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Conley, Verena. 2012. - Open Access...
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Figure 1. Still from Robinson in Space (1997). Still courtesy BFI. London and Robinson in Space are
released together on DVD by the BFI.
England, That Desert Island. Patrick Keiller’s spatial fictions.
The work of Patrick Keiller, from his early shorts to the four feature-length
films produced so far, sit somewhat uncomfortably between documentary and fiction,
embedding at once the argumentative quality of the essay, the erudite precision of the
travelogue and the lyrical suspension of the poem. If it is true, as Adorno says, that
‘the essay’s innermost formal law is heresy’ (1991: 23), then Keiller’s films could be
said to fit within the essay film tradition. However whilst the influence of Chris
Marker on Keiller is evident, such classification might be too reductive, if not
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misleading. As Rascaroli explains the ‘temptation of assigning the label of essay film
to all that is non-commercial or experimental or unclassifiable must, however, be
resisted, or else the term will cease being epistemologically useful’ (2008: 25). The
films are indeed difficult to classify and one should perhaps resist the urge to
categorise them. However they do display recurring formal strategies: in the shorts the
camera frames the world from a (sometimes) mobile subjective point of view and the
first person voice-over reveals the inner meditations of a main character. In the
feature-length films the camera is static, gazing at the world from what appears to be
an objective point of view, whilst the voice-over, delivered by a narrator on behalf of
a character (Robinson) whose voice the audience never hears, takes the filmed spaces
as starting points for personal, aesthetic, socio-historical and critical observations.
Here the stillness of the frame reminds one of the experiments that marked the advent
of cinema and of the aesthetic that dominated non-fiction films from 1906 to World
War I. Tom Gunning describes these early cinematic works as displaying ‘the “view”
aesthetic’, writing that ‘early actuality films were structured around presenting
something visually, capturing and preserving a look or vantage point’ (2016: 55)’.
Keiller seems interested in stressing the element of mere presentation in his frames
and the result is an emphasis on the autonomy of the spaces and situations the camera
frames from the authorial gesture. Gunning identifies precisely in this claim for the
world’s independence from the filming subject the goal of the ‘view’ films: ‘“Views”
tend to carry the claim that the subject filmed either pre-existed the act of filming (a
landscape, a social custom, a method of work) or would have taken place even if the
camera had not been there (a sporting event, a funeral, a coronation), thus claiming to
capture a view of something that maintains a large degree of independence from the
act of filming it'’ (2016: 55-56).
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The counterpoint between image and sound in Keiller’s films however is
never merely illustrative, but rather structured around a series of deferrals,
subversions, literary or philosophical references and personal musings. It is perhaps
this thoughtfully incongruous relation between visual and aural elements that has led
Iain Sinclair to describe Keiller’s first feature-length film as an ‘essay, document,
critique, poem’ (1998, 298), avoiding to privilege one category over the others.
This deliberate disconnection points also to Keiller’s political strategy.
Throughout his work one finds a repeated association of landscape filmmaking with
the pursuit of a transformation of everyday reality. The critical lineage Keiller aligns
his films to is one committed to demonstrate via cinematography the possibility of
creating a better world. The utopian strands that inform this corpus, running from the
Surrealists to the Situationists and beyond, ground the political import of Keiller’s
work. Nevertheless the question as to whether cinematic images – and artistic
expression in general – can produce the collective radical subjectivity that Surrealists
and Situationists saw as the goal of their projects, is never completely settled. The risk
that this type of poeticisation can quickly be absorbed and become a self-referential
activity removed from its ultimate goal or worse can be put at the service of various
forms of neutralising cosmesis is one that Keiller repeatedly addresses. In a text on
psychogeography for instance he writes: ‘I am inclined to set the growing interest in
the poeticisation of experience of landscapes – typically urban landscapes, but also
those of railways, airports, and various other industries even agriculture – in an
economic and political context’ (2013: 70). The context alluded to is one dominated
in Britain by a generally dilapidated, but very expensive built environment, and by the
apparently irresistible rise of gentrification. Keiller concludes polemically with a
quote from Gombrowicz (already used by de Certeau): ‘Incapable of magic
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architecture, we made art out of our deprivation. I hadn’t realised it was quite that
bad. “When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has”’ (73).
At the same time however the voice-over – frequently reminiscent of the impassive
tone of public information films – is occasionally used as an explicitly polemical tool.
