Turns out, Flickr user little_swills was passing by when a friend and I were filming the old Montaigne School of English last week:

Synchronicities abound. This week I released A Wide Arm Of Sea, a walk along the coast of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe which quotes extensively from Rimbaud’s Illuminations. And this morning, as little_swill’s email arrives, I find myself listening to Britten’s rendering of the Illuminations, last night’s Performance on 3.

Britten was introduced to Rimbaud in his 20s by Auden. I’ve always thought that the peripatetic figures of Britten and Peter Pears bore some affinity to Robinson. And so, I know.

From ScreenDaily:

Vanessa Redgrave has signed on as Narrator for Robinson In Ruins, the long-awaited follow-up to Patrick Keiller’s celebrated 1990s films London and Robinson In Space.

Robinson In Ruins will see Redgrave replace the late actor Paul Scofield, who was Narrator for the two previous films. The actress was a close friend of Scofield and worked with him many times in theatre productions.

Keiller said: “My fictional protagonist and I are delighted Vanessa Redgrave has accepted the role of the Narrator of the former’s most recent, perhaps most quixotic expedition.”

Robinson In Ruins is in post-production and is expected to surface in the autumn, possibly at the Venice International Film Festival.

The film is produced by Keith Griffiths through UK outfit Illuminations. A sales agent is expected to be announced shortly.

Another busy weekend, but also another insanely busy week. So, quickly: Shots 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 27, 33, 36, 37, 38 in the bag.

Shaftesbury Avenue, where the Montaigne School of English has become the Malvern House School of English – what implications does this have? Has Montaigne gone Welsh? The Houses of Parliament in brighter sunshine than Keiller had them. At Millbank we scrambled down a rusty old ladder to film Vauxhall Cross from the foreshore – completed since Keiller saw it. At Vauxhall Park, we heard the gateposts speak to us. On Hartington Road Keiller pulled his first big trick – Robinson’s flat, in Eastry House, must have been filmed from the roof of a neighbouring school. Will have to ask permission and go back. But why this house? Why these difficult shots? Finally, we asked the duty manager for permission, and it was kindly given (although he wished we’d come earlier when the shop was tidy), to film in the Sainsbury’s at Nine Elms, its interior almost unchanged despite much renovation.

Onward.

I’d like to apologise for being so flippant in an earlier post about a comment left on Londonist, which accused this project of necrophilia.

Because London is not a corpse: there can be no grave-robbing here. The films ’s life goes on because the film is not just what you see on screen; it’s the places that Keiller visited, and the reasons he had for doing so. The politics and the personal. The fact that we’re still talking about it now, and going over it. It lives.

Here’s the thing: I haven’t dealt with video in quantity before. It’s big. It takes up space. I’ve shot 80 minutes already and its huge. Unlike text, or stills or even audio, it takes real time to move around, and comes with real storage costs. So: don’t expect a lot of footage until I figure that bit out. Advice is welcome.

Still: on Saturday I went to the Banqueting Hall, for the 361st anniversary of the execution of Charles I, as featured in Shots 28 – 32, and particularly, Shot 30.

I didn’t know until I did the research that for his stand for episcopalianism, Charles I was canonised after the restoration. He is the only Anglican Saint since the Reformation: St Charles, King and Martyr.

If you think that that would make his followers nutters: you are not wrong. High Anglicanism is not far from Papist idolatory. Saturday’s mass came with plenty of right-wing ideology, and the first occurrence I know of of Godwin’s Law in a sermon: Dr Colin Podmore, Secretary to the House of Clergy of the General Synod called out the Roundheads as the first Nazis of Europe, and John Cooke as the progenitor of Goebbels. I do not jest. Admittedly, Dr Podmore was playing up to it a bit – but he went on to discourse on why women bishops were basically a portent of the apocalypse, and God knows what he would have said about the gays.

The service ended with the veneration of the relic: which, to those not raised in a disturbingly superstitious religious tradition, means kissing the blood of the murdered King. Actually, you know, kissing it:

The purpose of this report is not to ridicule those for whom this ceremony holds a strong, historical, and binding call upon their souls – it is merely to point out that such ceremonies go on amongst us, just as they did when Keiller made the original film.

