Daniele Rugo
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Cultural Politics, Volume 12, Issue 3, © 2016 Duke University Press
DOI: 10.1215/17432197-3648834
Daniele Rugo
However, while the influence of Chris either preexisted the act of filming (a land-
Marker on Keiller is evident, such clas- scape, a social custom, a method of work)
sification might be too reductive, if not or would have taken place even if the cam-
misleading. As Laura Rascaroli (2008: 25) era had not been there (a sporting event,
explains, the “temptation of assigning a funeral, a coronation), thus claiming to
the label of essay film to all that is non- capture a view of something that maintains
commercial or experimental or unclassifi- a large degree of independence from the
able must, however, be resisted, or else act of filming it’’ (55 – 5 6).
the term will cease being epistemologically The counterpoint between image and
useful.” The films are indeed difficult to sound in Keiller’s films, however, is never
classify, and one should perhaps resist the merely illustrative but rather structured
urge to categorize them. However, they do around a series of deferrals, subversions,
display recurring formal strategies. In the literary or philosophical references, and
shorts, the camera frames the world from personal musings. It is perhaps this
a (sometimes) mobile subjective point thoughtfully incongruous relation between
of view, and the first-person voice-over visual and aural elements that led Iain
reveals the inner meditations of a main Sinclair (1998: 298) to describe Keiller’s
character. In the feature-length films, the first feature-length film as an “essay, docu
camera is static, gazing at the world from ment, critique, poem,” thereby avoiding
what appears to be an objective point of privileging one category over the others.
view, while the voice-over, delivered by a This deliberate disconnection points
narrator on behalf of a character (Robinson) also to Keiller’s political strategy. Through-
whose voice the audience never hears, out his work, one finds a repeated asso-
takes the filmed spaces as starting points ciation of landscape filmmaking with the
for personal, aesthetic, sociohistorical, and pursuit of a transformation of everyday
critical observations. Here the stillness reality. The critical lineage with which
of the frame is reminsicent of the experi- Keiller aligns his films is one that is com-
ments that marked the advent of cinema mitted to demonstrating via cinematog-
and of the aesthetic that dominated nonfic- raphy the possibility of creating a better
tion films from 1906 to World War I. Tom world. The utopian strands that inform
CULTURAL POLITICS • 12:3 November 2016
Gunning (2016: 55) describes these early this corpus, running from the surrealists to
cinematic works as displaying “the ‘view’ the situationists and beyond, ground the
aesthetic,” writing that “early actuality political import of Keiller’s work. Never
films were structured around presenting theless, the question of whether cinematic
something visually, capturing and preserv- images — and artistic expression, in
ing a look or vantage point.” Keiller seems general — can produce the collective
interested in stressing the element of mere radical subjectivity that surrealists and situ-
presentation in his frames, and the result ationists saw as the goal of their projects
is an emphasis on the autonomy of the is never completely settled. The risk
spaces and situations the camera records that this type of poeticization can quickly
from the authorial gesture. Gunning identi- be absorbed and become a self-referential
fies the goal of the “view” films precisely activity removed from its ultimate goal or,
in this claim for the world’s independence worse, can be put to the service of various
from the filming subject: “ ‘ Views’ tend forms of neutralizing cosmesis is one that
26 4
to carry the claim that the subject filmed Keiller repeatedly addresses. In a text on
PATR ICK K EILLER’S SPATI A L FICTIONS
Figure 1 Still from Robinson in Space (1997). Still courtesy BFI. London and Robinson in Space are released
together on DVD by the BFI.
And yet their political and formal inven- milieu that Will Self (2014) emphasizes
tiveness, the accumulation of references, when he writes about Keiller that “the very
the oblique adoption and deflection of manner in which he shoots his films —
various theoretical positions seem to circumscribed as they are by factors of
invite endless opportunities for criticism. time and money — is that of a dérive: an
However, perhaps surprisingly, the liter- arbitrary progress through town and coun-
ature devoted to Keiller’s work is not as try, with each camera set-up an oppor-
conspicuous as one would expect. Most tunity to capture the frisson, and thereby
critical approaches to Keiller’s London and detach the map a little more from the
Robinson in Space (1997) have focused on territory.”1 The references to André Breton,
the films’ analyses of English capitalism Louis Aragon, and Guy Debord offer the
(Dave 2000, 2011, 2013; Burke 2006), opportunity to respond to the very manner
while commentaries on Robinson in Ruins of Keiller’s films — their serendipitous
(2010) tend to rely on the film’s proposed association of image and text — in a way
alliance with nonhuman forces, such as the that moves from their formal specificity
lichen (Xanthoria parietina) on a road sign rather than submitting this to the subject
at Oxford’s Abingdon Road (Dave 2011; matter (English capitalism, the problem of
Fisher 2010; Hegglund 2013). England).
There are, however, notable excep- The attempt here is then to read
tions: Steve Pile, for instance, emphasizes Keiller’s films as “spatial fictions” (Conley
the phantasmagorical aspect of Keiller’s 2012: 147): reconfigurations of existing
films, describing the explorations of Lon- spaces under the pressure of the cine-
don as “less about reaching a source or matic gaze, itself operating under the influ-
a destination (the arrival at places already ence of various strands of utopian thinking.
known) than about the amnesias, frustra- Understood in this way, these films can be
tions and diversions of the city” (2005: 11). said to have as their goal the production
In Lights Out for the Territory, Iain Sin- of a new imagination of space. Space is
clair (1998: 298) describes London as “a also the umbrella term Keiller (2014) uses
modestly ironic epitaph to Conservatism to frame his various activities: “I usually
and the destruction of the city,” a conse- describe them in terms of the subject
CULTURAL POLITICS • 12:3 November 2016
implications for cinema.” It is this cultural screen, of the methods and mechanisms
PATR ICK K EILLER’S SPATI A L FICTIONS
Spatial Critique
The interpretative framework briefly film’s spatial critique. The prominence of
sketched above produces a shifting of the question of space — not over the polit-
the emphasis away from the political ical question but as an eminently political
events the films evoke and toward a reflec- question — becomes clear in Keiller’s iden-
tion on the ways in which these events tification of the landscape as an accurate
are transfigured as part of a wider spatial measure of the country’s wealth. In an
fiction, one that relies on and experiments interview, Keiller (2014) says that “one of
with the cinematic ability to change the the interesting things about the United
perception of existing spaces. Paul Dave Kingdom is that the discrepancy between
(2011: 19) frames the three Robinson films the visible appearance of the landscape,
as reactions to particular electoral results. which looks very impoverished, and the
For Dave, the films could be organized as supposed wealth of the country . . . is
responses to the mood of electoral cycles, much more marked here. Maybe what hap-
with “the first bringing with it the dismay pened five years ago is that actually we dis-
and shock of another Tory government covered that it wasn’t very prosperous, and
following on from the long night of that the look of the landscape was a much
Thatcherism; the second marking the more accurate measure of the United King-
advent of a New Labour government able dom’s wealth than the figures.” The priority
to capitalize on the intense suspense and of the landscape and of a critique of space
excitement generated by this delayed over the milestones of political life can
CULTURAL POLITICS
change; and finally, the moment of May be traced back to the strands of utopian
2010, coughing up the Conservative – thinking mentioned above. Keiller is much
Liberal Democrat coalition” (19 – 20). What closer to the surrealist-situationist lineage
these interpretations tend to overlook is than most commentators have acknowl-
that the critical force of these films has a edged and, as a consequence, to the
spatial dimension that cannot simply be proposed reconciliation of Karl Marx’s politi-
reduced to the political moments they cal economy with Friedrich Nietzsche’s
allude to and, in some cases, document.2 revaluation of all values attempted by Henri
267
These have already been mediated by the Lefebvre. During Robinson’s sojourn in
Daniele Rugo
Reading, following a “visit” to the places of political struggle: “(Social) space is not a
Jane Austen’s education and Oscar Wilde’s thing among other things, nor a product
imprisonment, the narrator of Robinson among other products: rather, it subsumes
in Space quotes Lefebvre: “The space things produced, and encompasses their
which contains the realized preconditions interrelationships in their coexistence and
of another life is the same one as prohibits simultaneity — their (relative) order and/or
what those preconditions make possible” (relative) disorder” (Lefebvre 1991b: 73).
