The View From the Train

by Patrick Keiller

  In 1979, I embarked on a postgraduate project in Peter Kardia’s Department of Environmental Media at the Royal College of Art, where I began to make films and identified a canon of relevant texts, including Walter Benjamin’s essay Surrealism (1929), in which I read that ‘the true creative overcoming of religious illumination … resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration’ and that

  No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution – not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects – can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism. Leaving aside Aragon’s Passage de l’Opera, Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert everything we have experienced on mournful railway journeys (railways are beginning to age), on godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian quarters of the great cities, in the first glance through the rain-blurred window of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action. They bring the immense forces of ‘atmosphere’ concealed in these things to the point of explosion. What form do you suppose a life would take that was determined at a decisive moment precisely by the street song last on everyone’s lips?6

  The Surrealist frisson, as a phenomenon, is described in literature (most explicitly in Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris), but is experienced primarily as a subjective transformation of appearances. It is easy to associate it with the impulse to take a photograph, with photogénie, which Christopher Phillips describes as ‘the mysterious transformation that occurs when everyday objects are revealed, as if anew, in a photograph or on the motion picture screen’.7 While Surrealism may not have lived up to Benjamin’s appreciation of its revolutionary potential, especially after the Second World War – Henri Lefebvre, writing in 1945, was particularly scathing8 – the Surrealist preoccupation with transfiguration, and hence with the sacred, endures for us in the now-commonplace presence of everyday objects in art, and in the subjective transformation, radical or otherwise, of everyday surroundings, the most familiar manifestations of which are the various practices of urban exploration that have become so widely established, especially in London, since the early 1990s.

  My image-making developed over several years. In 1977, I began assembling a collection of colour slides documenting ‘found’ architecture, and discovered a precedent for this in the Surrealists’ adoption of particular locations and structures in Paris. The buildings I found were certainly interesting, but the pictures were not always very successful. I had embarked on the project with the intention of extending it with moving image media, either video or film, but had been discouraged by their poor definition compared to that of photographs, and by the limits of the camera’s frame. I spent several months trying to develop a technique of architectural photography and eventually, on a trip to France, made a series of photographs which became the basis of an installation combining monochrome slides and spoken narration, which was followed by another made with photographs of a high wall behind the prison on Wormwood Scrubs. These two works were fairly well received – they were later included in an exhibition at the Tate Gallery9 – and I recovered the project’s initiative, which led me, a few weeks later, to cycle along Harrow Road.

  Wormwood Scrubs, 1980

  When I arrived at the place I had seen from the train, I found that it was overlooked by an extraordinary structure, a metal footbridge I had not noticed as the train passed beneath it. About 200 metres long, it carries pedestrians over both the main line and a branch that passes underneath it, at an angle, in a tunnel. The longer of the bridge’s two spans is oriented so that Wembley Stadium is framed between its parapets. The bridge’s architecture suggested a renewed attempt at moving pictures: its long, narrow walkway resembled the linearity of a film; its parapets framed the view in a ratio similar to the 4×3 of the camera, and its elaborate articulation, with several flights of steps, half landings and changes of direction, offered a structure for a moving-camera choreography which might include occasional panoramas.

  Allotments, Wembley, 1980

  View from footbridge, Wembley, 1980

  The resulting film had two parts, the second of which was photographed a few weeks after the initial visit to the bridge, by walking a hand-held camera across it during a continuous ten-minute take. By this time, I think I had already decided to write fictional narration to accompany the picture. I discovered another footbridge, a square of walkways above the nearby junction of Harrow Road and the North Circular, with a spiral ramp at each corner, and photographed another ten-minute moving-camera walk, which became the first half of the film. This bridge was demolished in about 1992, when an underpass was built at the junction. The film was called Stonebridge Park (1981). Its narrative, such as it is, recalls the context, in the first part, and the immediate aftermath, in the second, of a theft committed by the narrator.

  * * *

  This rudimentary film was neither made nor conceived in a moment, but it originated in the unusual, unexpected experience that produced the photograph from which it evolved. Becoming more experienced in making images, I came to rely less on anything resembling the experiential phenomena of Surrealism, and became increasingly uncertain about their political significance. Exceptional moments of natural light seemed to offer similar conceptual transformations, and produced better pictures; for many who work with photographic media, the weather is not merely analogous with a state of mind. I have sometimes wondered whether I might have addressed these questions better if more of Henri Lefebvre’s writing had been translated into English sooner than it was. La Production de l’espace was first published in 1974, but did not appear in English until Blackwell published Donald Nicholson-Smith’s translation in 1991. I first encountered the book in 1994, before which I knew of Lefebvre and his relationship with the Situationists only from a brief mention in Leaving the Twentieth Century (1974), Christopher Gray’s anthology of Situationist writing, an essential text for any would-be-literate punk rocker in the 1970s, in which I had found Gray’s translation of part of Raoul Vaneigem’s Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (1967), known in English as The Revolution of Everyday Life, from which I often quoted:

  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.10

  Nicholson-Smith’s 1983 translation is closer to the original:

  though not everything affects me with equal force, I am always faced with the same paradox: no sooner do I become aware of the alchemy worked by my imagination upon reality than I see that reality reclaimed and borne away by the uncontrollable river of things.11

  Lefebvre’s assertion that ‘the space which contains the realised preconditions of another life is the same one as prohibits what those preconditions make possible’12 is a thought not unlike that in Vaneigem’s paragraph. I wondered if the prohibition that Lefebvre identifies is sometimes suspended within the spaces of a film, and, if so, whether this might explain some of the attraction, and the seemingly utopian quality, of so much film space, and why some people are willing to devote so much time and effort to making films.

  In Volume 3 of his Critique of Everyday Life (1981, published in English in 2005), Lefebvre wrote of

  Intense instants – or, rather, moments – it is as if they are seeking to shatter the everydayness trapped in generalised exchange. On the one hand, they affix the chain of equivalents to lived experience and daily life. On the other, they detach and shatter it. In the ‘micro’, conflicts between these elements and the chains of equivalence are continually arising. Yet the ‘macro’, the pressure of the market and exchange, is forever limiting these conflicts and restoring order. At certain periods, people have looked to these moments to transform existence.13

  Lefebvre often writes of ‘moments’. ‘What is Possible’, the final c
hapter of Volume 1 of the Critique, written in 1945, includes:

  Mystics and metaphysicians used to acknowledge that everything in life revolved around exceptional moments. In their view, life found expression and was concentrated in them. These moments were festivals: festivals of the mind or the heart, public or intimate festivals. In order to attack and mortally wound mysticism, it was necessary to show that festivals had lost their meaning, the power they had in the days when all their magnificence came from life, and when life drew its magnificence from festivals.14

  Later, in The Production of Space, he identifies another kind of moment, in which ‘around 1910 a certain space was shattered’.15 This observation first appeared in English translation in 1990, its paragraph quoted by David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity, also published by Blackwell, and Harvey quoted it again in his afterword for Blackwell’s edition of The Production of Space. Harvey’s interest in the passage arises, I assume, from its identification of the beginning of a period that ended with the ‘profound shift in the “structure of feeling” ’ that signalled the onset of postmodernity in the early 1970s, with the break-up of the Bretton-Woods fixed-exchange-rate system and the subsequent slide to neoliberalism. In the autumn of 2008, it began to seem possible that this period might be giving way to another.

  If such moments of historical transition (however questionable their identification) open possibilities for creativity, for the moments to which, in Lefebvre’s words, people have looked to transform existence (1910 was, among other things, the year in which Apollinaire invented the art of going for a walk16) it seemed strange that Surrealist and Situationist techniques – flânerie, the dérive and psychogeography – should have become the subject of so much attention (if they were not quite actually ‘revived’) in London during the 1990s. At the time, I suggested that their purpose had been overlooked: the dérive and psychogeography were conceived, in a more politically ambitious period, as preliminaries to the production of new, revolutionary spaces; in the 1990s they seemed more likely to be preliminary to the production of literature and other works, and to gentrification, the discovery of previously overlooked value in dilapidated spaces and neighbourhoods.

  In an essay on ‘contemporary London Gothic’,17 Roger Luckhurst suggested that the Gothic genre that he and others identified as characteristic of London in the 1990s was a response to ‘that curious mix of tyranny and farce that constitutes London governance’, particularly the dominance of the City of London, with its medieval peculiarities and its untiring pursuit of an ever more unequal, damaged world. Among the writers Luckhurst identified with the contemporary London Gothic, several have invoked the techniques of Situationist urbanism, as if the power of the financial sector is such that subjective re-imagination offered the only possibility for change that had become unattainable in other ways. In 2008, cycling along Harrow Road, I did not encounter any explosion of the ‘intense forces of “atmosphere” ’ that are undoubtedly concealed there, but unexpected memories of earlier discoveries, at a time when it seemed possible that a dysfunctional economic orthodoxy was finally collapsing, suggested that such experiences still have some value.

  Acknowledgements

  I am very grateful to everyone who commissioned or asked me to write the essays in this book, including, in chronological order, Michael O’Pray, Joe Kerr, Sarah Wigglesworth, Jeremy Till, Ann Gallagher, Kester Rattenbury, Mohsen Mostafavi, Nick Barley, Giles Lane, François Penz, Jane Rendell, Matthew Beaumont, Michael Freeman and Greg Hart, and to everyone involved in the book’s production, particularly Leo Hollis and Rowan Wilson at Verso, who suggested it. I would also like to express my gratitude to Middlesex University, the Royal College of Art, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Film Institute, for institutional support; Yehuda Safran, the late Ray Durgnat, Richard Wentworth, Jon Thompson, Barry Curtis, Ian Christie, Laura Mulvey, Michael Leaman, Al Rees, Mark Rappolt and Kitty Hauser, all involved in various ways; the late Cedric Price who, having been an inspiration to me since 1968, was such a generous interviewee and essay subject; and my partner, fellow-artist and sometime collaborator Julie Norris, whose contribution to these and other works of mine is very considerable.

  A longer version of ‘The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape’ was published in Undercut 3/4 (March 1982), pp. 42–8, reprinted in Nina Danino and Michael Mazière, eds, The Undercut Reader (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), pp. 75–83.

  ‘Atmosphere, Palimpsest and Other Interpretations of Landscape’ was published in Undercut 7/8 (Spring 1983), pp. 125–9, reprinted in Nina Danino and Michael Mazière, eds, The Undercut Reader (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), pp. 204–8.

  ‘Port Statistics’ was published in Iain Borden, Joe Kerr and Jane Rendell, with Alicia Pivaro, eds, The Unknown City (Cambridge MA: MIT, 2001), pp. 442–58.

  ‘The Dilapidated Dwelling’ was published in Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till, eds, The Everyday and Architecture, Architectural Design Profile No. 134, Architectural Design 68: 7–8 (1998), pp. 22–7.

  ‘Popular Science’ was first published in an exhibition catalogue Landscape, edited with an introduction by Ann Gallagher (London: British Council, 2000), pp. 60–7, reprinted in Anthony Kiendl, ed., Informal Architectures: Space and Contemporary Culture (London: Black Dog, 2008), pp. 32–7, and Criticat 9, March 2012, pp. 114–123, and abridged in the Independent, 6 March 2000.

  ‘Architectural Cinematography’ was published in Kester Rattenbury, ed., This Is Not Architecture (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 37–44.

  ‘London in the Early 1990s’ was published in AA Files 49: London, Post-Colonial City (London: Architectural Association, 2003), pp. 20–4, and Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson, eds, London from Punk to Blair (London: Reaktion 2003), pp. 353–61.

  ‘London – Rochester – London’ was published in Hans Ulrich Obrist, ed., Re:CP (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2003), pp. 168–185.

  The Robinson Institute is one of a series of Diffusion e-books, Species of Spaces (2002), available at diffusion.org.

  ‘The City of the Future’ was published in City 7: 3 (November 2003), pp. 376–86.

  ‘Film as Spatial Critique’ was published in Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser and Mark Dorrian, eds, Critical Architecture (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 115–123.

  ‘Phantom Rides: The Railway and Early Film’ was published in Matthew Beaumont and Michael Freeman, eds, The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space and the Machine Ensemble (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 69–84.

  ‘Imaging’ was first published in Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart, eds, Restless Cities (London: Verso, 2010), pp. 139–154, and an extract reprinted in Brian Dillon, ed., Ruins (London: Whitechapel Gallery/MIT, 2011), pp. 145–150.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1 Roger Cardinal, ‘Soluble City: The Surrealist Perception of Paris’, in Dalibor Vesely, ed., Surrealism and Architecture, Architectural Design Profile 11, Architectural Design 48: 2–3 (1978), pp. 143–9.

  2 Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, transl. Edmund Jephcott, Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), pp. 225–39, at p. 229.

  3 9H was initiated in 1980 by a group including Wilfried Wang, later director of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, and Ricky Burdett, later founding director of the Architecture Foundation, Professor of Urban Studies at the London School of Economics, director of LSE Cities, etc.

  4 There was an exhibition, Czech Functionalism 1918–1938, at the Architectural Association in 1987 (11 November–18 December); see Vladimír Šlapeta, Czech Functionalism 1918–1938 (London: Architectural Association, 1987).

  5 Published as ‘Czech Perspective’, Building Design, 13 March 1987.

  6 See Stephen Daniels, ‘Paris Envy: Patrick Keiller’s London’, History Workshop Journal 40 (1995), pp. 220–2.

  7 ‘Port Statistics’, in Iain Borden, Joe Kerr and Jane Rendell, with
Alicia Pivaro, eds, The Unknown City (Cambridge MA: MIT, 2001), pp. 442–58.

  8 Patrick Keiller, Robinson in Space (London: Reaktion, 1999).

  9 The City of the Future, FACT, Liverpool, 28 May–27 June 2004; as part of Londres, Bombay, Le Fresnoy: Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing, 12 October–24 December 2006; and The City of the Future, BFI Southbank Gallery, 23 November 2007–3 February 2008. For an account of Londres, Bombay, see Vertigo 3: 6 (Summer 2007), pp. 42–3.

  10 See also Patrick Keiller, The Possibility of Life’s Survival on the Planet (London: Tate Publishing, 2012).

  1. The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape

  1 Louis Aragon, ‘On Décor’, Le Film, September 1918, reprinted in Paul Hammond, ed., The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1978), pp. 28–31.

  2 Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. with an introduction by David Galloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp. 179–88, at pp. 188, 179.

  3 Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, transl. Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. x.