One of London’s core points is how Londoners are inured to ignore the often bizarre and privileged activities going on around them at all times, taking over their city, carving it into zones of haves, of histories, and have-nots and have-no-histories. Eighteen years on, here’s one that is still very much going on.

Plenty more pictures at Flickr for the curious →

*

On Sunday, thanks to helpful folk on Flickr, I finally discovered the location of the “Barking Creek” I’d been looking for before. Not Barking, but Channelsea, and a spot I’d passed numerous times before:

Not much more to say about that, really, apart from this:

Oh, and the “University of Barking” at which Robinson taught possibly does exist – if it is Brit College, which is not one hundred yards from the site of this shot.

Last week I went to a Barbican / Architecture on Film screening of Frederick Wiseman’s 1997 documentary Public Housing, which observes the final months of the Ida B. Wells development of South Chicago, the nadir of US social housing, subsumed by poverty, lack of investment, drugs and alienation.

Wiseman’s film is long – over 3 hours – and occasionally gruelling, but it does an extraordinary documentary job, through two techniques that become apparent only over the course of the whole film. The first point is that the only voices heard in the film are those of the state actors: social workers, repair men, building supervisors, housing agents, mediators. The voices of the the residents themselves are almost entirely absent: a not unsubtle but highly effective metaphor for the way the city and the state subsumes and ignores the individual. Secondly, the documentarist himself is removed from the film – the camera never shows itself. There are perhaps only a couple of moments when a glance at the camera has not been excised, and no questions are asked, no obvious editorial direction given. We simply observe.

In this way, the film is very different to London, wherein the direction is overt, and the narrator present throughout (although I have written elsewhere about how Keiller and the narrator are two characters, who both appear in the film, eliding into one another, then separating again). But there are strong tonal and visual similarities. Both filmmakers are concerned with the way the government of a city or a state impresses itself on its citizens: first paternalistically, and later forcibly. And in the shots of black children playing in the streets, particularly under the gaze of Wiseman’s shaky and washed-out 16mm which makes the film appear as if from the early 80s, rather than the late 90s, I was strongly reminded of Keiller’s Bangladeshi children playing in the streets around Arnold Circus.

Since announcing this project publicy for the first time on Monday, it’s had a great response – with one brilliantly notable exception, which we’ll come to in a minute.

Thanks to everyone who’s mentioned it on Twitter, and to Londonist who posted about it and helped spread the word, and particularly to everyone who’s chipped in on Flickr to identify the remaining unknown locations. I’m still working through these and confirming them, but you’ve knocked off a good number – including some of the hardest.

I knew the crowd-sourcing part of the set-up would be necessary, and was pretty sure it would work, but it’s really brought home to me how we all have our own Londons – how one person’s completely unknown location, and moreover a location which seems without any identifying features, utterly banal and unknowable, is someone else’ familiar corner, instantly recognisable. There’s a whole set of locations, from Robinson’s South Lambeth Road, through Burgess Park and East to the Old Kent Road, that pass through a section of London I simply do not know, and would never have identified – but to people who know the area, are unmistakeable.

So thank you. I hope to credit everyone who helped in some way in the course of the project – although we’ll heave to wait and see its final form before that we know what form the credit will take. In the mean time, I’d also like to thank the person who left this fantastic comment on Londonist:

I would say that this is quite possibly the worst idea I have heard all morning. @Londonist (join the fun and get on Twitter today, folks – I’m @Mankauf) asked me, “Why so? Won’t it be fascinating to see how places have changed in 20 years?”

Whilst I agree that this would make for an astonishing photographic exhibition, planning to remake London shot-for-shot seems to me to be an entirely pointless ego-trip, as the film already grapples with themes of London’s change since the time of Rimbaud.

Indeed, that is Robinson’s (the never-seen, never-heard main character whose journey is described by Paul Scofield’s Narrator) obsession, the whole point of his journey; it is his pilgrimage to the forgotten & decayed London of the Poets, now sunk and covered in grime. The changes studied in the film are over a hundred years, not 20. Has London’s face changed so much since the early 1990s? Re-filming London shot-for-shot, with the addition of a little glass and steel and some beige paving slabs, strikes me in fact as highly offensive (as remakes often are). The city changed an inordinate amount over the 20th Century. Since 1992 the only noticeable changes to London’s face seem to be the addition of the Millennium Dome and a slight increase in dog mess on the pavements (although not the popular white variety I recall from my youth).