In London (1994) for instance Keiller reports someone shouting ‘Pay your taxes you
scum’, during a visit of the Queen to Leicester Square. Whilst these instances are
isolated enough to come across as ‘tonal disruptions’ (Bruzzi 2008: 118), when the
socio-political commentary occupies the foreground it offers the opportunity to bridge
the gap between the reflections on the past and the problems of the present, between
the transformation sought by the ‘views’ and the political framework that underpins
them.
This constant crossing of boundaries and the ‘speculative’ approach to their
subject matter make the films difficult to qualify and even more difficult to discuss. In
many ways these films already offer a conceptual framework that seems to leave little
room for commentary, since part of their strategy is precisely to present a ‘discourse’
and offer a series of arguments. And yet their political and formal inventiveness, the
accumulation of references, the oblique adoption and deflection of various theoretical
positions seem to invite endless opportunities for criticism. However, perhaps
surprisingly, the literature devoted to Keiller’s work is not as conspicuous as one
would expect. Most critical approaches to Keiller’s London and Robinson in Space
(1997) have focused on the films’ analyses of English capitalism (Dave 2000, 2011,
2013; Burke 2006), whilst commentaries on Robinson in Ruins (2010) tend to rely on
the film’s proposed alliance with non-human forces, such as the lichen (Xanthoria
Parietina) on a road sign at Oxford’s Abingdon Road (Dave 2011, Fisher 2010,
Hegglund 2012).
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There are however notable exceptions: Steve Pile for instance emphasises the
phantasmagorical aspect of Keiller’s films, describing the explorations of London as
‘less about reaching a source or a destination (the arrival at places already known)
than about the amnesias, frustrations and diversions of the city (2005: 11). In Lights
Out for The Territory, Iain Sinclair describes London as ‘a modestly ironic epitaph to
Conservatism and the destruction of the city’, a consequence of the triumphant
‘dictatorship of the suburbs and suburban values’ (1998: 298). More importantly
Sinclair provides a succinct yet illuminating précis of Keiller’s inspiration: ‘he was
interested in the exploration of architectural space [...] Surrealist texts, Czech
modernist poetry, the implications of psychogeography’ (299). In a text that provides
a useful reconstruction of the filmmaker’s scholarly work, Anthony Kinik emphasises
Keiller’s ‘participation in a tradition of theoretical, historical, and practical
engagements with the built environment, one with tremendous implications for
cinema’ (2009: 108). It is this cultural milieu that Will Self emphasises when he
writes about Keiller that ‘the very manner in which he shoots his films –
circumscribed as they are by factors of time and money – is that of a dérive: an
arbitrary progress through town and country, with each camera set-up an opportunity
to capture the frisson, and thereby detach the map a little more from the territory’
(2014)i. The references to Breton, Aragon and Debord offer the opportunity to
respond to the very manner of Keiller’s films – their serendipitous association of
image and text – in a way that moves from their formal specificity rather than
submitting this to the subject matter (English capitalism, the problem of England).
The attempt here is then to read Keiller’s films as ‘spatial fictions’ (Conley
2012: 147): reconfigurations of existing spaces under the pressure of the cinematic
gaze, itself under the influence of various strands of utopian thinking. Understood in
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this way these films can be said to have as their goal the production of a new
imagination of space. Space is also the umbrella term Keiller uses to frame his various
activities: ‘I usually describe them in terms of the subject matter, which is landscape
[…] or possibly space’ (2014). This reading therefore focuses on the role that space
(and the built environment in particular) plays in the films and on the ways in which
these spatial fictions are haunted in various ways by absence. It is from the connection
between these two terms, absence and space, that the argument takes its energy. This
does not however amount to say that the question of English capitalism or more
broadly the reflection on why Britain is what it is today is side-lined, rather it is
submitted to the scrutiny of what happens on the screen, of the methods and
mechanisms of the films, but also of Keiller’s scholarly work. In this case the
filmmaker and the essayist cannot be separated.
In the following pages, I will use the idea of spatial critique as a guiding
principle to understand Keiller’s work and its relation to the theoretical context that
emerges in his films and essays, before discussing the solitude of space. I will use the
expression to describe how in Keiller’s films the transformative possibilities of
cinema are repeatedly paired with a deliberate emphasis on the absence of human
presence and activity.
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Figure 2. Still from Norwood (1984) © Patrick Keiller.
Courtesy of the artist.
