I went to Carnival on Sunday. It was brilliant, as always. I filmed in the morning, when it rained a bit. The sun came out in the afternoon, but I was too busy dancing by then to reshoot.

Autumn approacheth. Much to be done.

On Friday, only a couple of weeks late, I set out to walk the Second Expedition, from Stockwell to Stoke Newington. In the film, this journey takes place over two days, with a break in the middle for the Trooping of the Colour, which I attended a couple of weeks ago.

The walk actually started in Brixton Market, as I, accompanied by a friend, picked up a few other South London shots in Brixton and Clapham North, location of Apollinaire’s obsession.

The expedition starts officially at Stockwell Bus Garage, a magnificent building.

And proceeds up Clapham Road to the old red brick of the Belgrave Hospital for Children, now converted into flats, and its signage removed, and the social housing around Oval station. Sadly, the WWII stretchers that once surrounded these buildings as railings have been removed in the last decade (although they survive elsewhere).

Around Elephant & Castle, Keiller dwelt on the post-war prefab homes that lived on, perilously, in front of the London Park Hotel, a former hostel and hotel. The prefabs are gone now, and the Hotel demolished to make way for new development – although its empty plot stands with no hint of what’s to come, in the newly revealed shadow of the old Lambeth Hospital water tower. Keiller’s concern was for the fragility of these dwellings; in their place with have an already nostalgic Blairism: dead building sites ringed with hoardings exalting us to “Build a Better Britain”.

Did I mention it was the hottest day of the year? The Elephant was a furnace, and Keiller had predictably chosen a difficult vantage point: an exposed roundabout, with no pedestrian access. The Elephant is a psychically troubled zone; in the heat we encountered numerous rowing couples, threats of violence and collapse. Attempting to film Alexander Fleming house we were accosted by security guards demanding “permission”. In the cool, spotless halls of Brent Cross or the secure borders of the Mall, this is understood, but on the rundown fringes of the crumbling and cracked Elephant & Castle shopping centre it seems absurd: what authority can be exerted here?

Keiller’s first day ends at London Bridge, a surprisingly calm and simple filming experience untroubled by security concerns. And we pushed on, to take in the City parts of the second day of the Expedition: the spaces under London Bridge, London Stone, Monument, the sundial of St Katherine Cree and the alleys around St Mary Axe, blasted, reconfigured and rebuilt following IRA bombs.

At this point, the light and heat necessitated a break for refreshments on the river. However, many hours later, the expedition’s route was completed with a walk to Stoke Newington, taking in most of the other shots, which will have to be returned to and filmed shortly.

Crossing the City at night, I discovered it is possible to orienteer oneself almost exclusively along car-free paths, through the City’s myriad tiny alleyways and closes, through old lanes and along walkways slung beneath skyscrapers. The city retains its medieval footprint: obscured by office buildings contorted around graveyards and taverns, at ground level one encounters fragments of ancient walls, blackened signs, and somewhere, far away, the sound of running water.

Quick note – Andrew Ray of Some Landscapes has seen a preview of Robinson in Ruins:

On Friday I got to see extracts from Patrick Keiller’s forthcoming film, Robinson in Ruins, at the AHRC’s ‘Art and Environment’ conference at Tate Britain. Keiller has been making it as part of an interdisciplinary project for the Landscape and Environment programme. With him to present and talk about the film were an all-star panel – Patrick Wright, Doreen Massey, Matthew Flintham and Iain Sinclair. Each of these, apart from Sinclair, was involved in the project, but working in parallel rather than contributing directly to the film itself. Robinson in Ruins looks similar to Robinson in Space, filmed this time around Oxfordshire and focusing on the financial crisis unfolding through 2008. Vanessa Redgrave takes over from Paul Scofield as the narrator. The film documents sites of political or historical significance, like the woodland where Professor David Kelly committed suicide, interleaved with recurrent images – letter boxes, wind blown flowers, lichen growing on traffic signs.

Full post.

One of the nice things about this project is people sending me bits of film and references. So I thought I’d compile a few of them that I an others have found lying around the internet – Londonish, Keilleresque, related, or not.

Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil is available on Youtube, while La Jetée is on Google Video, alongside much else. Here’s Sans Soleil:

An extract from Humphrey Jennings’ “Listen to Britain”, cited by Keiller as a major influence (more where this comes from):

Alex selected this, Old London Street Scenes (1903), from a great long list of films generously uploaded by the BFI, which is very much worth exploring:

They’ve even compiled all the London extracts into a “Big Smoke” playlist. Thank you BFI! (In particular, check out the Robert Wyatt-soundtracked Solarflames Burn For You.)