I find myself now very angry about this idea. Think about it: who would narrate such a piece, now that Mr. Scofield has passed on? A third-rate impressionist. Piss of the palest order, to steal a phrase.

If London is London’s epitaph then it follows that a shot-for-shot remake would be akin to digging up its rotted bones and engaging in a practice which was made illegal in the United Kingdom under the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

Thanks @Mankauf. I can’t really argue with you, and I have no intention of doing so – although if it’s only the worst idea you’ve heard this morning, I’d love to know what happened in the afternoon. It is, totally and utterly, an ego trip, in the sense that it’s a personal project, a way of finding myself in London again, and so finding London.

A few (quite a few) years a go, when I wrote a psychogeographical/mystical pamphlet to protest the building of the now almost-complete Heron Tower on Bishopsgate, and distributed it outside Bank station during rush hour on a Monday morning, a user of the Syscraper Forums wrote:

“This is a work of genius. It is a rare mind that can tie together such an incoherent jumble of crap and have enough confidence in the result to publish it in the face of inevitable intellectual ridicule.”

What did I do? Why, I took it as my motto of course. And so, in like wise, I declare London 2010 a necrophiliac enterprise, disturbing the grave of Keiller’s masterpiece, and copulating wildly with the corpse.

On Saturday, I went to the Rivergate. The opening sequence – Shots 005, 007, 009, 011 and 013, were shot on January 11th, 1992.

Tower Bridge publishes a list of times when it will be opening. The closest lift was last Saturday, the 16th. And so, lashed by wind and rain, there I found myself.

Everything went to schedule. However, I was using a rubbish tripod which wobbled noticeably in the (high) winds. And the weather was filthy, and I’m probably going to have to go back and film it again, on a better day, with better light, and a better tripod. You live and learn.

The above was put together with iMovie. Which is horrible. It’s also – yes, I know, at a bit of an angle. It will not be permanent.

But: it has begun.

I’m going to start talking about this in public now. In particular, I need help finding the remaining, unchecked locations. These are all grouped in a single Flickr set: if you recognise the location, please leave a comment, preferably with a Google Maps (or even Street View) link.

Thank you. 3. 2. 1. Let’s go.

At some point, I think it will be necessary to make a complete transcript of the film (I’m not aware of the existence of one in book form, or online, at this time). In the meantime, I noted down some key quotes during the Chronology viewing, so it seems sensible to transcribe them here.

A couple of notes. There are several tones in the narration, but two primary ones: the narrator simply narrating his and Robinson’s adventures, and another more strident one in the broader monologues. The latter intersperse the film, and frequently seem to step outside the main narration, becoming perhaps Keiller’s voice directly, not merely that of the narrator. They are frequently accompanied by rising music too – and the identification of the music throughout the film is another task on the list (the music is uncredited, and Shazam isn’t helping).

So, with the shots in which the quote starts:

#3: “It is a journey to the end of the world.”

#41: “He was searching for the location of a memory… a street that no longer exists… He seemed to be attempting to travel through time.”

#108: “Robinson believed that if he looked at it hard enough, he could get the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events, and in this way to see into the future.”

#134 (The election celebrations): “… our alienation from the events taking place before us …”

#158: “Robinson is a materialist, his view of the world that of Lucretius.”

#170: “In his enthusiasm for crowds and public places, Robinson is a modernist.”

#177: “English culture had been irretrievably diverted by the English reaction to the French revolution. His interest in Sterne and other English writers of the 18th Century and in the French poets who followed Baudelaire was an attempt to rebuild the city in which he found himself as if the 19th Century had never happened. Of course, he is bound to fail. In 1800 London’s population was 850,000. By 1900 it had grown to 6 and a half million: the largest city ever known.”

#244: “I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen of a metropolis considered modern because all known taste has been evaded in the furnishing and exterior of the houses as well as in the layout of the city. Here you would fail to discover the least trace of any monument or superstition; morals and language are reduced to their simplest expression, at last. These millions of people who do not even need to know each other manage their education, business and old age so identically that the course of their lives must be several times less long than that which mad statistics calculate for the peoples of the continent.”