Spatial Critique
The interpretative framework briefly sketched above produces a shifting of the
emphasis from the political events the films evoke and reflect on to the ways in which
these are transfigured as part of a wider spatial fiction, one that relies on and
experiments with the cinematic ability to change the perception of existing spaces.
Paul Dave frames the three Robinson films as reactions to particular electoral results
(2011: 19). For Dave the films could be organized as responses to the mood of
electoral cycles, ‘the first bringing with it the dismay and shock of another Tory
government following on from the long night of Thatcherism; the second marking the
advent of a New Labour government able to capitalize on the intense suspense and
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excitement generated by this delayed change; and finally, the moment of May 2010,
coughing up the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition’ (19-20). What these
interpretations tend to overlook is the fact that the critical force of these films has a
spatial dimension that cannot simply be reduced to the political moments they allude
to and in some case documentii. These have already been mediated by the film’s
spatial critique. The prominence of the question of space – not over the political
question, but as an eminently political question – becomes clear in Keiller’s
identification of the landscape as an accurate measure of the country’s wealth. In an
interview Keiller says that ‘one of the interesting things about the UK is that the
discrepancy between the visible appearance of the landscape, which looks very
impoverished, and the supposed wealth of the country […] is much more marked
here. Maybe what happened five years ago is that actually we discovered that it
wasn’t very prosperous, and that the look of the landscape was a much more accurate
measure of the UK’s wealth than the figures’ (2014). The priority of the landscape
and of a critique of space over the milestones of political life can be traced back to the
strands of utopian thinking mentioned above. Keiller is much closer to the Surrealist-
Situationist lineage than most commentators have acknowledged and as a
consequence to the proposed reconciliation of Marx’ political economy with
Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values attempted by Henri Lefebvre. During Robinson’s
sojourn in Reading, following a ‘visit’ to the places of Jane Austen’s education and
Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment, the narrator of Robinson in Ruins quotes Henri
Lefebvre: ‘the space which contains the realized preconditions of another life is the
same one as prohibits what those preconditions make possible’ (Keiller 1999: 5). This
short reference at the beginning of the film ideally places Robinson’s entire project
under the aegis of Lefebvre’s ‘production’. In his magisterial The Production of Space
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Lefebvre gives the term ‘production’ a double connotation that grounds his analytical
matrix: on the one hand he notes that space is produced, every society and its mode of
production generate a specific spatial practice; on the other hand however Lefebvre
also warns that space is itself productive. To the idea that ‘(social) space is a (social)
product’ (1991b: 26), Lefebvre adds that ‘the space thus produced also serves as a
tool of thought and of action […] as such, it escapes in part from those who would
make use of it. The social and political (state) forces which engendered this space
now seek, but fail, to master it completely’ (26). Space is therefore not just the
product of a particular mode of production, but a force with a relative autonomy,
capable of reproducing the conditions it has been designed for, but also of
undermining them, of turning against them, of suggesting the preconditions of another
life. The importance of spatial critique as a necessary tool for any emancipatory
politics was already a central concern for Lefebvre at the time of the publication of
the first two volumes of the Critique of Everyday Life and the works on the urban
problematic (Right to the City [1968], The Urban Revolution [1970] and La Pensée
marxiste et la ville [1972]). The Production of Space systematically makes of space
the focus of political struggle: ‘(social) space is not a thing among other things, nor a
product among other products: rather, it subsumes things produced, and encompasses
their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity – their (relative) order
and/or (relative) disorder’ (73). The work ultimately dismisses the solutions suggested
by the Surrealists, in particular ‘the substitution of poetry for politics, the
politicization of poetry and the search for a transcendent revelation’ (18). However it
acknowledges at the same time that the Surrealists’ attempt to ‘decode inner space
and illuminate the nature of the transition from this subjective space to the material
realm of the body and the outside world’ (18) remains part of an unfinished project.
9
Lefebvre is equally ambivalent with the work of the Situationists. Whilst he assigns
great significance to Debord’s détournement, he finds the method to be self-defeating.
Describing the appropriation of the Halles Centrale between 1969-1971 Lefebvre
writes: ‘the diversion (détournement) and reappropriation of space are of great
significance, for they teach us much about the production of new spaces […] Be that
as it may, one upshot of such tactics is that groups take up residence in spaces whose
pre-existing form, having been designed for some other purpose, is inappropriate to
the needs of their would-be communal life’ (168). Despite these significant
differences, an urgency for new beginnings, for a comprehensive renewal is never far
from Lefebvre’s concerns, given that, as he writes, ‘diversion (détournement) and
production cannot be meaningfully separated’ (169).iii
Figure 3. Still from The End (1986) © Patrick Keiller.
