Many years ago … it must have been ten years, I watched “Patrick Keiller”:http://www.rca.ac.uk/pages/research/patrick_keiller_234.html ‘s pseudo-documentary “Robinson in Space”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120028/ on TV. It stayed with me, though, frustratingly, I forgot the title and therefore from time to time rummaged around my collection of old videotapes trying to find “that film”. The other day I was visiting my son and it turned out that his flatmate had the DVD of Robinson together with its precursor “London”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110377/ (in “a set issued by the BFI”:http://www.bfi.org.uk/booksvideo/video/catalogue/index.php/page/item_view/code/425 ) , so I borrowed them and watched again. They are curious works: very quiet and somewhat mannered. Against a backdrop of national decline (how the Zeitgeist — though not the reality — has changed in ten years!) Charged with investigating the “Problem of England”, Robinson and his companion (the narrator) tour a combination of literary sites, docks, prisons and so forth whilst the viewer is treated to a deadpan recitation of facts about history, politics, import-export statistics and other trivia — including that England is the leading producer of rubber sheeting of the type necessary for S&M orgies. (The quietness combined with the sequence of images and literary allusions has a slightly Sebaldesque flavour.) The journey (or journeys) supposedly retrace the steps of Daniel Defoe’s _Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain_ .Keiller depicts a land without public space or political virtue but one where beauty and morality take second place to turning a profit. Recommended.
{ 5 comments }
Dave Maier 07.21.07 at 9:04 pm
I saw this a while back. You have to be in the right mood, but if you are it sucks you right in. Sort of like a subdued early Peter Greenaway faux-doc. Glad to see it’s on DVD.
getoffmeland 07.21.07 at 9:19 pm
I returned to England from a trip to Barcelona a couple of months ago. It felt like going back to school after the summer holidays. English towns and cities are ugly. Sorry, that should be fugly.
astrongmaybe 07.22.07 at 8:37 pm
If I remember rightly, the writer Iain Sinclair has some interesting things to say about Keiller in “Lights Out for the Territory”. He’s a friend, occasional collaborator of Keiller’s, I think. This quote from it was lurking around online:
Keiller stares at London with autistic steadiness. It discomforts us, we are not used to it. He freezes still lifes, arrangements of municipal flowers, swirls of brown riverwater. When some gatepost or doorway takes his fancy he gazes at it with the abstracted longing of an out-patient at a discontinued bus stop. Sinclair, Lights Out, p310.
The Witch from Next Door 07.23.07 at 11:36 am
One of the highlights of my life was getting an email from Patrick Keiller thanking me for my review of the DVD set of London and Robinson in Space. (My life hasn’t had many highlights, as you might perhaps guess.)
What I find fascinating about London, looking at it now, is how much of a period piece it seems compared with when I first watched it. It was shot 15 years ago, I suppose, but with its boxy cars and IRA bombs and Conservative election victories it seems like another world.
Tony 07.24.07 at 11:47 am
LONDON is perhaps my favourite film of all time.
It is very beautiful, very clever, and very funny. (“Like many auto-didacts, Robinson is prone to misconceptions about his subject, but since there is no-one at the University to oversee him, his position is relatively secure.”) Repeated viewings reward, not least because of the subtlety of Scolfield’s unreliable narration – what is the narrator’s attitude to his Robinson really?
I was surprised to see there was a sequel – since my original reading of the way LONDON ended was that Robinson had died. LONDON is by far the warmer film of the two, though ROBINSON IN SPACE is another great pleasure. The liner notes in the BFI DVD pack are nice too.
Comparisons with Sebald are very valid. I saw Sebald read in Dublin in ’99 and wanted to ask him if he had seen LONDON, but didn’t pluck up the courage in the end.
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