Keiller Q&A: “That which is interesting about London is even less visible today.”
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.”
