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.

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.

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.