(Lefebvre 1991b: 189 – 9 0; Keiller 1999: 5). The work ultimately dismisses the solu-
This short reference at the beginning of the tions suggested by the surrealists, in partic-
film ideally places Robinson’s entire project ular “the substitution of poetry for politics,
under the aegis of Lefebvre’s “produc- the politicization of poetry and the search
tion.” In his magisterial The Production of for a transcendent revelation” (18). How-
Space, Lefebvre gives the term production ever, it acknowledges at the same time
a double connotation that grounds his that the surrealists’ attempt to “decode
analytical matrix. On the one hand, he inner space and illuminate the nature of the
notes that space is produced: every society transition from this subjective space to the
and its mode of production generate a material realm of the body and the outside
specific spatial practice. On the other hand, world” (18) remains part of an unfinished
however, Lefebvre also warns that space is project. Lefebvre is equally ambivalent
itself productive. To the idea that “(social) about the work of the situationists. While
space is a (social) product,” he adds that he assigns great significance to Debord’s
“the space thus produced also serves as détournement, he finds the method to be
a tool of thought and of action . . . as such, self-defeating. Describing the appropria-
it escapes in part from those who would tion of the Halles Centrale between 1969
make use of it. The social and political and 1971, Lefebvre writes: “The diversion
(state) forces which engendered this space (détournement) and reappropriation of
now seek, but fail, to master it completely” space are of great significance, for they
(1991b: 26). Space is therefore not just the teach us much about the production of new
product of a particular mode of produc- spaces. . . . Be that as it may, one upshot
tion but a force with a relative autonomy, of such tactics is that groups take up resi-
CULTURAL POLITICS • 12:3 November 2016
capable of reproducing the conditions it has dence in spaces whose pre-existing form,
been designed for but also of undermining having been designed for some other pur-
them, of turning against them, of suggest- pose, is inappropriate to the needs of their
ing the preconditions of another life. The would-be communal life” (168). Despite
importance of spatial critique as a neces- these significant differences, an urgency
sary tool for any emancipatory politics was for new beginnings, for a comprehensive
already a central concern for Lefebvre at renewal, is never far from Lefebvre’s
the time of the publication of the first two concerns, given that, as he writes, “diver-
volumes of the Critique of Everyday Life sion (détournement) and production cannot
and his works on the urban problematic: be meaningfully separated” (169).3
Right to the City ([1968] 1996), The Urban The productive dialogue (which
Revolution ([1970] 2003), and La Pensée often descended into a quarrel and then
marxiste et la ville (Marxist Thought and a dispute) between Lefebvre and the
the City; 1972). The Production of Space situationists can be seen most explicitly in
268
systematically makes space the focus of the striking affinity between the “theory
PATR ICK K EILLER’S SPATI A L FICTIONS
years, the material and other circum- Life), implies a radical overturning of what
stances of the United Kingdom’s popula- is already here, a sweeping upheaval not
tion have altered enormously, but much of merely of the mechanisms and hierarchies
the urban fabric of the 1900s survives.” of the political and economic system but
This passage provides an important link: of those minute gestures, habits, percep-
looking at the built environment offers the tions that — often implicitly — sustain and
opportunity to see a certain backwardness promote it.4 While the import of this revo-
in the way we live. The spatial elements lution may seem limited, its promise is to
269
of the landscape allow one to evaluate our rebuild society from the bottom, showing
Daniele Rugo
Figure 4 Still from Robinson in Ruins (2010) © Patrick Keiller. Courtesy of the artist
“the extent to which the objective condi- As we hear these words, we see the view
tions of the contemporary world advance from the train leaving London Paddington
the cause of subjectivity day after day. railway station: the screen is split in half
Everything starts from subjectivity, but by the Westway and the almost perfect
nothing stays there” (Vaneigem 2012: 4). horizontality of the frame is interrupted by
Robinson in Space begins with the notes Bicknell & Hamilton’s Canal House (also
of Allan Gray’s A Matter of Life and Death known as the Battleship Building and
(1946), followed by a voice announcing the originally built as a British Rail maintenance
departure of a Great Western train to Plym- depot).5 The landscape is undeniably urban
outh. The narrator, whom we can imagine but sparse and devoid of human presence.
is sitting on that very train, delivers a pas- Keiller’s revolution rests on the constant
CULTURAL POLITICS • 12:3 November 2016
the possibility, albeit constrained, to experi- deliberately depicts places that are nearly
ence non-existent spaces and in particular or altogether devoid of human presence
to experience spatial qualities seldom, not and activity, but which because of this
yet, or no longer encountered in ordinary absence, are suggestive of what could
experience . . . for me the medium’s allure happen, or what might have happened.”
