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

1

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).

2

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

3

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).

4

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

5

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.

6

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

7

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

8

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.

10

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

11

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

12

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.

13

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

14

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

16

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

18

(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

19

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

References

Adorno, Theodor. 1991. Notes to Literature, Vol 1. Translated by Shierry Weber

Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Aragon, Louis. 2000. “On Décor.” In The Shadow and Its Shadow. Surrealist

Writings on the Cinema, edited by Paul Hammond, 50-54. San Francisco, CA: City

Lights Books.

Burke, Andrew. 2006. “Nation, Landscape, and Nostalgia in Patrick Keiller’s

Robinson in Space.” Historical Materialism 14 (1): 3-29.

Conley, Verena. 2012. Spatial Ecologies. Urban Sites, State and World Space in

French Cultural Theory. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

25

Dave, Paul. 2000. “Representations of Class, Capitalism and History in the work of

Patrick Keiller”. In British Cinema: Past and Present, edited by Justine Ashby and

Andrew Higson, 339-351. London: Routledge.

Dave, Paul. 2011. “Robinson in Ruins. New materialism and the archaeological

imagination.” Radical Philosophy no. 169: 19-35.

Dave, Paul. 2013. “Romanticism and the Problem of Capitalism in Post-War British

Film”. Discussion Paper. University of East London. http://hdl.handle.net/10552/3299

accessed 11/10/2015.

Debord, Guy. 2002. “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of

Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency.” In Guy Debord

and The Situationist International. Texts and Documents, edited by Tom McDonough,

29-50. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974. Edited by David

Lapoujade. Translated by Mike Taormina. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Fisher, Mark. 2010. “English Pastoral. Robinson in Ruins.” Sight & Sound 20 (11):

22.

Gunning, Tom. 2016. “Before Documentary. Early Nonfiction Films and the ‘View’

Aesthetic.” In The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism, edited by

Jonathan Kahana, 52-63. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

26

Hegglund, Jon. 2013. “Patrick Keiller’s Ambient Narratives: Screen Ecologies of the

Built Environment.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20 (2):

274-295.

Keiller, Patrick. 1999. Robinson in Ruins. London: Reaktion Books

Keiller, Patrick. 2009. “Landscape and cinematography.” Cultural Geographies 16

(3): 409–414.

Keiller, Patrick. 2012. The Possibility of Life’s Survival On the Planet. London: Tate

Publishing.

Keiller, Patrick. 2013. The View From the Train. London: Verso.

Keiller, Patrick. 2014. An Interview with Patrick Keiller by David Anderson. The

White Review. http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-patrick-

keiller/ accessed on 12/09/2015.

Kinik, Anthony. 2009. “‘A Bridge Between Imagination and Reality Must Be Built’:

Film and Spatial Critique in the Work of Patrick Keiller.” Intermédialités: histoire et

théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques / Intermediality: History and Theory of

the Arts, Literature and Technologies, no. 14: 105-125.

27

Lefebvre, Henri. 1991a. The Critique of Everyday Life. Foundations for a Sociology

of The Everyday. Translated by John Moore. London: Verso

Lefebvre, Henri. 1991b. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-

Smith. Oxford: Blackwell.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. Writing on cities. Translated by Eleonore Kofman. Oxford:

Blackwell.

Mepham, John. 1994. “London: The Commonplace Transfigured.” Vertigo 1:4.

http://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-1-issue-4-winter-1994-

5/london-the-commonplace-transfigured/ accessed on 22/10/2015

Merrifield, Andy. 2002. “Henri Lefebvre: a socialist in space.” In Thinking Space,

edited by Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift. London: Routledge.

Pile, Steve. 2005. Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City

Life. London: SAGE.

Rascaroli, Laura. 2008. “The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual

Commitments.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49 (2): 24-47.

Self, Will. 2014. “The Frisson.” London Review of Books, 20/01/2014.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/2014/01/20/will-self/the-frisson accessed on 22/10/2015

28

Sinclair, Iain. 1998. Lights Out for the Territory. London: Granta Books.

Vaneigem. Raoul. 2012. The Revolution of Everyday Life. Translated by Donald

Nicholson-Smith. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

Villarmea Álvarez, Iván. 2015. Documenting Cityscapes: Urban Change in

Contemporary Non-Fiction Film. New York: Wallflower Press.

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.