Patrick Keiller is one in a long line of English geniuses that includes Ian Sinclair, Derek Jarman, Andrew Kotting, JG Ballard, and honorary Englishman WS Sebald. People who understand what England looks like and why it looks like that.
Keiller developed his ideas in two astonishing, playful, silly, beautiful, insightful films in the 1990s, which combine almost static images with erudite monologues. London (1994) is about the city in its mid-90s nadir, before the creation of the mayoralty and GLA when London and indeed Britain under John Major were trapped in stasis, while the IRA were still trying to blow it up. Keiller, his anonymous narrator (Paul Schofield), and his eponymous hero explore the city, tracing its relationships to visionaries, artists, poets and anarchists, from the London Stone to Brent Cross shopping centre. It’s a real alternative history of the city, full of unlikely collections, provocative ideas, and little jokes.
Robinson in Space (1997) moves outside the capital. Superficially inspired by Daniel Defoe’s travels, it explores the British countryside conceived as a series of exurbs, business parks, depots, and transit sites. It’s a world based on consumption, not production, a late-capitalist society that functions to take goods from the far east as efficiently as possible and distribute them to the population.
He followed these films up much later with Robinson in Ruins (2010). Schofield was dead by then, and the fictional Robinson (who derives from Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night via Chris Petit’s eponymous novel) has vanished, leaving a shadowy research institute led by Vanessa Redgrave to try and piece together his life.
It should be a great film: it combines the 2008 crash with the story of Bartholomew Steer's failed Oxfordshire Rising of 1596, against the enclosure of agricultural land, and an exploration of British Cold War sites around Oxfordshire and Berkshire. These include Greenham Common (former airbase home to nuclear missiles but now returned to use as agricultural land) and the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston.
But instead of witty historical reflections and striking images, there are a lot of very long static shots of flowers and plants. It’s pastoral, but it’s also kind of boring. And the narration is less arch and witty than Schofield’s, intentionally bureaucratic. It feels put together much more cheaply, without the freedom to take the camera to interesting places or to pick up some of those historical titbits and coincidences that enliven his earlier films.
Maybe Robinson should have been more careful with his self-concealment. Maybe they should have hired someone better to reassemble his records into a feature film. Maybe it just needed fewer minutes devoted to lichen on a traffic sign. The beauty of Keiller, as with Sinclair or Sebald, is that they encourage you to go out and actually search the landscape yourself, to find the historical forces and bizarre coincidences that animate it. So even if the film’s a bit disappointing, you can create your own story.