Tom sent me this, which is just brilliant, and according to Joe Moran, was shot on Stamford Road on Dalston – a road I cycle down almost every day – in 1976. John Smith’s short film, The Girl Chewing Gum:

Most of this street has been demolished and rebuilt since then (such as the Odeon cinema), but the aspects of other buildings are still very much in evidence:

To close, here’s an extract featuring the peerless James Mason in the classic “The London Nobody Knows”, recently re-released by the BFI, bless ‘em, with plenty of other clips available:

Please do keep sending interesting things as you find them. Thanks for those, sung and unsung, who have done already.

Since the last update, there has been shooting…

In the city, on the site of the 1992 Baltic Exchange bombing:

And in Leicester Square:

An informative morning was spent at the Trooping of the Colour. Unfortunately, it was not possible to attain the ICA balcony, where Keiller shot from, leading to some creative uses of the tripod. (The tripod causes problems: I was told I wasn’t allowed to use it in Leicester Square by a particularly gittish security guard for “health and safety” reasons. A policeman at the Trooping, having watched without action for a good 10 minutes, also said I wasn’t allowed to use it – none of his colleagues complained when I set up again 10 yards away.)

I found Brent Cross much changed – Keiller’s fountain is gone, and the security guards pounced as soon as my camera cleared my bag. After a fruitless hour trying to obtain permission for a single brief shot from the duty managers (health and safety, risk assessment, “our customers will sue us for absolutely anything”), I shot some wobbly footage on my video-capable stills camera instead.

At Staples Corner, site of the second bombing of 10 April 1992, one of those periodic pieces of intense strangeness occurred. The next site to the rebuilt retail store is owned by Robinsons, a removal firm. Strange enough, but when I realised Robinson was actually inserting himself into the frame I knew the game was up.

Staples Corner is a strange, resonant site even without that. I’d like to return to it – the metal gangways and foursquare pedestrian bridges are strongly reminiscent of Keiller’s earlier “Southbridge Park”:

Finally, last Wednesday, Tower Bridge was advertising the arrival of a mysterious “Vessel” with not one but two tugs, an opportunity I was not going to miss. The ship turned out to be a French naval frigate, the Latouche Tréville, visiting London for 5 days on “diplomatic duties”:

That’s what I’ve been up to. How about you?

Watch in High Definition at Vimeo.

Many, many thanks to Katie Bonham and the 99 crew for a wonderful weekend, and to all those who came along.

http://99delights.com

Art lovers, Foodies, ladies and gents!

Ceramic artist Katie Bonham is presenting her new London inspired collection at Dalston’s best kept secret restaurant, 99. Katie’s new collection is built on the foundations of London’s history and today, creating works using clay dug from the Thames and London bricks as her new and exciting collection will be given its first outing. Alongside Katie’s work there will be showings of a film by James Bridle retracing Patrick Keiller’s 1994 film ‘London’, flamboyant stories read by James Stennett about the grit and grime of ye olde London.

In the garden kick back and relax with a coffee , gourmet cooked breakfast or lunch from the chefs at 99, or indulge in some homemade pies, pickles, bread served up by Lardy Da.

Saturday 5th June 12 – 6pm
Sunday 6th June 12 – 6pm

On Tuesday the Roxy Bar & Screen in Borough held a screening of London, together with a Q&A with Patrick Keiller. I attended. Before the film and Q&A I made some notes about the process that now seem irrelevant, but I did find the following:

“A few years ago, I had the idea that if one looked carefully at films from the past, they might reveal something about the present and also, perhaps, the future.” – Keiller, interviewed in Time Out, 2007

“What I really liked about Wenders’ films and Fassbender’s is that they would think nothing of stopping the film for two minutes and playing a record.” – Chris Petit, interviewed in The Times, 2010

Keiller introduced the film by talking about Jane Jacobs and (this may be me or him) “recovering the modernity of the past”—which strikes a chord for me with the contemporary architectural writings of Owen Hatherley and the practice of “Design Thinking” as embodied in something like Sascha Pohflepp’s Golden Institute

In July 1989, he said, he felt there was a change about to come over London after ten years of stasis and this feeling led to the first idea of London. His previous films, with the exception of the already-mentioned Stonebridge Park, were made by going away by car – to mainland Europe, or to Lewis. He wanted to make a longer, feature-length film, which would take about a year, so it was “better to make a film about being at home”, despite the discomfort of this. Indeed, the first title card of the film declares: “the Horror of Home”. The semi- or pseudoromantic photographer was uncomofortable with that, requiring an outsider’s view, as was the architectural photographer, constantly foiled by the city’s inherent ugliness, its railings and street furniture.