has always derived from its capacity to The films are constantly returning
imaginatively transform already-existing to this original gesture, the creation of
space.” This imaginative transformation absence but also its reception, to the fact
seeks ultimately a point from which every- that a certain absence is already at stake
day reality can be transfigured. Filming in space. Absence can been seen as
an environment — paying attention to its inhabiting these films in three senses: the
form and materiality, its overlooked spatial absence of human subjects allows space
qualities, its vitality, and to the animation to be reopened, to offer itself to “what
that it might impose or receive — is the first could happen,” to “what might have hap-
step toward changing the conditions of life. pened,” to what could be; the absence of
Keiller can be said to use film not to depict characters articulates an inability to inhabit
space but to critique and transform it. In space (our hold on the everyday is too ten-
Keiller’s spatial fictions, film becomes, or, uous); and the absence of formal gestures
rather, returns to being, a spatial technol- maximizes film’s transformative potential.6
ogy. At the opening of the essay “Archi-
tectural Cinema,” Keiller (2013: 75) writes
that “since its invention, the cinema has
offered glimpses of what Henri Lefebvre
described, in another context, as ‘the pre-
conditions of another life.’ ”
This focus on the transformative
possibilities of film can be more fully
articulated once it is paired with a second
observation: in Keiller’s films, the human
element is essentially — which does not
mean entirely — absent. The presence of
human beings is rare, and when we do Figure 5 Still from Robinson in Ruins (2010)
encounter this presence, we are surprised, © Patrick Keiller. Courtesy of the artist
almost stunned. When human presences
cut across the continuum of townscape The camera gazes from a position that
and landscape, we experience a shock, as cannot be identified with a subject within
CULTURAL POLITICS
if these were a startling exception (perhaps the film, nor does it betray an “intention.”
this is what motivated Mepham [1994] to As Iain Sinclair (1998: 302) writes, “Keiller
write that “Keiller is a composer of epipha- gazes at London with autistic steadiness.”
nies”). What one encounters on the screen
finds confirmation in the author’s words. Absence of Human Subjects
In describing the choice of his subjects, Toward the end of London, Robinson
Keiller (2013: 11) writes: “I began to look at says that the capital is “too thinly spread,
places as potential photographs, or better obscured, too private for anyone to know,
271
still, film images. . . . This visual material its social life invisible.” The description
Daniele Rugo
that Mepham (1994) attributes to London Europe and the United States who operate
negatively should here be reread positively: outside of conventional narrative codes and
“The population of this hauntingly beauti- who show a deliberate focus on landscape.
ful but unreal world is silenced.” I would James Benning’s Four Corners (1998),
argue that this absence is not an attempt as well as his California Trilogy (El Valley
to see the unseen but rather to see what Centro [1999], Los [2001], Sogobi [2002])
is already in full view. While Burke (2006: and the recent RR (2007), Ruhr (2009), and
24) writes that “the desire to see under- Small Roads (2011), deploy similar strate-
lies Robinson’s investigations” and that gies. Peter Hutton’s Fog Line (1971) and
“Keiller’s camera frames that which usually Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s
goes unnoticed,” what Keiller turns our Trop tôt, trop tard (Too Early, Too Late)
attention to is not that the secrets of the (1981) are other important — albeit very dif-
landscape must “be gleaned from what ferent — instances of a tradition that insists
cannot be seen.” Everything can be seen, on the relevance of space for film and on
if only we knew how to look. In order to the ability of film to transform space.8
learn how to look, in order to see what The absence of human subjects in
could be, we need to empty the frame of Keiller’s films offers the vision of England
human subjects. Similar voiding strategies as a desert island, a landscape dominated
can be detected in urban science fiction, in by isolation. In Stoke Newington, north
both its literary and filmic forms.7 It is not London, the narrator of London (1994)
surprising, for instance, that Nigel Kneale’s says: “They had gone looking for the
science-fiction serial Quatermass II (1955) man of the crowd and had found instead
figures in the exhibition that accompanied shipwreck and the visualisation of Protes-
the release of Robinson in Ruins. One tant isolation.” It is worth noting how, for
could equally think of Brian Aldiss’s novel Deleuze, the island is always an act of rec-
Greybeard (1964). The book describes a reation. He writes that to live on an island
world emptying of humans where a small or to image an island is to dream “of pulling
group of middle-aged survivors, rendered away, of being already separate, far from
sterile by a nuclear accident, trails along any continent, of being lost and alone — or
the Thames Valley confronting the circum- it is dreaming of starting from scratch, rec-
CULTURAL POLITICS • 12:3 November 2016
stance that no younger generation will ever reating, beginning anew” (2004: 10). There
succeed them. is an inherent impossibility in thinking of
However, this device could also be an island as inhabited. In the same text,
seen as a response to Louis Aragon’s Deleuze writes “that England is populated
emphasis on film’s restriction of vision as will always come as a surprise; humans
a method to emphasize expression. In his can live on an island only by forgetting
first published essay, Aragon (2000: 52) what an island represents” (9). An island,
writes that the cinema essentially relies on Deleuze continues, represents first and
two properties: an ability “to endow with a foremost the origin, “radical and absolute”
poetic value that which does not yet pos- (10) — a perfect place for a spatial utopia.
