England, That Desert Island. Patrick Keiller S Spatial Fictions

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 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).

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 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).

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 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.

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 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 document[ii]. 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 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. 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]

Courtesy of the artist.

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 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 it[iv]. 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’: