. The
opening shot provides a familiar skyline of modern Tokyo at night replete with
commercial neon signage. The sound of a clock chiming signals the close of the
working day, and in the subsequent high-angle shot looking down on the street
below we see a two-way stream of ofce workers, couples, and shoppers signifying
the everyday fow of life in the city. We then cut to a medium-long shot at street
level showing a more multidirectional stream of people passing by that exacerbates
the image of density and routine. The camera identifes a young woman as she
moves in front and simultaneously tilts down and tracks forward to hold her in the
center of the frame. She passes in front of a standing fgure and the camera then
pauses and tilts up to reveal Nagai’s medium profle, his eyes still gazing of-screen
left as they track the woman’s progress down the street. He then turns and addresses
the camera, saying “The Ginza’s the best. It’s just so cool”. The complicity being
staged here is developed when he asks us where we are from and says, “Oh from
that way?” meaning he’s assuming that the spectator is either not a local or from
Tokyo at all. From now on, we must assume that he is supposed to have a certain
degree of mastery over the image track as the flm’s storyteller, as well as authority
about the subject of the Ginza, but what he actually goes on to reveal demonstrates
instead a perhaps inadvertent level of oscillation between the credibility of what he
tells us, the credulity of the protagonists, and the ironic fact that the myth of the
Ginza he initially proposes actually turns out to be nothing but a redundant mirage.
The central way in which this process works is through display and deception.
When Nagai snaps his fngers and calls for music, we cut to a silhouetted Tokyo
skyline across which the title of the flm appears in fashing electric letters to the
accompaniment of a jazz-based drum roll. Whilst this might simply be a method of
announcing that the flm is beginning properly, it is also tempting to conclude that,
in the light of what ensues, the flm is also revealing the artifcial nature of both
its own construction and any consolidated idea at all of what modern-day Tokyo
might actually consist of. Although the modernity of the urban backdrop and
titling signifes the particular location of the Ginza, the song itself is sheer nonsense
based around the sung letters “A, B, C” and “X, Y, Z” and various frenetic comic
declarations from a drunk businessman, a gaggle of leaping teenagers, and a man in
a Hawaiian shirt being led in handcufs up the stairs of a police station.
We shortly cut to a shot on an underground train platform of a singing station
ofcer who leads us to Nagai atop a ladder adjusting the clock to ten o’clock in
the morning. This announcement of both a temporal ellipsis and a gear change in
terms of Nagai’s role in the flm is undercut immediately as we are introduced to
the character of Riko, who starts telling him that he has the wrong time and that
it is one minute later than he thinks. This interaction clearly pulls the apparently
dependable narrator down a peg or two, and from here on in the image track, like
the clock itself, seems permanently slightly out of kilter with any reliable, ordered,
and convincing everyday reality.17 Imamura’s flm reproduces the sense of a far more
disordered urban modernity than the one initially suggested by the images of the
gleaming frontage of the brand new city center railway station.
What initially seems to link Ozu and Imamura’s two commercial feature flms
with the collectively made and independently funded nonfction flm Tokyo 1958
is a shared interest in contemporary Tokyo and the ensuing idea of generational
transition. These elements certainly feature signifcantly within its overall design,
but Tokyo 1958’s fascination with the messy nature of the everyday space and time of
the modern-day Japanese capital also embraces a wider feld of urban flm-making
that, in this case, refects both on the subject and the manner of representation.
Tokyo 1958 was the work of the experimental flm-making collective Cinema 58
that included the documentary flmmakers Teshigahara Hiroshi and Hani Susumu.
In many ways, it follows the “city symphony” template of several avant-garde flms
of the 1920s that confgures the everyday temporal and spatial rhythms of a major
metropolis within a structure that looks at a cross-section of the ordinary social
and commercial activities of the city in relation to a loosely coordinated timeframe
that shifts from day to night. In so doing, the flm foregrounds the social and mate-
rial progress of the postwar period through a combination of numerical statistical
evidence about the ballooning scale of Tokyo’s growth and extensive documentary
footage of Tokyo’s streets and architecture that provides a set of densely layered
information about past, present, and emerging forms of urban experience.
In addition to this, Tokyo 1958 also represents the consolidation of an ongoing
set of contemporaneous debates within the city’s intellectual and artistic circles
about the nature of the screen image and intersecting questions of documentation
and the apprehension of present-day social change. The second half of the 1950s
marked several signifcant interventions within the feld including the founding of
the Kiroku Geijutsu no Kai (Association of Documentary Arts) in May 1956 and
the publication of the frst issue of the journal Kiroku eiga in May 1958.18 As both
Takuya Tsunoda and Yuri Matson also point out, the rationale of this work was
to extend a politically driven and experimental concern with the image into more
popular forms of expression with the aim of melding the concrete day-to-day reali-
ties of the external world with an intensifed awareness of the inner fuidities of the
subjective gaze.19 As Matsumoto Toshio put it in his article “On the Method of the
Avant-Garde Documentary Film” in the inaugural issue of Kiroku eiga:
Today, reality appears as an extremely surrealistic world in which the ordi-

nary laws of causality as they apply to the surface of things have been stripped
away. . . . We liberate the word ‘document’ from the shackles of naturalism.
The word ‘document’ has a new meaning today. It denotes the documenta-
tion of the actual material reality of fact as fact and, at the same time, the
scrupulous documentation of the corresponding inner reality.20
Tokyo 1958 might thus be fruitfully situated within a wider discourse of “debate
on the image” (eizō ronsō) that, as Yuriko Furuhata discusses, began to proliferate in
the year of the flm’s production and included signifcant contributions by the likes
of Hani and flm scholar Okada Susumu.21 In her commentary on the term eizō,
Furuhata is careful to distinguish between a notion of the image in general and the
specifc act of visual mediation engendered by the mechanical apparatus of the flm,
television, or still-photography camera. What makes Tokyo 1958 so fascinating is
not just how it speaks directly about the nature of this relationship between the
printed and recorded image, but, when it comes to the representation of everyday
life in the Japanese capital, it does so in a way that reanimates many of the social
tensions we have already observed in the two previous flms.
Tokyo 1958 begins with a set of shots of a young Donald Richie looking at a
shop window containing a set of ukiyo-e prints. The sequence initially sets up a
system of intercutting between the “live” flmed pictures of his body on the street
and the still woodblock pictures that are the object of his gaze. As we progress,
however, this pattern becomes more complicated as the intermediary plane of the
window glass presents not just an image of the framed prints beyond but a sense
of the refected frames of the modern urban ofce windows behind. This correla-
tion between two felds of meaning – the past and the present, the individual and
the corporate, the photographic and the printed – might initially seem to suggest
a degree of continuity, but this is immediately vanquished when the flm disrupts
both Richie’s and the spectator’s feld of vision by having the characters within the
prints move and superimposing the eyes of the fgures onto the face of the aston-
ished onlooker. The unsettling impact of these shots is underscored by a series of
canted framings and rapid shifts in shot scale as the flm jolts between long shot and
close-up. Tokyo 1958 thus immediately becomes not so much a flm about the pro-
gressive linearity of the city’s history, as articulated by the completion of the land-
mark Tokyo Tower, but a more haphazard portrait of the capital that is questioning
the cost of a centrally planned urban modernity on the individual subjectivities of
its citizens. This animation of the stillness represented by the traditional woodblock
print thus has two functions. It is frst a playful method of intensifying one’s aware-
ness of the visuality of the flm, but second, and far more importantly, through its
recurrent and increasingly subversive presence, it unfxes any sense of the stability
of the “high growth era” of the Japanese capital.
Not long after its opening, the flm shifts to a complex sequence about makeup
and the application of facial treatments in a city department store. In his discus-
sion of the flm’s gender politics, Marcos Centeno rightly makes the point that
the female body is “used throughout the documentary as a metonym for Japanese
society”.22 Part of the way this process is certainly enacted is by linking the com-
modifcation of the female body to an urbanized consumption culture, something
frequently the case too in other global city symphony flms. The flm, however, at
least in part, resists validating this move by representing the application of beauty
products in terms of a deliberately performative gesture that is signaled in counter-
point to other sets of facial close-ups representing the female face caught unawares
on camera. The act of presenting and putting on a face to collude with the virtues
of the accelerated consumer economy is thus contrasted with a more mobile and
more credible documentary gaze that continuously reasserts the everyday vitality of
the ordinary Tokyo citizen.
This theme is developed in another sequence that visualizes the phenomenon
of the modern singing contest. The flm observes a set of contestants reenacting
the vocal and performance style of popular American musicians, and the winning
female singer is naturally presented with a set of makeup as her prize. We also see
the adoring and distracted gazes of local Tokyo dwellers in the audience. Instead
of merely providing a direct transcription of this in terms of an audiovisual record
of a live public event, however, the flm chooses to also take us back to the win-
ning contestant’s local neighborhood. This shift from the space of performance to
the spaces of the working-class street and the everyday interior of the family home
is instructive. The feld of vision that opens up becomes reminiscent of the work
of humanist documentary photographers of the time such as Kuwabara Kineo or
the photographic reports of everyday Tokyo life that Hani Susumu made with the
photographer Natori Yōnosuke for the collection Iwanami Bunko between 1952
and 1956. In one particular long shot, for example, we see a picture of various city
residents in the center of a street of worn wooden buildings. The overground elec-
tric cabling and the presence of a moving train in the distance indicate an emerging
process of modernization still at odds with the milieu that the contestant has just
left. This message is reinforced by the arrival of other prize goods into the home
including those symbolic attributes of the postwar economy: the washing machine,
fridge, and vacuum cleaner. The shift from the impact of live documentary to the
aesthetics of still photography is but one part of the flm’s wider process of interme-
dial performativity. The reassertion of ordinary Tokyo life is itself re-presented as a
spectacle that also signals the advent of a more televisual mode of looking. At the
point the van arrives outside the family home, instead of taking us into the home
with the girl, the flm cuts to a long shot from within the house so that we watch
her entrance through the open doorway from the vantage point of her parents. It
appears that whole event has therefore clearly been deceptively staged as if it is part
of a modern-day reality television show being played out in front of our eyes. The
illusory appeal of consumer gratifcation and commodity worship is aligned with
a sense of the now-pervasive mediatization of everyday urban reality to the extent
that any true presence of the ongoing fow of “the real” – and thus Tokyo – is being
directly questioned by the very operations of the flm itself.
To conclude, all three case studies have to varying degrees demonstrated the
diferent attributes of Tokyo discussed by Augustin Berque and others at the begin-
ning of the chapter. They certainly reveal the impossible task of achieving a holistic
and completed sense of the everyday life of the capital on flm. Having said this,
though, they do suggest a remarkable degree of consistency in terms of under-
standing the city in spatial terms that reiterates the value of adopting a more syn-
chronic perspective to the subject. A closer look at one single year within the long
screen history of the capital not only reveals a place with a strong awareness of
its past and present but also somewhere with a clear sense of uncertainty about a
provisional future only just beginning to come into view. Despite the eforts of the
Japanese government to regulate a sustained and linear sense of progressive urban
modernity – something materialized by the construction of the Tokyo Tower –
both popular and experimental Japanese cinema presented a more contested sense
of the direction that the city was taking in ways that visibly challenged the logic
of completion and achievement that culminated in the grand internationalizing
gesture of the Tokyo Olympics of 1964.
All three flms recalibrate the notion of the singular fow of an ofcially sanc-
tioned model of accelerated modernization and instead posit the idea of a more
multiple, fragmented, and unfnished arrangement of time and space that existed
both within and well beyond the metropolis. In some ways, this duality might be
said to be a feature of all developing global cities, but, as these flms also show,
there were distinctively local aspects to the process by which urban tradition, loss,
displacement, and adjustment were all felt and noticed within the experience of
everyday life. In sum, this might well be what most clearly distinguished Tokyo
as a cinematic city at the time: the ability to mediate the holding on to the more
contingent and layered heritage of the city’s past in ways that explicitly denied or
implicitly subverted the administratively planned repression of the present and the
growth-driven aspirations of the future.
Notes
1 Augustin Berque, Japan: Cities and Social Bonds (Yelfertoft: Pilkington Press, 1997),
126–7.
2 Hidenobu Jinnai, Tokyo. A Spatial Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), 11.
3 Ibid., 2. This delineation also informs the two volumes of Edward Seidensticker’s history
of Tokyo: Low City, High City (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1984) and Tokyo Rising.
The City Since the Great Earthquake (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1991).
4 Henry D. Smith, “Tokyo as an Idea: An Exporation of Japanese Urban Thought Until
1945,” Journal of Japanese Studies 4, no. 1 (Winter 1978): 71
5 Miriam Silverberg, “Constructing the Japanese Ethnography of Modernity,” Journal of
Asian Studies 51, no. 1 (February 1992): 32
6 Harry Harootunian, “Foreword: A Walker in the City: Maeda Ai and the Mapping of
Urban Space,” in Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity, ed. Maeda Ai (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2004), xiii.
7 Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan (New York: Oxford University Press), 251.
8 Rafaele Pernice, “The Transformation of Tokyo During the 1950s and Early 1960s.
Projects Between City Planning and Urban Utopia,” Journal of Asian Architecture and
Building Engineering 5, no. 2 (2006): 254.
9 Carol Gluck, “The Past in the Present,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon
(Berkeley: University of California Press), 65–72.
10 Evelyn Schultz, “Mapping Environments of Memory, Nostalgia, and Emotions in ‘Tokyo
Spatial (Auto)biographies’,” in Tokyo, Memory, Imagination and the City, ed. Barbara E.
Thornbury and Evelyn Schultz (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefeld, 2018), 80.
11 William W. Kelly, “Finding a Place in Metropolitan Japan: Ideologies, Institutions and
Everyday Life,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of
California Press), 189.
12 Ibid., 216.
13 See Simon Partner, Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Con-
sumer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
14 Alisa Freedman, “Bus Guides Tour National Landscapes, Pop Culture and Youth Fanta-
sies,” in Modern Girls on the Go. Gender, Mobility and Labor in Japan, ed. Alisa Freedman,
Laura Miller and Christine R. Yano (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press,
2013), 107–30.
15 See Alexis Agliano Sanborn, “Burn, Fade and Glow: The Cultures and Times of Tokyo
Tower, 1958–1990,” www.academia.edu/2974839/Burn_Fade_and_Glow_The_Cul
ture_and_Times_of_Tokyo_Tower_1958-1990.
16 See Donald Richie, “Attitudes Towards Tokyo on Film,” East-West Film Journal 3, no. 1
(December 1998): 68–75, and Marilyn Ivy, “Formations of Mass Culture,” in Postwar
Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press), 239–58.
17 For discussion of the critical reception of the flm, see Jennifer Coates, “The Making of
an Auteur: Shōhei Imamura’s Early Films 1958–1959,” in Clients and Kindred Spirits. The
Taboo Cinema of Shohei Imamura, ed. Lindsay Coleman and David Desser (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 21–40.
18 See Yuriko Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality. Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season
of Image Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 37–52.
19 See Yuri Matson, “The Word and the Image: Collaborations Between Abe Kōbō and
Teshigahara Hiroshi,” MA diss., University of British Columbia, 2002, 35–6, and Takuya
Tsunoda, “The Dawn of Cinematic Modernism: Iwanami Productions and Postwar
Japanese Cinema,” PhD diss., Yale University, 2015, 439–40.
20 See Matsumoto Toshio, “On the Method of Avant-Garde Documentary Film,” in From
Postwar to Postmodern, Art in Japan, 1945–1989, ed. Chong et al., 142–5.
21 See Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality, 37–43, and Marcos P. Centeno Martín, “Postwar
Narratives and the Avant-Garde Documentary: Tokyo 1958 and Furyō Shōnen,” in Persis-
tently Postwar: Media and the Politics of Memory in Japan, ed. Blai Guarné, Artur Lozanzo-
Méndez and Dolores P. Martinez (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 41–62.
22 Centeno Martín, “Postwar Narratives,” 47.
11
“MADE IN HONG KONG”
The (re)production of publicness in
the cinematic urban topography of
contemporary Hong Kong
Zhuozhang Li
After the Second World War, the British planner Sir Patrick Abercrombie was
invited by the colonial government to propose a strategic report on urban develop-
ment in Hong Kong. In the report, Abercrombie raised the notion of both market-
led development as a key concept and the model of “trafc-free town center”,
which were implemented in the Hong Kong of the twentieth century and pro-
vided essential guidance for the urban plans of the city that followed.1 For instance,
in the Metroplan (1990), it asserts that “continuous, high capacity, grade-separated,
all weather, noise protected routes for pedestrian circulation” should be provided
in the main commercial areas to create a comfortable and pleasant environment for
both “workers and shoppers”.2 This focus on verticality has produced a prevailing
attachment to “going up” in urban strategy in Hong Kong, and, hence, verticality
has become integral to the booming urbanization of Hong Kong and transformed
it into a “city without ground”.3 In this profoundly vertical city, skyscrapers and
shopping malls are connected with bridges and passageways that abut – or superim-
pose while seen from above – streets and other urban spaces. It, then, generates an
intricate spatial confguration of the city that is difcult to be represented and stud-
ied in the same way as Nolli applied in his fgure-ground map of the old Rome.4
Meanwhile, from a political economy point of view, the foregrounding strategy of
market economy also drives a total privatization of the city and a rigid management
of urban space.5 With the street being replaced by the privately owned public space,
the city’s development is based on a vague perception of publicness or an erosion
of public good, which is spatially presented in the ambiguous boundary between
public and private of its built environment.
The verticality of Hong Kong and the blurred boundary between public and
private, however, is not merely presented in its spatial confguration of the built
environment. Within everyday life, the urban space is constantly modifed through
the spatial practices by ordinary people in diferent levels of the city. Before
DOI: 10.4324/9781003107309-15
“Made in Hong Kong” 159
Abercrombie, the British civil engineer Osbert Chadwick, in his 1882 report on
the sanitary condition of Hong Kong, noted that rooftop space was used for “rear
yard activities”, and the street was transformed into a kitchen by butchers due to
the confned interior space in the segregated Chinese community.6 In this way, a
three-dimensional relationship between the city and the people is also conducted
in everyday urban life through the spatial praxis as a response to its geographical
limitation, centralized economic development, and injustice of urban space. These
everyday practices, from food stalls and shop extensions to back lane storages and
rooftop farms, produce an informal layer of the city that bewilders the solid bound-
ary of public/private, urbanity/domesticity and further obscures the conventional
notion of publicness.
While urban scholars have been trying to give a legible defnition and categori-
zation, public space in the real city is often found as being between more public or
less public.7 The Central District of Hong Kong, for instance, would be occupied
by cardboard and crowds of domestic helpers and become a space of gathering and
socializing on every Sunday while being the prime site of bank buildings, ofcial
center, and high-class hotels on the other weekdays. The level of publicness in the
urban space – squares, streets, and passageways – is varied: on one hand, their bod-
ily appearances become a collective manifesto of their neglected existence in the
city that, referring to Butler, reconfgure the materiality of urban space and reclaim
the public space;8 on the other hand, with the urban space being occupied by a
specifc group that difers in race and social status, it loses the notion of publicness
for other people in the city to some extent. Therefore, the understanding of public
space being a place open to all must be considered as a process of negotiation in
diferent times and among the people. It is an everyday discourse that is constructed
through socio-spatial practices of diferent groups against their social structures and
cultural backgrounds.
Cinematic urban topography

Where then can these everyday stories be found? For local scholars and writers,
the authenticity of the urban life in Hong Kong, “a true expression of the city’s
identity”, is not in the shiny skyscrapers and the spectacle of shopping malls but
in the peripheral rooftops behind those towers and in the crowded streets “from
whence we can hear the sound of Hong Kong citizens’ breathing and footsteps”.9
Yet, these informal and temporal practices, as de Certeau notes, being the real dis-
course of the city, has been commonly neglected in the ofcial documents through
a strategic totalization and an elimination of the ordinary culture and everyday
stories.10 With this technocratic perspective, the neglect and misapprehension of
these everyday appropriations also exist in urban and cultural studies, in which it
can lead to a reductive or even biased perception of the urban. Fruit Chan’s Little
Cheung (1999), for example, a flm that portrays the urban milieu in a traditional
neighborhood in Mong Kok, was criticized for being too nostalgic. As a response,
Chan writes that “the critics seemed to be looking across to Tsim Sha Tsui from
160 Zhuozhang Li
Central. . . . They were like foreigners and refused to get in touch with things
grass-roots, which have not changed”.11 With this remote and elite view, the nar-
ratives of everyday life, the breathing, the footsteps, and the informal practices of
ordinary people have become a merely murmuring discourse that is easily over-
looked during the investigation of the city.
The question therefore arises of how to approach these concealed everyday
stories in the past that are mostly absent in the ofcial archives and urban studies.
In order to access this very process of temporary transformation of urban space
and the negotiation of publicness, we have to look into other forms “constituted
by ethnological descriptions” of the “micro-stories” of everyday actions and social
relations.12 In the context of Hong Kong, some works of local literature (i.e. novel-
las and poems), for example, have provided detailed depictions of the relations
between the people and the city. With an enunciation on the urbanity and social
milieu from an everyday perspective, writers such as Leung Ping-kwan construct
a “topographical writing” that portrays the city as a “lived” space by capturing the
“sense of place”.13 In this paper, it is intended to follow this topographical under-
standing of urban life and to illustrate the everyday hidden layer of Hong Kong
through the lens of its urban cinema.
Hong Kong urban cinema

