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.
London (1994) 35mm, 82 min, colour
London - Patrick Keiller - DVD courtesy of Mira, Rip by G R A E M E.avi 
A fin-de-siècle personal portrait of London shot over a period of twelve months, which saw the election of John Major as prime minister, renewed IRA bombings, the 'Black Wednesday' European monetary crisis and the "fall of the house of Windsor".
Neither documentary nor fiction, London (d. Patrick Keiller, 1994) is more than either: a chronicle of a year in the life of England's capital through the eyes of Keiller's imaginary protagonist, Robinson, and the unnamed and unseen narrator and relayer of his insights, voiced by Paul Scofield.
1992 is a low point in the history of London. The fourth successive Tory election victory returns to power a government with no social or cultural interest in the capital, only in the City of London as a financial centre. IRA bombs continue to kill and destroy buildings, while anachronistic ritual dominates London in the form of royal pomp and ceremony. Robinson speculates that the nineteenth century, England's reaction to the French revolution and the failure of the English Revolution itself may all be to blame for London's decline and its imminent isolation and disappearance.
Obsessed with late-nineteenth century French poets (Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Baudelaire) and eighteenth century Romantic English writers (Horace Walpole, Laurence Sterne), Robinson declares London to be a series of monuments to these writers and their adventures: Canary Wharf's tower becomes a memorial to Rimbaud's wanderings in the London docks. London is not only an explanation of London as a failed city but an attempt to re-imagine it and reinvest it with all the values that Robinson (and Keiller) feel to be missing.
Looking for public spaces both lively and comforting, Robinson finds them only in the suburbs: in Wembley and in the arcades of Brixton Market. He identifies aspects of London's history as fragments of a never-achieved Utopia: Routemaster buses, Arnold Circus's social housing, and County Hall, the now-defunct seat of London's own government.
London was shot silently: ambient sound, narration and music were added subsequently, giving the film a layered quality: sound, images and music play off each other, in both harmony and contradiction. The recurring motif of ripples on water suggests the natural solidity of the Thames: London cannot after all disappear as easily as Robinson predicts.
Nearly ten years after the film's release, London is a different city. A Labour government has given it back a governing body, and new social architecture. The Millennium Bridge and Tate Modern have reshaped London's face, and Robinson's worst predictions have not come true. But the power of Robinson's visions remains necessary: in his monuments to French poets we can see what London might have been.
