Robinson in Ruins: politics and landscape on film · December 6th, 2010
“It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.”
Fredric Jameson’s The Seeds of Time (1996)
It is with this sentence that opens Patrick Keiller’s latest offering, Robinson in Space, at once an eminantly political essay on landscape and history, a rigorously experimental filmic object, and part three of a fictional trilogy involving a mysteriously elusive and half-deluded scholarly type named Robinson who undisguisably acts as Keiller’s own projection and fantasy.
The film purports to be assembled from reels abandoned in a caravan left behind by this evasise and shifty character, and is self-described as ‘picturesque views on journeys to sites of scientific and historical interest’. Its narrative backbone consists in the retelling of the unfolding events of the global economic meltdown of 2008, whilst Robinson’s obsession with port statistics has been replaced by agricultural observations and Paul Scofield’s voice-over, which seemed to embody the character in his absence, has given way to Vanessa Redgrave’s slighlty more distant, but no less monotonic and laconic tone.
Made possible through an AHRC-funded project, ‘The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image’, which explores narratives of mobility and the political in landscape and place and received the input of many academics including Doreen Massey, professor of Cultural Geography at the Open University, the film unveils the history and political forces at work in the seemingly peaceful and uneventful rolling hills of rural Oxforshire, quintessance of the English landscape; It challenges notions of the picturesque, confront visions of a rustic past with industrial romanticism and issues of land ownership, and is ultimately a reminder of the socially constructed notion of landscape.
Robinson’s camera stares ininterruptedly at these places, hoping to discern the “molecular basis of historical events”, framing the only visible remain of a decommissioned US airbase: a fire hydrant sticking out in the middle of a field near Greenham Common (the location of Dr David Kelly’s suicide), or highlighting the ruins of the abandoned villages around Hampton Gay, where 16th-century rebellion against the countryside’s enclosure began. Robinson ultimately discovers a vast network of government oil pipelines running unnoticed through southern England, connecting military sites.
True to Keiller’s own brand of meticulously prepared near-static images, the film alternates wide shots and macro, and sometimes reveals the imperceptible, for example in the red paint of a post-box being slowly eroded by use, or a colony of lichens growing at the corner of letterings on the surface of a roadsign.
The camera lingers for long moments, capturing seemingly mundane images of a noisy machine harvesting a field, or swaying foxgloves merely accompanied by birdsong, followed by the precise but silent beauty of a spider delicately spining its web – contrasted with the narrator’s detailed account of the near-collapse of the international banking system – hinting at the dual challenges posed by an economic and ecological crisis. These long shots effectively result in drawing the spectator towards meditative rhythms of thought oppositional to the politically brutal mechanisms outlined in the commentary, bringing intensity and focus and confering a hightened meaning to images of an otherwise mundane materialism, uncomfortably confronting daily reality with remote global events that seem outside any control, asking what efforts of the mind may be required to break free from the hold of market economy with the state of nature.
The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image blog: http://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com/
Blind stories, blind walks: the cinema of the mind · July 13th, 2010
A couple of days ago my good friend Roberto invited me to take part in an ‘experiment’, in fact it was a sketch for a live art piece he will be presenting at the Rifrazioni Festival of Contemporary Art (Lazio, Italy), in which he and I will be participating in late July.
It was a hot summer night in Clapton. I was sat on a bench in Millfields Park, eyes closed, waiting for the moment to arrive. A presence behind me, someone walking in the grass. A blindfold on my eyes. Roberto sat next to me, opened my hands and took my keys. From now on, I could only follow him – I felt somewhat submitted, I had to listen. He was the only guide. The story he was recounting was shifting time and place: it was now winter and I was in Brooklyn.
Eyesight disabled, the first steps in the grass were a little intimidating. Because of this sensory deprivation, my way of perceiving the world had to be reconsidered, and the world itself was changed into a place full of challenges: my feet became sensors of the ground, every bump a potential hurdle, every kerb a threshold, every wall an insurmontable frontier. Despite being relatively familiar with the area we traversed, I was completely unable to tell where I was going.
Sound was the other point of reference I could rely upon, but again it was hugely transformed by the effect of the blindfold: Ambient sounds took a whole new significance; they became abstracted, almost as if they were part of a setup, akin to a film soundtrack. Street chatter and conversations strangely felt like they were ‘acted out’ by people.
This unique experience, reminiscent of a soundwalk like Subtlemob, if only better, placed me at the center of an invisible stage, where everything and everyone around me took up a new role, forcing me to focus both on my senses – to make sense of my surroundings, and on my imagination – to visually interpret the story I was listening to.
The Rifrazioni festival takes place on the 29th, 30th of July and 1st of August in Anzio e Nettuno (Italy).
Destinations · November 25th, 2009
A couple of years ago, the French National Railways Network (SNCF) ran this ad campaign ironically subtitled “luckily, we give you more options than just the train”, to publicise the lesser-known range of travel services they were offering and mock the dusty and tarnished image often carried by the state transport operator.
In these pictures, the frenchisised phonetics of faraway place-names (Los Angeles, New York, Cancun, Singapore) humourously collide with the humble road sign more typically found at the entrance of the average sleepy village, deep in the Gallic countryside…
Halte aux casseurs du C!! · August 9th, 2009
Quelques photos témoins des derniers développements a la Résidence Universitaire d’Antony (92), le sort de laquelle semble hélas condamné…
What is place? · July 8th, 2009
“Old traps vanish, new ones take their place; the old safe places become impassable, and the route can either be plain and easy, or impossibly confusing.”