Despite a long history of flm production, it was not until the late 1970s when
the Hong Kong New Wave cinema movement emerged that local flmmakers
started enunciating the urban life and social milieu from the perspective of ordi-
nary people, with flms such as The Secret (Ann Hui, 1979) and Cops and Robbers
(Cheung Kwok-ming, 1979). The movement was followed by the Second New
Wave movement with directors such as Wong Kar-wai, Alex Law, and Fruit Chan
in the later 1980s and the SAR New Wave after its handover in 1997. Their works,
recognized as “Hong Kong urban cinema (香港城市電影)” by Leung Ping-kwan,
have reinforced a new relationship between the real and reel city:
it [the city] is presented from the angle of the underprivileged, expresses the
need for social change, detects problems from an everyday situation. . . . It is
this kind of self-awareness of the city and its representation that could help us
map out a gradual and complicated formation of urban culture.14
For example, Fruit Chan, one of the most “local” directors in Hong Kong, por-
trays a series of marginalized groups of people and their living spaces in his “Hong
Kong Trilogy” and “Prostitute Trilogy”: from a group of young people living in
the public housing in Made in Hong Kong (1997), several ex-servicemen wandering
around the Central District in The Longest Summer (1998), and a local boy play-
ing with an illegal immigrant girl in the alley near his old neighborhood in Little
Cheung (1999); to a sexual worker following her undercover restaurant-hotel rou-
tine in Durian (2000), a butcher’s son living in a squatter area that is surrounded by
private developments in Hollywood Hong Kong (2001); and a wife living on a boat
with her Three Husbands (2018).15 As the boy Cheung and his immigrant friend
make a swing inside a lorry on the street, calling the holes torn in the roof of the
truck “stars of the dark sky”, these people and their everyday lives are no longer
presented as pitiable stories or the shadowy side of the glamorous city. Instead, their
living environment becomes a joyful and vibrant everyday space through a variety
of practices, even if temporarily. As Leung argues, these flms represent the “daily
tactics of negotiation”, reexamine the underrepresented urban spaces, and redefne
the cultural identity of the city.16 Meanwhile, in addition to providing a new per-
spective of the city, these cinematic representations of urban space can also reveal
a disappearing past. In Fruit Chan’s Hollywood Hong Kong (2001), by capturing the
clear contrast between a newly developed shopping mall and Tai Hom Village, a
squatter area built by inhabitants in the 1950s, the flm provides one last glimpse
of the area before it was torn down in 2001. Urban cinema thus becomes a crucial
primary resource by which to understand this other side of the story – the “daily
tactics of negotiation” and the (dis)appearance of the everyday lived space – in the
face of the market-led urban development of Hong Kong.
With an abundant supply of the depictions of everyday urban space, we face a
bittersweet situation: to gain the access of this archive of everyday life, one has to
deal with innumerable flmic materials that are fragmented and overloaded with
details. For instance, there were 3,260 flms produced in Hong Kong from 1979 to
2010, but not all are related to the contemporary urban Hong Kong.17 The cases
discussed here need to be related to everyday situations of the city during a period
of time corresponding with its production, in which the flms could synchronize
the development of the city and establish a reference point for other flms from
the same period or made using the same locations. Diferent from Ann Hui’s or
Cheung Kwok-ming’s critical realist perspective, some New Wave directors have
responded to the political environment in an allegorical and imaginary way.18 For
example, in his flm The Wicked City (1992), Tsui Hark portrays people coming
together to defend the city in a futuristic Hong Kong being invaded in 1997 (the
year of the coming Handover) by ruthless monsters apparently based in the Bank
of China building. This type of flm certainly depicts the psychological milieu of
the city – that is, the fear of a new government and the determination in facing an
uncertain future – but it contains barely any information by which to understand
the everyday spatial production in the city around that period. Meanwhile, many
Second New Wave flmmakers embraced a nostalgic turn rather than an imaginary
future, such as Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (1987) and Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for
Love (2000).19 Notwithstanding their triumph in depicting the social context of
the time – and in some instances exerting a certain degree of infuence on the
site of the flm after the release20 – these flms provide vivid but olden portraits of
the city in earlier eras – an image of Hong Kong Island in the 1930s in Rouge and
a story of the 1960s Hong Kong from In the Mood for Love – in such a way that
they diminish the coherence of the narrative and diverge from the contemporary
context of this study.
162 Zhuozhang Li
With an aim of examining the (re)production of publicness in the urban areas,

this study also pays attention to flms that provide detailed information about the
locations and that can therefore be deployed as a resource by which to study the
urban topography of the real city. To identify the locations of these flms, evidence
could be found in each scene or, borrowing a concept from Penz, in diferent
“urban narrative layers” of flms, for example from a road sign next to the character
or a landmark building standing in the background.21 Such evidence – a specifc
streetscape, certain buildings, and neon lights of shops and restaurants – can indi-
cate shooting locations and the urban environment of a scene. At the same time,
this type of information can also be confrmed out of those layers and of the
screen, for example through reference to documents from the Hong Kong Film
Archive and cinema studies literature, all of which have provided valuable informa-
tion for the discussion.
Based upon these criteria, after reviewing more than 3,300 flms produced in
Hong Kong since the start of the New Wave movement, I watched over 270
directly related to contemporary Hong Kong city and studied 28 flms, includ-
ing award-winning productions, cinema scholars’ favorites, and flms that evoke
many echoes of Hong Kong society (Figure 11.1). They are from 16 local directors
whose social and cultural identities belong to a part of the collective identity of
the city, covering diferent age groups, genders, and backgrounds. The list includes
well-established (and indeed in some instances world-famous) New Wave pioneers
such as Ann Hui, Wong Kar-wai, and Johnnie To; flms by young local directors
like Adam Wong Sau-ping and Barbara Wong Chun-chun are also covered in the
discussion. Following Ann Hui, other female directors including Wong Chun-
chun and Chan Siu-kuen shed light on the younger generation and immigrant
workers and their everyday lives in the city. To interpret each of the diferent works
from these directors, who have been widely recognized in cinema and cultural
studies, could unfold a series of thorough depictions of the urban milieu (both
socially and spatially).
Covering four decades, including the prime of industrialization under the
collision between the colonial administration and Chinese natives and the afu-
ent consumer society with locals questioning the identity of the city and them-
selves, these 28 flms provide a general picture of the geographical factors, as
well as the social and cultural context, of the two areas of Kowloon and Hong
Kong Island, which were developed primarily since the colonial period of time
based on the Abercrombie Report and following plans. In addition to the locations,
my investigation examined diferent types of space, everyday spatial practices
that appear in each flm and its specifc social and cultural background in difer-
ent areas and periods. All selected flms succeed in portraying diferent sides of
contemporary Hong Kong with detailed depictions of diferent levels of the city,
of informal spatial productions in everyday urban life, of the ever-shifting social
context throughout four decades, that is to say, a cinematic urban topography
of the city.
FIGURE 11.1 List of selected flms.
Cinematic urban topography

The next question to be addressed was how to decipher these cinematic depictions
of the production, or reduction, of publicness that are archived in the flms. How
to systematically translate these scattered everyday situations of the appropriation of
urban space into a series of data for further investigation? This requires a detailed
study of the spatial practices in each selected flm. Through critical flm analysis,
this study deconstructs the cinematic urban entity and the pattern “laid out by the
flmmakers”.22 Instead of discussing the form and style, narrative structure, and
editing continuity, flms are deconstructed and analyzed as archival materials to
examine the rhythm of everyday urban space, the transformation between formal
and informal urbans space, and the historical process of this transformation.
In order to thoroughly examine the urban space and spatial appropriations that
the flms portray, I analyzed and recorded every type of space that appeared, from
the frst scene to the last, noting the time duration, the level of space (underground,
street level, corridor space, rooftops), the notion of publicness, types of practice,
164 Zhuozhang Li
and real locations. This then becomes an evidence-based, methodical database with
a large number of references to the everyday (re)production of publicness in the
cinematic urban topography of Hong Kong. Following the preceding discussion on
public space, the space depicted in Hong Kong urban cinema can also be divided
into several types based upon the notion of publicness. Although a large amount
of public and private space remains public and private in the flms, as users appear
to follow the originally intended uses, some public space might happen to be occu-
pied by specifc groups, such as protestors and domestic workers, thereby retaining its
public quality but becoming less welcoming for anyone outside the group. Then,
some urban space is appropriated for private uses such as shop extensions and vend-
ers, while the private space is appropriated for public activities as in the case of Hong
Kong’s many rooftops. Meanwhile, scenes in some of the flms happen outside the
urban boundaries, for instance in mountains and wetlands.
Considering this complex nature of the evaluation of publicness, the whole
process of flm analysis is conducted manually. In a further step, this database it
then transformed into a series of flm spectrums by expressing levels and degrees
of publicness in diferent heights and colors. In the flm-specifc spectrum applied
here, the color yellow is used to denote “public space being occupied by specifc
groups”, blue for “public space being appropriated for private uses”, red for “pri-
vate space being used for public activities”, light grey for “(nonappropriated) public
space and cityscape”, grey for “(nonappropriated) private space”, white for “non-
urban areas, or spaces outside Hong Kong”. This method enunciates the situations
where everyday practices defy and transform the established urban space in Hong
Kong cinema. With the analysis of 28 flms produced in varied urban areas and
at diferent times, it provides a collective portrait of the spatial appropriations and
informal transformations of urban space that happed, or are happing, in the city.
In Fruit Chan’s Little Cheung (1999; Figure 11.2), for example, the urban space
in Mongkok is transformed by the local residents through a variety of practices such
as shop or domestic extensions and other forms of daily spatial appropriations.23
FIGURE 11.2 Film spectrum of urban space in Little Cheung: a) formal urban plan; b)
everyday life.
FIGURE 11.3 An overview of the flm spectrums of selected Hong Kong flms.
While the built environment of the city may have a solid spatial demarcation based
on its formal planning, the clear-cut dichotomy between public and private is
diversifed into a more dynamic situation in its everyday urban life. This kind of
transformation could be found in all 28 flms to diferent extents (Figure 11.3).
The fuidity of everyday urban space

What these visualized spectrums demonstrate is a collective portrait of the everyday
situation depicted in the flms that maps out some common factors of this cin-
ematic urban topography. The frst is that the city consists of a dynamic everyday
urban space underneath the functionalist layer in Hong Kong. Each spectrum (and
the flm it represents) illustrates the socio-spatial pattern of ordinary people chang-
ing with the rhythmic, distinctly individual practices of their daily lives. That is to
166 Zhuozhang Li
say, a same street could be appropriated in completely diferent ways according to

the social group and time.
This leads to the second factor: the boundary between public and private space
depicted in Hong Kong urban cinema is constantly shifting in the everyday level
(Figure 11.2). If the city, from the perspective of urban management, struggles to
clarify the notion of public space due to its ambiguous defnition and restriction as
well as the commodifcation of pseudo-public space inside private properties, this
everyday layer of tactical practice is likely to infame the complicated situation of
public space in Hong Kong. Another factor being verifed through these flm spec-
trums is that the urban verticality of Hong Kong could be considered as not only
an urban strategy devised by investors but also part of everyday life. From the old
street and the narrow back lane to the corridor of the mall and the top of a theatre
arch, these practices and (re)productions of publicness could be found at every level
and every corner of the city, with spatial appropriations varying according to the
specifc urban conditions. It is therefore necessary to zoom in and start examining
everyday phenomena from each level and corner.
Another example that illustrates this frontier of everyday contest against the
multilevel urban built environment can be found in Wong Sau-ping’s 2013 flm
The Way We Dance. In the flm, a scene shows a group of young men starting a
dancing battle in a tea canteen where a vacant space has been cleared out. Then,
the battleground shifts from the canteen to the corridor and the lift afterward,
and, eventually, they arrive at the rooftop. Leaping over the huge gaps among the
concrete structure and circulation pipes on the rooftop, the young rooftoppers
trace each other and try to get hold of a cap – whoever puts the cap on top of the
lightning conductor will be the winner of this game – against the high residential
towers and roofs of other buildings in the background (Figure 11.4).
The location of this scene, the Kwun Tong Industrial Centre, was built between
1978 and 1980. With the economic boom of Hong Kong in the mid-twentieth
century, Kwun Tong was developed as the earliest industrial district in Hong Kong,
reaching its peak in the 1970s and 1980s. However, following the relocation of
the manufacturing industries in the 1980s, the factory buildings like Kwun Tong
FIGURE 11.4 Dancing scene in The Way We Dance (Adam Wong Sau Ping, 2013).
Industrial Centre became empty and started looking for redevelopment. Since the
Urban Planning Committee proposed the regional regeneration plan and changed
the land use of the area from industrial to business in 2001, most of these build-
ings have been turned into retail and cultural functions because of their convenient
locations and relatively low rent.24 At the same time, due to the strict management
of private-owned open space on the ground, more and more street dancers struggle
to fnd places, and, as a result, many of them have moved into such factory build-
ings. The large scale of those former factories provides a plentiful space for diferent
activities, from practicing to performing. Additionally, the easy accessibility to the
rooftop expands this spatial platform and ofers more possibilities. In the flm, the
dancers capture this potential and make the rooftop part of their playground. The
flm thus visualizes the alternative appropriation of the empty rooftop or, in de
Certeau’s words, a tactical practice that has “a clever utilization . . . of the oppor-
tunities it presents”.25 This feeting bodily action produces an alternative vision of
urbanity. It echoes the Lettrist International’s scenario on the “rational improve-
ments” to the city of Paris by reimagining a new function of rooftops for all citizens
by opening them up to “pedestrian trafc” in the city.26 Both defy the preexisting
mechanism of the city and reclaim the right of participating in the process of oper-
ating the urban space.
Following this perspective of the relationship between the body and the con-
trolled urban space, the tactical practice and the strategic urban system, it would,
moreover, lead us to another layer of revelation: not merely the alternative route that
it reveals but also the identity of the dancers – the identity of themselves as citizens
rather than consumers. Going back to the polemological origin of the terms strat-
egy and tactic, the game in the playground is a battle between the dancer and the
city. By creating his own answer to the controlled urban space, the dancer reclaims
the power of choosing the city he wants to be and thus the person he wants to
be.27 In her writing on the flm, Hong Kong flm critic Wu Junyu argues that these
young Hong Kong locals embrace the spirit of hip-hop and seek their own iden-
tities through dancing.28 The title of her review, I Dance Therefore I Am (我舞故
我在), demonstrates the nature of this tactical practice in the playground – a play-
ful yet resolute manifesto to the question of an individual’s identity in a privatized
and globalized city.
Sometimes, so the flms reveal, a variety of spatial practices by ordinary people
may all occur in one area simultaneously, difering, superimposing, evoking, and
even colliding with each other. For example, in Little Cheung (see Figure 11.2), the
blue section at the end of the spectrum indicates a general situation of public urban
space being appropriated for private uses, while the scene in fact depicts a range
of diferent practices such as shop extensions, food vendors, and domestic items
piled on streets. Similarly, in The Way We Dance a group of well-arranged plants
also appears on the rooftop while dancers transform it into their playground. In
Wong Chun-chun’s Truth or Dare: 6th Floor Rear Flat (2003), the rooftop becomes a
domestic “rear yard” for the tenants. Clothes are hung in-between TV aerial stands
and roof structures; plants are placed next to deck chairs; a swimming pool air bed
168 Zhuozhang Li
and swim rings are placed on the roof as seats for a group chat on a summer night.
These activities, which happen more frequently and require more materials than
dancing (even for drying clothes, tools such as strings, clips, and stands are required
beyond bodily movements), demonstrate another way of appropriating the rooftop:
an extension of the living space.
Conclusion
In order to understand this “history of everyday practices”, I have developed an
interdisciplinary approach that is based upon the afnity between Hong Kong
urban cinema and the real city. The scope of this research ofers a comparative case
studies of individuals’ everyday lives, which foregrounds the ephemeral but real
(re)actions of ordinary people and the “real discourse of the city”. To study these
everyday practices that are constructed and depicted in the cinematic urban topog-
raphy can help understand the micro-history of the city and the transformation of
appropriations with a refection to its urban and cultural identity.
By putting the flm analysis spectrums in a chronological order (Figure 11.5),
the result visualizes a general reduction of publicness through a gradual disappear-
ance of spatial appropriations, thus a reduction of the possibilities for producing
one’s own urban (social) space. From one of the frst Hong Kong New Wave
flms Cops and Robbers (1979) to Derek Yee’s One Nite in Mongkok (2004), during
this period of time, the additional layer of spatial appropriation can be found in
most scenes. Even if some flms were mainly shot indoors, including Wong Kar-
wai’s As Tears Go By (1988) and Wong Chun-chun’s Truth or Dare: 6th Floor Rear
Flat (2003), there were still a few practices being depicted in the street or on the
rooftop. Nevertheless, it is in the late 2000s that the cinematic representation of
appropriating the urban space, especially at the street level, started vanishing, which
echoes a wave of redevelopment projects in the city around that time – such as the
construction of Langham Palace in Mongkok (completed in 2004) and the regen-
eration of Lee Tung Street (2003–2007). Through these cinematic representations
of the disappearing past in Hong Kong urban cinema, it becomes possible for us
to expose the topographic evolution of everyday urban life and to understand the
various layers of urban space within diferent historical periods.
It can be argued that, through this cinematic urban approach, the real discourse
of the city, concealed by chaotic appearances and ambiguous social relations, could
be truly understood. Behind the verticality of the urban space and the ambiguous
notion of publicness in contemporary Hong Kong, there is another layer of spatial
production that has been murmuring in everyday life. As a response to the com-
modifcation and fortifcation of the urban space, the ordinary people who have
been largely muted in the city’s ofcial discourse, but who remain in the spotlight
of cinema, utilize the ambiguity of the urban space and appropriate the planned
city for their own spatial, social, and mental needs. This then alters the static order
of the city and forms an ever-changing feld that keeps blurring the social and
spatial boundary and the notion of publicness at the daily level. With the explicit
FIGURE 11.5 The general decline of spatial appropriation after 2004.

170 Zhuozhang Li
depiction of this hidden layer of everyday life, Hong Kong urban cinema has
become a point of confuence for diferent facets of everyday urban life: spatial
appropriation, social reproduction, and psychological atmosphere, as well as their
relations with the existing city (i.e. its built environment, economic structure, and
cultural context). Thus, by unfolding the real process of the production of everyday
space, what this cinematic urban approach suggests is an attempt to bring insights
into the everyday spatial politics of ordinary people.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Adam Wong Sau-ping and Golden Scene Co. Ltd. for
their kind permission to use the flm stills of The Way We Dance (2013).
Notes
1 The title of the report is Hong Kong Preliminary Planning Report 1948; see Lawrence Wai
Chung Lai, “Refections on the Abercrombie Report 1948 a Strategic Plan for Colonial
Hong Kong,” Town Planning Review 70, no. 1 (1999): 61–86; also see Zheng Tan and
Charlie Q. L. Xue, “The Evolution of an Urban Vision: The Multilevel Pedestrian Net-
works in Hong Kong, 1965–1997,” Journal of Urban History 42, no. 4 (2016): 688–708.
2 See Planning Department. Metroplan: Topic Action Plans. Hong Kong: Government
Printers, 1990. Accessed January 11, 2021. https://www.pland.gov.hk/pland_en/p_
study/comp_s/metroplan/metro_es/eng_6.htm.
3 Yiu Fai Chow and Jeroen De Kloet, “Flânerie and Acrophilia in the Postmetropolis:
Rooftops in Hong Kong Cinema,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, no. 2 (2013): 139–55;
Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. Solomon, and Clara Wong, Cities Without Ground: A Hong
Kong Guidebook (Singapore: Oro Editions, 2012); also see Barrie Shelton, Justyna Karak-
iewicz, and Thomas Kvan, The Making of Hong Kong: From Vertical to Volumetric (London:
Routledge, 2013).
4 In Cities Without Ground, 30, Frampton, Solomon, and Wong argue that: “without a
ground, Hong Kong can have no fgure-ground relationships. Rather, the city is a dense
mass of fgure abutting each other directly in three dimensions”.
5 See Alexander R Cuthbert and Keith G McKinnell, “Ambiguous Space, Ambiguous
Rights – Corporate Power and Social Control in Hong Kong,” Cities 14, no. 5 (1997):
295–311; also see Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Lon-
don: Pimlico, 1998); Anna Minton, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-
frst-century City (London: Penguin, 2012).
6 See Osbert Chadwick, Mr. Chadwick’s reports on the sanitary condition of Hong Kong (Lon-
don, 1882), 26.
7 See George Varna and Steve Tiesdell, “Assessing the Publicness of Public Space: The
Star Model of Publicness,” Journal of Urban Design 15, no. 4 (2010): 588–93.
8 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2018), 70–1.
9 See Dawei Chen, “Street Landscape: the Topographical Writing of Streets in Hong Kong
(街道微觀：香港街道的地誌書寫),” Xianggang wenxue 187 & 188 (July–August 2000):
4–14.
10 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2011), 118–22.
11 See Guoling Pan, “The Emotional Map of Hong Kong Cinema,” in Location, ed. Win-
nie Fu (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2006), 101.
12 See de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 70.
13 See Chen, “Street Landscape,” 13.

14 See Leung Ping-kwan, “Urban Cinema and the Cultural Identity of Hong Kong,” in
The Cinema of Hong Kong, ed. Poshek Fu and David Desser (Cambridge, UK: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2012), 238–41.
15 See Esther M. K. Cheung, Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2009), 2–6.
16 See Ping-kwan, “Urban Cinema and the Cultural Identity of Hong Kong,” 242–9.
17 For instance, among the 108 flms released in 1979, only 14 flms are not related with
genres such as ghost, zombie, period drama, and classic martial arts flm. See “The List
of Hong Kong Films (1914–2010)” (Hong Kong Film Archive, 2010).
18 On realistic Hong Kong cinema see Jason McGrath, “Realism,” Journal of Chinese Cin-
emas 10, no. 1 (2016): 22; also see the discussion of Tsui Hark’s Wicked City in Ackbar
Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002), 24.
19 See Natalia Chan Sui Hung, “Rewriting History: Hong Kong Nostalgia Cinema and
Its Social Practice,” in The Cinema of Hong Kong, ed. Poshek Fu and David Desser (Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
20 For example, Echoes of Rainbow (Alex Law, 2010), a flm about a family living in a tradi-
tional Hong Kong neighborhood in the 1960s, evoked public discussions on the conser-
vation of the flming location, Wing Lee Street, and it has become one of the tourism
spots for knowing the “everyday life of traditional community” in Hong Kong, see Steve
Pan and Chris Ryan, “Film-Induced Heritage Site Conservation: The Case of Echoes
of the Rainbow,” Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research 47, no. 1 (2013): 125–50.
21 Penz demonstrates four layers, including people/body, zoning/planning, people/body,
and camera/framing, to read the information provided by city flms, and to allow “the
streets and the urban fabric to come to the fore”. See François Penz, “Towards an Urban
Narrative Layers Approach to Decipher the Language of City Films,” CLCWeb: Com-
parative Literature and Culture 14, no. 3 (2012): 9–10.
22 Based on Bordwell and Thompson, flm is an architecture, or a pattern, “that the flm-
makers laid out”, and flm analysis, which is normally with some “specifc purpose”, is
a critical and systematic way of interpreting certain parts of this construction. See David
Bordwell and Kristin Thompson and Jef Smith, Film Art: An Introduction (New York:
McGraw-Hill Education, 2018), 69, 398.
23 The main shooting locations of the flm are in Portland Street and Temple Street.
24 See Energizing Kowloon East Ofce Report (2001).
25 See de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 39.
26 In the Potlatch #23 in 1955, Debord mentions a Plan for Rational Improvements to the City
of Paris in a letter to André Cheneboit, “With a Careful Rearrangement of Fire Escapes,
and the Creation of Walkways Where Needed, Open the Roofs of Paris for Strolling,”
see Tom McDonough, ed., The Situationists and the City (London: Verso, 2009), 69–71.
27 See David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (September–
October 2008): 23–40.
28 See Junyu Wu, “I Dance, Therefore I Am (我舞故我在:《狂舞派》的順流逆流),”
Film Art, no. 3 (2014).
PART IV
in the home
12
CINEMUSESPACE
A cinematic exploration of the minor
magic of everyday life
François Penz, Janina Schupp, Maureen Thomas

and Matthew Flintham
With the coming of the digital era in the twenty-frst century and the advent of
random-access editing, computer scientist Manovich, intrigued by the potential
of digital culture and emerging visual languages, asked: “How can our new abili-
ties to store vast amounts of data, to automatically classify, index, link, search and
instantly retrieve it lead to new kinds of narratives?”1 In the twenty-frst century,
the AHRC-funded research project, CineMuseSpace: A Cinematic Musée Imaginaire of
Spatial Cultural Diferences (2017–2020), has wielded the mature power of computer
software to handle large databases and reconfgure narrative and to output results in
high visual quality in support of a new research methodology. The team developed
an innovative database and system of classifying video clips to semi-automatically,
digitally dissect cinematic data on lived spaces and the day-to-day activities they
facilitate, outputting new fexible moving-image sequences to visually illuminate
and compare spatial cultural diferences and similarities across cultures.
CineMuseSpace’s digital approach generates a novel understanding of deeply
rooted societal diferences in the usage of architecture, experience of space, and
everyday activities within the home by observing with fresh eyes and freeing up
the cultural elements profoundly embedded in the cinematic image. The project
constitutes the frst large-scale, cross-cultural study of the everyday to be based
on analyzing the primarily visual medium of flm through new digital tools. It
proposes that, in a globalized world, the spatial thinking revealed by cinematic
representation is key to answering important, complex questions about cultural
diferences, which, by recognizing the importance of local idiom, will inform the
future of the built environment while developing new intercultural understandings.
French social anthropologist Philippe Descola demonstrates that, in order to
understand cultural diferences and similarities through visual artefacts, we need
to get “under the skin of the image”.2 He compares examples of Chinese and
Dutch seventeenth-century landscape-paintings, which, on the surface, may appear
DOI: 10.4324/9781003107309-17
176 François Penz et al.
similar (bar stylistic distinctions) but that on closer consideration reveal profound
diferences. The Dutch (European) “naturalism-based” landscape adopts a mimetic
form of representation, typical of Western painting, while the approach deployed in
the Chinese painting of mountains and water incorporates the resonance between
the cosmos and the painter’s implicit presence, representing the human body’s place
in the world without depicting the human fgure as such, embodying the ethos of
“analogism” common in the East. Inspired by Descola, CineMuseSpace extends his
categorization of images as underpinned by naturalism or analogism to cinematic
spaces in order to construct a cinematic ontology of spatial cultural diferences and
similarities.
To this end, 53 fction flms falling into the Western naturalism tradition and
an equivalent number falling into the Eastern analogism tradition were identifed
and analyzed. From the resulting large database of annotated fction flms, Cine-
MuseSpace then experimented with the new visual and storytelling languages upon
which Manovich focused attention, in the service of its central investigative meth-
odology and outcome: the construction of a system of cinematic spatial cultural
classifcation.
Hypothesis and assumptions

In the last few decades of the twentieth century and the frst two of the twenty-
frst century, the rise in spatial thinking – sometimes referred to as “the spatial
turn”3 – increased exponentially, spreading across the social sciences and humani-
ties. Fields such as anthropology, sociology, history, literature, and art history have
become increasingly spatial in their orientation. No longer subordinated to time
and the lens of historicism, space as a feld of studies emerged after WWII through
the seminal works of Foucault (2004), Harvey (2006), de Certeau (1990), Lefebvre
(1991), Perec (1996),4 and many others. Space has become a vehicle for interdisci-
plinarity across academic felds. Buildings, streets, squares, and monuments consti-
tute a spatial language out of which a society defnes itself.5 Space is an expression
of our culture and history materialized in stone, concrete, and glass. CineMuseSpace
therefore hypothesizes that understanding spatial constructs from other societies
may give us a unique insight into other cultures6 and that the study of their ways of
representing space visually provides a uniquely valuable starting point.
CineMuseSpace further postulates that cinema is the ideal cultural form through
which to understand how space is used, precisely because of its status as a “pecu-
liarly spatial form of culture”7 and its concrete visual representation of local idiom.
In other words, we construe cinema as a container and interpreter of cultures
and – for the purpose of CineMuseSpace research – recognize in the visual medium
of fction flms a number of crucial characteristics and features.
As MacCabe points out, in flm, “realism has been the dominant aesthetic since
the Second World War, aiming to represent reality as efectively as possible” – “the
possibility as such of the representational relation is taken for granted”.8 Summariz-
ing the views of early flm theorist Bazin,9 MacCabe points out that “what is in
CineMuseSpace 177
question is not just a rendering of reality but the rendering of a reality made more
real by the use of aesthetic device”.10 Since 1976, when MacCabe was writing,
“Realism” in flm has been problematized, sparking debate between “realists” and
“formalists” – a debate fruitfully harmonized by flm philosopher Irving Singer:
“The meanings in a flm emanate from the cinematic devices that comprise the
diversifed nature of the medium. But that itself exists only as a way of expressing
problems that matter to human beings, problems they care about and have to face
throughout their lives”.11 For the purposes of CineMuseSpace’s research, “realist”
flms have provided the most fruitful material, though in analyzing them some
formalist principles have been deployed.12 As historian Lawrence Murray notes:
“An analysis of feature flms as historical documents hinges on the fundamental
proposition that movies are not produced in a social vacuum. Every movie, regard-
less of theme or subject matter, refects the values, attitudes, concerns, and interests
of the social milieu in which it was made, and thus the visually literate can learn a
great deal about a given society by examining the flms which it has generated”.13
CineMuseSpace takes the cinematic image to be the visible manifestation of a
society at a particular epoch, grasped and intensifed by flmmakers as the environ-
ment of their fctions.
Films record and communicate with unique immediacy how people in diferent
cultures and cities live their lives. Ross, refecting on the “Villa Arpel” scenes in
Mon Oncle (Tati, 1958), remarks: “If I return throughout the book to the flms of
Jacques Tati, it is because they make palpable a daily life that increasingly appeared
to unfold in a space where objects tended to dictate to people their gestures and
movements”.14 In other words, Tati’s use of his visual medium has societal reso-
nance farther reaching than a reading of the flm as plot or story alone reveals. The
image that comes to mind is of a cinematic tip of the cultural iceberg, beneath
which lurks the history of the modern movement – Le Corbusier, La Villa Savoye,
the modular, etc. Films provide a toolkit that can be used toward understanding
complex situations: Mon Oncle acts (Figure 12.1), perhaps unwittingly, as agent,
source, and product of history15 within the given cultural, political, and social con-
text of its time.16
The case for the everyday

Key to the CineMuseSpace project is the uncovering of everyday lives through flm.
It expands ideas originally developed in Penz’s book, Cinematic Aided Design: An
Everyday Life Approach to Architecture17 to encompass China and Japan,18 with a view
to creating a cross-cultural comparison between their visual representation of daily
life and the quotidian of the West. However, CineMuseSpace does not propose a
novel study of everydayness or a new interpretation per se but rather brings a novel
way of examining everyday life through the lens of cinematic images. Indeed,
while we may be blind to our own everydayness,19 we evidently delight in the
observation of the lives of others on the screen. As Léger pointed out, “The dog
that goes by in the street is only perceived. Projected on the screen, it is seen, so
FIGURE 12.1 Mon Oncle – the tip of the iceberg: agent, source and product of history.
much so that the whole audience reacts as if it discovered the dog for the frst
time”.20 With Henri Lefebvre’s publication of La Critique de la Vie Quotidienne,21
the study of everyday life took of, mainly amongst the philosophers Blanchot
(1969) and De Certeau (1990) and writers (e.g. Perec). Only from the 1990s did it
become an architectural concern – see Berke and Harris (1997), Wigglesworth and
Till (1998), and Upton (2002),22 amongst others.
However, very little was said about the link between everyday life and cinema –
aside perhaps for Klevan (1996) via Cavell (1994)23 – and certainly never before in
relation to architecture until in 2018 Penz posited that
Films have exposed precious everyday gestures and large fragments of our
everyday life. They constitute an extraordinary archive of lived and practised
spaces, a formidable reservoir of post-occupancy studies. In other words,
flms constitute the most comprehensive lived-in building data in existence –
a largely ignored and untapped resource that can be mined in many diferent
ways.24
It may require a leap of faith to believe that fction flms can constitute a valid
observation of everyday lives: but as noted by Newton, citing the example of Eric
Rohmer,
his flms allow a space for correspondences, for a magic of the everyday; they
are seeing things. What’s so striking is that this visionary sense occurs in the
most down-to-earth, mundane environment . . . sitting on buses, waiting for
trains, meeting friends for drinks, family dinners, going to work.25
CineMuseSpace 179
Of course, not all flms lend themselves to such observation of the quotidian,
but a surprisingly large number turn out to do so – perhaps none more efectively
than Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman,
1975).26
Many flmmakers, especially perhaps those infuenced by the legacy of the
French New Wave,27 tend to root their fction in an approachable reality that
chimes with viewers’ own lives. They construct a world that we are invited to enter
and share in the same way as we would enter a home, such as that at Akerman’s 23,
Quai du Commerce. As spectators we become fully immersed in a carefully crafted
domestic biosphere with its own embracing ecology and climate, what architect
Peter Zumthor would defne as “atmosphere”.28 But we also get something extra:
the afective dimension of flm, which often reveals hidden dimensions between
the perceptual and the afect. In real life we experience space perceptually without
necessarily recognizing its emotional impact. The unfolding of the story in fction
flm focuses the afective dimension deriving from the people – the actors portray-
ing the characters – to create moving drama, where space is not a mere background
but is exploited to express feeling. It “uses the architectural features of the environ-
ment to underline the emotion of the drama”.29 Through cinematic framing, the
audience is made to see what matters, like the dog remarked on earlier. In real life
our minds may wander in any direction, not notice the present scene – we may
dream of an elsewhere as we pass through the here and now, but in flm our atten-
tion is fxed by the cinematic experience and always directed to particular images.30
We start to be drawn in by the moving pictures on the screen, to participate in
the everyday life of others, so often elusive in our own reality. This absorption and
forced observation ranges in scale from large scenes to smaller details. Film con-
denses complex realities and makes them more approachable. Providing an accel-
erated education in experiencing spatial situations, flm can be construed as an
efective form of equipment for living. The vast archive of movies available since
1895 constitutes a formidable reservoir of post-occupancy studies, a unique form
of spatial visual ethnography.
A spatial typology of lived spaces

Selecting from the vast array of available material, the CineMuseSpace project
chooses to concentrate exclusively on dwellings, recognizing the domestic envi-
ronment as the ideal arena for revealing spatial cultural diferences; it best refects
“how profound is everything involving the house, the ‘home’ and domesticity, and
thus everyday life” remarks Lefebvre, characterizing it as exemplifying “the loftiest
values of art, ethics and culture”.31 However, unlike Lefebvre, who studied every-
day life with a view to changing it, CineMuseSpace chose to observe domestic cine-
matic scenes from across the globe in order to build a unique, shared, cross-cultural
understanding. The data-mining the team performed on the wide sample (106
flms) of cinematic images enabled analysis and comparison of precious information
FIGURE 12.2 Akerman’s flm, Jeanne Dielman, beside Neufert’s Architects’ Data.
on patterns of domestic use. CineMuseSpace studied thousands of scenes to assemble

the frst cinematic architectural user-manual of lived space.
From the CineMuseSpace study emerged the observation that numerous scenes
from quite diferent flms portrayed everyday lives in a systematic way that inspired
comparison with Neufert’s taxonomy in his Architects’ Data of prototypical home
layouts,32 which includes human fgures carrying out their domestic tasks in many
of the drawings, to communicate scale, proportion, and activities. Figure 12.2 jux-
taposes two of the kitchen scenes in Jeanne Dielman with the equivalent set-ups
in the Neufert prototypical kitchen standard layouts. Here lies the kernel of con-
struing cinematic everyday scenes as a form of spatial visual ethnography. In this
striking juxtaposition, the flmic kitchen scenes are set up and portrayed as such a
systematic parallel to Neufert’s work that they could be construed as “Film-maker’s
Data” of kitchen layouts. The inspiration of these parallel images is at the root of
the CineMuseSpace efort to create a compendium of standardized spatial flm scenes
across cultures, whose portrayal of everyday lives and domestic dramas act efec-
tively as reference for the post-occupancy study of domestic dwellings.
An architectonic of cinema
Neufert’s Architects’ Data not only carefully outlined the typologies of domestic
spaces (kitchens, bedrooms, dining rooms, etc.) but also catalogued individual fea-
tures such as doors, windows, and stairs. Rem Koolhaas’s Elements of Architecture
developed for the 2014 Venice Biennale33 follows in Neufert’s footsteps. In the
same vein, CineMuseSpace extended its cinematic encyclopedia of lived domes-
tic situations to the diferent basic components of architecture – doors, windows,
CineMuseSpace 181
stairs, and other elements, to constitute an “architectonics of cinema”: an examination

of how key building-elements have been cinematically instantiated and revealed,
throwing new light on features often taken for granted.
This new visual architectonics also enables us to read flms diferently: for exam-
ple, L’Eclisse (Antonioni, 1962) can be construed as a flm about windows – windows
as communication, windows for dreaming, windows that separate, or windows that
unite; windows that interrogate, windows that hide. It reveals that windows are not
just there to let light in and prevent heat from escaping or to be a means of ventilation
but present myriad functions that often go unnoticed but that cinema defamiliarizes
and reveals. This multitude of facets make us see humble doors and windows in new
and unexpected ways, through the emotional dimension intrinsic to cinema, which
is certainly not taught in schools of architecture but which perhaps should be.34
Detecting cinematic cultural diferences – Descola’s ontologies

An initial analysis of the architectonics of windows from diferent cultures reveals
striking diferences as well as similarities. In a scene in Tokyo Twilight, 1957, the
window is treated by Ozu as a site for contemplation, as both father-in-law and
son-in-law stop their conversation to observe the snow falling outside; the outdoor
surroundings can be construed as an extension of their selves, indicating harmony
with nature. By contrast, JLB “Jef” Jeferies (played by James Stewart) in Hitchock’s
Rear Window (1953) observes his neighbor in a typically voyeuristic activity, fun-
damental to the flm. These contrasting examples demonstrate the central thesis of
CineMuseSpace: that the same building element, in this case the window, can poten-
tially start to reveal diferent usages and practices relating to diferent cultures. In
this case, the act of looking out may signal divergences between attitudes to nature,
the world outside the dwelling.
Jef’s binoculars accentuate a typically anthropocentric way of looking at the
world as separate from its human inhabitants, who are themselves highly individu-
ated in the act of observing and being observed, while in Tokyo Twilight the two
men sitting together inside the house have a communality of vision in relation
to nature outside. In Hitchcock’s flm there is a very active use of the window as
division of space and people, while in Ozu’s it acts as a vehicle for unifcation via a
contemplative moment. This simple comparative exercise hints at a deeper difer-
ence in cultural sensibility.
Such speculation has been supported in the CineMuseSpace project by refer-
ences to French social anthropologist Philippe Descola’s approach, deployed in
his La Fabrique des Images exhibition in Paris.35 Descola proposes a novel way of
analyzing iconic images from diferent cultures, characterizing them according to
four ontologies based on cultural “schemas” or “deeply internalized . . . cogni-
tive and corporeal templates that govern the expression of an ethos”.36 This ethos
is refected in systems of qualities detected in objects such as paintings and other
visual representations and can, broadly speaking, be utilized to classify the world-
views of diferent cultures.
FIGURE 12.3 Images showing successively Descola’s four ontological categories: a

sculpture for animism/a painting for naturalism/a bark painting for
totemism/a painted mask for analogism.
Succinctly, the four ontologies, which helped CineMuseSpace to develop the

categories it used to describe elements of the flms analyzed, are: (1) the animated
world of animism, (2) the objectifed world of naturalism, (3) the subdivided world
of totemism, and (4) the entangled world of analogism (see Figure 12.3). Naturalism
often characterizes the modern world and Western thought. It insists on the divi-
sion between humans and nonhumans, which are perceived as having both difer-
ent interiorities and diferent physicalities, while animism, most common among
the indigenous populations of Africa, Amazonia, Northern North America, and
Northern Siberia, emphasizes continuity of interiority (soul), say between human
and animal or plants, despite discontinuity of physical body. Analogism perceives
discontinuity between both physicality and interiority so that terms that are joined
must be initially distinguished.37
Descola holds that Analogism was the dominant ontology in Europe from Antiq-
uity to the Renaissance and in the twenty-frst century is still very common in
China, Japan, and India, as well as in Western Africa or among the indigenous
cultures of Mexico and the Andes. Totemism (same interiority, same physicality) is
best exemplifed by Australian Aboriginal cultures. Although this system of cat-
egorization – inspired by Levi-Strauss’s38 structuralist approach to social anthropol-
ogy – is not unproblematic and has been challenged,39 it helped us greatly with the
preliminary classifcation of properties of cinematic space.40
Methodology
Filmic Canon
Between 2017 and 2020, the CineMuseSpace project gathered a canon of 307 rel-
evant flms into its database – a corpus that continues to be expanded. Out of this
collection, a targeted sample of 106 flms was selected for detailed analysis via a
CineMuseSpace 183
multistep sampling process. CineMuseSpace needed to fnd flms of a suitable length

that portrayed the contemporary world in which they were produced to observe
the way they represent dwelling in domestic space. An initial sample selection was
based on Calvino’s defnition of the “Classics”, which was here transposed to the
cinematic canon. Paralleling Calvino’s defnition in Why Read the Classics?,41 Cine-
MuseSpace focused on flms that one would not categorize as to “watch” – but to
“rewatch”. For the project, the criteria for primary flm selection were narrowed
to fction flms released between 1950 and 2019. Calvino notes that what “distin-
guishes the classic . . . holds good both for an ancient work and for a modern one
that has already achieved its place in a cultural continuum”42 – this is certainly true
of the French New Wave and Italian Neo-Realism and their posterity. For the
project, critically acclaimed works from each decade were chosen, based especially
on the results of flm festivals in the East and West, such as the Cannes, Berlin, or
Busan International Film Festivals. To avoid external cultural bias, an international
team, including French, German, Norwegian, Rumanian, British, and American
flm experts and nationals cooperated to create the cinematic canon of European
and American works. In parallel, the choice of Chinese and Japanese flms was
made in collaboration with academics and students from the University of Nanjing,
National University of Singapore, and Tokyo Institute of Technology. The flms
selected had to fulfl the criteria of being narratively set in their time of production.
In the selection, directors from the culture portrayed and flms shot in the depicted
country tended to predominate.
As a result of this initial sampling, a certain bias appeared in the project’s reli-
ance on the festival circuit, auteur directors, and more well-studied flms. We also
faced limitations in the type of material that survived, was accessible, and was of
sufcient quality – especially in the Chinese context. We hence introduced a more
randomized element in the fnal selection from the long list to short list. Our fnal
sample pool was selected based on the duration of a certain type of scene content
rather than critical acclaim or personal preference. This was achieved by applying a
selection threshold of a minimum of 15% everyday content in the duration of the
flm and by prioritizing flms with a high percentage of related segments (between
80–100%). The intention of this decision was to extract as large an amount as
possible of everyday situations from a limited number of high-yield flms given
the limited running time of our pilot study and our aim of positing a transferable
hypothesis and approach with ample initial results for the feld of architecture. The
“richest” everyday flms were hence selected by prioritizing the amount of every-
dayness as primary selection criteria for the fnal sample of 106 flms.
The fnal inventory consequently contained a high number of “slow cinema”
flms, such as oeuvres by flmmakers Chantal Ackerman, Richard Linklater, or Jim
Jarmusch. This is not surprising given their detailed focus on everyday domestic
activities and the screen time given to the mundane through narrative structure.
To counter this limitation and to test whether our hypothesis could in the future
be extended beyond the canon resulting from our initial criteria, we deliberately
included counter examples, including crime dramas such as Lao pao er/Mr. Six (Hu
Guan, 2015) and Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011). Including these outliers enabled
us to evaluate whether relevant insights into the domestic everyday could equally
be obtained from other genres.
The CineMuseSpace digital archive

