14
Jun11
An Interview with Patrick Keiller
by Daniele Rugo
Premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival and the 54th BFI London Film Festival Robinson in Ruins, Patrick Keiller's third film-essay in his Robinson series, after London and Robinson in Space, is released by the BFI on DVD and Blu-ray on 20 June. An intriguing blend of fiction and documentary, Robinson in Ruins presents the findings of the trilogy’s mysterious would-be scholar and original narrator, Robinson, who, after having been released from prison, has been haunting the Oxfordshire countryside with a ciné camera. When his film cans and notebook are discovered in a derelict caravan, the results of his search for the origins of capitalist catastrophe in the English landscape are assembled as a film that is narrated by their institution’s co-founder (voiced by Vanessa Redgrave).
Daniele Rugo interviews one of Britain’s most stimulating filmmakers.
1: Your Robinson films often engage with the idea of walking. Could you name a direct influence or perhaps a set of literary references?
If you’ll excuse me, I should first of all mention that in Robinson in Space, the most comprehensive of the films, the journeys are mostly undertaken not on foot, but in a Morris 1100, a very particular car.1 Returning to your question, I think I would suggest the influences of Cervantes and Sterne, perhaps most directly from the passages in Tristram Shandy in which Mr Shandy attempts to enlighten his brother about ‘duration and its simple modes’ and ‘the succession of our ideas’, anticipating both cinema (especially in the mention of ‘images in the inside of a lanthorn turned round by the heat of a candle’) and its potential to mimic aspects of consciousness.2
The films, however, are not very like literature, as in each case the narration comprises only comparatively few words – about 8,000 in Robinson in Ruins – and is written to complement an already-edited sequence of a large number of pictures. As assemblies of text and image, they have more in common with illustrated stories, which I spent a good deal of time reading aloud during the years when I was making the films, so that the more effective influences are perhaps from author-illustrators like Judith Kerr and Beatrix Potter. Judith Kerr (The Tiger Who Came to Tea, Mog the Forgetful Cat) is the widow of Nigel Kneale, who wrote the three Quatermass series for BBC television, and the later film adaptations, all of which I often revisit, especially Quatermass II. Kerr’s family fled Berlin when she was a child. I think people are tempted to identify the sense of unease in her stories with this experience, and the Quatermass plots involve comparable anxieties, as Kneale himself acknowledged.3 Beatrix Potter was an active and early contributor to the National Trust. Many of her stories explore the predicament of living alongside others who would like to eat you, suggesting analogies with class relations. I particularly admire The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, The Tale of Little Pig Robinson and, most of all, The Tale of Mr Tod.
2: Shooting with self-imposed restrictions and then devising a narrative that often contradicts the image. This seemed to be the methodology in the previous Robinson films. Did you proceed in this way for Robinson in Ruins as well?
I’m not sure there are any restrictions, other than those that are intrinsic to the medium – that the image is rectangular, for example -– or, if there are, that they’re self-imposed. The narration is conjured up by looking at the image (as I mentioned above, the words are written after the pictures have been photographed and edited). It generally doesn’t repeat what’s visible in the pictures, but I wouldn’t say that it contradicts them. It merely adds something that is perhaps not immediately visible, or not visible at all. Towards the end of Robinson in Ruins, for example, there are several long passages describing historical events that took place at the locations visible in the accompanying pictures, where there are few visible traces of what happened.
3: The duration of the shot plays a crucial role in your films. There is something of early cinema, in particular of those unedited urban visions from the 1910’s. Would it be correct to identify these early examples as the nucleus of your idea of cinema?
No, I don’t think so. Early films tend to comprise one or very few relatively long takes of a single subject, often a topographical subject, but they are very short, and each film is clearly identified with its camera subject. In this, they are more like the installations of some contemporary artists. In the Robinson films, there are many images of a large number of different camera subjects, none of which are the subject of the film. The films are ‘about’ something more general, they are quite long, and most of their individual images are much shorter than those of early cinema. I didn’t encounter very much of early cinema until I had made both London and Robinson in Space, whereas I did look very closely at a number of more recent films when I was wondering how to make London. That said, the Robinson films probably do belong to what Tom Gunning identified as ‘the cinema of attractions’, which (after 1907) ‘does not disappear with the dominance of narrative, but rather goes underground, both into certain avant-garde practices and as a component of narrative films’.4 There is also the post-1960s phenomenon sometimes known as ‘slow cinema’, but that seems to include many different kinds of film, from many different places.
4: Robinson is a strange kind of fictional creation, somehow moving between Defoe, Kafka and Céline. Rather than a proper character, with a specific psychology, he is situated at the intersection between what is said of him and what the image shows of his research. He is half subject and half object. This ambiguity of Robinson is particularly attractive and seems to conjure the sort of ‘profane illumination’ that you mention in Robinson in Ruins. Did you work towards a similar result? Did the concept played an important role in your research?
