The Clouds

United Kingdom

1989

19 Min

Black and White

English

Currently 3.7/5 Stars.
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DIR Patrick Keiller

CAST Iain Cuthbertson, Mandy Evens, Derek Devereux, Christine Dawe

Berlinale (Panorama)

Synopsis

Over a series of industrial and rural images of Britain, a narrator tells the story of his conception and birth, weaving in a mythic history of the formation of the world and its early inhabitants.

He is conceived, and his parents move to a new town. During his mother’s pregnancy, his father’s decline and unreliability lead her to contemplate abortion, but discussing it with a cousin, she decides against it and his future is assured.

The earth forms and giants live upon it: traces of them are still visible in the industrial landscape and processes of today. The narrator is born in a city of his time, built upon geological formations but multicultural and industrial. Before he can separate himself from the world around him, he too is a giant, but grows to ponder where free will can come from, and the hidden world that lies within the visible world.

As office blocks are built opposite the school to which he will go, he tells us that he is weary of life even before having entered upon it, but that tomorrow he will go to the sea with his family.

With its dense, poetic and philosophical text and its sequences of apparently unrelated images, The Clouds has many threads: the narrator makes parallels between his own conception and birth and the geological formation of the earth. Descriptions of geological time are echoed by images of rocks and water. Mythical giants who lived early in the earth’s history show their remains in electricity pylons that dominate the landscape; boats and bridges are the backdrop to Kathleen Ferrier’s rendition of traditional Scottish song.

Keiller’s characteristic use of shots in which the camera doesn’t move, but instead switches from one scene to another, or between different perspectives on the same scene, is reminiscent of the early British documentary tradition, of Humphrey Jennings and even Free Cinema. But Keiller has moved away from using images to narrate, using them rather to obliquely illustrate a fractured and personal text.

The Clouds is a film poem: its meanings are not exhausted in a single viewing, and one can return to it and discover new things, new connections between separate images, and between words and images. It also crystallises many of the methods of composition and narration that Keiller would use in his next, feature-length films, London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1996). —Screenonline.org

Director

Patrick Keiller

One of the most distinctive voices to emerge in British cinema since Peter Greenaway, Patrick Keiller was born in Blackpool in 1950. He studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and initially practiced as an architect. Chris Marker’s film La Jetée (France, 1962) left a deep impression, but he only made practical steps towards cinema in 1979, when he joined the Royal College of Art’s Department of Environmental Media as a postgraduate student.

Slide-tape presentations blending architectural photography with fictional narratives pointed the way towards his first acknowledged film, Stonebridge Park (1981), visually inspired by a railway bridge in an outer London suburb. Images from a hand-held camera are accompanied by a voice-over commentary presenting the thoughts of a petty criminal panicked by the consequences of robbing his former employer. Norwood (1983) continued the ‘story’, and the technique, in another London… read more

One of the most distinctive voices to emerge in British cinema since Peter Greenaway, Patrick Keiller was born in Blackpool in 1950. He studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and initially practiced as an architect. Chris Marker’s film La Jetée (France, 1962) left a deep impression, but he only made practical steps towards cinema in 1979, when he joined the Royal College of Art’s Department of Environmental Media as a postgraduate student.

Slide-tape presentations blending architectural photography with fictional narratives pointed the way towards his first acknowledged film, Stonebridge Park (1981), visually inspired by a railway bridge in an outer London suburb. Images from a hand-held camera are accompanied by a voice-over commentary presenting the thoughts of a petty criminal panicked by the consequences of robbing his former employer. Norwood (1983) continued the ‘story’, and the technique, in another London suburb. Short films of increasing technical sophistication climaxed in 1989 with The Clouds, a further topographical exploration combining another anxious fictional commentary with imagery derived from a journey across the north of England from Jodrell Bank to Whitby.

None of these films stretched beyond twenty minutes. But any doubts about the limits of Keiller’s idiosyncratic approach were obliterated by the feature-length London, an electrifying, slyly witty portrait of a city in decay, shot during 1992, and successfully premiered at the 1994 Berlin Film Festival. The essay format and audio-visual mix may superficially recall early Greenaway films, but the polemical punch and artistic strategies remain Keiller’s own. Its success generated a sequel, Robinson in Space (1997), so similar in technique and spirit that for all the differences in emphasis and geography it seems as though we’re watching the same film.

Stylistically, these features extend the habits developed in Keiller’s shorts. The visual material consists of static camera shots: images of urban decay and other socio-economic signifiers, road sign clutter, glowering skies – a landscape sharing some territory with the poetic realism of Humphrey Jennings and the Free Cinema film-makers, but framed and cut with a sharper, more avant-garde edge. Narrative input is chiefly found in the commentaries, spoken with quiet irony by Paul Scofield as an unseen friend of the equally unseen Robinson, a reclusive academic who undertakes research journeys into the ‘problem’ of London and England. Matters of architecture, French literature, fine art, Surrealism, photography, geography, history, sociology and economics all mingle in Robinson’s analyses – aptly described in the London narration as ‘exercises in psychic landscaping, drifting, and free association’. Both films explore and criticise Thatcher’s Britain, but Robinson in Space pursues points more rigorously, advancing the contrast between prosperous new development and trade exports and the de-industrialised landscapes created by Thatcherite economics.

Keiller returned to architecture as the subject for his third and most cogent feature, The Dilapidated Dwelling (2000), made for television but never broadcast, with Tilda Swinton as the voice of another researcher, surveying the dilapidated state of England’s housing stock after a twenty-year absence. Conventional documentary elements are featured (archive footage, talking heads), but Keiller continues to press home his points with the kind of intellectual fibre, wit, and precision rarely given a chance to bloom in British cinema.

As of March 2010, Keiller’s next film Robinson in Ruins is in post-production. It is one of the outcomes of a three-year research project entitled The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image and reprises the Robinson character from London and Robinson in Space.

In between film work, Keiller teaches, writes, undertakes his research, and works on gallery installations. —screenonline.org.uk

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