Courtesy of the artist.
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The productive dialogue (which often descended into a quarrel and then a dispute)
between Lefebvre and the Situationists can be seen most explicitly in the striking
affinity between ‘the theory of moments’ and the ‘practice of situations’. Influenced
by his experiences with the Surrealists, Lefebvre developed in the second volume of
the Critique a theory of moments that would respond to ‘the need to organize,
programme and structure everyday life by transforming it according to its own
tendencies and laws’ (1991a: 343). The theory, Lefebvre adds, ‘wishes to perceive the
possibilities of everyday life and to give human beings a constitution by constituting
their powers, if only as guidelines or suggestions’ (343). In its first manifesto the
Internationale Situationniste declared that the main task of the new group would be
‘the construction of situations, that is, the concrete construction of temporary settings
of life and their transformation into a higher, passionate nature’ (2002: 44).
This spatial critique then has an intrinsic relation to what one could call our
form of life and in particular to a radical renewal of the everyday. As Andy Merrifiled
notes: ‘to change life is to change space; to change space is to change life.
Architecture or revolution? Neither can be avoided. This is Lefebvre’s radiant dream,
his great vision of a concrete Utopia’ (2002: 173).
In a text on films shot by the Lumière and Biograph companies before 1903
Keiller writes: ‘on looking at them what struck me was a contrast between their often
familiar-looking landscapes and the unfamiliarity of the society glimpsed in them. In
the last hundred years, the material and other circumstances of the UK’s population
have altered enormously, but much of the urban fabric of the 1900 survives’ (2013:
155). This passage provides an important link: looking at the built environment offers
the opportunity to see a certain backwardness in the way in which we live. The spatial
elements of the landscape allow one to evaluate our way of life. Whilst Dave is right
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in pointing out that Keiller shows throughout London ‘an allegiance to traditions of
municipal socialism and a culture of cosmopolitanism (London under the GLC); a
support for the republicanism mandated by theories of Britain’s incomplete bourgeois
revolution; and “anti-capitalist” style direct action’ (2000: 21), the renewal Keiller’s
films point to seems to go beyond the scope and promise of municipal socialism. The
emphasis in the films can be said to rest on the ability of film or photography ‘ to
poeticise or otherwise transform experience of everyday surroundings’ (Keiller 2013:
118). The films’ defamiliarization of familiar locales have in sight the possibility to
catch glimpses of a radical subjectivity capable of engendering a revolution of
everyday life. The expression, derived from the imaginative title given to the English
translation of Raoul Vaneigem’s Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes
générations (1967), implies a radical overturning of what is already here, a sweeping
upheaval not merely of the mechanisms and hierarchies of the political and economic
system, but of those minute gestures, habits, perceptions that – often implicitly –
sustain and promote itiv. Whilst the import of this revolution may seem limited, its
promise is to rebuild society from the bottom, showing ‘the extent to which the
objective conditions of the contemporary world advance the cause of subjectivity day
after day. Everything starts from subjectivity, but nothing stays there’ (2012: 4).
Robinson in Space begins with the notes of Allan Gray’s A Matter of Life and Death
followed by a voice announcing the departure of a Great Western train to Plymouth.
The narrator, whom we can imagine is sitting on that very train, delivers a passage
from chapter 23 of Vaneigem’s book entitled ‘Radical Subjectivity’:
reality, as it evolves, sweeps me with it. I’m struck by everything and, though
not everything strikes me in the same way, I am always struck by the same basic
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contradiction: although I can always see how beautiful anything could be if only
I could change it, in practically every case there is nothing I can really do.
Everything is changed into something else in my imagination, then the dead
weight of things changes it back into what it was in the first place. A bridge
between imagination and reality must be built. (Keiller 1999: 1)
As we hear these words we see the view from the train leaving London Paddington
railway station: the screen is split in half by the Westway and the almost perfect
horizontality of the frame is interrupted by Bicknell & Hamilton’s Canal House (also
known as ‘The Battleship Building’ and originally built as a British Rail Maintenance
Depot)v. The landscape is undeniably urban, but sparse and devoid of human
presence. Keiller’s revolution rests on the constant contradiction between familiar,
mundane, everyday surroundings and the defamiliarization produced by the camera,
the creation of habitable space and the observations of spaces haunted by absence.