I hope he doesn’t have anything to do with Céline. I ‘found’ Robinson in Kafka’s Amerika. The name comes with an extensive cultural history: for example, Simón Rodríguez, the Venezuelan philosopher and educator who taught Simón Bolivar, called himself Samuel Robinson in exile, hence the Misión Robinson in present-day Venezuela; Ray Charles’s full name is Ray Charles Robinson. ‘Profane illumination’ is Benjamin’s term5 for the Surrealist frisson, which Louis Aragon describes in Le Paysan de Paris. This is an experiential phenomenon, but I have always understood it, also, in terms of photogenie. I don’t think this has anything to do with Robinson, and I no longer think about it very often, but it is probably essential to the films: they are all attempts to transform experience, to reveal something of their spatial subjects, through cinematography. As Vanessa’s character says, in Robinson in Ruins: ‘We set up a small research team, with the aim of developing novel definitions of economic wellbeing, based on the transformative potential we attributed to images of landscape.’
5: There is a sort of apocalyptic tone looming over the film. Is the reference to ruins part of this? Are those ruins the signs of our imminent disappearance?
The current predicament is certainly apocalyptic, though at the moment it’s still a slow apocalypse, but I think the film’s outlook is rather optimistic: on one hand because it seems to suggest that it wouldn’t be so difficult to avoid the apocalypse if there was a serious political will to do so – a kind of ‘war socialism’, as it’s sometimes imagined - and on the other because even if, in the absence of such political will, we do ultimately destroy ourselves, that won’t necessarily be the end of the world. I used to be extremely exercised about the impossibility of successfully protecting the planet from the terrible legacy of high-level radioactive waste from nuclear power stations, until it occurred to me that in geological terms, a million years isn’t very long. Unless runaway global heating does finally result in the oceans boiling off, which is only one of several likely scenarios, the biosphere will eventually recover. However, the ruins of the film’s title are not, primarily, ecological, but economic: the ruins of neoliberalism (which is both to hope that the neoliberal era is passing, and to equate neoliberalism with ruin). The title can also be understood to imply that Robinson and, by implication, his creator, are ‘in ruins’, which I think we probably are.
6: Your films seem to produce a constant tension between two positions: on one side one wants to become the desertedness of the landscape, leaping after the human element; on the other the voice seems to consciously spoil the possibility of such a leap. Would this be a suitable reading of your Robinson trilogy?
In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre writes: ‘the fact is that the space that contains the realized preconditions of another life is the same one as prohibits what those preconditions make possible’.6 I have written elsewhere that it sometimes seems to me that this prohibition is sometimes suspended within a film and that, perhaps, this is the attraction of film space.7 If so, it is a general characteristic, but the Robinson films are particularly single-minded in pursuit of the phenomenon.
7: Your work always struck me as the best kind of political art, making the best out of the gap between art and politics. The controlled anger that dominates the tone is extremely effective. While London came across as an act of resistance against a certain Conservative brutality, what is the political focus of Robinson in Ruins?
On the back of the box, the film is described as a ‘search for the origins of capitalist catastrophe in the English landscape’, an allusion to Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944), which identified the origins of twentieth-century catastrophe in the development of market society in England, beginning with land enclosure by ‘new gentry’ in the sixteenth century. Towards the end of the film, not long after the near collapse of the banking system in October 2008, the camera arrives at the location of the 1596 Oxfordshire rising, which was to have been an armed insurrection against enclosing landlords. Although the rebels failed in their attempt to ‘knock down’ Oxfordshire gentlemen and march on London, their rising was not a failure: to avoid further threats to the fragile social order of the period, the government soon legislated against enclosure. In retelling this story in the context of the current ‘revolution of the rich against the poor’ – the rise of the super-rich in the UK in recent decades has been compared with that of the gentry in the late 16th and early 17th centuries – the film appears to endorse violent insurrection, especially against Oxfordshire gentlemen.
8: Iain Sinclair, commenting on your London, said that any future London cinema must take its lead from you and be a cinema of vagrancy. Have you been to London recently? How would you film the Olympics? What kind of image do the games inspire to you?
I often visit London, but I know very little about the Olympics except that one of the instigators of its modern revival was Pierre de Coubertin, who wrote in the Revue Olympique in 1913: ‘People are beginning to learn from sport how despicable hatred is without physical contest . . . An army of sportsmen will be humane and fair during wartime and calm and collected thereafter.’8
9: The last image of Robinson in Ruins is a milestone on the way to London, does this suggest that Robinson has traveled back to the capital? Is there any chance he will be back as a lecturer at the University of Barking?
