for 'Archive' : IN SEARCH OF PATRICK KEILLER

Friday, 16 May 2008

"I'VE been looking again at the films of Patrick Keiller. His masterpieces are London and Robinson In Space, both of which tour around the industrial wastelands of modern Britain and find poetry and insight there. Each frame could be a photo by Andreas Gursky, so great is the composition. He combines these images with a voice-over in which a narrator offers us his thoughts on modern life. These two [films] remind you that he's one of the greatest auteurs in this country."
...........Alain de Botton, The Independent, August 18, 2006

Commander Lop made the first sighting as we cruised along the shoreline phase, above the flat concrete of the watcher's protuberance known as Promenade. 'O Bok,' he squeaked, 'I see his eyes.' Sighting confirmed by rest of excursion, who peered from saucer windows. The two huge balls, located in the watcher's shoulder-boil, were turned on us; our vessels juddered as they hit the beams. We had met the centre of Blackpool consciousness.
...........Blackpool Vanishes (Richard H Francis; Faber and Faber; London, 1979) p167

Patrick who? Even Archive readers would be forgiven for not being familiar with Patrick Keiller's oeuvre, such as it is. Two features: London in 1994, Robinson In Space three years later. Difficult to classify them - not quite documentaries, not quite anything else. Beforehand: five seldom-screened shorts, plus a trio of very early works, apparently no longer extant in screenable form.
   Afterward: The Dilapidated Dwelling, which was, upon its completion in 2000, the most expensive documentary ever commissioned by Channel 4 - but which was never transmitted,   Rumours of a third film have swirled over the years since Robinson In Space. When I travelled to Keiller's Oxford home around 2002 to interview him for Critical Quarterly, he spoke with enthusiasm about a project he referred to, tantalisingly, as Robinson In China. In spring 2007, I curated what was very probably the first full Keiller retrospective anywhere in the world, at the Bradford International Film Festival. After the screening of Robinson In Space I interviewed Keiller again - and now the talk was of The Robinson Institute. This "might" be a film - or "it might be something else." In 2003, Keiller had stated that "the third Robinson project is called The Robinson Institute. I have not yet managed to secure patronage for this film from any of the conventional sources, but have instead found myself working in academic research as if I were (though I hasten to say that I am not) an employee of The Robinson Institute."
   For Keiller fans - and there's no shortage of us, around the world - the wait for a new Keiller film is an exquisite torture. But even if Keiller never himself shoots another frame, London and Robinson In Space warrant his inclusion in any survey of 'non-fictional' film-making, even if they themselves occupy that intriguingly hazy frontier between 'fact' and 'fiction'. Inspired by the recollection that both of his films are about geographical journeys of various kinds, examining along the way the interface between the past and the present, between the real and the fictional, I decided to stage an expedition of my own: a pilgrimage (or, pace David Cronenberg, a PilgrImage) of sorts.
   And so it was that, in the middle of September 2007, I made my way to Patrick Keiller's birthplace, the town where he spent the first years of his life, taking along with me a rather obscure British science-fiction/comic novel of the 1970s which happened to be set in the area. Blackpool Vanishes, written by one of my old university professors, was the sort of thing I liked to imagine that Keiller and his films' two recurring 'characters' - Scofield's never-named 'Narrator', and his great friend, the never-heard never-seen 'Robinson' - might well have approved of. In London, the Narrator proclaims that the film relates "a journey to the end of the world". My journey was rather less ambitious: to the beginning(s) of Patrick Keiller.
    The central library, an ornate medium-sized affair not far from the seafront, built as part of a bequest by Scottish-American millionaire Andrew Carnegie (whose munificent funds were responsible for dozens of libraries all over the UK, including no less than three in my own home-town of Sunderland.) All that I knew of Keiller's birth was that it took place in 1950, in Blackpool.

   A trawl through the birth-records in the library's local history department confirmed that a male child, George Patrick Campbell Keiller (those extra names came as a pleasant surprise, a small but valuable reward for my detective-work) was born to the Elsie Keiller at Blackpool's Victoria Hospital on August 17th 1950. A consultation - via micro-film reels - of the back issues of the local newspaper, the West Lancashire Evening Gazette - yielded further details:

  "Keiller. On August 17th, at Victoria Hospital, to Elsie (nee Emery),
   wife of Lt-Col L.E.Keiller, High Crossroad, Poulton-le-Fylde, a son (Patrick)."

The nearby public-record office provided yet more information, Keiller's birth-certificate identifying his father's job and employer: 'Area Manager, Bristle Brush Manufacturers'... manufacturers of bristle-brushes being, of course, exactly the type of enterprise chronicled during Robinson In Space's saunter around what remained, post-Thatcher, of Britain's non-service-industry economy.
    Back at the library, I took the opportunity to cast my eves over the newspaper's other pages: on the front page a BIG BREAK THROUGH was THREATENED in the Korean War ('Reds Hit Hard... 32 Americans Bound, Shot). An unfortunate WOMAN HAD 22 STAB WOUNDS; another GIRL "CONFESSED" TO STOP CANING - MOTHER FINED; there was talk of a EUROPEAN ARMY PROPOSAL; but by far the most Keillerish/Robinsonian headline was the one warning of DEARER GAS IN MIDLANDS.
   Although in 1950 Britain was still under toiling under post-war austerity measures - including food-rationing, which would not be fully discontinued until 1954 - Blackpool was still very much Blackpool, and the paper's entertainments section promised all manner of excitements. This has never been much of a cinema town, however - live shows have always predominated - and, just as there's now only one town-centre cinema (not unusual in 2007), there was also just the one* back when Keiller was born (most unusual for 1950, when any British town or city of any size would have well over half a dozen 'movie-houses' to choose from.) Showing on the 17th August, at the Palace Pictures in the Palace Ballroom, daily at 2.15, 5.50, and 8.10: Black Magic with Orson Welles as Cagliostro, the notorious hypnotist who "uses his powers for revenge against King Louis XV's court."
   A far cry indeed from the measured, quietly, scholarly films which Keiller himself would eventually compose. But when Keiller brought his cameras to Blackpool - for Robinson In Space, and also the short-film entitled 'Valtos, or The Veil' - the images he would present of the town would, coincidentally enough, capture meteorological conditions precisely similar to those recorded in the Gazette on the day of his birth: 'Weather: SQUALLY.'

by Neil Young
for Archive magazine (a publication of the National Media Museum, Bradford)

Robinson In Blackpool, a longer version of this piece appears in KINO! magazine

* A reader wrote in to correct this mistake: there were several cinemas in Blackpool centre at this time, they just didn't all advertise every day in the local paper.

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