Figure 4. Still from Robinson in Ruins (2010) © Patrick Keiller.
Courtesy of the artist.
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The solitude of space.
The relation between cinema and architecture is then a defining feature of Keiller’s
work. In a reflection on the subject the filmmaker writes that whilst architects have
sought to use cinema as a source of spatial concepts ‘what initially attracted me – and
continues to attract me to the medium is that it offers the possibility, albeit
constrained, to experience non-existent spaces and in particular to experience spatial
qualities seldom, not yet, or no longer encountered in ordinary experience […] for me
the medium’s allure has always derived from its capacity to imaginatively transform
already-existing space’ (2013: 147-148). This imaginative transformation seeks
ultimately a point from which everyday reality can be transfigured. Filming an
environment, paying attention to its form and materiality, to its overlooked spatial
qualities, to its vitality and to the animation that it might impose or receive is the first
step towards changing the conditions of life. Keiller can be said to use film not to
depict space, but to critique and transform it. In Keiller’s spatial fictions, film
becomes or rather returns to be a spatial technology. At the opening of the essay
‘Architectural Cinema’, Keiller writes that ‘since its invention, the cinema has offered
glimpses of what Henri Lefebvre described, in another context, as “the preconditions
of another life’” (2013: 75).
This focus on the transformative possibilities of film can be more fully
articulated once it is paired with a second observation: in Keiller’s films the human
element is essentially – which does not mean entirely – absent. The presence of
human beings is rare and when we do encounter this presence we are surprised,
almost stunned. When human presences cut across the continuum of townscape and
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landscape we experience a shock, as if these were a startling exception (perhaps this is
what motivated Mepham to write that ‘Keiller is a composer of epiphanies’ (1994)).
What one encounters on the screen finds confirmation in the author’s words. In
describing the choice of his subjects he writes: ‘I began to look at places as potential
photographs, or better still, film images […] This visual material deliberately depicts
places that are nearly or altogether devoid of human presence and activity, but which
because of this absence, are suggestive of what could happen, or what might have
happened’ (2013: 11).
The films are constantly returning to this original gesture, the ‘creation’ of
absence, but also its ‘reception’, the fact that a certain absence is already at stake in
space. Absence can been seen as inhabiting these films in three senses: the absence of
human subjects allows space to be reopened, to offer itself to ‘what could happen’, to
‘what might have happened’, to what could be. The absence of characters articulates
an inability to inhabit space; our hold on the everyday is too tenuous. The absence of
formal gestures maximises film’s transformative potentialvi. The camera gazes from a
position that cannot be identified with a subject within the film nor does it betray an
‘intention’. As Iain Sinclair writes, ‘Keiller gazes at London with autistic steadiness’
(1998: 302)
15
Figure 5. Still from Robinson in Ruins (2010) © Patrick Keiller.
Courtesy of the artist.
Absence of human subjects
Towards the end of London, Robinson says that the capital is ‘too thinly spread,
obscured, too private for anyone to know, its social life invisible’. The description that
Mepham attributes to London negatively should here be reread positively: ‘the
population of this hauntingly beautiful but unreal world is silenced’ (1994). I would
argue that this absence is not an attempt to see the unseen, but rather to see what is
already in full view. Whilst Burke writes that ‘the desire to see underlies Robinson’s
investigations’ (2006: 24) and that ‘Keiller’s camera frames that which usually goes
unnoticed’ (24), what Keiller turns our attention to is not that the secrets of the
landscape must ‘be gleaned from what cannot be seen’ (24). Everything can be seen if
only we knew how to look. In order to learn how to look, in order to see ‘what could
be’, we need to empty the frame of human subjects. Similar voiding strategies can be
detected in urban science fiction, both in their literary and filmic formvii. It is not
surprising for instance that Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass II (1955) figures in the
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exhibition that accompanied the release of Robinson in Ruins. One could equally
think of Brian Aldiss’ Greybeard. The book describes a world emptying of humans
where a small group of middle-aged survivors rendered sterile by a nuclear accident,
trails along the Thames Valley confronting the circumstance that no younger
generation will ever succeed them.