I think he’s most likely still in the district. By the end of the film, he seems to be more insubstantial than ever, so he might be somewhere in the picture, even though we can’t see him. If not, he might have gone off in the other direction, to Aberystwyth.
10: Have you watched any interesting film recently?
I’m not sure there are any restrictions, other than those that are intrinsic to the medium – that the image is rectangular, for example -– or, if there are, that they’re self-imposed. The narration is conjured up by looking at the image (as I mentioned above, the words are written after the pictures have been photographed and edited). It generally doesn’t repeat what’s visible in the pictures, but I wouldn’t say that it contradicts them. It merely adds something that is perhaps not immediately visible, or not visible at all. Towards the end of Robinson in Ruins, for example, there are several long passages describing historical events that took place at the locations visible in the accompanying pictures, where there are few visible traces of what happened.
3: The duration of the shot plays a crucial role in your films. There is something of early cinema, in particular of those unedited urban visions from the 1910’s. Would it be correct to identify these early examples as the nucleus of your idea of cinema?
No, I don’t think so. Early films tend to comprise one or very few relatively long takes of a single subject, often a topographical subject, but they are very short, and each film is clearly identified with its camera subject. In this, they are more like the installations of some contemporary artists. In the Robinson films, there are many images of a large number of different camera subjects, none of which are the subject of the film. The films are ‘about’ something more general, they are quite long, and most of their individual images are much shorter than those of early cinema. I didn’t encounter very much of early cinema until I had made both London and Robinson in Space, whereas I did look very closely at a number of more recent films when I was wondering how to make London. That said, the Robinson films probably do belong to what Tom Gunning identified as ‘the cinema of attractions’, which (after 1907) ‘does not disappear with the dominance of narrative, but rather goes underground, both into certain avant-garde practices and as a component of narrative films’.4 There is also the post-1960s phenomenon sometimes known as ‘slow cinema’, but that seems to include many different kinds of film, from many different places.
4: Robinson is a strange kind of fictional creation, somehow moving between Defoe, Kafka and Céline. Rather than a proper character, with a specific psychology, he is situated at the intersection between what is said of him and what the image shows of his research. He is half subject and half object. This ambiguity of Robinson is particularly attractive and seems to conjure the sort of ‘profane illumination’ that you mention in Robinson in Ruins. Did you work towards a similar result? Did the concept played an important role in your research?
I hope he doesn’t have anything to do with Céline. I ‘found’ Robinson in Kafka’s Amerika. The name comes with an extensive cultural history: for example, Simón Rodríguez, the Venezuelan philosopher and educator who taught Simón Bolivar, called himself Samuel Robinson in exile, hence the Misión Robinson in present-day Venezuela; Ray Charles’s full name is Ray Charles Robinson. ‘Profane illumination’ is Benjamin’s term5 for the Surrealist frisson, which Louis Aragon describes in Le Paysan de Paris. This is an experiential phenomenon, but I have always understood it, also, in terms of photogenie. I don’t think this has anything to do with Robinson, and I no longer think about it very often, but it is probably essential to the films: they are all attempts to transform experience, to reveal something of their spatial subjects, through cinematography. As Vanessa’s character says, in Robinson in Ruins: ‘We set up a small research team, with the aim of developing novel definitions of economic wellbeing, based on the transformative potential we attributed to images of landscape.’
5: There is a sort of apocalyptic tone looming over the film. Is the reference to ruins part of this? Are those ruins the signs of our imminent disappearance?
The current predicament is certainly apocalyptic, though at the moment it’s still a slow apocalypse, but I think the film’s outlook is rather optimistic: on one hand because it seems to suggest that it wouldn’t be so difficult to avoid the apocalypse if there was a serious political will to do so – a kind of ‘war socialism’, as it’s sometimes imagined - and on the other because even if, in the absence of such political will, we do ultimately destroy ourselves, that won’t necessarily be the end of the world. I used to be extremely exercised about the impossibility of successfully protecting the planet from the terrible legacy of high-level radioactive waste from nuclear power stations, until it occurred to me that in geological terms, a million years isn’t very long. Unless runaway global heating does finally result in the oceans boiling off, which is only one of several likely scenarios, the biosphere will eventually recover. However, the ruins of the film’s title are not, primarily, ecological, but economic: the ruins of neoliberalism (which is both to hope that the neoliberal era is passing, and to equate neoliberalism with ruin). The title can also be understood to imply that Robinson and, by implication, his creator, are ‘in ruins’, which I think we probably are.
6: Your films seem to produce a constant tension between two positions: on one side one wants to become the desertedness of the landscape, leaping after the human element; on the other the voice seems to consciously spoil the possibility of such a leap. Would this be a suitable reading of your Robinson trilogy?
