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Case Study - Heather Norris Nicholson Academic Projects and Research Work Using The Archives
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Case Study - Patrick KeillerSince the early 1980s, Patrick Keiller has made a series of films involving urban and other landscapes. His current research explores questions and ideas about the evolution of experience of urban space during the twentieth century in a three year AHRB-supported project based at the Royal College of Art in London. With archive film, especially that from the early years of the twentieth century, the project will suggest a critique of present-day and possible future spatial experience. Its artefacts are to include a database of selected footage, compilations of archive film for gallery exhibition, and a single screen work, perhaps with fictional narration. The project follows Keiller's most recent completed film 'The Dilapidated Dwelling', a documentary about the predicament of the house and 'housing' in the developed world. The starting point for this was the observation that, despite the best efforts of architects, engineers and others throughout the twentieth century, houses and other dwellings have proved largely resistant to many of the modernisations and cost reductions that characterised the development of consumer economies during the twentieth century. In the UK, house-building is now at a historical low, and existing dwellings are replaced so rarely as to imply that they will have to last for several thousand years. In previous films, Keiller had documented aspects of the present-day landscape with his own footage, but here the longevity of the subject suggested including archive film. Many of the archive extracts in 'The Dilapidated Dwelling' are not so much records of spaces of the past, but of past predictions or proposals for the spaces of our present. These include Buckminster Fuller's presentation of his 'Dymaxion' house of 1927, and Constant Nieuwenhuys's radical New Babylon proposal, as seen in a Dutch television film of 1962. Viewing footage of more everyday subjects, Keiller noticed a contrast between the familiarity of so many of the spaces seen and our distance from the lives of those who then inhabited them. The proposal for the present project was developed from these observations over several years. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, he argues, we experience many new and unanticipated phenomena, but we do so, often, in spaces that have changed in only relatively subtle ways during the last 100 years. Patrick Keiller is an AHRB Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the Royal College of Art, a partner institution in the AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies. A database of films and viewing notes produced as part of the research for the project is available to download from: http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/collections/CF.html Selected filmography and related publications
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