If you like Chris Marker you'll appreciate Keiller's films.
PATRICK KEILLER
One of the most distinctive voices to emerge in British cinema since Peter Greenaway, Patrick Keiller was born in Blackpool in 1950. He studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and initially practised as an architect. Chris Marker's film La Jetée (France, 1962) left a deep impression, but he only made practical steps towards cinema in 1979, when he joined the Royal College of Art's Department of Environmental Media as a postgraduate student.
Slide-tape presentations blending architectural photography with fictional narratives pointed the way towards his first acknowledged film, Stonebridge Park (1981), visually inspired by a railway bridge in an outer London suburb. Images from a hand-held camera are accompanied by a voice-over commentary presenting the thoughts of a petty criminal panicked by the consequences of robbing his former employer. Norwood (1983) continued the 'story', and the technique, in another London suburb. Short films of increasing technical sophistication climaxed in 1989 with The Clouds, a further topographical exploration combining another anxious fictional commentary with imagery derived from a journey across the north of England from Jodrell Bank to Whitby.
None of these films stretched beyond twenty minutes. But any doubts about the limits of Keiller's idiosyncratic approach were obliterated by the feature-length London, an electrifying, slyly witty portrait of a city in decay, shot during 1992, and successfully premiered at the 1994 Berlin Film Festival. The essay format and audio-visual mix may superficially recall early Greenaway films, but the polemical punch and artistic strategies remain Keiller's own. Its success generated a sequel, Robinson in Space (1997), so similar in technique and spirit that for all the differences in emphasis and geography it seems as though we're watching the same film.
Stylistically, these features extend the habits developed in Keiller's shorts. The visual material consists of static camera shots: images of urban decay and other socio-economic signifiers, road sign clutter, glowering skies - a landscape sharing some territory with the poetic realism of Humphrey Jennings and the Free Cinema film-makers, but framed and cut with a sharper, more avant-garde edge. Narrative input is chiefly found in the commentaries, spoken with quiet irony by Paul Scofield as an unseen friend of the equally unseen Robinson, a reclusive academic who undertakes research journeys into the 'problem' of London and England. Matters of architecture, French literature, fine art, Surrealism, photography, geography, history, sociology and economics all mingle in Robinson's analyses - aptly described in the London narration as 'exercises in psychic landscaping, drifting, and free association'. Both films explore and criticise Thatcher's Britain, but Robinson in Space pursues points more rigorously, advancing the contrast between prosperous new development and trade exports and the de-industrialised landscapes created by Thatcherite economics.
Keiller returned to architecture as the subject for his third and most cogent feature, The Dilapidated Dwelling (2000), made for television but never broadcast, with Tilda Swinton as the voice of another researcher, surveying the dilapidated state of England's housing stock after a twenty-year absence. Conventional documentary elements are featured (archive footage, talking heads), but Keiller continues to press home his points with the kind of intellectual fibre, wit, and precision rarely given a chance to bloom in British cinema. In between film work, Keiller teaches, writes, undertakes his research, and works on gallery installations.
Robinson in Space (1997) 35mm, 78 min, colour
Robinson in Space - Patrick Keiller - DVD courtesy of Mira, Rip by G R A E M E.avi 
England, 1995. An unnamed narrator sets out from Paddington to meet his gay friend Robinson in Reading, where the latter is earning a precarious living as an English-language teacher. Soon the couple (whom we never see) are enlisted as spies by a mysterious organisation and set out on seven meandering trips over England, in imitation of Daniel Defoe's literary tour of the country. The first trip takes them along the Thames, west and east of London; the second to Oxford, Cambridge, and Bristol; the third to the West Midlands; the fourth to Birmingham and Liverpool; the fifth to Manchester and Hull; the sixth to Scarborough and Whitby; the seventh to Blackpool and Sellafield.
Speaking over images of a wide variety of places, the narrator gives a picaresque account of the couple's uneventful journey, embroidered with historical and philosophical observations on English life. Inexplicably released from their quixotic task, the couple end their journey in Newcastle, where Robinson may or may not find the utopia he has been seeking.
Robinson in Space (d. Patrick Keiller, 1996) begins with Robinson's unseen narrator quoting the 1960s French radical Situationist Raoul Vaneigem demanding that "a bridge between imagination and reality must be built." It ends with Robinson's disappearance and the narrator declaring that "I cannot tell you where Robinson finally found his Utopia." In between is the search for that Utopia in the industrial landscape of England, and an attempt to bridge the gap between two worlds.
A mysterious advertising agency has tasked Robinson with investigating the 'problem of England'. He and the narrator embark on a series of seven journeys across England, inspired by Daniel Defoe's Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, based on Defoe's travels as a spy in the 1720s. Robinson brings to the journey the same restless sensibility encountered in Keiller's previous film, London (1994), unearthing the unlikely histories of manor houses and ports alike. He discovers the French poet Rimbaud's residence in Reading, and the site of Dracula's mansion at Carfax. Everywhere, he finds traces of Defoe himself: the houses in which he wrote and the Bristol pub in which he met Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson's namesake Crusoe.
Along the way, the film presents us with an initially bewildering flurry of industrial and economic statistics: the productivity of the United Kingdom's manufacturing and aerospace industries; the ownership and throughput of coastal ports. In the process we discover an England in which, contrary to popular wisdom, manufacturing and trade are not in decline but healthy: the apparent poverty and desolation is the result of power. Here are two worlds: the unseen world of England's prosperity, and the visible world of England's decline. Prosperity, however, also relies on the unsavoury exercise of power, as Robinson finds privatised prisons and the manufacturers of handcuffs and leg-irons for export.
Like London, the film layers static images, music, narration and quotation. At the beginning and end of the film, we hear Allan Gray's haunting prelude from A Matter of Life and Death (d. Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, 1946), a film made at the very beginning of the postwar period of English optimism, whose hero traverses the gap between the worlds of wartime reality and the afterlife. Robinson seems to be telling us that though the foundations of the world are material, reality itself is beautiful only insofar as our imagination transforms it.
