For those readers of The View From the Train , the new book of writings by Patrick Keiller, already familiar with the author’s films, it will come as little surprise to discover many of the essays herein are playfully dense. As evinced by Keiller’s Robinson Trilogy (1994-2010), the British architect, writer and filmmaker is something of a specialist when it comes to the digestible and often amusing presentation and juxtaposition of historical facts, industrial statistics, literary references and all those other curious nuggets that comprise a cultural landscape.
As Keiller noted in typically throwaway—if far from insincere—fashion during a talk at London’s Tate Britain in May 2012, “everything is connected.” And although how one thing relates to another is not always immediately evident, Britain’s most consistently cogent film-essayist subscribes to the notion that the way in which we merely look at things can and often does...
As Keiller noted in typically throwaway—if far from insincere—fashion during a talk at London’s Tate Britain in May 2012, “everything is connected.” And although how one thing relates to another is not always immediately evident, Britain’s most consistently cogent film-essayist subscribes to the notion that the way in which we merely look at things can and often does...
- 1/10/2014
- by Michael Pattison
- MUBI
<p><img align="middle" src="http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg220/donpayasos/Kobayashi/vlcsnap-825451.png" alt="l" width="500" /></p> <p>In the dying years of the last century, Patrick Keiller was Britain's leading cinematic psychogeographer, mapping the unconscious impulses of the English cityscape in two remarkable feature films, <i>London</i> (1994) and <i>Robinson in Space</i> (1997). Both films were supported by the British Film Institute, before it stopped supporting the production of actual films. As state support for the arts dwindled in Britain, becoming more and more driven by the desire to pursue commercial success at the expense of artistic creativity (as if the two should always be considered polar opposites), Keiller seemed to fall silent, like that other great BFI beneficiary, Terence Davies.</p> <p>But now, rather astonishingly, he's back! <i>Robinson in Ruins</i> (2010) will continue the peregrinations of the fictitious lecturer and flaneur, although with the passing of Sir Paul Scofield, the film's narrator has undergone a change of identity and will now be embodied, or rather disembodied, by Vanessa Redgrave.</p> <p>Such a...
- 12/2/2010
- MUBI
Brian Dillon hails the return of Patrick Keiller's Robinson in a film about the conundrum of the countryside
The opening sentence of Patrick Keiller's new film, voiced with laconic precision and italic irony by Vanessa Redgrave, is calculated to quicken the hearts of admirers of Keiller's enigmatic oeuvre: "When a man named Robinson was released from Edgecote open prison, he made his way to the nearest city and looked for somewhere to haunt." Robinson in Ruins is the third of Keiller's feature-length essay-fictions to deposit his eccentric protagonist among the relics of millennial England, where he functions once more as the comically half-deluded conduit for the director's own brand of visionary scholarship. As a fictional invention, the autodidact aesthete Robinson, whom we only ever encounter via the films' narrators' vexed relations with him, is an absurd sort of wraith, tricked up from reminders of Defoe and Céline, but...
The opening sentence of Patrick Keiller's new film, voiced with laconic precision and italic irony by Vanessa Redgrave, is calculated to quicken the hearts of admirers of Keiller's enigmatic oeuvre: "When a man named Robinson was released from Edgecote open prison, he made his way to the nearest city and looked for somewhere to haunt." Robinson in Ruins is the third of Keiller's feature-length essay-fictions to deposit his eccentric protagonist among the relics of millennial England, where he functions once more as the comically half-deluded conduit for the director's own brand of visionary scholarship. As a fictional invention, the autodidact aesthete Robinson, whom we only ever encounter via the films' narrators' vexed relations with him, is an absurd sort of wraith, tricked up from reminders of Defoe and Céline, but...
- 11/20/2010
- by Brian Dillon
- The Guardian - Film News
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