An encounter with Patrick Keiller
In setting up the lecture series that was the seed for this book, we wanted to discuss the issue of film space, how it differs from architectural space and how it deals with the question of movement. Who better to invite than Patrick Keiller, educated and active as an architect before he became a film-maker, and author of a new kind of film depicting place and architecture in its political context, of which Robinson in Space and Robinson in Ruins are the best-known examples. Keiller arrived with a bag full of discs to show us samples of his own and other types of film and entered into a fascinating and wideranging disquisition about the use of film and the history and theory of cinema, followed by a question session that, among other things, revealed his attitudes to his own work. We recorded the occasion and made a transcript, but it is hard to follow without the visual examples that were the essential core, and it was an oral performance rather than a text. All the same, a number of valuable observations and arguments were made and examples were presented, and, as the topic should not go unrepresented in this book, we have put together this summary.
We first looked at brief excerpts from two films, both of which seem to portray place and architecture. I, as host,1 first showed the opening take from Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), which runs for minutes and involves a cast of hundreds. The camera, on a mobile crane, starts inside and moves outside, then up and over the street, then down and along it, all the time following the principal actors, with the life of the street flowing around them. It is an extreme case in the history of cinema of complex, continuous movement involving persons, vehicles and the camera, stretching to the limit the capabilities of the crane and lenses. It must have been a nightmare to organise and rehearse, all for the sake of a new sense of realism by eliminating cuts. It gets the film off to a thrilling start, but the view of the camera is not the view of a potential observer, its movement not the possible path of a pedestrian. A second film, chosen by Keiller, was the opening of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Un Flic (1972), about a bank robbery conducted in an off-season French Atlantic resort, with the winter waves crashing in. As we ran the film, Keiller pointed out the joins between takes and remarked that, although the exterior shots were evidently authentic, the bank interiors with which they were intercut were quite probably a studio set. So began his series of reflections about the contrivance of cinematic space and the juxtaposition of images:
Un Flic is more conventional than Touch of Evil in that it begins with what was probably a long take intercut with the opening titles, but mainly because the first location is represented using conventional narrative film montage, so it has reverse angles and multiple changes of viewpoint which together create a representation of the space in which the action takes place. There is not much verisimilitude, and I am pretty sure some of the interiors are sets. So although the exteriors are a real place, the interiors probably are not. One of the reasons I chose it was because it has both. Both Un Flic and Touch of Evil might be regarded as examples of film noir. They are of a similar mood and both very location-based. Melville is perhaps best known in this country for his film Le Samuraï (1967), but I thought this a better example of more-or-less conventional spatial montage, of the assembly of space in film, just to show how people do it. Both films contain examples of the survival of what film historian Tom Gunning describes as the ‘cinema of attractions’, which he argues existed at the turn of the last century, before the advent of what we now recognise as narrative cinema.2 Until the mid-to-late 1900s, films were generally very short, between 1 and 3 minutes long, and consisted of one or more fairly long takes, indeed, many consisted of only one take.
They were not much edited, though there is evidence of editorial thinking in some, as the camera sometimes stops and then starts again. This was done for a reason, perhaps because something was in the way. Some films have more than one camera subject, but most have a single subject which persists throughout. It might be somebody singing a song or doing a comic turn, but is as likely to be some sort of topographical actuality. Many are street scenes or what are known as ‘phantom rides’: where a forward-facing camera is mounted on the front of a train, though the term is also used more loosely to indicate a film from a camera set up on a moving vehicle, a boat, or something similar, which might also be facing backwards or sideways. As Gunning points out, after about 1907, people began to edit films in a new way. They had already started joining these attraction films together to make little stories. Sometimes the people who did this were not the film-makers themselves. The film-makers, perhaps, were happy enough just to film actuality because it was such a marvellous thing to do. It was those interested in making money out of the films who started to splice them together; the producers, as they became known. This is allegedly how narrative cinema evolved, and the change in my view was much more fundamental at this stage than the later change from silent to sound.
This change of form did not just affect fiction. There were similar things that looked like newsreels, often called ‘topicals’. So by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century the form of film had changed. But as Gunning writes, ‘the cinema of attractions does not disappear with the dominance of narrative but rather goes underground, both into certain avant-garde practices and as a component of narrative films’.3 That is why I think it is interesting to look at these two feature films, because their opening sequences can be seen to be descended from phantom rides and other kinds of early film.
I was reminded of all this recently by a review, by John Naughton, Professor of the Public Understanding of technology at the Open University, of Tim Wu’s The Master Switch: The rise and fall of information empires. The book is about the Internet, but also discusses the way previous technologies were similarly colonised by large corporations. As Naughton put it: ‘A freewheeling, chaotic and creative industry was cornered by a cartel of vertically integrated corporations which for decades channelled all cinematic creativity through a set of narrow apertures.’4
My interest in Tom Gunning’s proposition is that it helps explain to me why I make such films. I am perhaps trying to recover something of ‘the cinema of attractions’, though I’m not quite sure what. My films do not really look like early cinema, but they do have some things in common with it. They do not follow the normal tradition of representing architectural or landscape space, even in the way Melville does. Melville manages to make architectural documentaries, even if he does it inadvertently. But I am doing something else, attempting to perform a transformation on everyday surroundings, so I point my camera at unremarkable places in the hope of enacting a transformation upon them.
Henri Lefebvre seems to describe something similar. In The Production of Space he writes: ‘The fact is that the space which contains the realised preconditions of another life is the same one as prohibits what those preconditions make possible’.5 I understand this to mean that if you look at everyday surroundings in a certain way, with a certain subjectivity, they seem to contain ‘the realised preconditions of another life’, but this space somehow also prevents the revolution, the transformation, actually occurring. It seems to me that in films, the ‘prohibition’ is sometimes suspended. So there is something potentially utopian about film space, though utopian is perhaps not quite the right word.
Keiller then showed us excerpts from Robinson in Ruins, which is structured in months, and he chose to begin with October. He uses a static camera set on a tripod, so that any movement is either what occurs within the frame or the shift from one camera set-up to the next, and the story is held together by the narrator’s voice-over about the fictional Robinson, informing us of aspects of the political and historical background and building a narrative around the place. Within this disciplined format, the choice and juxtaposition of images are of crucial importance, and he began to reflect on this: