First published by Verso 2013
© Patrick Keiller 2013
All photographs and film frames are by Patrick Keiller unless otherwise noted
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Verso
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US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN (US): 9781781681961
ISBN (UK): 9781781685051
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Keiller, Patrick.
The view from the train : cities and other landscapes / by Patrick Keiller. pages cm
ISBN 978-1-78168-140-4 (hardback)
eBook ISBN: 978-1-78168-196-1
1. London (England)–In motion pictures. 2. London (England)–In art.
3. Landscapes–Great Britain–In art. I. Title.
PN1995.9.L57K45 2013
791.43’09421–dc23
2013024703
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction: The View from the Train
1 The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape
2 Atmosphere, Palimpsest and Other Interpretations of Landscape
3 Port Statistics
4 The Dilapidated Dwelling
5 Popular Science
6 Architectural Cinematography
7 London in the Early 1990s
8 London – Rochester – London
9 The Robinson Institute
10 The City of the Future
11 Film as Spatial Critique
12 Phantom Rides: The Railway and Early Film
13 Imaging
Acknowledgements
Notes
Introduction
The View from the Train
In 1977, I embarked on a project identifying and photographing what I later came to call ‘found’ architecture. I had lived in London for ten years and was becoming familiar with the city’s geography. Living near Parliament Hill, working in Clapham, teaching part-time in Walthamstow and visiting sites over much of south London, I travelled between all these places, often, by motorcycle, and on these and similar journeys had encountered a variety of buildings and other structures with striking architectural qualities that were, mostly, not the result of conventional architectural activity. I decided to celebrate my first decade in London by making 35mm colour transparencies of these buildings, and any others that I might notice. I saw them initially as possible models for architectural production, as early twentieth-century modernists regarded some industrial and other structures, but they also seemed to admit the possibility of a more inclusive transformation of everyday surroundings, and I began to think they might be subjects for cinematography.
In January 1978, the exhibition Dada and Surrealism Reviewed opened at the Hayward Gallery. In its catalogue, and more particularly in an article by Roger Cardinal, ‘Soluble City: The Surrealist Perception of Paris’, in Surrealism and Architecture, a special issue of Architectural Design that accompanied the exhibition,1 I read about the Surrealists’ adoption of various sites and structures in Paris in the 1920s. It seemed to me that my identification of sites in London in the 1970s could be seen as something similar. I began to take my slide collection more seriously, and in the autumn of 1979 it was the starting point of a two-year postgraduate project in Peter Kardia’s Department of Environmental Media at the Royal College of Art. After a difficult year confronting a previously overlooked lack of technique, I assembled a series of monochrome slides of landscapes photographed in France during the summer of 1980 and wrote a five-minute narration to accompany them. I made another five-minute photo-narrative with photographs of a tall wall next to a car park on Wormwood Scrubs, behind the prison, and then, on a Sunday afternoon in December, set out to look for a possible camera subject that I had seen from a passing train, where I found a structure that prompted a film.
Demolition of cattle market shed, La Villette, Paris, September 1980
The first essay in this collection, ‘The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape’, is from this period. It identifies the literature that informed the project, revisited when beginning to make another film, London (1994), ten years later. The last and most recent essay, ‘Imaging’, recalls the journey, in December 1980, to the first film’s location, and Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Surrealism’, in which he identifies the revolutionary potential of ‘everything we have experienced on mournful railway journeys … on godforsaken Sunday afternoons’.2 While I was writing the narration for the film Robinson in Ruins (2010), I remembered that I had first seen the final destination of its exploratory journey from a passing train, so that I have produced, so far, a body of work that begins and ends with views from trains.
The second essay here was written in 1983, while I was editing a second film, Norwood (1984), ‘photographed entirely in Norwood’. The essay added Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater to the references assembled by its predecessor. During the rest of the decade, I was making or writing proposals for films, while teaching two or three days a week, and there were no more essays for some time. I made three more short films, the first of which was photographed in September 1983, on eight 100-foot rolls of 16mm monochrome negative, during a journey with my partner and sometime collaborator Julie Norris to Italy, via Belgium, Germany and Switzerland. This footage eventually became a third film, The End (1986), the model for all its successors in that it was the first in which narration was written for an already-edited montage. The previous two films had been assemblies of a few long takes for which it was fairly easy to write continuous narrative, but in The End, most of the camera subjects appear only briefly.
Its completion was delayed by an unrealised project for a film about the life and work of the architect Adolf Loos, conceived after another journey, to Czechoslovakia in 1984, where we had visited some little-known Loos buildings. This was the first of several projects for more ‘serious’ films in which I hoped to re-engage with architecture. It was a collaboration with Yehuda Safran, who had been one of my tutors at the RCA, and Stuart Hood, who had just produced a film about Dario Fo for Channel Four Television. While I had migrated from architecture to art, Yehuda had been travelling in the opposite direction, and was by then involved with the architecture journal 9H.3 With Wilfried Wang, one of the journal’s co-founders, he was co-curator of an Arts Council exhibition The Architecture of Adolf Loos that was to open at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in October 1985. When we returned from Czechoslovakia, I had the idea I might be able to make a film to accompany the exhibition. The initial proposal attracted some development finance, but none of the likely institutional patrons could be persuaded to commission the film.
Another of these would-be scholarly projects was for a film about the Devětsil, the Czechoslovakian avant-garde of the 1920s, and would have accompanied an exhibition that we had seen, then in preparation, on a second visit to Czechoslovakia, to Prague, Brno and Bratislava, in 1986: a two-week British Council academic exchange to study Czechoslovakian modern architecture of the 1920s and ’30s. I was interested to examine any relationship between Surrealism and architectural practice: although the Surrealists in Paris had been interested in urban space and architecture, none of them were architects, but the Devětsil, the precursor of Czech Surrealism, included several architects, among them Jaromír Krejcar (1895–1949), t
he designer of the Czechoslovak pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Exhibition. The history of Czech modernism was then still largely unknown in English-speaking countries;4 I wrote an account of what we had seen, published with a selection of our photographs in Building Design,5 and gave a copy of the Devětsil catalogue to David Elliott, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, where the exhibition opened in March 1990. The proposal for the film was developed with Keith Griffiths, later the producer of London. I returned to Prague in April 1994, for a conference of which there are some traces in the essay ‘Popular Science’, written five years later.
I had completed The End in the summer of 1986. It was selected for the Edinburgh Film Festival; some drawings I had made as aids to writing the narration were included in a touring exhibition that opened at the Serpentine Gallery, and in 1987 Channel Four bought the UK television rights. It was followed by two competitively won commissions for short films co-funded by Channel Four, the second of which was made for the British Film Institute and led to the opportunity to develop London (1994).
London and its sequel, Robinson in Space (1997), found an audience among academics and other specialists, initially in schools of architecture and among geographers. This led to invitations to write for architectural and other publications, and was a kind of reconciliation with my earlier career, so that there was no longer any need to pursue projects for architectural documentaries, but rather a tendency to see the realised films as some kind of spatial research. London, presented as a study by a fictional researcher, Robinson, of the ‘problem’ of London, was based on and sometimes parodied ideas about what constitutes successful urban space that had been current in architectural discourse since the late 1970s.6 In this respect the film did not say very much that had not been said already. Its novelty was perhaps more in the way it represented what we already knew. Its sequel, however, seemed to confirm the validity of exploratory film-making as a method of research. Both London and Robinson in Space had set out with a perception of economic failure, the result of a backward, specifically English capitalism; but in the second film, this gave way to an understanding that the UK’s social and physical impoverishment was not a consequence of some inevitable ‘decline’, but of the successful operation of a particular economic system in the interests of those who own it. The ‘problem’ that the film had set out to examine was revealed as the result of political decisions that could be challenged.
I was anxious to emphasise this outcome of the project, and concerned that reviewers might interpret the film as an account of industrial decline, which they sometimes did, perhaps in accordance with their expectations. In autumn 1996, when Robinson in Space was practically complete, I began an essay in which I hoped to give a more detailed exposition of what I thought the film had demonstrated. I met one of the co-editors of a book, then in preparation, and he asked me to send him the completed essay. The book was eventually published in 2001 as The Unknown City, in which the essay7 was grouped with contributions from Doreen Massey and Patrick Wright, my co-researchers in a later project.
By this time, I had adapted Robinson in Space as a book.8 I continued to write, when asked, usually in connection with a current or previous project, until early 2007, when I began the work preliminary to Robinson in Ruins (2010). During this long interval, I was mostly occupied with a project about the likely future of the UK’s housing stock and another, developed from it, that set out to examine the built environment more generally. The first of these involved the production of a film, The Dilapidated Dwelling (2000); the second the development of a navigable assembly of early topographical films (including many views from moving trains), a virtual landscape of circa 1900 which became the basis for a series of exhibitions.9 Much of the writing arose from these two projects. The essays are arranged in the order in which they were written, which is not always that in which they were published, or of the projects they relate to. Some were written in response to requests and invitations from academic or cultural contexts in which I thought I would be largely unknown, so that I explained myself from the beginning, and as a result there is some repetition, especially of quoted texts, that I have not attempted to edit.
