The relationship between film and the city is increasingly recognised as the archetypical ground for examining visual and sensory experience, form and style, perception, cognition and the meaning of the filmic image and filmic text. Liverpool, widely regarded at the end of the nineteenth century as the ‘gateway to the British empire’, provides an exemplary instance of a city in which moving image culture has played an ongoing role in shaping perceptions of its urban environment. With cities such as New York and Philadelphia often taken as standard examples of ‘film cities’ in the North American context, Liverpool, the first UK city to create a film office to promote the city as a location, is an excellent example of how moving image culture has contributed to changing the identity of a city from post-industrial wasteland to post-modern playground. This paper explores how an approach informed by interdisciplinary perspectives can expand understandings of the relationship between moving image environments and perceptions of the urban landscape through a study of the ways in which Liverpool's character, form and identity were projected between 1897 and 2008. The City in Film project (www.liv.ac.uk/lsa/cityinfilm) has catalogued over 1700 film and video recordings made in and about the city, available on a publicly accessible database. The database creates opportunities for quantitative and in-depth analysis of a relationship that Charlotte Brunsdon (2007) describes as a background presence, always there, often a source of interest and speculation but rarely the focus of explicit commentary and excavation.
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