#273: “Robinson sees himself as an amateur of similar significance [to John Evelyn], and hopes that his work, though not unprecedented, will be as influential.”

#275: “London has always struck me as a city full of interesting people, most of whom—like Robinson—would prefer to be elsewhere.”

#290: “Robinson is experimenting with time travel again.”

#369: “Life is a hospital where everyone is obsessed with changing beds. One would like to suffer opposite the stove, another is sure he’d get better beside the window. It seems to me that I should be happy anywhere I am, and this question of moving is one I am eternally discussing with my soul.”

#381: “He argued that the failure of London was rooted in the English fear of cities, a protestant fear of popery and socialism, the fear of Europe, that had disenfranchised Londoners and undermined their society. He denounced the anachronisms of the City and its constitutional privileges.”

#384: “For Londoners, London is too obsure. Too thinly spread, too private for anyone to know. Its social life invisible, its government abolished, its institutions at the discretion of either monarchy or state or the City, where at the historic centre there nothing but a civic void, which fills and empties daily with armies of clerks and dealers, mostly citizens of other towns. The true identity of London, he said, is in its absence. As a city it no longer exists. In this alone it is truly modern. London was the first metropolis to disappear. ”

A few of the more obvious themes: time, and time travel; modernism and modernity; alienation; personal philosophies.

And some more things to research: the music; the literary figures mentioned; dates, times and locations thereof.

As previously stated, the film unfolds quite deliberately over a set time, and there is no indication that Keiller did not shoot the film in order, on the dates specified in the script. Therefore, these are the dates we shall be following, typed up from the notes made during last night’s viewing. While not intended to be exactly reproduced, they show where we should be going.

January 11th – Shot #8, the start of the film, covering the narrators arrival on the boat. Following this, he stays for some time in Robinsons’s flat in Vauxhall, mentioning his workplace, the supermarket, the Montaigne School of English, and the locality of Vauxhall, until…

January 30th – Shot #27, the anniversary of the execution of Charles I, memorial gathering at Westminster Hall. Narrator notes (Shot #31) that the wreathes remained around the base of the statue “for several weeks, during which I gradually reacquainted myself with the city.” Wanderings around Vauxhall, Battersea, Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Lambeth…

March 10th – Shot #56, the beginning of the first expedition. The day of the Wandsworth Common bombing, 2 days after the 19th anniversary of the bombimng of the Old Bailey. Also Budget Day. The bomb interrupts the journey, so…

March 11th – Shots #60 & #61 are “the next day”, although there is no noticeable difference, until the journey restarts on…

March 12th – Shot #62 – “We set off again across Clapham Common…” continuing until the overnight stay in Twickenham is announced in Shot #69.

March 13th – Shot #71: “The next day, it was Spring”. A walk along the river from Richmond Hill to Kew, where another night is spent.

March 14th – Shot #89: “the next day”: UTOPIA. Another “next day” is mentioned in Shot #93, but this would appear to refer to the same next day. Although unclear, this makes sense with the tone and distance covered. The first expedition ends the same day, on Shot #108.

March 31st – is the date given for the opinion polls mentioned in Shot #111, in a brief interlude before the events of April…

April 6th – date given in Shot #117, but the sequence begins on Shot #115, the approach to the Strand.

April 7th – “the next morning” is the shots of the river from the Savoy’s windows in Shots #119 -#122. There is then some confusion, as the “night before polling day” is mentioned The General Election of 1992 took place on…

April 9th – beginning at Shot #123, but interrupted by the Green Man dream sequence, which interposes between the polling station on South Lambeth Road, where Robinson votes, and that on Charing X Road, where the narrator’s Seaman’s vote is registered. At 4am on…

April 10th – Shot #134, we watch the Conservative jubilation in Smith Square, and perhaps the most famous monologue of the film (more on that later). Later the same day, we revisit the FT printworks (Shot #140).

April 14th – Shot #151 refers explicitly to the 14th, but also to “the previous day” and the IRA bomb at Staples Corner. Actually, the Staples Corner bomb exploded on April 11th, and the St Mary Axe Bomb the day before – not the same day, as the narrator has it. Nevertheless, it is the 14th that the walkers spend exploring Brent Cross, and then return to Vauxhall, where Robinson “brooded for weeks over the outcome of the election.”