In order to extract the everyday threads woven into the narrative fabric of these
flms, CineMuseSpace built an extensive flm database accessible to any team mem-
ber from anywhere around the globe at any time. CineMuseSpace devised and devel-
oped this core digital tool in collaboration with Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lütgert,
based on their 2011 Pan.do/ra database technology. The CineMuseSpace approach
analyses raw cinematic data into clips on which time-based annotations are used to
analyze and tag all instances of activities in a domestic setting. A detailed keyword
ontology and related lexicon, together with dictionaries of culturally specifc ter-
minology, were developed to create a meticulous pool of analytic metadata. This
methodology generated a malleable and extendable repository of thousands of flm
clips searchable by specifc keyword combinations for analytical purposes and to
generate various typologies.
Three stages form the core of the CineMuseSpace digital analysis process:
1. Data input (auto-generated analytical measurements, followed by segmenta-

tion of material and careful annotation of everyday content across the temporal
spectrum of each flm)
2. Data mining and analysis (retrieval of correlations, quantitative and qualitative
examination of comparisons, and testing of hypotheses)
3. Data recombination and dissemination (collage clip output for exhibitions and
stills output for paper-based publications).
When a flm is uploaded to the live database, an automatic statistical analysis is

generated, including color, cut (edit points), and dialogue word averages. Slit-scan
timelines are produced, which condense into easily reviewed and compared visu-
alizations a series of slices taken through the sequences constituting the flm. For
each flm, a team member then marks up every segment that plays in a home envi-
ronment and annotates it with the keywords that designate the elements forming
the CineMuseSpace ontology. This time-based annotated database, built on the seg-
mentation of fction flms according to relevant properties, constitutes a searchable
archive of cinematic everyday content. Using this new tool, researchers can easily
collect, store, analyze, compare, and contrast the myriad quotidian activities taking
place in the various domestic spaces in the constituent sequences.
An overview of the results and interpretations
Slit-scan timelines
Once a flm is uploaded to the CineMuseSpace database (and before the annotation
process begins), slit-scan timelines are generated to gain a frst overall impression
CineMuseSpace 185
FIGURE 12.4 Time-based annotation analysis example in Eternity and a Day (Angelo-
poulos, 1998).
of the flm. This automated slit-scan procedure captures a slice or slit of the cen-
tral pixels in every frame of the flm to compile a visualized timeline ofering an
impression of the flm’s color range, cinematographic texture, and editing rhythm.
Slit-scan literacy soon develops, and the visualizations function almost like a book
cover, giving an indication of the content within the flm. These visualizations
of the flmic material rendered evident that, in the canon of 100 flms, there was
a divergence between cinematic accounts of the everyday largely representing in
Europe and the United States Descola’s “naturalist” ethos, in contrast with China
and especially Japan where his “analogist” ethos tends to prevail.
On average, depictions of the everyday in Europe and the US employed darker
shades, with earthy tones and grey as overall tinge, such as in the prime example
of Jeanne Dielman. The everyday here, through overall mise-en-scène, cinemato-
graphic texture, and editing rhythm, is portrayed as a dreary routine, monotonous
and almost inescapable. In contrast, an analysis of the timelines in Japanese and
Chinese portrayals of the everyday reveal more variety in texture and especially
brighter colors. A preponderance of natural tones, such as green and blue, hint at a
close connection between the domestic everyday and nature.
In the Chinese context, a dichotomy was often found in the texture of everyday
depictions. Although some Chinese narratives such as in What a Family (Haowei
Wang) 1979 demonstrate similarities to the Japanese flms in their variegated color
and rhythmic texture, others can be located at the other end of the spectrum, with
a continuum of shade rather than light seldom discerned in the European and
American context. In the Chinese context, recurrently, narratives of murder and
suicide are woven into the ordinary, showing a dark outlook and desperation to
escape the everyday.
The visual overview of the ethos of diverse cultures obtained by the CineMuseSpace
project via slit-scan timelines already gives a glimpse into the visual and formal
cinematic qualities that represent and portray the everyday.
A time-based annotation approach with a defned keyword

ontology
The frst impressions gained through the visual timeline information are then
deepened as part of the CineMuseSpace research methodology through a time-based
annotation of the everyday via the analytical application of a detailed keyword
ontology. The CineMuseSpace project’s computer-aided flm analysis approach is an
extension of traditional computer-aided statistical flm analysis, such as Cinemet-
rics, pioneered by Vlada Petric43 and Barry Salt in the 1970s.
The keyword ontology for the CineMuseSpace project relates the practices of
the everyday to the domestic built environment across diferent cultural contexts,
so it could be applied within any cultural matrix. It also registers the manner of
representation, refecting Descola’s structuralist approach to image analysis through
the various mise-en-scène (staging for the camera), mis-en-cadre (framing), and
other cinematic strategies employed to represent these slices of everyday lives. To
facilitate and record both the analysis of content and the analysis of cinematics, the
project deploys an overall dual categorization: the varied rhythms of occupancy of
the spaces depicted and their cinematic framing.
The frst main branch of the keyword ontology extracts circadian rhythms, pay-
ing attention to seasons, time of the day, weather, and the bodily rhythms of the
characters in the flm. This analysis identifes repeated patterns and divergences in
daily activities – such as the way rooms are used according to the time of day or
how everyday life varies season by season. In this branch, the environment of the
action is also categorized, from the geographical location of the dwelling and its
building-structure and occupancy as a whole down to individual architectural com-
ponents and their varied uses – for example, the way windows are opened to facili-
tate communication with neighbors or closed to shut them out. A core element of
the analysis is the classifcation of the type of domestic activity, who performs it,
and where in the building it is depicted. General practices identifed include, for
example: “cooking”; “talking”; “reading”; “switching on an appliance”; as well
as more culturally specifc activities such as “playing mahjong”. Researchers also
noted the age and gender of the characters carrying out these daily activities. Lived
spaces such as the kitchen, bathroom, or bedroom are marked up with informa-
tion on practices performed there. Communal and outdoor spaces are tagged so
the way everyday life moves across particular rooms – or how it fows from private
to public spaces – can be followed, which proved especially important in Chinese
flms, where the culture is most often expressed visually and cinematically in a fuid,
analogist ethos. Items down to the smallest most-handled units of everyday practice
are annotated, from crockery, clothing, and furniture to personal transport.
Due to the universality of circadian rhythms, dawn and dusk, and bodily func-
tions, the same types of activities – such as sleeping, cooking, and eating – persist
CineMuseSpace 187
in Eastern and Western cultures. However, the flms reveal diversities in the spatial
use of the home to perform these activities. For example, while in flm Western
houses often have defned spaces for each activity (e.g. a dining room for eating and
a kitchen for cooking), Eastern homes in contrast recurrently conceive of rooms as
fexible and serving multiple purposes. A room can function as both living room
and bedroom in the traditional Japanese architecture conveyed to the screen, as
revealed in the daily apartment-life of protagonist Yoko Inoue in Café Lumière
(Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2003), while cooking is shown to take place in corridors in
reappropriated older building-structures in China, as in Beijing Bicycle (Xiaoshuai
Wang, 2001). By annotating the building type and location of the activity within
the home, the analysis data allows us to flter out a cinematic typology according
to housing or room types. As a result, the analysis can reveal the diferent uses of
spaces for comparable everyday activities in naturalist and analogist-ethos cultures,
as well as the diversity of particular activities in specifc lived spaces pertinent to
each individual culture.
The CineMuseSpace ontology classifes the cinematic framing of domestic life
under a second main branch – the cinematic representation of domestic space and
the ordinary through both mise-en-scène and mise-en-cadre. Keywords identify
the shot type, camera height, camera angle, and direction of flming, plus a curated
selection of principal visual components – as defned by Bruce Block –44 such as
shape, line, and space. The mise-en-scène ontology also employs a valence and
arousal model for emotion classifcation, transposed from the feld of psychology.
Using a simplifed version of the Self-Assessment Manikin45 with its valence and an
arousal scale enabled the project to analyze and compare the emotions attached in
the fction flm dramas to everyday activities and the spaces of the home, ofering
insight into the most uplifting hobbies and depressing chores of everyday routines
in diferent cultural contexts.
Combined, the branches of the entire CineMuseSpace lexicon encompass over
3,000 keywords. These make available thousands of flm clips with attached meta-
data, searchable by combinations of keywords, in a malleable repository, so that
diferences in domestic spatial practices across diverse cultures can be analyzed and
immediately compared. As all the flmic information extracted can be combined in
any number of new juxtapositions, the data on domestic occupancy can be mined
for both quantitative and qualitative examination. The novel connections between
flmic fragments and their analytic metadata forged in the process yield insights into
patterns of everyday life in domestic interiors, highlighting recurrences as well as
variations in daily activities, gender balance, age, and interaction between inhabit-
ants and architectural elements.
Mining the CineMuseSpace’s flmic database

of the everyday
The CineMuseSpace database consists of existing full-length flms, already edited,
mostly according to the principle of producing the illusion of continuity of action
to support a story, dominant in narrative cinema.46 By labelling specifc shots,
scenes, or sequences with keywords relating to specifc attributes represented by

the lexicon of terms derived from the CineMuseSpace ontology and then assembling
these automatically or with some degree of curation, according to combinations
of keywords, new edits are produced that no longer generate continuity of story.
This necessarily disrupts what Eisenstein, who wrote extensively on editing from
a formalist perspective, in his 1929 essays, Beyond the Shot, The Dramaturgy of Film
Form, and The Fourth Dimension in Cinema, terms “tonal” montage – which follows
or produces the emotional trajectory of the drama.47 Disrupting the emotional tone
of sequences necessarily divorces part of the afect of a scene from its relational
context, but the location and set-up of the individual shots themselves – framing,
lighting, color, saturation, plus staging for the camera and performance – survive
the process of reconfguration, carrying with them their dominant emotional tone.
The varying intensity of tone, which Eisenstein identifes as a key element in the
impact of flmic narrative drama, gives to reading the values of architectural features
in relation to human activity a revealing and inspiring dimension.
Experiments were tried with constructing what the project termed “minimov-
ies” out of individual full-length fction flms, collecting perhaps fve to ten minutes
of material featuring attributes labeled in the database and organizing these to tell
the story of the flm, using voice-over commentary to link the fction narrative
and the aspects of inhabitation and architectural content identifed by the team.
The results were illuminating for research, but the analysis of the whole flm itself,
scripting and recording the voice, plus the new edit carried out by humans and
requiring real editing talent and expertise rather than automated sorting by com-
puter, took too long for it to be possible to try more than a few experiments; since
the results of the project were to be exhibited publicly, there were also copyright
issues to be considered.
However, the minimovie experiments like Schupp’s Strange Little Cat: A Post-
Occupancy Study of Everyday Life in a Berlin Apartment (2018) pointed out some
aspects of the fction flms worth observing closely and comparing. It demonstrated
how specifc scenes staged in specifc spaces within the house highlighted tensions
and harmonies in family relationships. These were dramatized in the feature flm at
their most intense in the kitchen at breakfast, where individuals are still vulnerable
from sleep and the way people treat each other is heightened: whether they serve
or accept service, eat sociably or withdraw, upset rhythms or generate them, form
alliances or create confict. The kitchen was shown to be the most sociable space in
the house, where mealtimes focus group interactivity. The constraints of the room’s
architecture, fttings, and furniture provide a setting that underlines interpersonal
relationships and the emotions they involve, as this German family negotiates or
uses them, seating themselves at the table or perching against countertops at the
edges of the room. For example, while everyday squabbles develop in the crowded
space, the trapped mother gazes longingly out of the smallish window at the green
spaces outside – a realm of freedom.
By contrast, Schupp’s edit of Amélie: Architectural Elements from Separation to Con-
nection (2018) revealed how a solitary person living in a traditional Paris apartment
CineMuseSpace 189
encounters other lives – through windows with views across the small courtyard,
stairs where all inhabitants of the building cross paths, and letterboxes through
which glimpses of homes can be caught. Amélie shows how the architecture of the
building can be divisive and antisocial, hiding inhabitants from each other and pro-
moting loneliness, but if windows, doors, and common areas are treated as points of
access and communication rather than defense, the everyday life of the apartment-
dwellers can be enlivened and uplifted by neighborly engagement.
Instead of investing time and energy in creating many of these revealing but
time-consuming minimovies, for purposes of analysis and exhibition to the pub-
lic the project created a series of what the team termed “supercuts”. These are
curated sequences derived from automated assembly of shots and scenes, according
to keywords chosen by the editor, to interrogate specifc aspects of visual spatial
ethnography – what Eisenstein classifed as “intellectual montage”,48 where the
flm-maker follows a structural principle outside the story (fabula). CineMuseSpace
also created many sequences with minimal curation, simply by bringing together
shots or scenes according to keyword-labeled architectural items – such as “win-
dow” or “threshold” – paying no attention to continuity of story or action or
to formal shot characteristics, since the material comes from diferent flms and
is assembled algorithmically – following Eisenstein’s orthodox “combination of
shots according to their predominant sign”.49 Eisenstein’s structuralist approach to
editing chimed well with Descola and Koolhaas’s approaches to anthropology and
architecture respectively, helping the team to assemble illuminating and compre-
hensible sequences along consistent lines.
The creative practice used by the team here builds on Christian Marclay’s con-
ceptual flm The Clock (2010–2011), which comprises a 24-hour collage of flm
clips of clocks, wristwatches, and time-pieces taken from hundreds of movies and
TV shows. When shown according to instruction, this supercut flm50 is synchro-
nized with real time so that the time shown on the screen is the same time as
experienced by the viewer. This considerable editing feat aside, The Clock provides
a mesmerizing collision of images plucked from the history of cinema and repur-
posed as a meditation on time itself. The Clock is also an example of “database cin-
ema” in line with Lev Manovich’s view that, by privileging the random access logic
of the database, artists can be liberated from linear and fxed narrative structures.51
While Marclay’s piece certainly advances this agenda to create an original artwork
from a database of “found” moving-image material for display in a gallery setting,
the CineMuseSpace database demonstrates that “found” flm can be mobilized as
evidence to support formal and abstract hypotheses in a research context.
What new knowledge did the CineMuseSpace database reveal? It is not simply a
digital repository of moving-image material but a searchable and editable resource
for retrieving specifc visual elements within flms, such as architectural details,
flming locations, character activities, and camera movements and positions. It is
possible to search for “windows”, for instance, and retrieve hundreds of images
of windows of all kinds, and a refned search might retrieve “French windows”.
An even more refned search might fnd a selection of French windows being
“opened” or “closed”. In this way it is possible to link architectural elements with

activities, including those culturally determined habits and routines that are the
principal focus of the CineMuseSpace project. The database segments and codifes
these elements and activities for retrieval in a way that releases the spatial and cul-
tural information locked in the linear form of flm. For example, after conducting
a basic search for “eating”, the user is presented with either a linear timeline or a
grid of segments (represented by a series of still frames), which can then be selected
and played. Even after a cursory glance at the grid of still frames, certain assump-
tions about spatial and cultural diferences can be discerned – traditional Chinese
architecture appears diferent from Japanese, and both are diferent from Western
buildings and interiors; Japanese diners sometimes appear to eat at low tables, and
Western families often gather around high tables; diferent utensils and tableware
are used, and dining takes place in diferent social contexts.
The list of apparent diferences goes on. To fip these superfcial observations,
it is perhaps most fruitful to look at the grid of flm segments and see the com-
monalities between cultural practices and architectural spaces – many European,
American, Japanese, and Chinese characters occupy similar modern spaces – with
little ornamentation or architectural detail – and appear to share similar domes-
tic routines and activities. It is possible to quickly surmise that modernity has
reshaped urban living for many, in both the East and West, in the post-war era and
that perhaps an increasingly connected, globalized market has tended to dissipate
or homogenize cultural diference. While these cursory observations may seem
like lazy generalizations, they could be seen to speak of certain culturally condi-
tioned assumptions brought to flm and architectural research, assumptions that
the structuralist approach of MacCabe, Heath, and Descola encourages researchers
to explore and challenge. Indeed, the priority of the CineMuseSpace project is to
treat flm as evidence and let the material speak for itself, allowing it to challenge
assumptions about cultural diference as well as its representation in flm.
Cinematic collages as revelators of spatial

cultural diferences
From a keyword search of the CineMuseSpace database it is possible both to view
individual segments and automatically generate supercuts of segment groups. For
example, it is possible to export supercut flms of people eating at tables, open-
ing windows, entering rooms, or walking down staircases. It is equally possible
to export supercuts of people crying or playing or laughing and to combine these
with architectural elements and human activities to quickly reveal similarities and
diferences.
The team also tried a number of searches based on generalized themes such as
“Maintenance”, “Food”, “Creativity”, “Sleeping”, “Intellectual activity”, “Tech-
nology”, and “Recreational activity”, each of which yielded hundreds of results,
which can be played out automatically as a supercut, with or without audio. For
instance, “Maintenance” included activities relating to washing, personal grooming,
CineMuseSpace 191
FIGURE 12.5 Supercuts 1: Maintenance.
laundry, and cleaning of the home and presented a series of striking serendipitous
juxtapositions. In a lurid, green-tiled bathroom, a character from Amélie (Jeunet,
2001) sits in a bath and raises her hands from beneath the water, staring at them,
perplexed. Her hands are seen in close-up, wrinkled and saturated.
Next, a segment from The Taste of Green Tea (Ishii, 2004) shows a child sitting
in a deep tiled Japanese bath staring at her hands, which are blistered and grey from
extended submersion. Both bathing characters appear calmly mesmerized by their
own accelerated decay. Next, a pair of hands from Roma (Cuarôn, 2018) vigorously
scrubs an item of clothing with soap in a concrete sink while a portable radio and
a wrist watch perch on the ledge nearby, followed by a cut to another pair of hands
belonging to The Old Barber (Hasi, 2006) as he whips up shaving soap with a brush
in a tiny glass tray: two intimate acts of labor separated by thousands of miles. Cut
to two further scenes of washing – a woman viewed from above sits on a low stool
kneading some wet clothes in a bowl surrounded by hanging laundry (What a Fam-
ily, Wang, 1979), and a pair of hands wring the water from some socks in a sink
(The Man Who Sleeps, Queysanne, 1974). These are followed by several scenes of
face-washing, including a scene from Poor Cow (Loach, 1967) in which a woman
in a black negligée scrubs her neck with water from a tin bowl next to a collection
of kitchen pots and pans – a vivid collision of glamour and poverty. Next, in an
everyday act of tenderness and care, a little boy has his hands washed by his mother
over an enamel bowl on a metal stand (Spring Forever, Shen, 1959). Behind him,
the father briefy kisses another child on the cheek, and a bicycle stands conspicu-
ously in the middle of the spacious room, suggesting its centrality to family life. In
contrast to the cramped and dark tenement of Poor Cow, here the airy, austere sur-
roundings speak of a modest yet stable family life, perhaps one constructed by the
flm-makers to mirror the Chinese state’s aspirations for the Great Leap Forward.
Later in the “Maintenance” supercut, a middle-aged Chinese man wrapped
in winter clothes stands with a glass of water outside a siheyuan-style courtyard-
building brushing his teeth, steam pouring from a pipe in the side of the wall next
to him. The material deprivation in this brief scene from The Blue Kite (Tian,
1993) is readily apparent and in stark contrast to the serenity that colors the clip
from Spring Forever. Indeed, the scene from The Blue Kite is more aligned with
the realism and social commentary of Poor Cow in its depiction of urban life as a
struggle for survival, and both scenes ofer feeting glimpses of preclearance mass
housing in London and Beijing.
Further into the supercut, a series of scenes in kitchens demonstrate the ubiq-
uity of washing dishes as a basic domestic task, and perhaps unsurprisingly almost
all these tasks are undertaken in the clips by women or girls. The camera zooms
in toward a woman’s face (The Tree of Life, Malick 2011), and she looks toward us
glaring at someone or something beyond us, her hands buried in a sink of soap
suds. This is followed by a dimly lit scene of an older Chinese woman (The Way
We Are, Hui, 2008) as she turns a delicate bowl under a tap, rinsing the suds away,
which quickly cuts to another woman (Two or Three Things I Know About Her,
Godard, 1967) in a stylish foral dress standing in a simple modern kitchen littered
with utensils and dishes. She turns to us briefy, mouths a few words, then returns
to the dishes. Cut to another woman with her back to us (Exhibition, Hogg, 2013),
wearing yellow rubber gloves and cleaning an immaculate, minimal work surface.
Cut to a well-worn Japanese kitchen where yet another woman with her back to us
(Tokyo Story, Ozu, 1953) wears a short-sleeved blouse and an apron as she washes a
glass in a tiled sink. Next, a woman in a blue housecoat (Jeanne Dielman, Akerman,
1975) scrubs something in a small sink surrounded by yellow wall tiles. Whether
forming part of the naturalistic or analogist ethos delineated by Descola, the point
of observation and narrative stance speak tellingly of the gaze of the camera.
The otherwise unrelated clips of dish-washing continue, and almost all begin
with a woman with her back to us with her hands working the contents of a rec-
tangular sink – a process which in both Eastern and Western flmic language has
become a cypher for mundane, familial continuity or domestic labor.52 Elsewhere
in the supercut, women are ironing clothes in several consecutive clips. Sleeves
rolled up and sweating, a woman in a modern Western apartment wields a steam
iron, pressing some clothes in front of a wall of books and gazing at a tv out of shot
(Code Unknown, Haneke, 2000).
Next a woman in a dimly lit kitchen presses linen on an ironing board, when a
man walks in proudly adjusting the collar on a new leather coat. He stands in front
of her for inspection, and they exchange a coy smile, a tender but barely percep-
tible afrmation. Cut to four women in an elegant Japanese washitsu room with
sliding doors and paper-framed screens. A casually dressed young woman in shorts
reclines on a tatami matt with a towel around her head, languorously scratching
her neck with a long-handled brush and enjoying the breeze from an electric fan,
FIGURE 12.6 Supercuts 2: Maintenance.

CineMuseSpace 193
while another sits cross-legged on the foor ironing clothes and listening intently
(Our Little Sister, Koreeda, 2015). The brief scene describes young modern women
relaxing in each other’s company, at extreme ease in a traditional Japanese domestic
setting. Is there a deliberate incongruity between the characters’ actions and the
simple austerity of the interior space, between contemporary technologies and
gestures, and the refnement of the architecture?
Whether a character is cleaning the house or themselves, the universality of
everyday domestic labor is inscribed with the signs of both privilege and privation,
cultural diference and commonality. Removed from the constraints of charac-
terization and narrative structure, these segments remain individually meaning-
ful and yet, when shown consecutively and linked together by a thematic thread
they describe something new – a cinematic dialectic of objects and activities. The
CineMuseSpace database exports a fragmentary language of cinematic clips with
the capacity to describe and identify cultural diference and similitude. Divorced
from the complexity of narrative, architectural features become spatial fragments
adrift in a linear moving image collage, and yet these fragments are in constant
communication.
A catalogue raisonné of everyday life activities

As a result of digital methodologies, existing cultural material can be reinvented
into new narratives and collage flms ofering novel modes to visualize and reme-
diate extracted flmic data and overall research fndings, as Manovich suggested.53
Exploring yet another form of such new visual language enabled by digital
approaches, CineMuseSpace catalogued and published in paper format the activity
and architectural-usage data as a functional aid to architectural design (echoing
Neufert54) and as a contribution to broader cultural knowledge overall. The result-
ing A Catalogue Raisonné of Everyday Life Activities55 unites core everyday domestic
activities and the range of fundamental building elements defned by the project.
It is one of the key outputs of the CineMuseSpace project. A catalogue raisonné is
usually understood as a systematic and comprehensive catalogue of works of art
accompanied by scholarly commentary. This catalogue raisonné follows this tradi-
tion but with a twist: the “art” thoroughly examined here is the “everyday”, as
explored and revealed in cinema. Given the nature of our study, this catalogue is by
no means exhaustive and will keep evolving.
Loosely based on Georges Perec’s provocative reimagining of the characteristics
of an apartment according to “heptadian” rhythms, which “would give us apart-
ments of seven rooms known respectively as the Mondayery, Tuesdayery, Wednes-
dayery, Thursdayery, Fridayery, Saturdayery, and Sundayery”,56 the frst section of
the catalogue is organized around ordinary activities, to each of which is allocated
a day of the week: Monday for maintenance – washing and cleaning of bodies and
domestic spaces; Tuesday for food-related activities – cooking, eating, and drink-
ing; Wednesday for creativity – painting, making music, and drawing; Thursday for
rest – sleeping, relaxing, and waking up; Friday for intellectual activity – studying,
FIGURE 12.7 Penz and Schupp, A Catalogue Raisonné of Everyday Life Activities (2020).
FIGURE 12.8 Sample pages from A Catalogue Raisonné of Everyday Life Activities (Penz
and Schupp, 2020).
working, calculating, and thinking; Saturday for recreation – gardening, partying,

and playing games; while Sunday is for technology-related activities – using com-
puters, mobile phones, and domestic appliances.
The second section of the catalogue focuses on fve key building-elements per-
taining to architecture, to create an “architectonics of cinema”: walls; doors; corri-
dors; stairs; and windows. It records the way the diverse functions of these elements
are cinematically practiced and revealed.
Dissemination and exhibitions and discussion

Key outputs of CineMuseSpace’s research have been its dissemination to the wider
public as well as interested experts in museum and gallery exhibitions: at the Next-
Mixing Gallery in Shanghai in March/April 2019, the Art Museum of the Nanjing
University of the Arts in May 2019, Manchester’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary
CineMuseSpace 195
FIGURE 12.9 Manchester’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA) in August
2019.
Art (CFCCA) in August 2019, and the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight,
the Wirral, in September 2019. This manifestation of the research evolves from
French writer, art-theorist, and statesman André Malraux’s concept of Le Musée
Imaginaire.57
For Malraux, the work of art was linked to a setting – a gothic sculpture to a
cathedral, a classical painting to the castle or mansion where it hung.58 Works of
art were not traditionally designed to be taken out of their contexts and juxtaposed
with other works of art, as they are in museums. While acknowledging that we
could not and should not imagine our societies without museums, Malraux ques-
tioned their very mission, through the concept of Le Musée Imaginaire.
In particular, Malraux saw photography as a way of difusing and disseminating
art that would otherwise remain unknown.59 And in its exhibitions, CineMuseSpace
too has been difusing and disseminating art – flms – which would otherwise
remain unknown or have long been forgotten. Deeply infuenced by Eisenstein in
his work, Malraux deploys skills akin to a flmmaker as he selects, cuts, and assem-
bles images according to montage principles. Similarly, as outlined in the previous
section, CineMuseSpace has been exploring juxtaposing clips from a wide range of
flms from diferent cultures, out of which new meanings and new interpretations
have emerged. Malraux had long understood that cinema, as a popular medium,
ofers a compelling arena for revealing cultural diferences in space: “It is flm that
encounters the entirety of a civilization”, he said.60 CineMuseSpace’s exploration of
cinematic spaces makes use of the art-historical “compare and contrast” method
inaugurated by Wöllfin at the beginning of the twentieth century.61 However,
juxtaposing two images – or clips – from diferent cultures, merely on the grounds
of visual analogies and aesthetics, is not enough. Indeed, Descola argues that, when
considering “images having similar formal properties, but whose fgurative con-
ventions meet completely diferent principles . . . a purely formal approach to
images does not allow demonstrating the diferent world views they express”.62 In
other words, for the CineMuseSpace project, Descola’s anthropological ontologies

provide the crucial complement to Malraux’s concept of Le Musée Imaginaire.
This approach has enabled the CineMuseSpace project to acknowledge similari-
ties and diferences across cultures, to reveal them but also to celebrate them, by
inviting the public to view results at exhibitions. A permanent internet presence
is yet to follow. Cinema, a layered visual medium capable of communicating ethos
as well as action, opens up the path to innovative refection on the complexity of
architecture as experience and the need to take full account of everyday activities,
big and small, determined by needs, desires, and seasons or time of day, in design-
ing domestic dwellings. CineMuseSpace believes that observing cultural parameters
in the present and the recent past through cinematic representation can help us
rethink our attitudes and determine possible responses to the pressures of the as-
yet unknown. This method of analysis can be construed as a prequel to the art of
future living.
Acknowledgments
This work is supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC,
UK) Research Grant: A Cinematic Musée Imaginaire of Spatial Cultural Diferences
[CineMuseSpace], which took place at the Department of Architecture, University
of Cambridge, between 2017 and 2020.
This chapter builds on an earlier research note that appeared in Screen about
our digital methodology: Janina Schupp and François Penz, “A Digital Cinematic
Museum of the Everyday”, Screen, vol. 62, no. 2 (2021).
Notes
1 Lev Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form,” in Convergence: The International Journal of
Research into New Media Technologies 5, no. 2 (1999): 237.
2 Philippe Descola, La Fabrique des images: Visions du monde et formes de la representation
(Paris: Somogy éditions d’art, 2010).
3 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory
(Radical thinkers. London and New York: Verso, 2011).
4 Michel de Certeau, L’invention Du Quotidien, Nouv. éd. Collection Folio/Essais 146,
238 (Paris: Gallimard, 1990).
Michel Foucault, “« Des espaces autres »,” Empan 54, no. 2 (2004): 12–9.
David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism : Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical
Development (London: Verso, 2006).
Henri Lefebvre, 1901–1991. The Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).
Georges Perec, Life a User’s Manual (London: Panther, 1996).
5 A. J. Greimas, Sémiotique et sciences sociales / Algirdas Julien Greimas (Paris : Éditions du
Seuil, 1976), 131.
6 For characterizing culture, we refer here to Tylor’s classic and broad defnition “culture
is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and
any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”. Edward B.
Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion,
Language, Art and Custom (London: John Murray, 1871), 1.
CineMuseSpace 197
7 Mark Shiel, “Cinema and the City in History and Theory” in Cinema and the City, ed.
Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (Blackwell: Oxford, 2001), 5.
8 Colin MacCabe, “Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure”, Screen 17,
no. 3 (1976): 8.
9 A. Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinema? Vol. IV (Paris: Editions du cerf., 1962), 21, ed. & trans.
Gray, What is Cinema? Vol II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 99.
10 MacCabe, “Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure”, 9.
11 Irving Singer, Reality Transformed: Film as Meaning and Technique (Cambridge, MA and
London: MIT Press, 1998), xii.
12 Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1988).
13 Lawrence L. Murray, “The Feature Film as Historical Document,” The Social Studies 68,
no. 1 (1977): 10.
14 Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 11.
15 Marc Ferro, “Film as an Agent, Product and Source of History,” Journal of Contemporary
History 18 (3) (1983): 357–64.
16 For a more detailed exposé on the topic, see: François Penz, “Absorbing Cinematic
Modernism: From the Villa Savoye to the Villa Arpel,” in Visioning Technologies: The
Architectures of Sight, ed. Graham Cairns (Abingdon, Oxon: New York: Routledge,
2017), 121–35.
17 François Penz, Cinematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture (London:
Routledge, 2018).
18 See online at: www.cinemusespace.com.
19 Georges Perec, Espèces d’espaces (Paris: Galilée, 1974).
20 Fernand Léger, “La Roue, sa valeur plastique,” Comoedia (December 16, 1922): 5.
21 Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne – Vol. 1 – Introduction. Le ‘Sens de la marche’
(Paris: L’Arche, 1958).
22 Deborah Berke and Steven Harris, Architecture of the Everyday, 1st ed. (Princeton: Archi-
tectural Press, 1997).
Maurice Blanchot, L’entretien Infni (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).
Dell Upton, “Architecture in Everyday Life,” New Literary History 33, no. 4 (2002):
707–23.
Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till, eds., Architecture of the Everyday (London: John
Wiley & Sons, 1998).
23 Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary : Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism / Stanley
Cavell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Andrew Klevan, “Disclosure of the Everyday : The Undramatic Achievements in
Narrative Film,” PhD, University of Warwick, 1996, http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4099/.
24 François Penz, Cinematic Aided Design (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2017), 4.
25 Michael Newton, “Eric Rohmer: Everyday Miracles of a New Wave master,” The
Guardian, December 26, 2014.
26 For a detailed analysis of Jeanne Dielman see Penz, Cinematic Aided Design, 65.
27 Penz, Cinematic Aided Design, 111–5.
28 Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres: Architectural Environments – Surrounding Objects (Basel:
Birkhäuser, 2006).
29 Maureen Thomas, “The Moving Image of the City: Expressive Space/Inhabitation/
Narrativity: Intensive Studio Workshop on ‘Continuity of Action in Space’,” in Urban
Cinematics: Understanding Urban Phenomena Through the Moving Image, ed. François Penz
and Andong Lu (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2012), 299.
30 Merleau-Ponty argues that our perceptual feld is infnite and deployed across the hori-
zon. And whatever object one may focus on, it always stands out from the completeness
of the world Clélia Zernik, ‘« Un flm ne se pense pas, il se perçoit » Merleau-Ponty et
la perception cinématographique’, Rue Descartes 53, no. 3 (2006): 104–5.
31 Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne – Vol. 3 – De la modernité au modernisme (Pour

une métaphilosophie du quotidien). Le ‘Sens de la marche’ (Paris: L’Arche, 1981).
32 Ernst Neufert, Peter Neufert, and Johannes Kister, Architects’ Data (Chichester, West
Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
33 R. Koolhaas et al., Elements of Architecture (Venice: Marsilio Editori Spa, 2014).
34 A similar cinematic reading for stairs, corridors, walls, and corners has also been per-
formed (see Penz, Cinematic Aided Design, 178–97.
35 Descola, La Fabrique des images, builds on Descola’s previous study Beyond Nature and
Culture (Chicago London: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
36 Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2013), 92.
37 Ibid., 201.
38 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press,
1975).
39 See Marshall Sahlins, “On the Ontological Scheme of Beyond Nature and Culture,”
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 1 (2014): 281–90.
40 CineMuseSpace’s approach is also inspired by the legacy of the structuralist work on flm
of Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe at the University of Cambridge, where flm stud-
ies as such were not then taught, though since 2006 there has been an MPhil in Film
Studies.
41 Italo Calvino, “Why Read the Classics?” The New York Review of Books 33, no. 15
(1986).
42 Ibid.
43 Vladimir Petric, “A Visual/Analytic History of the Silent Cinema (1895–1930),” 30th
Congress of the International Federation of Film Archive (May 25th–27th, 1974),
http://fles.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED098639.pdf.
44 Bruce A. Block, The Visual Story: Seeing the Structure of Film, TV, and New Media (Boston:
Focal Press, 2008).
45 Margaret M. Bradley and Peter J. Lang, “Measuring Emotion: The Self-assessment
Manikin and the Semantic Diferential,” Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental
Psychiatry 25, no. 1 (1994): 49–59.
46 Gael Chandler, Film Editing (Studio City, CA: Michael Weise Productions, 2009).
47 Robert Robertson, Eisenstein on the Audiovisual: The Montage of Music, Image and Sound
in Cinema (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 111.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 The project uses the term supercut to refer to an automatically generated flm sequence,
created by our database when entering a series of keywords.
51 Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form,” 80–99.
52 Sue Clayton and Laura Mulvey, eds., Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental
Film in the 1970s (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017). 18–24.
53 Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form,” 80–99.
54 Neufert et al., Architects’ Data.
55 François Penz and Janina Schupp, A Catalogue Raisonné of Everyday Life Activities (Cine-
MuseSpace Project, 2019 and 2020).
56 Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, (London: Penguin Classics, 2008). 32.
57 André Malraux, Le Musée Imaginaire de La Sculpture Mondiale. (Paris: Gallimard, 1952).
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid.
60 André Malraux, ‘Our Cultural Heritage’, ed. Edgell Rickword, Left Review., Left
Review, 2, no. 10 (July 1936): 493.
61 Heinrich Wölfin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later
Art (New York: Dover, 1950).
62 Descola, La Fabrique des images.
13
INDIAN CINEMA AS A DATABASE
FOR SOCIO-ENERGY BEHAVIOR
IN CHAWLS
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Minna Sunikka-Blank,
Ronita Bardhan and Janina Schupp
Revisiting the chawl
The end of history

In 2004, urbanist and architect Neera Adarkar (together with Mumbai activist
Meena Menon) published their monumental One Hundred Years, One Hundred
Voices – The Millworkers of Girangaon: An Oral History1 with a specifc purpose.
A history, they felt, was in danger of coming to a close, and their intention was to
record that history through the voices of those who had lived it before it was too
late. The reasons for why that history was feared lost, why it needed to be recorded,
and by what means it could be memorialized are all questions relevant to the issue
at hand: the late-modern reconstruction of the chawl of Mumbai and what may
now be read into it.
Girangaon, literally translated as mill-town or mill-village, refers to a large region
in central Mumbai in which its famed textile industry was based. Since the frst
textile mill was founded in 1851, the region, adjacent to the city’s dockyards and
north of the walled Fort area, thrived for more than a century before its decline
in the 1980s. It saw its heyday in the cotton boom of the 1860s coinciding with
the American Civil War, which led to a fnancial bubble involving, in addition to
the mills themselves, the economies of land reclamation, construction, banking,
insurance, shipping, and fnance. That period, and Bombay’s role in it, had played a
central role in the longue durée of British colonialism. The 1870s also saw the insti-
tution of an economic arrangement with the Indian hinterland that one economist
famously named the “colonial mode of production”.2 Related to that “mode” was
a complex history of migration and of working-class struggle that would, over
the century, be associated with the Communist Party but also the centrist Indian
DOI: 10.4324/9781003107309-18
200 Ashish Rajadhyaksha et al.
National Congress and the right-wing Shiv Sena. Also related was a thriving popu-
lar culture in theatre, music, and, later, flm.
This entire history is widely, if controversially, viewed as having ended in the
1990s. Although some historians contend that the heyday of the great mills was
long gone before then, the era is more conventionally described as coming to a
close following the rise of an urban real-estate economy that made the land the
mills occupied more valuable than the factories they housed. Important landmarks
for that decline were the 1982 strike that lasted over a year (the strike was never
called of, but it fzzled out and is widely seen as having ended the industry), and
the 1993–1994 riots ostensibly caused by the “communal” violence following the
destruction of the Babri mosque, but which may in fact have been a barely veiled
cover for slum eviction drives and other battles over real estate.
However defned, the “end” of this history – and its posthumous
memorialization – had important consequences. Economically, it was viewed as
bringing to a close a glorious history of working-class militancy, as the class was
itself dismantled and its members either returned to their peasant origins or – as
manufacturing turned informal, moving into low-tech and labor-intensive spaces
in the city’s slums – were converted into migrant casual labor living in those slums.
Culturally, it was – as “end-of-history” narratives usually are – represented
in “then-and-now” terms, contrasting an increasingly romantically perceived
nationalist-radical “then” with a globalized “now”. Adarkar and Menon’s3 book
went along with several works – of theatre, music, flm, the visual arts, and above all
architecture – that sought to memorialize this history at this crucial juncture. Key
works here are the paintings of Sudhir Patwardhan, Sunil Shanbhag’s spectacular
2006 theatrical production of Ramu Ramanathan’s play Cotton 56, Polyester 84 that
was actually based on Adarkar/Menon’s book, and multiple museum projects start-
ing with one project announced in 2009 to convert the defunct India United Mills
in Lalbaug into a “mock mill environment” that would show tourists how cotton
was made and how workers lived.
Adarkar and Menon speak of how the
high walls that surround the mills, the chimneys looming above them, the
unpainted chawls like three- or four-storeyed boxes, the vegetable and fruit
vendors crowding the lanes and, when the shifts change, the streams of work-
ers fowing to and from the mill gates – all combine to create an impression
of a time warp.4
Nevertheless, and although they insist that the time warp is illusory, that
“a vibrant community life still exists”, it is hard to escape the nostalgia for times
past in their writing:
in lane after lane, there are crowds of men at street corners, talking, arguing,
gossiping; women in printed sarees accompanied by tafeta-ribboned young
girls shop for groceries. Small shops sell colourful cut pieces from the mills
Indian cinema as a database 201
for skirts and blouses, cholis and shirts. In the courtyards and corridors of the
chawls, women sit chatting, cleaning grain, cutting vegetables while some
others roll bidis all day long. Children do their homework here, in the open,
so as not to disturb fathers or brothers who may be sleeping after the night
shift. The air reeks of tobacco and the typical aroma of sauteed onions and
coconut.5
Such nostalgia is intensifed by the authors’ contrasting of this history with the
cynicism of real-estate entrepreneurs either insensitive to it or, worse, determined
to obliterate it. Adarkar and Menon point to a “huge scam involving the sale of
mill land”, as that land is being “turned into luxury apartment complexes and
entertainment centres for the rich, places which have nothing to do with the lives
of the 1,300,000 people living in the area”. The cynicism has been especially stark
in the example of the Phoenix Mills’ conversion into a glitzy entertainment-and-
shopping mall. “Phoenix Mills”, they point out, had “applied for permission to
create a club and recreational facilities for the workers of their mill. What they
did build was a fashionable bowling alley and a popular discotheque, places where
millworkers and their families will never be allowed entry”.6
The chawl
“Unlike cricket and the railways, the museum is one British import that has not
entered India’s everyday life”, says art historian Jyotindra Jain. The failure of the
institutionalized museum has often placed particular burdens on cultural memory
and its many popular representations. This has meant that material such as the hun-
dred voices in Adarkar/Menon’s book and similar other artefacts of history – the
architecture, the cinema, the popular culture – do form an especially rich resource
as they become a popular substitute for a larger institutional failure of memori-
alization. Interpreting such resources, then, requires a methodology that can also
unpick the historical pressure under which such voices speak and are recorded.
Such a resource has been the reconstructed chawl, a central discursive feature of
Girangaon, more than even the mill itself, upon which the tensions of nostalgia and
repurposed space have been most directly played out. The term adapts a Marathi
word for “sieve” and loosely translates as “tenement”. In its classical form, it com-
prises single-room tenements meant for a migrant male working class, but it has
almost never operated in this way, housing entire families and even joint families in
its miniscule enclosures. It was the predominant form of early twentieth-century
urban housing in central Bombay, sometimes built by the mills themselves for
their work force, sometimes by the Bombay Development Department founded
in 1920 that built the famous “BDD Chawls”, but mostly independently con-
structed. Typically, chawls existed as one, two, or three-story buildings with a large
entrance, a central courtyard, individual rooms on each foor opening out onto a
continuous corridor running over a hundred yards or more, and a single toilet –
and often a single tap – at the far end of the corridor servicing the entire foor.
The “ramshackle, jerry-built chawls were often packed closely into spaces between
streets and municipal thoroughfares”, writes historian Rajnarayan Chandavarkar
in his introduction to Adarkar/Menon’s book. “Since land was expensive, tenurial
conditions complex and, most crucially, returns on rentals for the poor invariably
low, builders flled their sites with chawls and squeezed into them as many tene-
ments as they could”.7
Elsewhere, Chandavarkar has spoken of metropolitan neighborhoods in relation
to the villages the workers had left: a “nexus between workplace, neighborhood
and village” that was “further soldered by the methods of recruitment that prevailed
in the industry”.8 A specifc conundrum – a variation of the “scratch a worker
and fnd a peasant” – was how so many members of the city’s working class could
return to peasant identities after the 1982 strike. Chandavarkar says that this may
well have been because they never really left their villages but, rather, brought their
village to the city: “Caste, kinship and village connections were . . . vital to work-
ers as they organized for life in Girangaon and not surprisingly their signifcance
has endured”. “Since recent migrants as well as longer established inhabitants of
Girangaon found a measure of security and protection through these afnities,
it followed that caste clusters formed both in occupations and in residential pat-
terns”.9 This had a major theoretical consequence: in contrast to Western histories
of industrialization, which are taken primarily to mean “the evolution of factory
from craft industry, generally presupposing the prior development of a market
economy, the social diferentiation of the peasantry and changing legal and social
structures”, in India, “all these forces were working together at the same time”, and
“no simple evolutionary schemata of social change and economic development can
be readily applied to the Indian evidence”.10
The defning feature of the chawl is historical simultaneity. These were, among
other things, the frst spaces of the modern public domain in Bombay, their central
courtyards used for political gatherings, entertainment, and above all for festivals.
“Chawls, streets and neighbourhoods organized communal activities, includ-
ing occasions of religious observance whether satyanarayan pujas, Moharram tolis,
Gokulashtmi melas or what became the increasingly popular observance of Tilak’s
invention, the Ganeshotsav”, writes Chandavarkar.11”Often, chawl committees and
gaon mandalis even acted as tribunals, settling disputes between neighbours and on
occasion, imposing their moral expectations upon tenants and members. . . . Local
and neighbourhood organization thus reached into the more rarefed spheres of
institutional politics in the early twentieth century”.
The chawl from afar

Such a chawl has been a product of both time and space: as the quintessential pro-
duction of life as it was “then”, it also produces the viewpoint of the “now” from
where it becomes visible.
“If you stand at night on the roof of one of the recent, still under-occupied
high-rise buildings erected on the property of a defunct mill in central Bombay”,
writes Chandavarkar, “often named with a surreal fourish like Kalpataru Heights,
or the Phoenix Towers that sprang from the ashes of a spinning mill, you will be
treated to an instructive, indeed, allegorical, view of the city”.12
Immediately at the base of the Heights upon which you stand will be a discerni-
ble circle of gloom. Further afeld, a mile or two away, whether toward the bustling
suburbs to the north or the old town and the business districts to the south, the city
will be awash with electric light. As the city’s textile mills have closed down, so the
residents of Girangaon are enveloped in darkness in the geographical center of one
of the world’s largest cities.
Such a view has been directly replicated in perhaps the most signifcant of
major and infuential genre of literature (the dainik kadambari or “daily-life novel”
that fourished in the interwar period and poetry, in the work of Narayan Surve),
music (including several famous lavanis and powadas, folk forms transformed into
the urban form of popular theatre known as the loknatya), and thence into the
cinema. The “Parel” flms made in Marathi now reproduce, alongside the history,
the planned museums, the theatre, and the music, a fabricated “then” against which
the present is mapped. While Jabbar Patel’s Simhasan (1979) may have been the frst
major flm in this genre, a recent classic is Mahesh Manjrekar’s 2010 crime movie
Lalbaug Parel. The flm begins with a tamasha performance in Lalbaug’s Hanuman
theatre. It then moves to the protagonist-narrator bringing his girlfriend to buy an
apartment in a high-rise that he has specifcally chosen because it overlooks the
chawl in which he grew up. As he looks down from its heights and points out the
tenement, the flm goes into fashback to tell a story of mill workers, union rights,
rapacious landlords, and criminal gangs, before coming back into the present.
In her detailed explication of chawl typologies, architecture theorist Gupte13 may
well be describing Manjrekar’s flm when she feshes out what “everyday life” was
like:
The shared corridor that was used to access the rooms was the frst to con-
tribute to this aspect of communal living. One was bound to meet their
neighbours while moving in and out of the houses. Secondly, on account
of the compact sizes of living units one found that a lot of the activities
inside the house made their way into the corridors, the staircases, the
bridges and the courtyards outside. The doors of houses were always kept
open through the daytime and the evenings . . . Common spaces became
shared living rooms, which completely challenged the binaries of public and
private spaces and the idea of what a home is, often making the entire chawl
building into one large house. Private spaces happened only when the doors
closed in the night.
What is signifcant in Lalbaug Parel is the set design (see Figure 13.1): it faithfully
reconstructs, as though taking on the responsibilities of the museum that never quite
was, the interiors of what architecture theorist Rupali Gupte names as the “court-
yard chawl” – one of three kinds of chawls, the others being the single-foor baithi
FIGURE 13.1 Views of the chawl in Lalbaug Parel.
chawls and the multistoried bar chawl. Courtyard chawls have, Gupte writes, “an
open-to-sky space within the chawl, along which runs the corridor of the chawl”.
Courtyards, which come in diferent sizes, are a shared resource that “becomes
active during evenings on a daily basis and during festivals on an annual calendar”.
This reticulate system of access often becomes the heart of the housing,
going beyond the function of movement . . . absorb(ing) much of the out-
door living functions of the house. By virtue of the multiple homes spill-
ing out their activities, these spaces become common living rooms of these
complexes. Often the spilling out means those rooms are never locked. Both
the front doors and the rear doors of houses are kept open such that one
can easily pass through the front corridor, through the house, into the back
corridor, into the bridge and back into the front corridor and the home of
another unit. The porosity of the house not only helps release the density
inside the otherwise tight living space but also builds many bonds between
its inhabitants.14
The interlocking system of space also becomes integral to most of the action in
Lalbaug Parel, as it moves its various actions from the single room/living room, the
“mori” (a space for bathing, but without running water), the corridor, the landing,
the central courtyard, and the street outside (see Figure 13.2). The space itself –
peopled by ghosts, as the protagonist puts it – provides the motivational logic, as the
flm runs through the dramatis personae of Adarkar/Menon’s oral history: the union
leaders, the workers, the jobbers, the mill owners, the neighborhood tea vendors
(“the tea vendor, it was said, provided an information exchange, acquiring and
dispensing news and gossip” writes Chandavarkar15).
History and memory

In 2019, it was widely reported that the stalled India United Mills project of creat-
ing a museum of the textile industry had been revived. As announced by the city’s
Municipal Corporation, it will include seventeen buildings over 44,000 square
meters of which nine – including a large underground water tank, an old muster
room, a temple, a freshwater pond, and a 160-ft-tall chimney – would be retained,
and the remaining rebuilt. “Laser cleaning contractors” would be hired to “clean
FIGURE 13.2 The chawl in Lalbaug Parel.
the writings and grafti on the two-storey structure”.16 It will house a sub-center
of the National Institute of Fashion Technology, become a center of fashion, along-
side the usual tourist paraphernalia – light and sound shows, an open amphitheater,
galleries, shopping, cafés, a library, and so on. According to the Additional Munici-
pal Commissioner (Western suburbs) Ashwini Joshi, the idea was to “let the citi-
zens of Mumbai know their historical past”, and so one textile mill will be restored
by the celebrated architecture restorer Abha Narain Lambah, and “a surrounding
chawl will also be renovated under the project”.17
The India United Mills closed in 1982 after the strike. Since then, despite mul-
tiple pronouncements, it has taken nearly 40 years to revive the museum idea, and
there is no evidence as to whether it will ever happen. Whether it does or not, it
doesn’t take much to recognize the contested nature of historical memory or the
need of popular cultural forms that ceaselessly create their own informal memori-
alization in forms like Manjrekar’s lowlife crime movie – which seeks to retain its
protagonist’s history even as it views that history from atop a multistory building
built on the former mill lands, looking down upon the life he had lived.
CineGenus
Methodology
Apart from a number of studies focused on spatiality in cities18 cinema is not yet
commonly used as a vehicle to study the unravelling of domesticity within dwell-
ings. At the same time, approaches to efectively capture the everyday life in domes-
tic environments have been a blind spot in energy research, and an argument has
been made for a paradigm shift to look at energy practices as social construct rather
than as rational behavior.19 Research on everyday routines and practices in shap-
ing household energy demand is well established in Western energy studies, but
only a number of studies have applied it in non-Western context.20 The CineGenus
project (2019–2020) explored how cinematic analysis and flms could provide new
data concerning domestic practices and energy use, taking flms located in chawls
in Mumbai as an example.21
In the CineGenus project, 19 feature-length fction flms were selected for the
analysis. The flms all had to have a signifcant number of scenes set in chawls, geo-
graphically located in Mumbai and flmed after the 1970s. Some flms were shot
on location, and in some flms (e.g. 3 Storeys directed by Arjun Mukerjee in 2018)
the chawl was purpose-built as a set constituting an “ideal” chawl. Given the rise
of more afordable small-scale electric appliances in the last two decades, the selec-
tion of flms especially featured recent cinematic releases that reached international
success (such as the Netfix distribution 15 August by Swapnaneel Jaykar made
in 2019), which were added to include contemporary representations of energy-
consumption practices.
For the specifc focus of this project, the CineMuseSpace keyword ontology
(detailed in Chapter 12) was adapted and tailored to precisely identify energy usage,
technology consumption, gender balance, and fnancial pressure related to eve-
ryday activities in the chawl context. The fnal principal branch of the ontology
focused on the type of domestic practice, who performs it, and in which space it
takes place. Types of practice include, for example: cooking, talking, reading, or
switching on an appliance. Lived spaces were marked up to defne where practices
are performed. Outdoor and communal spaces were also tagged to examine how
the everyday life moves and fows over from private to public spaces. Finally, the
smaller, more tangible units of everyday life were annotated, including specifc
items of furniture, clothing, stove types, or vehicles. Eighty-two technology key-
words were applied, ranging from kitchen tools to consumer technology, including
mobile phones, fans, and lamps.
FIGURE 13.3 List of the flms analyzed in the CineGenus project.
The application of flm analysis was combined with a site visit to Mumbai in
order to create an embodied understanding of spatial practices and circumstances.
This was a three-step process. First, the flms were viewed to gain initial knowl-
edge of Mumbai and chawl environments. This was followed by the site visit to the
“BDD Chawls”, anchoring the previous flmic, second-hand experiences of the
chawl environment in reality. The feldwork allowed us to compare site observa-
tions with the flm analysis: to connect the concepts with the context but adding a
deeper reading of the place. In turn, the real physical experience of the location fed
back into our reading of the mediated text, completing the auto-ethnographical
cinematic experience.
Analysis
The project focused on two key spaces in chawls (1) the central room/living room
as multipurpose space (i.e. one-room apartment) and (2) the courtyard. The use
of spaces was then analyzed based on the system of (1) activity, (2) furniture and
usage, (3) technology and technology user, and (4) gender association. Semantic
network maps were drawn to understand the frequently associated keywords within
the system space.
The flms show how the chawl courtyard is actively used for parties and gath-
erings and often acts as instrumental setting for the plot, enabling firting and
romance among the residents (e.g. 3 Storeys) or the celebration of festivals together
as a community (15 August), confrming their function as modern public domain
spaces in Mumbai. The courtyards continue to accommodate a number of com-
munity functions such as a temple or a stage, as observed on site in the “BDD
chawls” (see Figure 13.4).
The flms confrm Gupte’s22 observation on the social function of the corridor
in chawls. Public corridors around the courtyard are used to socialize, play, gather,
FIGURE 13.4 Public domain in the “BDD chawls” in Mumbai.
sit, look around, and call out for people across the corridor or on the ground. The
corridor also accommodates private practices such as drying clothes or styling hair
or preparing for cooking – in 15 August, we see an old man sleeping in a bed under
a mosquito net. In the corridor and the courtyard scenes the camera is often static
and observing from a distance, capturing interconnections of the social life that
unfolds before the camera.
Similar multipurpose spaces are observed in the private realm. In chawls, each
family has one private room. The flms show how this space is used as a living
room, bedroom, and dining area – even as a school or working space. Instead of
having a conventional, fxed dining table, the family is often sitting on the foor
or sets up movable chairs or beds with a table. The practices performed in the
multipurpose space in the flms refect this diversity: socializing, sitting down,
watching television, or talking about various issues such as marriage, studies, or
employment. Although the flms most commonly show the space used as a liv-
ing room, the furniture did not refect it, and typical sofa sets were observed in
only a few scenes. Instead, a bed is the most common furniture item, indicating
the space use as a bedroom. Hence, the furniture to sit on is mostly a bed with
movable chairs and a small table or a stool. To accommodate sleeping areas for all
household members, extra mats or mattresses are used, which are kept rolled up in
a corner during the day.
In addition to the analysis of the architectural elements, we looked at the pres-

ence of household technology in the flm scenes. Electric appliances were an
important part of the flm set but were not necessarily actively used in the scenes.
Figure 13.6 shows how much screen time each appliance had in the flms: the size
of the text is proportional to the screen time. The flms show how the television
is often located at the nexus of other practices at home: socializing, serving, host-
ing, drinking, and eating all take place by the television. Television presence is not
restricted to evenings, and it is often in the background, like a wallpaper or paint-
ing. It is notable that, in all the flms analyzed, men were more often in control of
the appliances than women, especially television, tablets, or laptops. In this way the
flms suggest the reinstatement of gendered domestic and entertainment practices.
In 15 August, the ideal suitor’s tablet gets a lot of screen time, and it is used as a
device to show his wealthy life abroad.
Figure 13.5 illustrates the use of household technology as present in the scenes:
while the most dominant appliances were ceiling fans and lamps in the 1970s and
1980s, television became the most prominent technology in the scenes from the
early 1990s. Modern appliances like a food mixer or a toaster were later additions
in these domestic environments and depict luxury appliances than more frequently
used welfare appliances like a fan or a fridge. Similar observations were found in
recent research.23
The kitchen has an important role in the flm narratives. Cooking was one of
the key activities shown at home, right after talking, sitting, looking, or walk-
ing. The equipment used for cooking in the flms is either a single stove chulha,
or a double/four plate LPG stove. Kitchen appliances are used in the flms as an
expression of domesticity and settled status of the family. In Sairat (Nagraj Manjule,
2016), after running away from home and enduring hardship of living in slums, the
protagonist couple manages to move to a chawl and have a home. Electric appli-
ances in their house, such television and kitchen appliances, with an LPG stove in
very clean kitchen, are used to portray this transformation to a “good life”. This
is refected in how the scenes are flmed: using an unhurried, wide frame of a
woman cooking in her kitchen, including a close view of her utensils and appli-
ances. A similar staging of a woman in her own kitchen is used in Court (Chaitanya
Tamhane, 2014). Despite her high social status as a lawyer, she is seen cooking
while her husband and children are eating and watching television, showing her
as a good wife and mother. Also in other flms like Gully Boy (Zoya Akhtar, 2019)
FIGURE 13.5 Household technology observed in the flm scenes.

and 3 Storeys, cooking practices are used to portray a woman’s general “being” at
home. By contrast, men are rarely seen using kitchen appliances. In the opening
scene of 15 August, the male protagonist (an unconventional and sulky artist, who
is not approved of by his girlfriend’s or even his own parents) is shown making tea
for himself in his kitchen. In this way he is introduced as single, unconventional
character, and his room in the chawl is presented as dark and messy and without
any appliances.
The kitchen is the setting for a tense key scene in Sairat as static, long scenes of
the female protagonist cooking in her kitchen precede a shockingly violent ending.
In Sairat, kitchen and appliances communicate several narratives: frst, they dem-
onstrate the settled status of the family; second, they show that the independent
woman who ran away from her family is still a good wife (male visitors are invited
to watch television while she makes tea: “watch TV if you like”); and third, they
contrast this safe, private place in the house with the eruption of violence that is
even more shocking and unexpected when it happens in the kitchen, preceded by
an unhurried, everyday routine of a woman making tea. The scene is an excellent
example of how everyday life in flm constitutes a baseline that provides fertile
ground from which the drama can erupt.
Concluding remarks
Built in the 1920s for mill workers, chawls are key features in the history and col-
lective memory of Mumbai. Threatened by booming real estate economy and high
land values, they are a rapidly vanishing example of communal and urban living in
the city. In the absence of any museum or heritage conservation, their presence in
cinema may become a substitute for a larger institutional failure of memorialization.
Adopting CineMuseSpace’s methodology, the CineGenus project explored how
spatial ethnography is an untapped source of information to study everyday life and
transitions in material culture at home, in this case the chawls. The flms show the
communal life in the courtyard and the corridor and the multipurpose function
of the private room – the interlocking system of space where “common spaces
become shared living rooms”.24 The application of a detailed keyword ontology
allowed us to map the presence and use of household technologies – and where
and how everyday practices were performed – as revealed by the flms across the
time period of four decades. The resulting CineGenus database can be resampled
for any further analysis, such as an examination of the cultural history of appliances
or using key scenes to construct a sequence of events of a typical day in the chawl.
CineGenus inspired two new research narratives: the AHRC Filming Energy
(FERN) Research Network25 that uses short documentary flms, made by the resi-
dents themselves, as a method to understand women’s everyday life in transition
housing in Mumbai and Cape Town and the use of animation flm to visualize
often “invisible” energy use (A Room in Mumbai,26 produced by Calling The Shots
for the BBCiPlayer “Animated Thinking” series; see Figure 13.6). These examples
demonstrate how flm is an underused tool, which can be deployed to understand
FIGURE 13.6 Short documentary flms made by the residents (left) and an animation
“A Room in Mumbai” (BBC iPlayer; right).
everyday life and energy use at home and how the arts and humanities research can
be used to mediate the often highly technical approach of energy studies.
Acknowledgements
CineGenus was funded by Global Challenges Research Funding (GCRF) Impact
Fund of the University of Cambridge. Professor François Penz was the Principal
Investigator (PI) in the project, and Jeetika Malik and Chetana Kothari were the
Research Assistants at IIT Bombay.
Notes
1 Neera Adarkar and Meena Menon, One Hundred Years One Hundred Voices: The Mill-
workers of Girangaon : An Oral History (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2004).
2 Hamza Alavi, “India and the Colonial Mode of Production,” Economic and Political
Weekly 10, no. 33/35 (1975): 1235–62, www.jstor.org/stable/4537329.
3 Adarkar and Menon, One Hundred Years One Hundred Voices.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 15.
6 Ibid., 16.
7 Rajnayaran Chandavarkar, “From Neighbourhood to Nation: The Rise and Fall of the
Left in Bombay’s Girangaon in the Twentieth Century,” in History, Culture and the Indian
City (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 2009), 134.
8 Ibid., 128.
9 Ibid., 19.
10 Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Industrialization in India before 1947: Conventional
Approaches and Alternative Perspectives,” Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 3 (1985): 624.
11 Chandavarkar, “From Neighbourhood to Nation, 136.
12 Ibid., 121.
13 Rupali Gupte, “Physical and Social Confgurations of the Bombay Chawls,” Sahapedia,
November 2, 2018.
14 Ibid.
15 Chandavarkar, “From Neighbourhood to Nation,” 136.
16 Abha Goradia, “Mumbai: Rs 200-Crore Textile Museum Will House NIFT Sub-
Centre, to Showcase City’s Mill Culture,” New Indian Express, August 13, 2019, https://
indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/mumbai-rs-200-crore-textile-museum-will-
house-nift-sub-centre-to-showcase-citys-mill-culture-5899859/.
17 Ibid.
18 Janina Schupp, “Margins versus Centre: Cinematic Tensions and Confict between the
Suburbs and Paris,” in Filmurbia: Screening the Suburbs, ed. D. Forrest, G. Harper, and J.
Rayner (London: Palgrave -Macmillan, 2017); François Penz, Cinematic Aided Design:
An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture (London: Routledge, 2017); Janina Schupp,
Andong Lu, and François Penz, “Cinematic Interpretation of Spatiality,” Cambridge Jour-
nal of China Studies 13, no. 4 (2019).
19 See Elizabeth Shove, “Beyond the ABC: Climate Change Policy and Theories of Social
Change,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 42 (2010): 1273–85; Elizabeth
Shove, “Putting Practice into Policy: Reconfguring Questions of Consumption and
Climate Change,” Contemporary Social Science 9, no. 4 (2014): 415–29.
20 See for example: Sanjoy Mazumdar, “Review: Consumption and the Transformation
of Everyday Life: A View from South India, by Harold Wilhite. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008.205pp. $90.00 Cloth. ISBN: 9780230542549,” Contemporary Sociology
39, no. 2 (2010): 210–2; M. Sahakian, Keeping Cool in Southeast Asia: Energy Consumption
and Urban Air-Conditioning (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014); M. Sunikka-
Blank, R. Bardhan, and A. N. Haque, “Gender, Domestic Energy and Design of Inclu-
sive Low-Income Habitats: A Case of Slum Rehabilitation Housing in Mumbai, India,”
Energy Research and Social Science 49 (2019).
21 Sunikka-Blank, Minna, Ronita Bardhan, Janina Schupp, Jaideep Prabhu, and Francois
Penz, “Films as Source of Everyday Life and Energy Use: A Case of Indian Cinema,”
Energy Research & Social Science 69, January (2020).
22 Gupte, “Physical and Social Confgurations of the Bombay Chawls.”
23 See for example: R. Debnath, R. Bardhan, and M. Sunikka-Blank, “How Does Slum
Rehabilitation Infuence Appliance Ownership? A Structural Model of Non-Income
Drivers,” Energy Policy, no. 132 (2019); Jeetika Malik and Ronita Bardhan, “Energy Tar-
get Pinch Analysis for Optimising Thermal Comfort in Low-Income Dwellings,” Journal
of Building Engineering, no. 28 (2020); Jeetika Malik, Ronita Bardhan, Tianzhen Hong
and Mary Ann Piette, “Contextualising Adaptive Comfort Behaviour within Low-
Income Housing of Mumbai, India,” Building and Environment 177, no. April (2020).
24 Gupte, “Physical and Social Confgurations of the Bombay Chawls.”
25 See www.arct.cam.ac.uk/research/global-urban/ahrc-flming-energy-research-network-
fern.
26 See www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p08z31q2/animated-thinking-a-room-in-mumbai.
14
DOMESTIC MOODS
Mood catchers and makers
Felicity Atekpe
Mood catchers
Defning the frame

White table: n 1 represents a place for discussion and involvement. 2 a sym-
bolic meeting place of people on equal terms for discussion. 3 ‘tabula rasa’ – a
clean slate.1
The “white table” can be seen as a blank canvas, which facilitates the dialogue
between me and the client. It frames our discussions and becomes a space for them
to articulate their aspirations for the desired mood and for us to start defning their
dreams and ambitions.
At the start of the project, I challenge the traditional design approach by spend-
ing a long time (somewhere between three months to a year, occasionally even
longer than this!) trying to know my clients beyond the superfcial, in order to
understand the mode of engagement as well as defning the frame of reference for
each project. I encourage my clients to think deeply about what things they fnd
important by way of the Proust Questionnaire2 and another one by Ilse Crawford,3
asking them to provide a list of aspirations. Some other key questions are:
When do you dream of home?

Where do you do your thinking?
How do you live now and how would living your best life look like to you?
In order to identify the mood for each client, alongside asking them questions,
I also ask them to provide an object that they fnd beautiful, something they love,
or sometimes by defning the opposite – what they fnd ugly.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003107309-19
214 Felicity Atekpe
Often, the easiest way to discuss moods is through cinematic references,

from Yasujiró Ozu at one extreme, particularly his flm Equinox Flower (1958),
to James L. Brooks’s flm As Good as It Gets (1997) with its kitchen and living
spaces of a house in the Hamptons via Wes Anderson, Tom Ford, and Studio
Ghibli. Film is the best medium for experiencing space and mood, and Kath-
erine Schonfeld explains this connection beautifully in her book, Walls Have
Feelings.4
Concurrently, I look at the story of their house, the interior world lived
there and the story they want to tell about the house and themselves. These real
or imagined stories normally set the mood of the project and also stop projects
from being solely defned by the budget. Finally, alongside clients, there is usu-
ally one other key collaborator: artists, builders, or sometimes a material or a
new technique.
Mood and relationships

I believe that where and how we live are fundamental to our well-being. Ayşe
Birsel notes, that in order to design well for people, they need to understand
their psychology and physiognomy in order to know and be true to themselves.5
Therefore I am also trying to understand my clients’ needs by breaking my own,
as well as clients’ preconceptions. This is so they can reconnect with their values
and visualize their future in order to plot an original roadmap to get them there:
prototyping a life they love.
Alain de Botton further clarifes and also gives examples of why this might be
an important pursuit by saying,
We value certain buildings for their ability to rebalance our misshapen

natures and encourage emotions which our predominant commitments force
us to sacrifce. Feelings of competitiveness, envy, and aggression hardly need
elaboration, but feelings of humility amid an immense and sublime universe,
of a desire for calm at the onset of evening or of an aspiration for gravity and
kindness – these form no correspondingly reliable part of our inner land-
scape, a rueful absence which may explain our wish to bind such emotions
to the fabric of our homes . . . what we call a home is merely any place that
succeeds in making us more consistently available to us the important truths
which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves
have trouble holding on to.6
Building anything in the home provides a change in people’s living conditions –

something that should be dealt with responsibly and with the utmost considera-
tion. For most ordinary people, refurbishing or rebuilding their homes is the most
money they will ever spend, after buying the home in the frst place. Each process
takes a slightly diferent trajectory, and it is never clear what the ingredients for
Domestic moods 215
making the project will be, nor the outcomes. Sometimes this road map can take
years to implement.
Setting the mood

The work is based on an understanding of the abundance and complexity that a
house must encompass. The creation and evocation of mood is then set by the use
of light, orientation, its position within the landscape, materials, and construction
and landscape.
It is always an attempt to capture the new life that is going to be led in the
home, in relation to the old one. I try to defne the problem that the client believes
needs to be solved and why they decided to choose an architect to help them.
The goal from then on is to integrate the practical and spiritual aspects of people’s
lives. Moore, Allen, and Lyndon articulated this perfectly in the foreword of their
book The Place of Houses as an “attempt to delineate (the) three conceptual building
blocks from which houses are made: rooms to live in, machines that serve life, and
the inhabitants’ dreams made manifest”.7 It is in the third part of making dreams
manifest where creating mood exists.
Poetics in the ordinary – making moods

In the initial stages, there are lots of presentations and physical model making;
an interpretation of the spatial implications, important values from the ques-
tionnaires from the clients, and an introduction to broader topics and thinking
on a subject from me. We look at precedents (often fragments from social media
or other architects’ work) to try to articulate what success looks like to inspire
and drive people toward achievements and realistic expectations. This is then
followed by an iterative process: having several attempts at a solution, making
models to explore the ideas and as a way of understanding our designs and
thinking, setting clear requirements and goals for each stage, showing inspira-
tional examples of success. The process is very handmade with computers used
only for orthographic drawings and making sure that we are in control of the
sizes of the spaces being proposed. All clients have very clear dreams and expe-
riences that they bring to the table: stuf they have seen, moods experienced in
their lives. Often it is about fnding a way of communicating that provides a safe
environment for them to be able to articulate their desires so that I can translate
them spatially. It is never right at the frst iteration, but it allows clients to be
more precise about what they want in the subsequent iterations.
In order to make the poetics real, the client has to also understand that the
created environment is situated in a complex framework of regulation and tight
procedures that need to be embraced if it is to deliver high-quality solutions. Inter-
woven, therefore, into all these discussions are the more prosaic requirements with
cost reviews. These are carried out as an intrinsic, iterative part of the design and
216 Felicity Atekpe
delivery process and are integral to making the spaces in which the poetry of the
everyday can unfold.
Ultimately architecture is about making. There is uncertainty in making. Any
intervention involves risk. I rarely go for an open tendering process for a project,
preferring to work from the start with a builder after a process of competitive inter-
view conducted with the clients. More often it is the builder who brings the client
to White Table, and we start there.
There will be an honest discussion about money and how much there is
to spend. These words are often spoken: “We can’t do this and that” or “not
all of that” and “it depends on how much time and money you have and how
out there I can go”. Often, the project will have to be realized in phases,
incrementally.
An analysis of the projects shows that there are fve key elements that give mood.
These are explored further as “mood makers” and are: space, light, materials, land-
scape, and atmosphere.
Mood makers
Space: how we live now

