Robinson in Time: Patrick Keiller preview

It is a Sunday afternoon in mid, almost late, November. Outside our flat the trees have mostly lost their leaves. I can hear children playing in the little park over the road, near the site of the former Fortune Theatre, which dated to when theatres were banned from the City of London as the authorities thought they were dens of iniquity, pits of plague and cauldrons of terrorist plot. Today, everything apart from the children is silent.

In Patrick Keiller’s new film, released last week, Robinson is in ruins. In fact he has disappeared. Paul Scofield know all about him in two previous ‘Robinson’ films, ‘London’ (1994) and Robinson is Space (1997). Scofield was his friend. Perhaps they had been lovers. Where has Robinson gone? Scofield died in 2008. He can’t tell us. What can we learn of Robinson now?

The prospect of seeing Keiller’s new Robinson film is all rather exciting. Indeed I was going to write a review of it but, today, in the stillness and cold of the day, I have instead decided to write a preview:

‘Robinson in Time’

In 1994, during a short stay in Cambridge, I visited the arts cinema and, not knowing what was showing, got a ticket for the only matinee available. It was a few weeks before I was about to recommence an attempt at higher education. I was to study English and European Literature rather than the study of the social and physical urban landscape – a course that I had abandoned a few years earlier.

The film I saw was London, by Patrick Keiller, and it is narrated with a dry, sometimes regretful, sometimes camp, sometimes angry wit by the late Paul Scofield. In the film, no actor is seen on screen. Scofield and his unseen friend/lover Robinson remain unseen. Instead, what the viewer sees is a series of ‘moving postcards’ – a fixed camera shot that focuses alternately on street furniture, road junctions, London’s parks, canals, markets, minicab offices… Filmed during 1992, the premise is a peripatetic journey across the capital; the political backdrop is the run-up to the general election and John Major’s victory for the Tories. Despite its slow, quiet pace, the narrative works stealthily, the images are riveting, compelling, and the film is both playful and deeply humane. Does the film show a city in decay? Yes, say some reviews. Fear of decay, certainly.

‘London’ premiered at the 1994 Berlin Film Festival and was a critical success. The sequel, Robinson in Space (1997), broadened Robinson’s worldview only inasmuch as he, Scofield and Keiller’s camera are allowed to travel beyond the M25. Again, the narration covers fields of knowledge such as architecture, literature, fine art, history, sociology and economics. Together the two films form a poetic depiction of the social and physical geography (psycho-socio-geography) of Thatcherite economics.

A third encounter with Keiller was in 2000 at the Curzon cinema in Soho. By this time I had already shown ‘London’ to postgraduate students as part of an MA course I was teaching, ‘Dedefining Britain’. I had taped ‘London’ from the TV – it was shown late at night, once, on Channel 4, and during an ad break a premium rate gay telephone chatline advert aired, which the students seemed to find the most amusing few seconds of the whole screening.

At the Curzon we watched Keiller’s documentary ‘The Dilapidated Dwelling’, narrated by Tilda Swinton. ‘Dwelling’ is more straightforwardly a film about architecture than ‘London’ or ‘Robinson in Space’ and forms a kind of survey of Britain’s dilapidated housing stock. Dilapidated dwelling; dilapidated housing stock; dilapidated country; dilapidated minds. Using Swinton’s narration as well as talking heads, the film asks why millions of people in Britain seem to be happy living in identikit mock-Tudor new-builds. Where and when did the postwar hope for a new social architecture disappear? The film was made for Channel 4, but it was never shown – and in a Q&A session after the Curzon showing, Keiller was rightly, though modestly, indignant about it.

Keiller was born in Blackpool in 1950 and studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. He initially practised as an architect too. In 1979, Keiller joined the Royal College of Art’s Department of Environmental Media as a postgraduate student and started to show slide-tape presentations that combined architectural photography with fictional narratives. His first film proper, ‘Stonebridge Park’ (1981), was a short made up of images from a hand-held camera, accompanied by a voice-over by a petty criminal character. ‘Norwood’ (1983) refined his technique and in 1989 ‘The Clouds’ (still only 20 minutes) saw Keiller’s camera-and-commentary style set to a journey across northern England.