“One day at the beginning of May we found ourselves in Leicester Square…” – Shot #163. The reopening of Leicester Square by the Queen – with reference to the underground substation, a link to the MI5/6 tunnels also discussed – followed by the Brixton segment in Shots #173 – #179.

“In the middle of May” – Shots #180 – #185 cover the period until…

May 31st – A Sunday, commencing on Shot #186, and the unveiling of the statue of Bomber Harris by the Queen Mother at St Clement Danes, continuing until Shot #195.

There is a brief reference to the repossession of the Canary Wharf development on May 28th, before –

June 4th – “we passed through Leicester Square again”, Shot #198, and then…

June 5th – Shot #201 marks the beginning of the Second Expedition, in Clapham, and as far as Stockwell, where on…

June 6th – Shot #209, the expedition begins properly at Stockwell Bus Station, moving to Oval and the Elephant & Castle, before breaking on…

June 7th – Shot #220, for the narrator to attend the Trooping of the Colour, a segment laced with republican sentiments – recounting the formation of the Guards regiments to accompany Charles II into exile, and the repeated references to Waterloo, the battle “which restored reactionary governments across Europe”. “In the afternoon” the narrator rejoins Robinson in Elephant & Castle.

June 8th – Shot #235, “the next day was Sunday” – a hiatus, broken only by the Richard Long “Watershed” billboard.

June 9th – Shots #238 – 240, commuters at London Bridge.

June 10th – “At 9am on Tuesday morning”, Shot #241, London Bridge commuters and another monologue (again, more later). This day comprises the middle third of the second expedition, passing through the City, to Spitalfields and Broadgate.

June 11th – Shots #264 – #270, spent largely in reverie in Arnold Circus.

June 12th – the finale of the second expedition, Shots #271 – #277: Shoreditch to Stoke Newington.

Shot #278: “For weeks [Robinson] read long into the night, until in August he began to venture out again with the fresh eyes of the convalescent.”

Shot #282: “By the end of the month he was ready for the Carnival.” And so Carnival – the August bank holiday, occupies Shots #283 – #286.

“The next day” in Shot #287 is unclear – it might be the Monday or the Tuesday after carnival, but the next date is fixed:

September 7th – Shot #288 takes us to Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, and that evening to the Savoy again, and then on “the next day”…

September 8th – Shots #299 – #310, the strange street behind St Pauls, and the weathered statue in the churchyard, before the resolution to return to the River Brent.

The chronology of the Third Expedition is defiantly unclear, beginning with Shot #311, “a few days after the attempt to prevent the collapse of the pound, and its subsequent withdrawal from the ERM.” This places its start in the days immediately following September 16th, aka Black Wednesday. The Third Expedition takes place over two days (Shots #312 – #320, Brent Cross – Wembley, and Shots #321 – #333, Hanger Lane – Brentford). At the end, the narrator remarks that they stayed with their friends in Bretford “for several days”, and “the next Sunday we returned to London. So we can assume that the Expedition took place in the first half of the week commencing Monday 21st September, with the return on Sunday 27th.

October 12th – Shot #334, a Monday, and a bomb in The Sussex Arms pub on St Martins Lane – “the 8th in London in a week“.

October 21st – Shots #337 – #342 – the first Miners Unions march.

October 25th – Shots #343 – #346 – the second march (same link). To Diwali, Southall, in the eveing.

October 26th – “the next day”, Shots #347 – #349, to Heathrow and spending the night on the Great West Road.

October 27th – again, “the next day”. Shots #350 – #353, Heathrow and Hatton Cross. “That evening, we went home…”

October 30th – “the next day, we came back.” Shots #354 – #362. The meditative silos of Hatton Cross.

November 4th – Shots #363 – #366, “the night of the Maastricht vote.” Westminster, at night.

November 5th – bonfire night, which means the daytime Shots #368 – #368 must take place the same day, before the explicit, elegiac, Kennington Park bonfire of Shots #371 – #376.

11th November – Shots #378 – #388. Remembrance day. Cenotaph, Lord Mayor’s Parade, a night at Robison’s.

12th November – Shots #390 – #394 – “the next morning, I awoke at 5am…”

December 9th. Title Card. Ends.