We live in a crowded world where it is hard to be by yourself. The constant bom-
bardment of information and the excessive use of social media makes us think we
are never alone, and yet sometimes we feel alone. Alexa is the fnal frontier in the
commercialization of domestic space. Most people seem to want solitude in their
home – the state of being alone, especially when this is peaceful and pleasant –
rather than loneliness, and this comes up again and again in the questionnaires.
Psychologists argue that solitude refers to the idea of being completely alone –
physically – but it does not imply a feeling of loneliness. It is a state where the
mind, far from constant stimuli, becomes self-aware. It is the moment when crea-
tivity – well known by artists – fourishes.8 Most of the projects address this need
for solitude by creating a quiet and strong volume of space for the home that uses
environmentally sustainable materials in their natural form. Additionally, I believe
it is important to create simple yet fexible spaces that make a feature of natural
light and views.
It starts with layering space, providing compartments as well as openness so that
we can get away if we need to but also stay connected as we wish. Layering also
makes it easy to use the spaces every day in an unintrusive way, as a background to
life. The new space created or reconfgured, like music or literature, tries to provide
a rhythm to the home by ensuring that some places in the home encourage you to
spend as much or as little time in them as is necessary. Acknowledging the impor-
tance of quiet but also noise; action and stillness. Pauses are also achieved through
the provision for space that can expand or contract in relation to use and spaces
that bleed into each other.
Domestic moods 217
Incidental rooms are especially important since they tend to be less loaded with
expectation than say a bedroom, living room, etc.: an inhabited staircase, an alcove
or “elaborated window”, a bathroom with a view even if it is the sky, and the abil-
ity to shut yourself of if necessary.
The room within a room concept – the layering of space – is often used. Expertly
demonstrated in Thomas Jeferson’s Monticello where alcove beds are rooms all of
their own and can inhabit spaces between activity and ablutions.9 Increasing color
plays more and more of a role with the following as references for mood and
atmosphere. Color flters also seem to work such as those used by Krzysztof Kies-
lowski – and his cinematographer Slawomir Idziak – in Three Colors trilogy: Red,
Blue, White, and in The Double life of Veronique with its yellow flter. The diference
between flm and architecture is that in architecture the efects have to be in the
production of a mood that can be sustained and altered every day, hour by hour.
I was struggling to articulate what I try to achieve until I read an interview with
an architect whose work and attitude I admire very much, Gabriel Poole:
GP: I don’t know how it happens, but I know that you can walk into my houses
and you can feel the volumes. I know that I feel that when I’m drawing on a
sheet of paper, and I seem to be able to transfer that into actuality.
LC: I also think there is some key point [where] certain architects manage to be
able to make buildings come alive. The plan has more in the spatial connec-
tion at the edges and boundaries than you might think. There is a dynamic
that’s attached to materials and the way they connect, and the light that falls
on them, and even color. These things can be used to create a space that feels
it can be occupied in a way that is delightful.”10
Light
“Light is a powerful substance. We have a primal connection to it. But, for
something so powerful, situations for its felt presence are fragile . . . I like to
work with it so that you feel it physically, so you feel the presence of light inhab-
iting a space”.
James Turrell11
We all have a sensitivity to phenomenal change, and light is important to all but
especially the elderly. One of the frst things when looking at a new project is to
understand where the sun comes in and how it travels in a home. We all need to
consume more light in the northern hemisphere. In particular I have been inter-
ested in: sunlight/natural light/daylight + bright light.
Like most people, I am always moved by the light at the beginning and end
of the day. Dawn or sunrise and the prevalence of light in the morning hours is
a crucial factor in contributing to SAD. At dusk or sunset, refective lighting and
white surfaces can be used to get interesting and therapeutic light. Being mindful
218 Felicity Atekpe
of these extremes and the daily light cycle when designing people’s homes produces
the most satisfactory solutions for clients. I think of them in musical terms: Aubade,
“a song or instrumental composition concerning, accompanying, or evoking day-
break”12 and Nocturnes “are generally thought of as being tranquil, often expressive
and lyrical, and sometimes rather gloomy, but in practice pieces with the name
nocturne, have conveyed a variety of moods”.13
The best way to deal with these observations is to provide at least two diferent types
of lighting in each room: artifcial light and a natural, living light such as is obtained
from an open fre or wood burner or the sun as it moves across a wall during the day.
Color palettes and placement of windows are signifcant in optimizing exposure.
Increasingly, I look to painters to help. In particular, Vermeer’s paintings of
domestic interiors with fgures in Delft. Richard Williams describes them as being
“an opportunity to give a virtuoso depiction of the fall of light”. Adding that they
are “very much an atmospheric evocation. There’s no deep emotion here”. Wil-
liams expands his analysis further by looking at Pieter de Hooch’s “A Courtyard
at Delft: a Woman Spinning”, which uses “a perspective view and an atmospheric
efect of light which creates the space between and around the fgures”.14 Light
usually comes in from one window or a single source.
I aspire to Vermeer’s subtle use of light, his ability to make us slow down and
absorb the richness of the space where suddenly the mundane chore of weighing
jewelry becomes very interesting – as long as you view it in the correct light. This
is what I want to bring to the homes I design, as well as a relationship to views.
Hammershøi’s use of light, muted tones, and choice of subject are indebted
to Vermeer; however, he adds another layer of understanding for me, and that is
the use of indirect light in designing quiet spaces. Hammershøi captures a sense
of timelessness and introspective solitude. As Hanne Finsen and Inge Vibeke
Raashou-Nielsen wrote, in his interior landscapes,
light is the principal subject . . . and that light is the meagre Danish winter
light, the light of grey weather quite without color, warmth, or gaiety, albeit
so rich in nuance. . . . There is a light that pours in over the canvas and
defnes the space. . . . The light is usually indirect for, of course, Hammershøi
also knows that indirect light is often the most beautiful.15
I used to teach chiaroscuro to architecture students in their frst year using the
two old masters of light: Velasquez and Caravaggio. I chose Velasquez for his ability
to render a natural fattering light and showing everyday people and experiences
with a commitment to showing reality in all its forms. Caravaggio has a clarity of
the light falling that makes it easier to study and replicate.
I make it a point to know the color temperature of any artifcial light I specify
and to create sufcient drama in the setting of rooms in a home. I admire the
work of Ingo Maurer for a playfulness with the light fttings he designed – paying
particular attention to the color temperature. Hogarth’s house in Chiswick, for
Domestic moods 219
FIGURE 14.1 From left to right [top]: Morning light (photographer: Ioana Marinescu);
Shower detail, cast glass by Jef Bell (photographer: Ioana Marinescu). From
left to right [below]: Everyday landscapes by the sea (photographer: Mariana
Bassani); Nocturne (photographer: Ståle Eriksen).
example, has a most memorable feeling of light in its interiors and their connec-
tion to the small walled mulberry garden attached to it. Similarly, Dennis Severs’
house in Spitalfelds at Christmas evokes a nostalgia for Victorian Christmases not
experienced except through books and flms.
I also try to bring an element of one of these into my projects: half-light, moon-
light, or gaslight. A sense of the romantic and dreamy should also be possible in
everyday life. I often encourage my clients to light a candle for a meal even if no
220 Felicity Atekpe
guest is coming to dinner. Rooms soften and are more beautiful in these lights pro-
vided there are the right surfaces for the light to dance. Softening interior lighting
is an important and indispensable architectural element to generating well-being
and mood.
Materials
By Materials, I mean both the particular characteristic of a place but also the smaller
components of a room, down to what you touch and use. To allow for the mood
or sense of the space to prevail, I try to make interiors free of afectations so that all
that is felt are the materials and their separate identities as well as when they come
together. Harmony and naturalness are essential to produce calm.
Three design practices inform my work: my thoughts on the Eames’ approach
are succinctly summed up in Brian Carter’s introduction to the 2001 Charles &
Ray Eames lecture by Shim Sutclife as “Charles and Ray Eames had an endless
curiosity in the furniture, spaces, and objects they designed. They were apprecia-
tive of good workmanship and seemingly compelled to devise the beautiful con-
nection”.16 Their materials are plywood, fberglass, wire, steel, and aluminum.
Charlotte Perriand with her profound interest in the art of living and creating
spaces, being sheltered in a mountain refuge, ship’s cabin, or a Japanese house:
everything has its own place. Ideas of rhythm, lightness, transparency, depth of
feld, of the outside inside and vice versa, and the idea of the removable and
collapsible in furniture and building and blurring those lines.17 She believed that
the more natural the better and her conversations between materials and their
textures were essential. Finally, most recently, the work of Francesca Torzo, par-
ticularly looking at Casa Uno in Sorano, Italy with its expressed services and
contrast between tuf masonry internally treated with a transparent waterproof-
ing and fnished with a brush application of white lime mortar with curving
edges and the contrast with sharp matte dark metal framing of the edges of doors
and windows but also walls fnished with a cotto tile carpet is very evocative of
a particular mood.18
Looking at my work, the recurring materials are lime or soft white walls; boat
canvas tarpaulin; transparent, translucent, and colored glass and Perspex; light-
colored wood or birch ply; green plants; matt white or limestone tiles; and matte
black metal. These are my go-to means of creating moods and atmospheres in the
everyday. Coupled with Carlo Scarpa’s idea that things you touch every day should
be treated diferently than other things that make up a room.19 The objective is
to create space conducive to make-believe with nothing to weigh you down and
everything to help you fy. Simple, afordable materials that are carefully detailed
can elevate the overall quality of space. The more natural the better. The fewer
processes that have to be done on-site, the more afordable the project becomes,
and the more control you have over the beauty of the fnish.
Domestic moods 221
Furniture and touch

The consideration of furniture has been an important part of my practice because
as Shim Sutclif articulates, it helps with the direct connection between design and
construction and the relationship developed with fabricators and joiners in under-
standing the capacity of materials and how they can be used.20 Furniture is how
you sit, what temperature you feel, and how you shape sightlines and frame views.
Landscape
Architecture by implication is related to other concepts: land, light, air, seasons,
weather, topography, and vegetation. To create mood in our homes, what is out-
side and inside becomes of paramount importance. How we feel about interiors
is explicitly related to the exterior envelope and how permeable that is. Looking
at nature is demonstrated to be of particular beneft to our mental health.21 In all
the projects, the outdoor spaces are integrated with the building and complement
and enhance both relationships. Both building and landscape are considered in
relation to routes, tempo, speed, texture, surface, axis, views, external enclosure,
and thresholds. Sometimes, as in a fat, there is no outside space, however, in those
scenarios, landscape views and bringing nature in become important.
Landscape thinking – by which I mean looking at the relationship between micro
and macro scales, the present and the future, the constant and the ephemeral – is a
very important tool in my practice. When it is a new house, not just site and build-
ing, the idea of a manipulated landscape of carving, sculpting, and digging has been
used successfully. Of particular interest are kitchen gardens and their place in articu-
lating a relationship between edible landscapes and the domestic world. Whenever
possible a budget is always set aside for a garden or, at the very minimum, planting.
However, it is primarily as Murasaki related in Tales of Genji, that the garden or
landscape enters most of the projects. I too seek to bring in what we can of the
seasons, “the fowering trees of Spring and the fowering grasses of Autumn, the
humming of insects that go unnoticed in the wild”22 and ofer this for the occu-
pier’s pleasure. Everyday landscapes are then about looking at weathering by either
mapping this out emotionally or physically and trying to capture feeting moments
to make new stories and souvenirs for a new occupation, one that is connected and
complicit with the outside.
Gardens are important for the creation of mood because our bodies’ circadian
rhythms are connected to the cycles of nature and especially to light. One of the
most profound relationships is that of ourselves to nature.23 Many people’s idea
of quiet is intrinsically linked to landscape. Nature has a way of taking us outside
of ourselves and is therefore helpful for creating mood in our homes. Our mod-
ern urban experiences of nature are on our own terms. Society encourages us to
ignore it, and this has led to a detachment from the natural cycles of existence and
a disconnection from our natural environment. Gardens allow us to consider the
222 Felicity Atekpe
idea of building inside and outside and the immediate climate and moderation of
that liminal space. The aim is for domestic intimacy through plants by the creation
of a new landscape for the home, sometimes artifcially, to allow the physical and
sensual elements of nature to complement the human cycle of life. This is a new
topography of the home where it rains, mists, shifts, changes color, and creates an
enclosure in relation to the seasons, where the home is able to refect the various
cycles of life from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, and season to season.
Physical rituals would be performed around these cycles.
Wireless technology ofers complete digital freedom within the home, render-
ing clearly defned digital spaces obsolete. The availability of absolute technology
means that the digital/artifcial landscape changes the circadian rhythm, the idea of
positioning, and what you frame. This blurring of landscape opens new possibilities
and may perhaps move us to a more fundamental existence whilst enjoying all the
modern conveniences and requires more refection and interrogation.
Atmosphere (memories)
“Life attracts clutter as surely as a letterbox attracts junk mail”.
Sir Terence Conran24
Film is one of the best mediums for creating atmosphere. In order to compare
and apply it to architecture, it is useful to borrow the flm experts’ defnition of
atmosphere as “the pervasive tone or mood” that a flm carries and encompasses
“totalities”: background, setting, sound design, weather, lighting, acting, props,
cinematography, costumes, music, and dialogue are all important and, when done
well, last longer than the flm. It is also important to understand that the mood
fabricated within flms is not just the tone the flmmaker intended but also the
perceivers’. Atmosphere encompasses all elements of the aesthetic work as well as
the surrounding perceptions of it.25
Most of the time, to create a mood, you need to create an atmosphere. This
frst relies on a conscious desire to create an atmosphere and second on a hyper-
awareness of how every detail in a space contributes to that atmosphere. For
instance, ensuring every element in the palette is from the same family and tone.
I think atmosphere and temperature are close bedfellows. To do it well, it requires,
as Jan Gehl tells us to “go out there and see what works and what doesn’t work, and
learn from reality. Look out of your windows, spend time in the streets and spaces
and see how people, actually use space, learn from that, and use it”.26
As well as flm, where it is possible to pause frames and analyze what the ele-
ments are that are at play, I try to analyze and make notes of places and spaces I have
been to that have particular moods to see what – and how – atmospheres are cre-
ated. Dennis Severs’ house in Spitalfelds, Sir John Soane’s house in Lincoln’s Inn,
The Wallace Collection, Erno Goldfnger’s Willow House in Hampstead, Kettle’s
Domestic moods 223
Yard in Cambridge, the Maison de Verre in Paris, and Barbara Hepworth’s house
and studio in St Ives are among the well-known places where the mood is tangible
along with the personality of the people who lived there. But this should be true
of every home.
Atmosphere is not only made from the hard elements of architecture such as
walls, doors, and windows but also the soft aspects, such as souvenirs, heirlooms,
cushions, paintings, music, etc. and most particularly resides in colors, textures, and
sounds. These elements illustrate the passing of time and carry personal history,
memory, dreams, wishes, hopes, and occasion and thus complement the hard ele-
ments of architecture to create a personal atmosphere unique to each client.
Conclusion
The work described in this chapter constitutes an exploration of the limits of inter-
vention with everyday sensations and everyday objects, through an understanding
of how people live. It is also concerned with how to encourage people to seek bet-
ter housing and to improve their day-to-day life, to make it more joyful, exciting,
and fulflling.
While this chapter has concentrated on the home, my architectural practice
has also worked on small-scale infrastructure, notions of the larger home in the
design of an orphanage, and working with the Parent House in Kings Cross, which
teaches parents about the rights of parents and children to equality and happi-
ness, working on the principle that hope for the future starts in the homes we are
brought up in and is gifted to us by the people who bring us up.
Alain de Botton notes how,
In an odd but quietly very important way, works of architecture ‘speak’ to us.
Some buildings, streets and even whole cities seem to speak of chaos, aggres-
sion or military pride; others seem to be whispering to us of calm or graceful
dignity, generosity or gentleness.27
He further explains that, although it is considered pretentious or over-sensitive to

suppose that something as external as a building could have much of an efect on
our internal mood, if we understood how ugly buildings and spaces sap our ener-
gies and make us vulnerable to our worst selves, we would legislate against them.
This approach to designing homes is certainly not the way to make money,
but it seems to profoundly change the way people think about themselves and the
spaces in which they live.
It also means that, by the end of most projects, clients inevitably become good
friends. The danger of this way of working is – as Huysmans describes of his own
work – that real characters in precisely described settings, depicting common exist-
ence and struggles, turns them into extraordinary people, as in his creation Jean des
Esseintes,28 but then I do think everyday life is extraordinary in its own way.
224 Felicity Atekpe
The process of designing with a client is a joint responsibility, but, at some

point, the building is handed over to the client on completion, with the hope that
the various spaces and intended moods are inhabited with people and the clutter of
daily life. The house goes on to provide a family a place of safety, security, celebra-
tion, happiness, ambitions, sorrow, and changing lives and a place to dream.
Notes
1 Felicity Atekpe, White Table, www.whitetable.co.uk
2 William C. Carter and Henry-Jean Servat, The Proust Questionnaire (New York:
Assouline, 2005).
3 Ilse Crawford and Edwin Heathcote, A Frame for Life: The Designs of StudioIlse
(New York: Rizzoli, 2014).
4 Katherine Schonfeld, Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City (London: Rout-
ledge, 2000).
5 Ayşe Birsel, “If Your Life is Your Biggest Project, Why Not Design it?” flmed Septem-
ber 2017 at TEDxCannes, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France, video, 14:14, www.
tedxcannes.com/watch/ayse-birsel.
6 Alain De Botton, The Architecture of Happiness: The Secret Art of Furnishing your Life (New
York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 118.
7 Charles Moore, Gerald Allen and Lyndon Donlyn, “Foreword,” in The Place of Houses
(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1974), ix.
8 Vivian Gornick, The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).
9 Robert C. Lautman, Thomas Jeferson’s Monticello: A Photographic Portrait (New York: The
Monacelli Press Inc., 1997) plates 14, 15, 16, 18 & 44.
10 Elizabeth Musgrave, “The Inspirations and Convictions of a ‘Bloody Rebel’ –
Gabriel Poole,” ArchitectureAU, May 21, 2020, https://architectureau.com/articles/
gabriel-poole-interview/.
11 James Turrell, Occluded Front (Culver City: Lapis Press, 1985).
12 “Aubade,” The Free Dictionary, accessed March 17, 2021, www.thefreedictionary.com/
aubade.
13 “Nocturne as a Musical Form?” Pianostreet, June 21, 2009, www.pianostreet.com/smf/
index.php?topic=34396.0.
14 Richard Williams, “Vermeer and the Illusion of Reality,” Podcast Transcript, Royal Col-
lection Trust, accessed March 17, 2021, www.rct.uk/sites/default/fles/Vermeer%20
and%20the%20Illusion%20of%20Reality.pdf.
15 Hanne Finsen and Inge Vibeke Raaschou-Nielsen, Vilhelm Hannershoi, En Retropektiv
udstilling (Copenhagen: ORdrupgaard, 1981), 16.
16 Brian Carter and Annette LeCuyer, Shim Sutclife: The 2001 Charles & Ray Eames Lecture
(Ann Arbor: Michigan Architecture Papers, 2002), 6.
17 Charlotte Perriand, Charlotte Perriand: A Life in Creation (New York: The Monacelli
Press, 2003).
18 “Works: n02 – casa due, sorano, italy, 2007–2010,” Francesca Torzo Architetto, accessed
March 17, 2021, www.francescatorzo.it/works/n02-casa-due-sorano-italy-2007-2010.
19 Francesco Dal Co and Giuseppe Mazzariol, Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Works (New
York: Rizzoli, 1986).
20 Carter and LeCuyer, Shim Sutclife, 13.
21 David G. Pearson and Craig Tony, “The Great Outdoors? Exploring the Mental Health
Benefts of Natural Environments,” Frontiers in Psychology 1178, no. 5 (October 2014),
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01178.
22 Shikibu Murasaki, “Chapter 21,” Tales of Genji, trans. Tyler Royall (UK: Dover Thrift
Editions, 2001).
Domestic moods 225
23 William J. Mitchell, Charles W. Moore, and William Turnbull Jr, The Poetics of Gardens
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001).
24 Terrence Conran, Easy Living (London: Conran Octopus Ltd, 1999), 129.
25 Gemma Raso, “The Power of Creating Historic Atmosphere in Films,” Medium,
last updated November 23, 2020, https://gemma-raso.medium.com/the-power-of-
recreating-historical-atmosphere-in-flms-1b2b3e8fe818.
26 Maria Anderson-Oliver, “Jan Gehl: Cities for People,” Assembly Papers, last updated
June 13, 2013, https://assemblepapers.com.au/2013/06/13/cities-for-people-jan-gehl/.
27 Alain de Botton, “The Importance of Architecture,”The School of Life, accessed March 17,
2021, www.theschoolofife.com/thebookofife/the-importance-of-architecture/.
28 Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Patrick McGuinness (London: Penguin,
2003).
INDEX
Page numbers in italics indicate a fgure on the corresponding page. Page numbers followed
by “n” indicate a note.
(re)production of space 45, 158–70 obsolescence 58–60; Bishopsgate

“right to the city” 53 Archives 99; CineMuseSpace digital
“topographical writing” 160 archive 184; community curated 76;
Derrida’s observation 37; experimental,
Abbott, H. Porter 119 of everyday life 58–68, 161; in flms
Acres, Birt 18, 20 163; of flms 105, 108, 112; museums
activist 99 and mausoleums of everyday life 61–2;
Adarkar, Neera 199, 200–2, 204 techniques and technologies of noticing
Adarkar, Neera 199, 211n1 62–4; YouTube as 42–3, 45–6, 51–2
Agamben, Giorgio 45, 55nn47, 50 Atekpe, Felicity 7, 224n2
Alhambra Music Hall 23, 24 Atkinson, Frank 61–3, 67n13
ambiguity and everyday life 60 Austin, Tricia 128n3
analogism 7, 103, 176, 182, 182 auto-ethnography 7, 207, 213
Anderson, Wes 214
apparatus 20, 27, 32, 34–5, 44, 50–1, Bachelard, Gaston 105
53, 153 Bankside 137
appropriation 6, 52, 159, 163–4, 166–9 Baudelaire, Charles 15, 27n8
architecture 45, 135, 183, 216; in Baxendall, Michael 26–7, 29n45
atmosphere (memories) 22; Bazin, André 176, 197n9
building-elements of 194; Chinese BBC Arena 30–8
190; components of 180; design and beads 136
117; as divisive and antisocial 189; Beigel, Florian 141
eclectic period 104; elements 223; flm Benjamin, Walter 8n3, 15, 27, 27n7,
and 217; Japanese 187; landscape and 29n46, 37, 38n15, 67n10
221; material culture of 7–8; of public Berque, Augustin 146, 148, 155, 156n1
foreground 144; in refugee children’s Betjeman, John 30–1
lives 3, 42; of the space 76; as spatial Birsel, Ayşe 214, 224n6
language of society 105, 111; in time and Blackfriars Bridge 13–14, 14, 21–2, 27nn1,
space 138; usage 2, 175 5, 28n25
archives 17, 34, 35, 89; of audio-visual Blanchot, Maurice 35, 37, 38n12, 39n16,
records 2; between continuity and 64–6, 67n19, 178
Index 227
Bombay/Mumbai 7, 199–202, 205–8, city 133–4; cinematic urban topography