sess it” and the power “to wilfully restrict The island remains deserted even if pop-
the field of view so as to intensify expres- ulated; the lack of human presence is, as
sion.” Aragon’s remarks, while seldom ref- it were, the island’s conscience. Deleuze
erenced explicitly, can be seen to resonate adds that “those people who come to the
272
with the work of a number of filmmakers in island indeed occupy and populate it; but
PATR ICK K EILLER’S SPATI A L FICTIONS
that must be cultivated: “The virtualities of that exists only between railway stations;
actual societies are seeking, so to speak, and only demands the passive acceptance
their incorporation and incarnation through of the view out of the window.” He then
knowledge and planning thought . . . if they continues: “Why was it that existence
do not find them, these possibilities go always implied that one should intervene
into decline and are bound to disappear.” in the world? Why could one not some-
In other words, unless certain possibilities how contrive to remain a spectator of the
that remain latent and only reveal them- picturesque bungling of others?” In Nor-
273
selves negatively in the built environment wood (1984), the audience learns that the
Daniele Rugo
narrator is actually dead and musing from Paul Scofield — in the third installment, his
beyond the grave. In The End (1986), the absence has become more radical; he is
narrator professes an excess of powerless- now an “influence.”
ness and admits to being unaware even of It is worth recalling how Lefebvre
his own (“assured”) inexistence. The voice pairs space and the everyday along diverg-
from The Clouds (1989) begins his story by ing lines. The two concepts are linked and
observing that his mother “lived as if in a yet estranged, because either the built
trance, a mere receiver of thoughts” and environment does not take the living into
concludes by describing himself as “weary account or because the everyday flattens
of life before even having entered upon it.” the built environment and foregoes the
Robinson himself — this most pene- stories it embeds (this particular dis
trating researcher, half Franz Kafka, half association has been extremely productive
Daniel Defoe, with the physiognomy of in the work of Nigel Thrift, Edward Soja,
Manfred Blank from Straub and Huillet’s Derek Gregory, and Edward Casey but
Klassenverhältnisse (Class Relations) also, in different ways, in Michel de Cer-
(1983) — never speaks with his own voice; teau, Guy Debord, and Marc Augé). The
he rather listens to his thoughts uttered absence of humans and of characters from
by his partner (see Keiller 2012: 6). While space shows that space is itself invisible
in London we learn from the narrator that from our life, its effects uncalculated, but
Robinson starts fearing for his well-being more importantly, it shows that space
as a consequence of John Major’s victory can be seen differently. If space can be
in the 1992 election (“There would be seen differently, in the tradition that Keiller
more drunks pissing in the street when inherits, then the everyday, life itself, can
he looked out of the window and more be seen differently. The utopia here is
children taking drugs on the stairs when precisely in thinking that space itself
he came home at night. His job would be must be changed before society can be
at risk and subjected to interference. His changed, and that once the fabric of space
income would decrease. He would drink is seen in a different way, then this
more and less well. He would be ill more change takes hold. Keiller (2009: 413)
often. He would die sooner”), in Robinson himself writes that attention to landscape
CULTURAL POLITICS • 12:3 November 2016
in Space his isolation has become com- functions “both as a critique of the world,
plete (“He seemed to know no-one in the and to demonstrate the possibility of creat-
town, and he had no telephone. His only ing a better one, even if only by improving
reassurance was the presence of eighteen the quality of the light.” Within the same
undeniably utopian Routemaster buses, text, Keiller declares that when he first
operated by enthusiasts in a deregulated started, landscape filmmaking “involved
market”) (Keiller 1999: 6). By the time his the pursuit of a transformation, radical or
demise has become the thematic under- otherwise, of everyday reality” (413).
