Patrick Keiller
Filmmaker and academic Patrick Keiller on his latest film and film-making practice as a research method:
'Robinson in Ruins is the latest in a series of feature-length films that arguably constitute research, each of which set out to examine a particular problem. For London (1994), this was the 'problem of London', and for Robinson in Space (1997), the 'problem of England'. The Dilapidated Dwelling (2000) addressed the near impossibility of house-replacement and the repeated failure of attempts to modernise house-production in the peculiar context of the UK's housing market. For Robinson in Ruins, the problem was dwelling itself, specifically a perceived discrepancy between, on one hand, the critical and cultural attention accorded to experience of mobility and displacement in everyday life in present-day, developed economies and, on the other, a tacit but seemingly widespread tendency to hold on to formulations of dwelling that derive from a more settled, agricultural past. While the former was extensive, it often seemed to involve regret for the loss or impossibility of the latter, and hence to reinforce, rather than rethink, some easily questionable ideas.
'The film is one of the outcomes of a larger project - a collaboration with Patrick Wright, Professor of Modern Cultural Studies at Nottingham Trent University, Doreen Massey, Emeritus Professor of Geography at the Open University, and Matthew Flintham, doctoral researcher at the Royal College of Art. Its largely unplanned, wandering cinematography began on 22 January 2008, the day after the first of many stock market crashes that year, and continued until the autumn, soon after the peak of the 2008 banking crisis.'
Patrick Keiller was born in Blackpool in 1950. He studied architecture at University College London, becoming an architect in 1976. In 1979, he embarked on a postgraduate fine art project in the Department of Environmental Media at the Royal College of Art, where he began to make films. His first audio-visual installations were exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1982. During the 1980s, he made a series of short films combining images of landscape with fictional narration. In 1989 he began the project that led to the film London and its successors. Since 1974, he has taught and lectured in schools of fine art and architecture and universities in the UK and elsewhere, most recently as a research fellow at the RCA. In 2002, he began to develop The City of the Future, a project with early film that has led to a series of installations, most recently at BFI Southbank in London in 2007-8. In 2006, he devised a 30-screen, 1000mē moving-image reconstruction of Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus for Le Fresnoy - studio national des arts contemporains in France. The project that has produced Robinson in Ruins began in 2007.
His publications include:
- Robinson in space / and a conversation with Patrick Wright (Reaktion Books, 1999)
- 'Port Statistics'in The Unknown City (MIT, 2001)
- 'Architectural Cinematography' in This Is Not Architecture (Routledge, 2002)
- 'Film as Spatial Critique' in Critical Architecture (Routledge, 2007)
- 'Imaging' in Restless Cities (Verso, 2010)
Links:
The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image
The Royal College of Art
LUXONLINE
screenonline
September 2010
