Non-Places and the personal

“Walking through
the underpass
under Cold Blow Lane
near Millwall
football ground
surrounded by mad fans
fighting
and police
while carrying two bags
of food and drink
I just walked
through it all
like walking through a film”

(Mirza/Butler, 1999)

In this ‘age of information’ we are constantly immersed in multimedia everywhere we look. For someone living in this age, it is quite easy to imagine your personal life as a film. As day to day events unfold and coincidences reveal themselves, they can become interlinked in ways that sometimes seem like they must have been scripted.

This illusory ‘film’ of your life is something only you will ever be able to see through your own unique viewpoint. No two people experience the same sights and sounds around them in the exact same way. If you were a Hollywood producer striving to recreate someone’s life on the big screen, you would edit out the majority of the mundane and the everyday. People would be interested in watching the immediate events leading up to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, but less so in watching the three hours spent on an aeroplane between Washington D.C. and Dallas.

Marc Augé states that “If a place can be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.” (1995, p.77-78) However this does not prevent non-places like airports, bus stops and elevators from becoming  concerned with identity on an individual level. This is exemplified in Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s film extract of ‘Non Places‘, where personal experiences are written as subtitles and laid over monochrome shots of ordinary walkways and stairwells. These places are not unfamiliar to anybody who has visited an urban area, but the subtitles illuminate invisible echoes of inner thoughts. “…the personal voice, translated into subtitles. There is no voice-over, so the lines are read, as it were, in the viewer’s own head. Personal memory, which might be thought alien to the very idea of a non-place, is here drawn close to it.” (Rees, 1999)

Mirza and Butler bring the personal in the non-place to light by evoking subconscious memories of non-places within the viewer that they may have previously overlooked.  “Some shots evoke an oblique connection between the story and the image – a train passes as the text refers to a railway station – but others imply a greater distance, a space for the viewer to fill by drawing on their own memories.” (Rees, 1999)

This ‘space for the viewer to fill’ invites the viewer to consider non-places with a dormant significance. Perhaps next time they pass such a non-place, they may find themselves smiling as they remember it afresh as their main meeting point for friends in their first year at university; the place where they sheltered from the rain the one time they locked themselves out of the house; or the first pedestrian crossing where their crush held their hand while waiting for the green light.

 

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