However this device could also be seen as a response to Louis Aragon’s
emphasis on film’s restriction of vision as a method to emphasise expression. In his
first published essay Aragon writes that the cinema essentially relies on two
properties: an ability ‘to endow with a poetic value that which does not yet possess it’
and the power ‘to wilfully restrict the field of view so as to intensify expression.’
(2000: 52). Aragon’s remarks, whilst seldom referenced explicitly, can be seen to
resonate with the work of a number of filmmakers in Europe and the U.S. who
operate outside of conventional narrative codes and who show a deliberate focus on
landscape. James Benning’s Four Corners (1998), as well as his California Trilogy
(El Valley Centro (1999); LOS (2000), Sogobi (2001)) and the recent RR (2007), Ruhr
(2009) and Small Roads (2011) deploy similar strategies. Peter Hutton’s Fog Line
(1971) and Huillet and Straub’s Trop Tôt, Trop Tard (1981) are other important –
albeit very different – instances of a tradition that insists on the relevance of space for
film and on the ability of film to transform spaceviii.
The absence of human subject in Keiller’s films offer the vision of England as
a desert island, a landscape dominated by isolation. In Stoke Newington, north
London, the narrator of London (1994) says: ‘they had gone looking for the man of
the crowd and had found instead shipwreck and the visualisation of Protestant
isolation’. It is worth noting how for Deleuze the island is always an act of recreation.
Deleuze writes that to live on an island or to image an island is to dream ‘of pulling
17
away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone—or it
is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew’ (2004: 10). There is
an inherent impossibility in thinking an island as inhabited. In the same text Deleuze
writes: ‘that England is populated will always come as a surprise; humans can live on
an island only by forgetting what an island represents’ (9). An island, Deleuze
continues, represents first and foremost the origin, ‘radical and absolute’ (10); a
perfect place for a spatial utopia. The island remains deserted even if populated, the
lack of human presence is as it were the island’s conscience. Deleuze adds that ‘those
people who come to the island indeed occupy and populate it; but in reality, were they
sufficiently separate, sufficiently creative, they would give the island only a dynamic
image of itself, a consciousness of the movement which produced the island, such that
through them the island would in the end become conscious of itself as deserted and
unpeopled. The island would be only the dream of humans, and humans, the pure
consciousness of the island’ (10). Inhabitation begins when the illusion of mastery of
the island is renounced in favour of letting the space realise a consciousness of its
own. One could then see the films themselves as acts of spatial recreation, they
gesture towards a recreation of space. Keiller’s work traces the history of England’s
‘occupation’ through the instants immediately following its evacuation. Some passers
by, very few indeed, remain, but one images them on their way to ferries, trains,
airplanes, cars and bikes that will take them to other shores, returning England to its
natural status: a desert island, with fragments of built environment. As if England
were actually only an experiment, a temporary settlement, a millenarianist avant-
garde. In order to reimagine our space we have to insist on its invisibility to us, on its
absence from our life and as a consequence on our absence from it. Thus Keiller’s
attention turns first and foremost to what Lefebvre calls practico-material morphology
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(1996: 103). This morphology for Lefebvre offers a number of possibilities,
virtualities and potentialities that must be cultivated, ‘the virtualities of actual
societies are seeking, so to speak, their incorporation and incarnation through
knowledge and planning thought […] if they do not find them, these possibilities go
into decline and are bound to disappear’ (103). In other words unless certain
possibilities that remain latent and only reveal themselves negatively in the built
environment are not nurtured and ‘realized’ by knowledge (in this case by film) they
disappear leaving one without alternatives. Keiller’s films are devoted to and practice
these very alternatives.
Figure 6. Still from London (1994). Still courtesy BFI. London and Robinson in Space are released
together on DVD by the BFI.
Absence of characters
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It should also be noted that the characters that animate Keiller’s films are all in
different ways on the verge of disappearance. Rather than inhabiting their spaces, they
haunt them, gazing at streets and buildings as if they already belonged elsewhere. The
shorts produced prior to his first feature-length work are particularly significant. The
character that narrates Stonebridge Park (1981) declares, after having committed a
violent crime, a longing for ‘the safe world that exists only between railway stations;
and only demands the passive acceptance of the view out of the window’. He then
continues: ‘Why was it that existence always implied that one should intervene in the
world? Why could one not somehow contrive to remain a spectator of the picturesque
bungling of others?’ In Norwood (1984) the audience learns that the narrator is
actually dead and musing from beyond the grave. In The End (1986) the narrator
professes an excess of powerlessness and admits to being unaware even of his own
(‘assured’) inexistence. The voice from The Clouds (1989) begins his story by
observing that his mother ‘lived as if in a trance, a mere receiver of thoughts’ and
concludes by describing himself as ‘weary of life before even having entered upon it’.