210–11 159–68; city types 21; complexity of
Borough High Street 137 138; everyday lives in 5–6; Kyushu
Bourdieu, Pierre 34, 38n8 151; people and 159; public foreground
Breton, André 34, 38n6 144–5
Brighton 5, 86, 88; 1978 FIAF Brighton city latticework 136
Congress 18; 2018 Brighton Fringe civic edges 142
Festival 86, 90, 91, 97; 2019 Brighton collaborative approach 5, 97, 105,
Fringe Festival 97–8; Brighton 107–8, 213
Museum & Art Gallery (2017–2019) 99; collage–like 142
Hip Trip of Brighton tour 88–9 collection 7, 15–16, 59, 61, 63, 71–8, 86,
Brooks, James L. 214 90–2; Chinese 109; Freud Museum 86;
Bruner, Jerome 119–20, 128, 129nn17, Lady Lever 111; MoT 95, 100; Museum
21, 47 of Everyday Life Exhibitions and Collections
Butler, Judith 159, 170n8 75; New England Barns Found Objects
75; Wallace 222
Caillebotte, Gustave 22 colonial period 162
camp 51; Balkan 49; Idomeni Refugee community participation 79
Camp 48; permanently temporary computer-aided flm analysis 186
52; refugees in 41–2, 45, 52–3; constellation 134
UN-operated 41 consumerism 36–7, 149, 154–5, 162, 167
Cantastoria 82 consumption culture 147, 154
catalogue raisonné of everyday life activities cooking 186–7, 193, 206, 208–10
7, 193–4, 198n55 Corbusier, Le 177
Catch and Steer 137, 138 corridor 150, 166, 194, 201, 204, 207–10
Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art courtyard 7, 142, 189, 191, 201–4, 207–8,
(CFCCA), Manchester 103–4, 107, 210, 218
194–5 COVID-19 136
Chan, Fruit 159–61, 164 Crawford, Ilse 214, 224n4
Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan 202, 211n10 Croydenness 144
Charms 136 Croydon, West 143
Chatman, Seymour 119, 129n15 cultural identity 32, 161, 168
chawls 201–2; from afar 202–4; BDD curatorial authority 77, 100
Chawls 201, 207; CineGenus project
206–10; in Lalbaug Parel 204–5; data mining 179, 184
revisiting 199–206; socio-energy database 43, 103–4, 164, 175–6, 182, 184,
behavior in 199–211 190; of flm clips 115; Indian cinema as
children 40–53; refugee, on YouTube 199–211; see also CineMuseSpace database
40–53; in visual culture 42–5 de Botton, Alain 214, 223, 224n7, 225n28
China 7, 103–4, 109, 161, 177, 182, de Certeau, Michel 34, 38n11, 65–6,
185, 187 68nn20, 21, 159, 167, 170nn10, 12,
Chinese 43, 109, 159, 162, 175–6, 183–6, 171n25, 176, 178, 196n4
190–1 derive 34
Chinese flms 186 Descola, Philippe 7, 9n16, 175–6, 181–2,
Chow, Yiu Fai 170n3 185–6, 189–90, 192, 195–6, 196n2,
Christou, Philip 141 198nn35, 62
chronological study 30, 32, 119, 168 design 35, 115, 133–42, 150, 193, 214;
cinematic city 148, 156 exhibition 78–9, 118–19, 127; in
cinematic urban topography 159–68 Lalbaug Parel 203; materials in 220–1;
Cinématographe 18, 28n17 mood and relationships in 214; of
CineMuseSpace database 104–5, 107–8, museums 103–5, 117; sense, Lewis’s 6
112–15, 175–96; digital archive 184; design methodology 121–2
flmic database of everyday 187–90; diagram 43, 45, 118, 122, 124–7
time-based annotation approach diaries 88, 91–2, 98
186–7 Dickens, Charles 15–16, 21
228 Index
digital/online archive 52, 184 everyday urban space 161, 163, 165–8
discourse 26, 32, 35, 44, 78, 121; academic everything is spatial 140
43; in cinematic urban topography exhibit 5; Dear Punk Princess, Bridget
159–60, 168; contemporaneous 151; of Prince 93; Diaries of Mary Booth, The,
“debate on the image” 153; jural 45; of Clair Morrow 92; MOOP exhibit 94–6
living beings 50–1; narrated 119; exhibition: Bells and Whistles 77; Defning
Tokyo 146 Beauty 118; Future Cities: Technopolis and
dispositif 42, 44–6, 50–3 Everyday Life 107; La Fabrique des Images
documentary 3, 31–7, 109–13, 155, 181; MOOP’s frst exhibition (The Spire,
210–11 Brighton) 91–3; My Late Mother’s Future
domestic environments 2, 7, 164, 179–80, Work 87; Vischering Castle 124–5
186, 206, 209, 222–3 experience: auto-ethnographical cinematic
domestic moods 213–24; atmosphere 207; ecstasy 72; everyday 98, 101,
(memories) 222–3; defning the frame 133, 148; of everyday modernity
213–14; furniture and touch 221; 60; of interpretation 121; mediated
landscape 221–2; materials 220–1; 72; narrative 120, 127; from power
mood catchers 213–16; mood makers perspective 31; revolutionary 37; social
216–23; poetics in the ordinary 215–16; 147; space and 105; theatrical 110; urban
relationships and 214–15; setting the experience 6; vernacular experience 34;
mood 215 visitors 117–19, 121–2
Eames, Charles 220 feminist critique of chauvinism 37

Eames, Ray 220 flm: architecture versus 217; as
early flm 13–27; construction of everyday avant-garde art 17; canon 182–4; for
life on screen and 13–27; preserving 17; creating atmosphere 222; dispositif
progressive aspects of 18 (apparatus) in 44; documentary genre
East 142 31–2, 109–13; everyday life through 2;
economic recovery 146 experimental flm-making 153; “frst,” of
Edison, Thomas 19–20 the Lumières 18; “found” 189; industry
electrical appliances 20 17, 148; photography and 60, 62; as
emotion 90, 188, 218; classifcation 187; a process of research and engagement
emotional doorway into visual displays 103–15; “Realism” in 177; studies 44;
80; oriented needs 42; and research in see also early flm
action 113–14 Finch, Nigel 3, 30, 32, 34, 37–8
energy studies 7, 206, 211 fâneur 15
Every Building On The Sunset Strip 141 forced displacement 40–1, 48, 52
everyday 59; between continuity and forced migration 52
obsolescence 58–60; CineMuseSpace’s Ford Cortina 34, 36, 37, 38n13
flmic database of 187–90; contingencies Ford, Tom 214
of 146–56; experimental archive of Foucault, Michel 3, 9n10, 43–5, 51, 53,
everyday life 58–67; Hamze’s video 54nn21, 28, 30, 55nn41, 44, 46, 48,
48; Hiba’s video 49; moments 124; 56nn82, 83, 176
Rostislav’s video 48; videos 46 Frampton Estate 141
everyday gesture 1, 81, 178 Friedlander, Lee 134
everyday life: activities, catalogue raisonné future living 196
of 193–4; in city 5–6; in a heritage
village 103–15; lives in home 6–8; gems 136
illusion of 25; minor magic of 175–96; gender 21, 100, 147, 150, 154, 186–7,
in the museum 4–5, 117–28; museum of 206–7, 209
61–2, 71–83; on screen 13–27; in visual generosity 143
culture 2–4 Genette, Gérard 119, 129n14
everyday practices 2, 4; and lived spaces of Giacometti, Alberto 141
refugee children on YouTube 40–53; Ginza 147, 150–2
space, flm, and 105 Goldfnger, Erno 222
everyday spaces, of migrant minors 46–53 good relationships 138
Index 229
Gorky, Maxim 23, 25 keyword ontology 7, 184, 210; CineMuseSpace

grassroots museum 4, 78–9 keyword ontology 206; time-based
grief 86 annotation approach with 186–7
Kieslowski, Krzysztof 217
habitus 34 Kinetoscope 16, 18, 20
Hackney Council 142
Hale, Jonathan 128nn1, 5, Lady Lever Art Gallery (Port Sunlight) 104,
129n20 107–9, 113–15, 195
Hamaguchi, Ryusuke 113 Landscape 135, 136
Hammershøi 218 Lefebvre, Henri 2, 6, 8n5, 9n13, 33, 34,
Harvey, David 171n27, 176 38n10, 48, 55n61, 60, 67nn6, 8, 105,
Hepworth, Barbara 223 116n2, 176, 178–9, 197n21, 198n31
heritage 62, 103–15 Leung, Ping-kwan 160, 171n14
hermeneutic circle 120–1, Lever, William Hesketh 104
127–8 lived space 2; migrant minors, everyday
High Street 136 spaces of 46–53; of refugee children
history 2; city’s 154; end of 199–201; on YouTube 40–53; spatial typology of
“end-of-history” narratives 200; of 179–80
everyday life in early flms 3; human Living History Museums 4, 61–2, 65
experience and 76; memory and 204–6; London imagined 145
recovering flm’s earliest years 17 London Orbital 135
home 109–12, 179, 209; anthropology-at- loss: of cultural scale 33; of the everyday 50
home 58; concept of 114; everyday lives Lumière, Louis 18–22, 26, 28n31
in 6–8
Hong Kong 6; contemporary 158–70; new MacCabe, Colin 176–7, 190, 197nn8, 10
wave movement 160, 168; urban cinema MacLeod, Suzanne 5, 108, 116n1, 128n2
160–4, 166, 168, 170; urban strategy in manifesto writing 75, 79
158; verticality of 158 Manovich, Lev 175–6, 189, 193, 196n1,
Hooper-Greenhill, Eileen 118, 120, 128, 198nn51, 53
128n7, 129nn12, 25, 28, 45 mapping 117–28; everyday life in the
household technology 209–10 museum 117–28; evidence-based 133;
Hui, Ann 160–2 narrative 117–28
marketing 37
Illustrated London News masculinity 34
15–16 Mass-Observation 58–9, 63–4, 66,
Imagining the present 134 67nn1, 18
inclusive program 90 materials 7–8, 17, 27, 65, 78, 142–3, 163,
informal space/practices 19, 140, 159–60, 215–16, 220–1
162–4 Matsumoto Toshio 153, 157n20
infrastructure 134, 136, 138, 144–5, 148, Mauss, Marcel 34, 38n7
223 Maye, Louis 145n2
institutional museums 72 Mayor of London 145
interpretation 80, 107, 120–1, 126–8, meaning 35, 52, 95, 118–20; in context of
177, 184–93; cinematic collages 190–3; the whole 120; of narrative expressions
CineMuseSpace database 187–90; slit-scan 127; past and the present 154; weighted
timelines 184–6; time-based annotation layers of, everyday objects 87, 100–1
approach 186–7 media dispositif 42, 44–5, 50–3
Inwood Hill Park 136 memory 40, 86; everyday life and 124;
history and 204–6; of human happenings
Japan: Eastern “analogism” tradition 7, 103; 119; images 27; meaning and 95
cinema 148–9, 155; flms 6, 146, 148, Menon, Meena 199, 211n1
183, 185; everyday life in 154; postwar micro-history 168
economy 148; urban modernity 151 migration 31, 42, 52, 199
Jinnai, Hidenobu 146, 156n2 mill workers 203, 210
Judd, Donald 141 minimovies 188–9
230 Index
minors 41, 46–53 online representation 3, 14, 18–19, 21, 27,

Minton, Anna 170n5 40, 50–2
Mitchell & Kenyon 33, 114 ontologies 7, 46, 62, 176, 181–2, 184,
modernity 6, 33, 34, 60, 147–52, 154–5 186–7, 196, 206
mood 114; catchers 213–16; makers ordinary 4, 37, 40, 48–50, 193; city life
216–23; making 215–16; relationships 149–50; discovery of 7; everyday life
and 214–15; setting 215 147; objects 75–6, 80; people 160,
Morandi, Georgio 141 165–8; poetics in 215–16; rooms in 60
Morland, Robert Henry 112 Orton, Jason 134
movement caught live 18 Orwell, George 59, 67n5
multipurpose space 207–8 oval courtyard 142
Mumbai see Bombay/Mumbai
Musée Imaginaire, Le 195–6 Pan, Guoling 170n11
museum 77; emerging canon 98–101; Pan.do/ra database 184
everyday lives in 4–5, 117–28; “Folk” panorama literature 3, 15
61; making 89–94; and mausoleums of Park House Hotel 139
everyday life 61–2; momentum 97–8; participatory process 4–5, 93, 107–8
Museum of Ordinary People (MOOP) Paul, Robert 14, 18, 20, 25, 33
85–101 Penz, François 113, 118, 128n11, 162,
Museum of Everyday Life 4, 171n21, 177–8, 197nn17, 24, 27,
71–83 198n55, 211
museum studies 117 Perec, Georges 8n1, 33, 38n3, 105, 133,
145n1, 176, 193, 197n19
narrative 61, 97; Chinese 185; corporate performance of everyday life 109–13
148; editing 18; entrance 120; performance/flmmaking as performance
everyday 99; exhibition 120–1, 126–7; 19, 109–13
interpreting 119–21; layers, urban 162; period eye 26
mapping 117–28; research 210; text 118; Perriand, Charlotte 220, 225n18
visual 51 Petit, Chris 135
narrativity 117 physiology of the city 15
narratology 122 place: authenticity of 126; characteristics
National Museums Liverpool (NML) 5, 138, 220; in a cultural continuum 183;
103–4, 107 elements of 133; place-making 41; in
naturalism 7, 25, 103, 176, 182 social contexts 190; spatial identity
nature: cycles of 222; domestic of 143
everyday and 185; of medium 177; Poole, Gabriel 217, 224n11
of performance 113; of publicness, Port Sunlight 5, 106–14, 195
evaluation 164; of screen image 153 Port Sunlight Village Trust 104,
neighborhood 45, 146, 149, 155, 159–60, 107–8, 115
202, 204 post-occupancy 178–80
Next-Mixing Gallery (Shanghai) 194 postwar period 153
NGO 50 power 31–2, 53; of computer software 175;
nothing but edges 143 Foucault on 45; of museum model 99,
101; of objects 75; of ordinary object
Object Meditation 79 87; political/administrative 43; power-
objects 94–7; activities and 193; of knowledge relations 51
amusement 17; archive of everyday practice 104, 206; cultural 34–5, 37,
through 59; bodily relationships and 61, 190; of everyday 6, 33, 105, 210;
76; of everyday life 72, 87, 94–7, 101; museum 85, 90; photographic 23, 62; of
of past everyday lives 4; heritage 62; refugee children 4, 40–53; spatial 158–9,
and interpretation 126–7; physical 75; 162–3, 187, 207; tactical 167
quotidian 80; of representation 26; Private Life of the Ford Cortina,
secret powers of 75; and spaces 141; The 30–8
trans-related 99 privatization 158
Index 231
Proust, Marcel 214 splicing–in 138

public realm 144 stories 17–18, 119–21, 199–201; Living
public space 104, 105, 136, 142–5, 158–9, History Museum 61–2, 65; micro-stories
164, 166, 186, 206 of everyday actions 160; picture-story
publicness 144, 158–70 recitation 81; see also narrative
storytelling 152, 176; see also narrative
Quennell, Marjorie 59–60 strategic planning 6, 31, 50, 144,
158–9, 167
Radio Times 30, 38n1 Studio Ghibli 214
Rancière, Jacques 33, 38n2, 63 Studio des Ursulines, Paris 17
realism 13–14, 25, 37, 63, 176–7, 192 supercuts 7, 189–92
refugee 3–4, 40; camp 41, 45; children 4, synchronic approach 147
40–53
representative 7, 103, 108 tactic 34, 161, 166–7
Research Centre for Museums and Tan, Zheng 170n1
Galleries (RCMG) 5, 103–6, 111 Tate Modern 137
Roberts, Lisa C. 117–18, 127, 128n8, Tati, Jacques 177
129n44 television 2, 17, 32–3, 37, 47, 91, 153,
rural museums 65, 76–7 155, 208–10
Ruscha, Ed 141 Thatcherism 32
Ryan, Marie-Laure 122, 129n31 The city exists 133
The public realm is where the city lives 144
Sadler, Walter Denby 112 “The Town” 145n1
Sayle, Alexei 30, 38n14 Thomas, Mark (flmmaker) 5, 108, 114
Scarpa, Carlo 221 Thread 136
Schonfeld, Katherine 214, 224n5 time-based annotations 184–7
searchable archive 184 timelines 184–6, 190
sensory kaleidoscope 133 Tokyo 146–56
Severs, Dennis 220, 222 tourism 14, 21, 149
sexism 34, 37 tracking 5
Shōhei, Imamura 6, 148, 151–2 train 25, 48, 151–2, 155, 213
Sinclair, Iain 135 Turrell, James 217, 224n12
slit-scan timelines 184–6
Smith, Henry D. 147, 156n4 unevenness 135
Soane, Sir John 222 Unilever 104, 112
social media 42, 50, 78, 108, 215–16 urban heterogeneity 134
social value 134 urban structures 136
social vitality 136 urbanization 148, 154, 158
socio-history 147
socio-spatial practices 159, 165 vast grid 136
Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, La 13–14, Vermeer, Johannes 218
18–19 verticality 158, 166, 168
Soup Collective 5, 104, 108, 110–13 Vertov, Dziga 31
space 105; how we live now 216–20; video: online platforms 3; of refugee
memory (arkheions) 43; public 105, 136, children 42–53
142–5, 158–9, 164, 166, 186, 206; (re) Villa Savoye, La 177
production of 45, 158–70; urban 165–8 virtual reality 27
space 136 visitor: exhibition 93, 118, 121–2, 127;
spatial cultural diferences 7, 109, 175–6, experience 5, 119; to the museum 76,
179, 190–3 82, 117, 124; narrative 127; research
spatial ethnography 7, 103, 189, 210 122–6
spatial signifcance 134
spatio-temporal rhythms 146 Wall, Anthony 32, 38n13
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces 145n1 Wentworth, Richard 143
232 Index
West Ham Lane 139 Xue, Charlie Q. L. 170n1

wild mesh 134
Williams, Raymond 33, 38n5 Yasujirō, Ozu 6, 147, 149–52, 181, 214
Window, Rose 144 Yentob, Alan 32
Wong, Adam Sau-ping 162, 166, 170 Youth, the 41
Woolf, Virginia 17, 23, 25, 28n15, 62 YouTube 2–3; as an archival platform 3;
workshops 78, 90–1, 97; moving beyond convenience of 52; as a dispositif 51;
research dissemination, 106–7; structure refugee children in visual culture 42–5;
108–9 refugee children on 40–53

The Everyday in Visual Culture Slices of Lives (François Penz, Janina Schupp)

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THE EVERYDAY IN VISUAL

François Penz is Emeritus Professor of the Department of Architecture and a

Janina Schupp is the SOUTHWORKS Career Development Fellow in Digital

Edited by François Penz and Janina Schupp

1 Early flm and the construction of everyday life on screen 13

2 Televising the quotidian: BBC Arena’s The Private Life

3 Everyday practices and lived spaces of refugee children

4 The arts of noticing (toward an experimental archive

5 The Museum of Everyday Life 71

6 The Museum of Ordinary People 85

7 Everyday life in a heritage village: flm as a process

8 Mapping narrative and everyday life in the museum 117

9 Imagining the present 133

10 Contingencies of the everyday: screen representations

11 “Made in Hong Kong”: the (re)production of publicness

12 CineMuseSpace: a cinematic exploration of the minor

13 Indian cinema as a database for socio-energy behavior

14 Domestic moods: mood catchers and makers 213

1.1 Paul’s Blackfriars Bridge (1896) has been regarded as a “record” of

5.1 Above: The Museum of Everyday Life – “embarking on our mission

8.2 NARRATIVE DIAGRAM. Diagram of the exhibition visit as

13.6 Short documentary flms made by the residents (left) and an

Felicity Atekpe is the director of Professional Practice at The Bartlett, UCL,

Ronita Bardhan is Assistant Professor of Sustainability in the Built Environment at

Yung Ho Chang is a founding partner and principal architect of Atelier Feichang

Tom Duncan is an architect and museum designer. He is a founding partner of

Gul Kacmaz Erk is a senior lecturer in architecture at Queen’s University Belfast,

Matthew Flintham is an artist and writer exploring speculative relationships

Ben Highmore is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. His

Michael Hrebeniak is Lecturer in English at Magdalene College Cambridge and

Julian Lewis is an architect, cofounder, and director of East architecture, landscape,

Suzanne MacLeod is Professor of Museum Studies at the School of Museum

Lucy Malone is Cofounder and Curator of the award-winning Museum of Ordinary

François Penz is Emeritus Professor of the Department of Architecture and a fel-

Alastair Phillips is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Warwick. He is

Ashish Rajadhyaksha is author of the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (with Paul

Janina Schupp is the SOUTHWORKS Career Development Fellow in Digital

Işıl Baysan Serim is an Istanbul-based architect and researcher teaching in archi-

Minna Sunikka-Blank is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture

Mark Thomas’s work spans documentary, immersive, and installation-based out-

Maureen Thomas is a screenwriter, story-architect and former Professor at the

HE: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.

I saw everything in the city.

to the ordinary to return. No matter if consciously perceived or receding into the

Part I: Slices of everyday lives in visual culture

Moving images are a formidable reservoir of documentation, some being recorded

Part II: Slices of everyday lives in museums

At thousands of miles distance, similar motivations created the Museum of Ordi-

Part III: Slices of everyday lives in the city

Part IV: Slices of everyday lives in the home

“People from 1896 in everyday motions, and here we are watching”

The illusion of real life

Unlike many of the Lumière exhibitions, we have no details of Paul’s programs

Blackfriars Bridge. “London bridge scenes” were already a well-established pictorial

Clearly the frst cinematographers understood from established photographic

A ‘period eye’ on early flm

13 Jean-Jacques Meusy, Ecrans français de l’entre-deux-guerres, vol. I (Paris: AFRHC, 2017),

33 Reproduced in Paul and the Origins, 80.

A ski run in Italy, a supermarket manager in Luton, a sandwich bar in Lon-

of reinforcing a seamless continuity, Arena’s directors treated the screened past as

A century of innovation prior to the 1960s had established the everyday as a

of egregious sexism within contemporary automobile marketing, as confgured by

reproduction”,17 remains particularly salient to a popular medium expressly con-

political connections, as well as connections to place, are intentionally and