pinning of a third film (Robinson in Ruins
[2010]), he has vanished. All that is left of Absence of Gestures
him is the result of his research: “19 film In this cinema of abeyance, one is then
cans and a notebook found in a derelict presented with a redoubling of absence.
caravan.” If in the first two films, Robin- Existing space can be observed only in
son controls the counterpoint of image absence of its inhabitants, and simultane-
274
and sound by proxy — through the voice of ously, the one who observes can do so
PATR ICK K EILLER’S SPATI A L FICTIONS
Figure 7 Still from Robinson in Ruins (2010) © Patrick Keiller. Courtesy of the artist
only by insisting on his own absence from absence of lived life. Absence is therefore
this space, by turning this absence into a result of the overlook Keiller adopts and
the point of view. Iain Sinclair (1998: 302) of its commitment to the (emancipatory,
writes that the experience of watching radical, utopian) ideas informing this prac-
these films “is like the very beginning of tice. His images produce a space without
cinema, when an audience was thrilled people because they try to produce a
by watching the representation of a train space that does not exist by redoubling
arriving at a station.” Keiller is therefore the absence within existing spaces:
producing the point of view as an overlook, these are not for us, they are not how we
both in terms of deliberately choosing to want them, they can’t be inhabited, they
frame overlooked space and in terms of don’t stop — even when inhabited — being
looking over and over again. A grammar deserted. Keiller’s films cultivate the ambi-
of overlooking can be traced in Keiller’s tion of “creating spatiality” (Alvarez 2015:
frequent cuts from wide shots to close-ups 37). The relation with the profilmic space
and extreme close-ups or in the biography is both faithful (the places are observed in
of the lichen from Robinson in Ruins. detail, gazed at through durational shots)
The overlook registers absence at two and completely imagined (through the
levels. An attention for space — a certain lens of what one could call a geography of
CULTURAL POLITICS
insistent look at it — demands the denial absence). The absence is both observed in
of human presence, as if individuals had the space and projected on it; as a conse-
to be removed from the space they use quence, one feels that this absence really
before this can be “read.” As Sinclair does exist and yet is completely “imag-
(1998: 302) writes, “Keiller is shooting ined” (produced by “the filmic image”).
surveillance films with a postcard camera.” The potential for transformation can be
At the same time, the imagined space occasioned not in the gathering of crowds
can be extracted from the actual only if an but in the solitude of a profane illumination.
275
the literary parallel would be Georges Perec’s Fisher, Mark. 2010. “English Pastoral: Robinson in
Species of Spaces and An Attempt at Exhausting Ruins.” Sight and Sound 20 (11): 22.
a Place in Paris. Gunning, Tom. 2016. “Before Documentary: Early
7. For more on the topic, see Sobchack 2004. Nonfiction Films and the ‘View’ Aesthetic.” In
8. For more on this, see Sitney 1993. For a The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory,
comprehensive list of filmmakers working on Criticism, edited by Jonathan Kahana, 52 – 6 3.
landscape in the United States, see MacDonald Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2001. Hegglund, Jon. 2013. “Patrick Keiller’s Ambient
Narratives: Screen Ecologies of the Built
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CULTURAL POLITICS
and Action of the International Situationist Lefebvre, Henri. 1997. “Lefebvre on the Situationists.”
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CULTURAL POLITICS • 12:3 November 2016
Daniele Rugo is senior lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences, Media, and
Communications at Brunel University London. He is the author of two books, Philosophy
and the Patience of Film (2016) and Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness (2013),
and his articles have appeared in Angelaki, Film- Philosophy, Asian Cinema, and the Journal
of Italian Cinema. He is the recipient of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Innovation
Grant for the project Following the Wires, which uses film to examine postconflict scenarios
in Lebanon. He’s currently editing (with Nikolaj Lübecker) a volume on the work of James
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Benning.