The Cultural Politics of Place: Local Representation and Oppositional Discourse in Two Films

In recent years, an increasing number of geographers have been concerned to develop what might be called a cultural politics of place. They have argued that the representation of places is both constituted by, and legitimates, social power relations. Although it is often acknowledged that the process of representation is thus the focus of struggle, there have been very few studies of particular examples of resistance. The paper suggests that the main reason for this neglect may be the bipolar model of culture with which most cultural geographers appear to work. This model establishes a hegemonic ideology which becomes the focus of critique and a counter-hegemonic opposition about which it is ethically difficult to speak. This model has its strengths, but a weakness is its disturbing erasure of oppositional cultural practices from geographical studies. This paper therefore prefers to draw on the notion of cultural hybridity in order to be able to discuss two films made in the early 1970s by local groups in the East End of London. The paper argues that in order to understand how these films can be described as oppositional, their complex engagement with dominant discourses must be explored. Discussion of the films centres on contemporary definitions of 'community media' and on their realist aesthetic in order strategically to specifiy their oppositionality.