Summing up the film, Keiller says: “It’s a joke about a man who thinks he’s be happier if London was more like Paris.”

The film took about 100 days to make, working 2-3 days a week with his “sweetheart” and doing pick-ups at weekend. Over 100 rolls of film were shot, about 40,000 feet. The shooting (or editing) ration was about 6:1, a big shift from previous films where about 75% of shot footage was printed. The story came afterwards.

It’s only when watching the film in company that I remember how funny it is. There are some great visual jokes – “Margritte” and the “monument to Rimbaud & Verlaine’s relationship“.

Watching the film for the nth time, I realised that I have transformed the film into an immensely (personally) moving repository of my own memories, reappropriating its locations and emotions for myself.

After the screening, Keiller spoke at greater length about the film and the process of making it.

The film was commissioned in 1991 after 18 months development, minimally funded by the BFI, who gave him “money to write something”.

He had spent the 1980s “extravagantly underemployed”, receiving a little notice for an essay entitled “Informal Architectures”, and then “waiting”.

Writing London was “an each-way bet on the making of it” – the shooting script was two halves to each page: in the upper half a list of locations that might suit, the bottom half narration (Keiller describes the original script as merely a device to obtain funding – the final narration was constructed later). Separate to this was a list of proposed journeys.

The original script started in September, but filming started in January, so only part 2 was filmed, and eventually became the whole film. There were originally 10 journeys, of which 3 are explicit in the final film, with fragments of the others.

Paul Scofield was chosen as the narrator because Keiller had read that “there are two stereotypes of the Gothic: the mysterious middle European and the Byronic Englishman.” Keiller’s had previously worked with the former, the Czech actor Vladek Sheybal, but following his death he approached Scofield, who accepted immediately. The narration was recorded in just two days, very easily, as was that for Robinson In Space. (Vincent Price was also, briefly considered.)

Asked if he had or would consider another London film, Keiller’s immediate response was a firm ‘no’, followed by a ‘but…’. He thinks a script about London would be too difficult, and filming more complicated. (In documentary, he noted, “the pictures are more expensive than the words”.) If you can make the images according to a recipe then it’s easier to write the script. Perhaps today such a film would be possible without words – and made with a phone rather than 8mm film. It would still be hard work, as “that which is interesting about London is even less visible now”.

[I have more to say on the subject of merely recreating Keiller's locations and shots, but: all that I am capturing, when I manage to do so, is the absence in each frame of what Keiller himself saw.]

The film had to be made in chronological order otherwise the images would simply not work with the changing of the seasons. There was “an element of performance” about making the film.

[No kidding.]

There was a routine of filming, 2-3 days a week. Drop off “the infant” in Short’s Garden, visit the lab to look at rushes, go out to film, then “pick up kid at 5.15″. Very disciplined, although Keiller himself could go out for pick-ups at nights and weekends.

The original intention was to do all the location filming by bus, but the volume of equipment required made this impossible. There was “a document” listing all the shots, e.g a list of all the bridges (which was not itself completed). If there was an event, he would go to that, otherwise simply follow the document.

Robinson In Space was planned differently, directly off a map. 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off; very fast. Initially, the images were not known, only their locations. For London, all the set pieces, such as the Royal stuff, were production manages. Otherwise production was “vague”.

The polemic of the film is not urbanist revival but architectural theory assembled over the previous decade. The film-maker “learns quickly how to make images of the city”. Ronald Macdonald was a big deal: the choice of Eastman film stock suddenly injecting all this colour into the drab Old Kent Road.

Keiller had a previous habit of collecting “found architecture”, travelling around South and Northeast London taking photos. But this found architecture was that of the everyday, not the bizarre. He didn’t like the viewfinders on film cameras at first – he couldn’t see anything. Chris Marker’s “Le Jolie Mai” cited as a big inspiration – long lens shots of the bridges over the Seine. At one point, London was going to contain Marker-style interviews of the citizens. Humphrey Jennings too – particularly “Listen to Britain”.

The film is supposed to make you like London again – a curative, a cure for “the malady” (although: not visually).