In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre writes: ‘the fact is that the space that contains the realized preconditions of another life is the same one as prohibits what those preconditions make possible’.6 I have written elsewhere that it sometimes seems to me that this prohibition is sometimes suspended within a film and that, perhaps, this is the attraction of film space.7 If so, it is a general characteristic, but the Robinson films are particularly single-minded in pursuit of the phenomenon.
7: Your work always struck me as the best kind of political art, making the best out of the gap between art and politics. The controlled anger that dominates the tone is extremely effective. While London came across as an act of resistance against a certain Conservative brutality, what is the political focus of Robinson in Ruins?
On the back of the box, the film is described as a ‘search for the origins of capitalist catastrophe in the English landscape’, an allusion to Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944), which identified the origins of twentieth-century catastrophe in the development of market society in England, beginning with land enclosure by ‘new gentry’ in the sixteenth century. Towards the end of the film, not long after the near collapse of the banking system in October 2008, the camera arrives at the location of the 1596 Oxfordshire rising, which was to have been an armed insurrection against enclosing landlords. Although the rebels failed in their attempt to ‘knock down’ Oxfordshire gentlemen and march on London, their rising was not a failure: to avoid further threats to the fragile social order of the period, the government soon legislated against enclosure. In retelling this story in the context of the current ‘revolution of the rich against the poor’ – the rise of the super-rich in the UK in recent decades has been compared with that of the gentry in the late 16th and early 17th centuries – the film appears to endorse violent insurrection, especially against Oxfordshire gentlemen.
8: Iain Sinclair, commenting on your London, said that any future London cinema must take its lead from you and be a cinema of vagrancy. Have you been to London recently? How would you film the Olympics? What kind of image do the games inspire to you?
I often visit London, but I know very little about the Olympics except that one of the instigators of its modern revival was Pierre de Coubertin, who wrote in the Revue Olympique in 1913: ‘People are beginning to learn from sport how despicable hatred is without physical contest . . . An army of sportsmen will be humane and fair during wartime and calm and collected thereafter.’8
9: The last image of Robinson in Ruins is a milestone on the way to London, does this suggest that Robinson has traveled back to the capital? Is there any chance he will be back as a lecturer at the University of Barking?
I think he’s most likely still in the district. By the end of the film, he seems to be more insubstantial than ever, so he might be somewhere in the picture, even though we can’t see him. If not, he might have gone off in the other direction, to Aberystwyth.
10: Have you watched any interesting film recently?
This is quite interesting:
Notes:
1. The car was designed by Alec Issigonis and produced by the British Motor Corporation in Morris, Austin, Riley, Wolseley, MG and Vanden Plas versions between 1962 and 1974. It was a technologically sophisticated design that quickly became the best-selling car in the UK in the 1960s and was a model for medium-sized mass-market cars worldwide. According to Karel Williams et al. (in Cars: Analysis, History, Cases, Berghahn Books, 1994, pp.144-160) the 1100 was conceived explicitly as a ‘world car’ (as the VW Golf was to become in the 1970s) but its international sales were constrained by the failure of the UK’s attempt to join the European Union, blocked in 1963 by De Gaulle, supposedly in response to the UK-US relationship, particularly the 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement and the UK’s decisions to cancel Blue Streak and purchase Polaris. Without tariff-free access to the European market, BMC failed to benefit from Issigonis’s innovative designs, and began the decades-long period of failure that led eventually to the collapse of the company (by then ‘Rover’) in 2005. In the film, the car is offered as an emblem of a briefly-glimpsed future, in which the UK would become a progressive European social democracy with a successful manufacturing economy: a future betrayed by successive, mostly Tory, governments who favored the finance- and property-dominated dystopia we have come to inhabit in the decades since. Robinson in Ruins returns to this story, with visits to RAF Westcott and the former Morris, now BMW, factory at Cowley, in the context of the government’s belated, unconvincing declarations about ‘rebalancing’ the UK’s economy towards manufacturing the wake of the banking crisis.
2. In Chapter 18 of Volume III, pp.199-201 of the 1983 Penguin edition.
3. Jonathan Jones: ‘My God, it’s horrible’ The Guardian 30 June 1999.
4. Tom Gunning: ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’ in Early Cinema: space, frame, narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker (London: BFI, 1990), pp56-62.
5. In ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929), reprinted in One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: NLB, 1979) pp.225-239.
6. Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp.189-190.
7. ‘Film as Spatial Critique’ in Critical Architecture, eds. Rendell, Hill, Fraser & Dorrian (Routledge, 2007), pp.115-123.
8. Wolfgang Schivelbusch: The Culture of Defeat (London: Granta, 2003), p.174.
PK 7 June 2011
http://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Robinson-Ruins-Blu-ray-Patrick-Keiller/dp/B004O2Z58M