During the interval between the completion of Robinson in Space and the commencement of Robinson in Ruins, I sometimes mentioned or alluded to a semi-fictional body, the Robinson Institute, most explicitly in an essay of that name, in which I suggested I might be one of its employees. This Robinson Institute – there are at least two others – was conceived in July 1999 with the aim of continuing the work of the protagonist of London and Robinson in Space, there being then, it seemed, no possibility to make another film in which he might continue the work himself. Robinson had been first imagined in June 1990, and was deployed as a way of allowing the films’ narrators to put forward ideas that one might entertain but would perhaps not wholeheartedly adopt. His name was borrowed from one of the two itinerants in Kafka’s Amerika, though at the time I wrote that he had been born in Shropshire.
As a series, the essays accompany the evolution, since the late 1970s, of an idea most recently restated in an introductory text for an exhibition, also called The Robinson Institute, at Tate Britain in 2012,10 beginning: ‘The Robinson Institute aims to promote political and economic change by developing the transformative potential of images of landscape.’ Thirty-five years earlier, I had set out with what was essentially the same aim, expressed slightly differently.
February 2013
1
The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape
The desire to transform the world is not uncommon, and there are a number of ways of fulfilling it. One of these is by adopting a certain subjectivity, aggressive or passive, deliberately sought or simply the result of a mood, which alters experience of the world, and so transforms it.
There is nothing particularly new or unusual about this. The subjectivity involved is that of the wandering daydreamer – Edgar Allan Poe’s in ‘The Man of the Crowd’; Baudelaire’s flâneurs and dandies; Apollinaire’s Baron d’Ormesan, the inventor of amphionism; Louis Aragon and his contemporaries in Le Paysan de Paris. The thrill they all seek is the frisson Aragon termed ‘a feeling for nature’, their realm is the street, and the common object of their speculation the phenomenon of place.
I began to pursue the ‘feeling for nature’ several years ago. My starting point was that of an architect, and my motivation the desire to find, already existing, the buildings that I wanted to build but for a number of reasons was unable to.
The more I looked the more I found, and the more I found the more I looked, but gradually my interest shifted from the instant transformation of a building (object), to the discovery of a deeper sensation of place (space) akin to the stimmung that Nietzsche discovered during his last euphoria in Turin, and that so affected de Chirico.
Coal hopper, Nine Elms Lane, London SW8, 1979
The present-day flâneur carries a camera and travels not so much on foot as in a car or on a train. There are several reasons for this, mostly connected with the decline of public life and urbanism (another kind of flâneur lives on in fiction – the private investigator – though his secrets are well hidden behind the street fronts), but also because there is something about a photograph or a shot in a film that exactly corresponds to the frisson that Aragon identified. As early as 1918, in his first published writing, he wrote: ‘Likewise on the screen objects that were a few moments ago sticks of furniture or books of cloakroom tickets are transformed to the point where they take on menacing or enigmatic meanings.’1
I became a sort of architectural photographer and film-maker, trying to produce photographs and film footage that interpreted the objects of my desire as I saw them. It occurred to me that a common aspect of these interpretations was a kind of analogy that saw the places I ‘discovered’ and photographed in terms of other places that I knew, or knew of, and it also occurred to me that much of this experience of other places was gained from lo
oking at photographs and films. The image of a place on the screen is transformed in exactly the same way as the objects to which Aragon refers – by the photography itself, by the images that precede and follow it, and by the narrative.
To a certain extent, I began to look at places as potential photographs, or better still, film images, and even the still photographs took on the character of film stills.
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. They are places in which events might take place, and the events are seen rather as possible contemporary myths. But the myths have a history – maybe they are history – and this history can be constructed as a narrative – a reconstruction of a past daydream or the construction of a new one – which links still images or provides a setting for the film, in the same way as the locations provide a setting for the action in other films. The aim is to depict the place as some sort of historical palimpsest, and/or the corollary of this, an exposition of a state of mind.
Such is a summary of the development of this activity up to now. What follows is an attempt to map out the tradition that has supported this development. There are different aspects to this: the literature of the wandering daydreamer, whom I perhaps inaccurately term the flâneur; the visual arts tradition of the reinterpretation of everyday objects and landscapes, which might be termed Surrealist realism, though it probably has more to do with photography as a way of seeing than any particular mode of thought; and a way of depicting places in literature and film where they are inextricably bound up with the state of mind of the characters who inhabit or observe them.
The Flâneur
The flâneur as a literary motif appears in two modes, or rather can be seen as signifying two types of experience. The first of these is that of a wanderer, perhaps a dandy, who takes the city as his salon, strolling from café to bar in search of amusement and perhaps romance. His chance encounters are largely with people; his haunts chosen for the company they provide, rather than any melancholy architectural quality, and the oneiric quality of his experience is largely the result of his surrender to the randomness of urban life.
The View From the Train Page 1