Robinson himself – this most penetrating researcher, half Kafka, half Defoe,
with the physiognomy of Manfred Blank from Straub and Huillet’s
Klassenverhältniss (1984) (Keiller 2012: 6) – never speaks with his own voice, he
rather listens to his thoughts uttered by his partner. Whilst in London we learn from
the narrator that Robinson starts fearing for his well-being as a consequence of John
Major’s victory in the 1992 election (‘there would be more drunks pissing in the street
when he looked out of the window and more children taking drugs on the stairs when
he came home at night. His job would be at risk and subjected to interference. His
income would decrease. He would drink more and less well. He would be ill more
often. He would die sooner’), in Robinson in Space his isolation has become
20
complete: ‘he seemed to know no-one in the town, and he had no telephone. His only
reassurance was the presence of eighteen undeniably utopian Routemaster buses,
operated by enthusiasts in a deregulated market’ (1999: 6). By the time his demise has
become the thematic underpinning of a third film (Robinson in Ruins, 2010), he has
vanished, all that is left of him is the result of his research, ‘19 film cans and a
notebook found in a derelict caravan’. If in the first two films Robinson controls the
counterpoint of image and voice by proxy – through the voice of Paul Scofield - in the
third instalment his absence has become more radical; he is now an ‘influence’.
It is worth recalling how Lefebvre pairs space and the everyday along diverging
lines. The two concepts are linked and yet estranged, because either the built
environment does not take the living into account or because the everyday flattens the
built environment and foregoes the stories it embeds (this particular disassociation has
been extremely productive in the work of Thrift, Soja, Gregory, Casey, but also in
different ways in de Certeau, Debord and Augé). The absence of humans and of
characters from space shows that space is itself invisible from our life, its effects are
uncalculated, but more importantly that space can be seen differently. If space can be
seen differently, in the tradition that Keiller inherits, then the everyday, life itself, can
be seen differently. The utopia here is precisely in thinking that space itself must be
changed before society can be changed and that once the fabric of space is seen in a
different way, then this change takes hold. Keiller himself writes that attention to
landscape functions ‘both as a critique of the world, and to demonstrate the possibility
of creating a better one, even if only by improving the quality of the light’ (Keiller,
2009: 413). Within the same text Keiller declares that when he first started landscape
film-making ‘involved the pursuit of a transformation, radical or otherwise, of
everyday reality’ (413).
21
Absence of gestures
In this cinema of abeyance one is then presented with a redoubling of absence.
Existing space can be observed only in absence of its inhabitants and simultaneously
the one who observes can do so only by insisting on his own absence from this space,
by turning this absence into the point of view. Iain Sinclair writes that the experience
of watching these films ‘is like the very beginning of cinema, when an audience was
thrilled by watching the representation of a train arriving at a station’ (1998: 302).
Keiller is therefore producing the point of view as an overlook, both in terms of
deliberately choosing to frame overlooked space and in terms of looking over and
over again. A grammar of overlooking can be traced in Keiller’s frequent cuts from
wide shots to close-ups and extreme close-ups or in the biography of the lichen from
Robinson in Ruins.
The overlook registers absence at two levels: an attention for space, a certain
insistent look at it, demands the denial of human presence, as if individuals had to be
removed from the space they use before this can be ‘read’. As Sinclair writes ‘Keiller
is shooting surveillance films with a postcard camera’ (1998: 302). At the same time
the imagined space can be extracted from the actual only if an absence is registered
within the image, the absence of lived life. Absence is a therefore a result of the
overlook Keiller adopts and of its commitment to the (emancipatory, radical, utopian)
ideas informing this practice. His images produce a space without people because
they try to produce a space that does not exist by redoubling the absence within
existing spaces: these are not for us, they are not how we want them, they can't be
inhabited, they don’t stop – even when inhabited – to be deserted. Keiller’s films
cultivate the ambition of ‘creating spatiality’ (Alvarez: 2014: 37). The relation with
22
the pro-filmic space is both faithful (the places are observed in detail, gazed at
through durational shots) and completely imagined (through the lens of what one
could call a geography of absence). The absence is both observed in the space and
projected on it, as a consequence one feels that this absence really does exist and yet
is completely imagined (meaning with the term it is produced by ‘the filmic image’).
