‘Merely Local’: Film and the Depiction of Place, Especially in Local Documentary

Long considered of limited interest, ‘locality’ has emerged as a key concept in both human geography and ethnography, championed by Doreen Massey and Clifford Geertz. It can be argued that all films, whether addressing ‘universal’ or limited audiences, deal in the depiction of place; and that our engagement with these often depends tacitly on how we identify such places, whether in a Western or in North London. Taking cues from Massey’s validation of the ‘merely local’, from De Certeau’s ‘practices of everyday life’ and from experience of working with local archive film, it is argued that spatial apprehension is a neglected aspect of how we engage with all film, and that a sense of the ‘local’ dramatises this engagement, making us active participants in the spaces represented filmically.