Abstract
Patrick Keiller’s films, notably the trilogy London (1994), Robinson in Space (1997) and Robinson in Ruins (2010), have made a notable contribution to the viewing of landscape in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, shaping the emerging public culture of psychogeography, and offering something of a touchstone for cultural geography. Robinson in Ruins was part of a wider project, involving geographers, in the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s ‘Landscape and Environment’ programme, and Keiller published reflections on the making of the film in the Cultural Geographies in Practice section of this journal (‘Landscape and cinematography’, July 2009). The View from the Train collects essays written by Keiller since 1992, the majority published after 2000, reflecting on the practice of film-making. Some are related to specific film projects, whether the Robinson trilogy, the 2000 consideration of housing in Britain, The Dilapidated Dwelling, or Keiller’s engagement with early cinema, while others range across theoretical and cinematic inspirations, and the political contexts and imperatives for filming cities and other landscapes. Keiller notes his aim as ‘to promote political and economic change by developing the transformative potential of images of landscape’ (pp. 7–8).
Keiller’s subtitle, ‘cities and other landscapes’, underlines how his work casts a landscape sensibility over the urban as well as the rural scene, with the urban here not simply metropolitan. The characteristic absence of human figures in Keiller’s cinematic work does not imply a lack of human interest, rather, as a 1982 essay puts it, his still filming ‘deliberately depicts places that are nearly or altogether devoid of human presence and activity, but which because of this absence are suggestive of what could happen, or what might have happened’ (p. 11). Highlights of this book include the final essay, ‘Imaging’ (2010), which along with the introductory ‘The View from the Train’ offers a memoir of 45 years; Keiller takes his book title from having begun and (so far) ended his work with views from trains. ‘Popular Science’ (2000) sets the ‘impulse to poeticise landscape’ (p. 72), including his own, into contexts of political tension and, in passing, spears psychogeography to specific social space: ‘In London now, psychogeography leads not so much to avant-garde architecture as to gentrification. One wonders what to make of this’ (p. 71). ‘Port Statistics’ (2001), written in 1996 in the final stages of producing Robinson in Space, is effectively, like that film, an essay in British economic geography: ‘Most UK manufacturing is unglamorous . . . Intermediate products, in particular, are often produced in out-of-the-way places like Sheerness or Immingham – places at the ends of roads’ (p. 45).
While Keiller’s films include productive self-reference, with the enigmatic Robinson of one film becoming differently enigmatic in another, the essays in this book carry elements of repetition which perhaps become over-familiar. The decision to reprint essays in their original form, without editing, is understandable and is valuable especially in conveying a critical voice from the 1990s and 2000s in its time, but if the effect clearly demonstrates the consistency of Keiller’s concerns and inspirations, whether dilapidated housing or surrealist urbanism, their repetition grates a little if this book is read at one sitting. Most readers though are likely to take individual essays at decent intervals, such that repetitions become useful reminders, hooks for thinking about the coherence of Keiller’s outlook. Coherence is also lent by Keiller’s distinctive modesty of tone and tentativeness in assertion. This is a landscape outlook where, much as in the Robinson films, theory is interrupted by droll anecdote, to the benefit of both.