Andreï Tarkovski, Stalker
As illustrated by Tarkovski’s Zone, the conception of place seems to be constantly evolving, ever-adapting to the circumstances of one-self.
Bergson sees place as “space in which the process of remembrance continues to activate the past as something which is lived and acted, rather than represented”.
Indeed, the notion of place couldn’t exist without memory – or perhaps even outside memory: when we leave a place, we take with us our own constructed and fantasised version of it: for instance, “home is absolutely an imagined or fictiously remembered place that people want to exist, but it exists almost entirely in memory” (Simon Schama). The tension between memory and present experience is epitomized by the feeling of Nostalgia (from the Greek word nostos meaning returning home, and algos meaning pain), which was once recognised as a clinical condition known to have once rendered Russian soldiers incapable of fighting.
In his street-walking itinerancies, Bojan Sarcevic has seeked to highlight the relationships going on between different forms of experience of a place, from tourist to inhabitant: from alienation, to strangeness, to familiarity. The remote and exotic place offers something ‘other’ to those who go there; but the tourists are themselves also ‘other’ to the city’s inhabitant…
On tourism, the sociologist John Urry wrote: “Like the pilgrim the tourist moves from a familiar place to a far place and then returns to the familiar place. At the far place both the pilgrim and the tourist engage in ‘worship’ of shrines, which are sacred, albeit in different ways, and as a result gain some kind of uplifting experience.”
For Erik Cohen, “Pilgrimage is defined by a movement from the ‘profane periphery’ to the ‘sacred centre’”.
Place (Tacita Dean & Jeremy Millar) is released in the Artworks collection, Thames & Hudson.
Revisiting places · May 25th, 2009
In one of the last chapters of Memory, Ian Hunter describes a phenomenon often experienced when one revisits a place not seen since childhood: the place strangely fails to come up to our expectations, and appears to have “shrunk”. Assuming that the place hasn’t changed, why should there be a discrepency between the recall and the perception of a place? The writer gives a poignant account of his own experience (p.276):
“I was motoring through a town which I had last visited twenty-three years before at the age of four. On that previous occasion, I had been taken through a certain school in this town by a relative who was a teacher there. And on several occasions since, I had vividly recollected this tour of inspection, larely in terms of visual imagery. I had recalled the large cement-covered playground in front of the school, the high iron railings, the grey stone facade of the building itself, the class-room on the left of the vast main doorway, and the enormous gymnasium at the end of the lenghty corridor. I still recall being impressed, as a child, with the vastness of the whole building. On seeing the school again, it seemed to have shrunk to such an alarming extent that I had to be reassured by someone else that this was, in fact, the same school. The railings were small, the playground tiny, and the building itself, although moderately sized, diminutive compared with my recollection of it.”
One disappointingly obvious explanation lies in the difference in physical sizes of child and adult at the time of perceiving; the same building is likely to be perceived differently, appearing larger to a child because of their relative smallness, hence everything looking bigger, longer, higher, heavier than it is to an adult.
Another factor is the cumulative experience of similar objects against which perception occurs, forming a constantly altered frame of reference. A child probably has a much more limited experience of large buildings than an adult has had. For the writer, coming into contact with a school for the first time at the age of four, it must have appeared truly enormous compared to the domestic dwelling he has been used to so far.
On top of this can be added the influence of distorted recalling: When memorising, we abstract and retain the dominant characteristics of an object, and by repeated recalling, we are likely to accentuate any characteristics of this object which especially impressed us at the time of perceiving. If a building impressed us as a child by its size, we might over the years recall a progressively larger caricature of this building. Lastly, it seems that the conception of value plays some part in distorting a “treasured memory”, people tending to recall a highly valued object as being larger than it actually is.
Home is where the hangar is · May 24th, 2009
Narita Tarmac
“I suspect that the airport will be the true city of the 21st century. The great airports of the planet are already the suburbs of an invisible world capital, a virtual metropolis whose faubourgs are named Heathrow, Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Nagoya, a centriportal city whose population forever circles its notional centre, and will never need to gain access to its dark heart.”
J. G. Ballard
Home is where the hangar is on utne.com
Reading to London and the Beautiful People · April 1st, 2009
Lately, my work has taken me to a college in Reading where I teach 16-18 years old kids; Weirdly perhaps, I haven’t been round so much juvenile display for the past 10 years. Being there was like jumping back in time, suddenly putting me back face to face with what I must have been like at that age. Yet because of the progressive evolution of my circle of acquaintances (and my aging!), I didn’t realise how I came to look retrospectively at the places I lived in with a strong connection to a particular age band – London being the most “grown-up” environment, dispossessed of any immaturity, as if pranksters had ceased to exist just because I became oblivious to them.
Coincidentally, Reading was also the set for a comedy series of 6 episodes running last autumn on BBC2, starring two teenagers as they are grappling with the hopes and dreams of moving to London in order to fulfil their lifelong ambition of becoming respected hair-dressers and being around the ‘Beautiful People’. The series amusingly managed to capture the essence of the nineties pretty well – thanks to a heavy load of girl-bands-era soundtrack [CD sold separately]. Besides, the acting was pretty good, especially from one of the characters who struck me by the physical resemblance he bore with me, and the similarities of his views on life.
The journey to London they undertake towards the end of the series is a lot more than a mere 30-min train ride: it tells of the irresistible attraction of the big city, the very embodiment of ambition, freedom, stardom: everything one craved as a teenager. It clearly represents the symbolic transition from one age to another, from one status to another. Only to realize that after all, the life of the Beautiful People isn’t as desirable as one might have imagined.
Beautiful People on bbc.co.uk