The potential for transformation can be occasioned not in the gathering of
crowds but in the solitude of a profane illumination.
Figure 7. Still from Robinson in Ruins (2010) © Patrick Keiller.
Courtesy of the artist.
The Tenderness of Space
The narrator of London confesses that ‘Robinson believed that, if he looked at it hard
enough, he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of
historical events, and in this way he hoped to see into the future’. The reference here
23
is to Lefebvre’s representational space: ‘the dominated space […] passively
experienced – which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate’ (1991: 39).
Cinema is a technology of space; it is not a representative device, but a spatializing
technology. Lefebvre famously condemns images (an indictment that would be
echoed by his former research assistant Jean Baudrillard), with a critique that, at times
skirting on iconoclasm, is directed not at a particular type of image, but at visual
media themselves: ‘where there is error or illusion, the image is more likely to secrete
it and reinforce it than to reveal it. No matter how “beautiful” they may be, such
images belong to an incriminated “medium”. Where the error consists in a
segmentation of space, moreover - and where the illusion consists in the failure to
perceive this dismemberment- there is simply no possibility of any image rectifying
the mistake. On the contrary, images fragment; they are themselves fragments of
space’ (1991b: 96-97). However he also points out that ‘occasionally an artist’s
tenderness transgresses the limits of the image’ (96). When this transgression is
occasioned something else altogether emerges, ‘a truth and a reality answering to
criteria quite different from those of exactitude, clarity, readability and plasticity’
(96). By negotiating a position between the absence of signs and the signs of absence
Keiller’s spatial fictions return space to its potentiality, thus consigning it to its own
tenderness, an exactitude beyond measure.
24
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Notes
29
i Iván Villarmea Álvarez develops a similar reading and describes London’s interrupted dérives as ‘the
backbone of Robinson’s research, his fieldwork’ (2015: 82).
ii See for instance the night of John Major’s victory in 1992, which Keiller introduces with a series of shots
from a high view-point, a compositional strategy widely used in the tradition of landscape painting. The
narrator offers no consolation, but a mixed shock and depressed resignation: ‘It seemed there was no longer
anything a Conservative government could do to cause it to be voted out of office. We were living in a one
party state […] Robinson’s first reaction was one of spleen. There were, he said, no mitigating
circumstances: the press, the voting system, the impropriety of Tory Party funding - none of these could
explain away the fact that the middle-class in England had continued to vote Conservative because in their
miserable hearts they still believed that it was in their interest to do so’.
iii In an interview from 1983 Lefebvre reflects back on his relation to the Situationists: ‘I was close friends
with them. The friendship lasted from 1957 to 1961 or '62, which is to say about five years. And then we had
a quarrel that got worse and worse in conditions I don't understand too well myself, but which I could
describe to you. In the end, it was a love story that ended badly, very badly. There are love stories that begin
well and end badly. And this was one of them’. 'Lefebvre on the Situationists', conducted and translated by
Kristin Ross, October no. 79, Winter 1997, p. 69.
iv Vaneigem remains loyal to a Nietzschean version of Marxism, one that aims to contaminate political
economy with the politics of desire.
v Built in 1969 by two architects who had designed other examples of municipal modernism (including the
new Harlow railway station) the building, visibly inspired by the work of Eric Medenlsohn, was ‘widely
touted as the first London building to come to terms with the symbolisation of a modern transport building’
http://manchesterhistory.net/architecture/1960/battleship.html .
vi This absence of gestures is precisely the gesture. In this Keiller belongs to a tradition of landscape
filmmaking that includes also James Benning and whose literary parallel would be Georges Perec’s Species
of Spaces and An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris.
vii For more on the topic see: Vivian Sobchack. 2004. “Cities on the Edge of Time: The Urban Science
Fiction Film.” In Liquid Metal. The Science Fiction Film Reader, edited by Sean Redmond, 78-87. London:
Wallflower Press.
viii For more on this see: Sitney, Adams, P. 1993. “Landscape in the cinema: the rhythms of the world and the
camera”. In Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, edited by Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, 103-126.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 103-126.
For a comprehensive list of filmmakers working on landscape in the United States see: MacDonald, Scott.
2001. The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.