Interpreting | 2010.06.14
The Illusionist has transformed my Edinburgh | Morven Crumlish
Seeing my home town made beautiful on the big screen is a flattering, yet jolting, experience
There is a beautiful still in the publicity for The Illusionist , Sylvain Chomet\'s animated feature, which is due to open the Edinburgh international film festival next week. A girl stands on a path halfway up a craggy, jutting hill, the whin grows low around her, and in the background you can see the spread of an old city.
When I saw the image I was startled by its familiarity: the girl is standing on Arthur\'s Seat in Edinburgh. The path is the same one I have stomped up on countless walks with various combinations of dogs, children and friends throughout my life. Other scenes from the film depict the windows of Jenners department store, the view along Princes Street: the stone, the sky, the hard, grey light, all are perfectly represented, and instantly recognisable to me as home.
If you live somewhere pushy and demanding, such as London or New York, you are used to having the streets you live in screaming down at you from cinema screens and popping out of the television. Addresses can be barked as shorthand for a way of life – rich or poor, trendy or suburban – places I have never visited assume my knowledge of their inner workings, their department stores and one-way systems.
Those of us who make do with quieter corners are generally happy with our anonymity: we are the steady-incomed working musician versus your needy, crotch-thrusting superstar. And yet, seeing ourselves up there, made beautiful by someone else\'s diligence and creativity, is as flattering as a personal compliment. Chomet fell in love with Edinburgh when he visited a few years ago, and ended up staying, relocating his whole life, as well as Tati\'s original script. I am irrationally flattered by this story. I live here because I have never quite got round to moving away, but knowing that I live in a city that draws people in, as well as allowing the happy stagnation of the rest of us, pleases me. It is similar to being complimented on your children, or pets, or the shape of your eyebrows, things you are vaguely aware of being in charge of, but generally seem to be outwith your control.
I grew up with very few fictional depictions of life that I recognised, and so I clutched at anything that came close. The children in Judy Blume\'s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing books lived in Manhattan apartment buildings (we were in a tenement), and they had to go down the street to the park (just like us!). This seemed more reasonable than the bucolic back gardens of most of the other books I read, and so I chose that as part of my past. It is the same reason that so many of us view a common language as an affinity to the US – we cling to the easiest similarity, and discard the enormous differences.
Recognition can be a negative. Places, people, characters or types – when we think we are experts at something we risk becoming unable to open up our minds to new interpretations. This is the contempt that familiarity breeds, the refusal to accept that our way of being is anything other than typical.
There are other pitfalls in knowing a depicted area too well. Just as a magnifying mirror is no friend to your relationship with the contours of your own face, seeing your home on screen can be a jolting experience: as one street cuts to another on the opposite side of town, you wonder what route this person is taking on their way home. And buses don\'t go down that road because of subsidence. And that\'s not a chemist, nor that a taxi rank. In the same sense that your reflection benefits from subdued lighting and a bit of distance, it is necessary to switch off the eager, sightseeing side of your brain when you know where you are in a movie, recognise that this place is a fiction of the world you know, lull yourself into the submissive position of credulity, and enjoy the view.
Morven Crumlish is a short story writer
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]usionist-transformed-edinburgh
