PATRICK KEILLER: LONDON 1994

I was first exposed to London (1994) by Patrick Keiller over 20 years ago at a Cambridge Film festival screening and it really left a resonance and stayed with me for some time as I tried to process and unpick it. The film is neither documentary nor fiction, and is a fascinating film essay by Keiller creating a unique kind of travelogue. The film charts a year in the life of England's capital through the eyes of the enigmatic Robinson, whose literary reflections and historical speculations are voiced by an unnamed, unseen narrator.

On its release the London Financial Times dubbed it"...the most innovative and absorbing British film in recent memory".

The film is a curious blend of fiction and factual blurring the two to highlight the third person narrative of the fictional Robinson the character at the centre of the film . This narrative is at the same time nonsensical and has it's own sense of subverted reality but also it bizarrely grounded in and allows comment on actual reality itself from a third person viewpoint.

Keiller himself states "What seems to be true is that as a physical structure, it is seriously deficient," he says. "But perhaps more than with any other capital, you can make your own London." Keiller trained as an architect but, partly due to a lack of work, turned to film, particularly intrigued by the surrealists' notion of changing a city by changing the way we look at it which all sound a bit like Robinson our hero in the film. This idea proved attractive for somebody who wasn't going to change it through architecture.

In London, Keiller transforms the city is by "reimagining" places. Which means giving us the pictures while the narrator tells pleasant often throw-away lies. Leicester Square, we are told as the images unfold, could be a place of homage to that proto-screen writer, Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy. Throughout, Keiller's photography make the city a star in it's own right and avoids the often obvious and shows off both the beauty and the ugly of the city. "I worried about the pictures being very flattering. I did want to show some neglect. And the narration includes the impact of political issues on the city's fabric, as Robinson's journeys into the past are interrupted by present-day events by, for instance, the aftermath of an IRA bomb attack. But," continues Keiller, "I also wanted to show how London could be, that is, how some of it already is."

The narrators detached reporting of Robinson's high-flown ideas and fibs works well. The thoughts of the wanna-be but far from it intellectual are cooly delivered to us, teasing us to take them seriously. "Robinson is handy," says Keiller. "Glib and ill-informed be may be, but he allows me to float ideas."




WHAT I WILL TAKE FROM LONDON

• The blending of fact and actuality footage and fiction to give it a different meaning and often using the fictional to shine a light on the factual.
• The detached third person VO of the (unreliable) narrator and the fictitious treatment of the real London. It allows comment as if an alien had landed amongst us and commentary on the real through the eyes of the unreal.
• The use of footage shot to capture this world and make some sense of it. The VO juxtaposed against the reality of the image yet working alongside to to offer comments on it.