The choice of 4:3 offers more field, “more emulsion”. It also meant that all formats (TV, cinema etc) are the same. The only notable thing cut when reduced to 166 were the bells on the Swiss Centre [itself now cut entirely].

The filming was done “in a terrible hurry all the time”. There was a parody of image-making: just put something in the middle. Too hurried to overthink it. This was and is “funny – but only funny in colour… Martin Parr-ish, and attempt at irony in the framing.”

“Robinson” existed before filming. It was originally first person, but “you can’t rant in the first person, the audience would just get up and leave” – so invent a level-headed narrator to report the ranting. Fictionalised to escape questions of truth in documentary. Robinson is a caricature of Keiller – he advances opinions Keiller would never really hold, or might have briefly entertained before discarding. In London, Robinson rants, but in Robinson In Space he makes a discovery, and changes some of his opinions. This discovery is the “bourgeois paradigm” of Nairn and others, which states that London and the country as a whole is a declining capitalist entity because it has never experienced a bourgeois revolution. Robinson rethinks English capitalism over the course of Robinson In Space.

The East of London does not appear in the film because, Keiller says again, it would have been “too difficult”. If making a film that was “hard” on London then you couldn’t approach East London with the same critique.

Finally, Keiller expanded briefly on Robinson In Ruins, due at the end of this year. The title is “a bit of a joke” as ruins are something he’s always tried to avoid. It’s “not paranormal, but it does go around in a circle”, covering territory he’s “avoided previously”. It represents, he says, his furthest abstraction from London yet, being “very rural”.

When the producers demanded a tagline for the new film, Keiller offered: “At the beginning of 2008, a marginal character attempts to trigger the collapse of neoliberalism by going for a walk.”

One of the reasons I selected this year, 2010, as the year I was going to undertake the London project was that it seemed likely that this year would allow me to capture on film a Tory election win, as Keiller did in 1992.

As a result, one of my concerns thus far was that, by undertaking the filming, I was somehow calling into being a Tory re-election; that this rite was not to achieve a symbiosis with Keiller’s film, but to conjure up all the conditions of 1992: the malaise, the depression, the Conservatives.

As we now know, such was not to be the events of the night. But not knowing this, I took the day off to capture the election, as well as pick up a number of Central and South London locations I’d missed so far, such as Lincoln’s Inn fields, the Magnolias of St-Mary-le-Strand and the Old Kent Road, sans Ronald.

“The school on South Lambeth Road where Robinson voted” is still in place, and still acting as a polling station:

As is the library on Charing Cross Road, although it is no longer – if it ever was – the place where seamens’ votes are registered. I asked the registrar.

Between those two I duked down to Putney Hill to record Robinson’s dream sequence – where he awakes on Putney Heath, by the Green Man, under threatening skies and amid threatening men. True to form, I enjoyed a blazing row with the cuntish manager of the Green Man myself.

I passed most of the night in a bar in Soho, eating absinthe jelly while male and female strippers wearing Margaret Thatcher and Nick Clegg masks wrestled in a pit. The crowd dwindled drunkenly as the night went on. Around 5am I headed to Conservative HQ to attempt to capture something. Millbank was nearly deserted but for OB vans and party activists smoking nervously. I saw Eric Pickles, but missed Cameron’s arrival by a few minutes. On the main entrance to the office complex – the same as that used as Labour’s party HQ for many years – a sign read: “Please use revolving door”. I shot 40 minutes of so of footage, concentrating on the large “Vote For Change” banners, and then cycled home through a pale, calm London dawn.

http://99delights.com

Art lovers, Foodies, ladies and gents!

Ceramic artist Katie Bonham is presenting her new London inspired collection at Dalston’s best kept secret restaurant, 99. Katie’s new collection is built on the foundations of London’s history and today, creating works using clay dug from the Thames and London bricks as her new and exciting collection will be given its first outing. Alongside Katie’s work there will be showings of a film by James Bridle retracing Patrick Keiller’s 1994 film ‘London’, flamboyant stories read by James Stennett about the grit and grime of ye olde London.

In the garden kick back and relax with a coffee , gourmet cooked breakfast or lunch from the chefs at 99, or indulge in some homemade pies, pickles, bread served up by Lardy Da.

Private View 3rd June (glass of fizz on arrival)
Thursday 6.00 – 9.30pm

Saturday 5th June 10.00am – 7.00pm (possible evening events.)
Sunday 6th June 10.00am – 7.00pm

[Election stuff hasn't been written up yet, goddammit. I was there.]