Now, Robinson is in ruins. Disappeared. But his notebooks have been found in a flat in Oxford. He had been in prison, it seems, perhaps for some anarchist-related crime. And in the notebooks lichen is hailed as an example of mutualism. And in the film the site of Dr David Kelly’s death is visited. Vanessa Redgrave narrates. A foxglove quivers. US military bases lie deserted. The Tories are back in power. And I have a film to see.

Mobile Notworks

New technology often makes old plot devices in films and novels redundant. If Romeo and Juliet were contemporary teens their fate might have been very different: a text message might have saved them.

Horror and thriller movies are no exception to this generalisation. In them, tension is often heightened by characters being stranded in a location where they can’t call for help – where no one can get in touch to save them from impending doom. Back in the days before mobile phones, someone only had to snip the telephone wires for the fear factor to set in and the shadows enclose. These days, technology means we take the world with us wherever we go – and it’s more difficult to script a realistic-looking scenario of scary isolation.

How many times can we send a group of teenagers into the dark forest before doing the ‘there’s no reception’ mobile phone scene? How many times does someone’s situation depend on a call/missed call? Observer newspaper critic Philip French even recently noted in his review of genre horror ‘The House of the Devil’, “Making a pastiche of a 1970s horror flick is one way of dispensing with the necessity of explaining why a student’s telephone isn’t working.”

Similarly scripted situations involving technology now pervade all mediums for storytelling. In a current ‘Coronation Street’ plot, old gossip Norris is fearful of the intimidating affections of ‘crazy’ Mary. She has taken him on holiday to a windswept cottage far out on the moors (never a good start) and, in order to maintain their isolation, has not only needed to break the landline phone but also Norris’s glasses, so that he can’t read or use her mobile – already difficult because he’s a curmudgeon who’s all fingers and thumbs when it comes to modern gadgets. It’s all a bit convoluted.

What phones mean for scripts is the possibility of new information. Characters can scream for help via them, or alternatively be caught out red-handed. Phones can also deliver new information that alters characters’ thoughts or actions:

THE SCENE:

A BEDROOM. 3AM. A MAN AND WOMAN ARE IN BED. THE TELEPHONE RINGS. THE WOMAN ANSWERS IT.

WOMAN: Hello? Hello? Yes. Of course. Okay. Yes. I said okay. Okay. Goodbye.

MAN: Who was that, darling?

WOMAN: Er, no one, just a, a wrong number. Don’t worry, just go back to sleep.

(etc)

And it’s not just telephone calls – what about a newspaper or a TV news headline that shows a photofit of a suspect who is on the run? That little dash to the TV to change channels before anyone sees? The scene is not quite as effective with a remote control, is it? The technology dims the drama.

Of course the plot device of the telephone, TV, newspaper, wireless radio, intentionally or unintentionally swapped videotape etc has been with us a long time. What has changed is how we use them and modern-day handheld devices pose a new set of options/problems for the writer. Once over, a phone ringing in a house broke the silence or interrupted the usual conversation. The TV had to be turned on – or perhaps emphatically turned off. TV news didn’t roll and of course there was no internet. Access to information and communication channels was still an interruption to the norm. Now, all of it is accessible almost at any time, almost anywhere.

One of the problem facing fiction writers (film, prose) today is that there is just so damn much of this stuff. And it’s not just thrillers or horror writing that is being affected. Writing about young people becomes particularly affected, for example, especially if the writer is aiming for any kind of verité, because the young are so familiar with having information and communication channels open to them on a number of different levels all of each and every day.

To describe the daily actions of many people in today’s world is to have to construct a narrative of many different conversations and moods: the actual conversations with people present in the same geographical space; then the more officious emails; the different lexicon of text messages sent and received; the self-branded output of Facebook updates; and then mobile calls at home or out and about – which interrupt other conversations; and then the little internet searches in bored moments when people are almost between other thoughts.

For a writer to capture all these in a narrative would be to test most readers’ patience. It’s do-able – I think. But difficult. And yet how are we to describe our heteroglossic experience of the modern world without it all?