Moving History - a guide to UK film and television archives in the public sector

Case Study - Patrick Keiller

Since the early 1980s, Patrick Keiller has made a series of films depicting urban and other landscapes. More recently, he has pursued questions and ideas about experience of urban space during the twentieth century in a three year AHRB/C-supported research project, The City of the Future, based at the Royal College of Art in London. Exploring archive film, especially from the turn of the twentieth century, this project aimed to develop a critique of present-day and possible future spatial experience. Its artefacts included a database listing selected footage, a single screen work with fictional narrative and a navigable compilation of archive film which has been exhibited in different forms in galleries and other contexts, most recently as a 5-screen installation at the BFI Southbank Gallery in London (23 Nov 07 - 3 Feb 08).

The project followed Keiller's film The Dilapidated Dwelling (78mins, 2000), 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 and since, 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 being replaced at a rate so low 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 proposal New Babylon, seen in a Dutch television film of 1962.

In early footage of more everyday subjects, there appeared a striking contrast between the familiarity of so many of the spaces seen and our distance from the society that then inhabited them. This observation led to the proposal for The City of the Future. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Keiller argued, 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 was a Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art until January 2011, having embarked on another AHRC-supported project The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image (see http://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com ) in 2007.

A database listing films and including viewing notes produced as part of the research for The City of the Future is available to download from:
http://www.vads.ahds.ac.uk/resources/CF.html

Selected links and publications

www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/nov/10/2

www.bfi.org.uk/whatson/bfi_southbank/exhibitions/previous_exhibitions/patrick_keiller_the_city_of_the_future

www.frieze.com/issue/review/patrick_keiller/

www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/may/21/2

www.bftv.ac.uk/newslet/0304p3.htm

www.frieze.com/issue/article/london_calling/

'Imaging' in Restless Cities, edited by Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart (London, New York: Verso, 2010), pp.139-154.

'Urban Space and Early Film’ in Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, edited by Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson (London, New York: Wallflower, 2008), pp. 29-39.

‘Phantom Rides: The Railway and Early Film’ in The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble, edited by Matthew Beaumont and Michael Freeman (Oxford etc: Peter Lang, 2007), pp.69-84.

‘Film as Spatial Critique’ in Critical Architecture, edited by Mark Dorrian, Murray Fraser, Jonathan Hill and Jane Rendell (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), pp.115-123.

'The City of the Future' in Picture Perfect: Landscape, Place and Travel in British Cinema before 1930, edited by Laraine Porter and Bryony Dixon (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), pp.104-112.

'Tram Rides and other Virtual Landscapes' in The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon: Edwardian Britain in Film, eds. Simon Popple, Patrick Russell, Vanessa Toulmin (London: BFI, 2004), pp.191-200.

‘The City of the Future’ in City Vol 7 No 3 (November 2003), pp.376-386.

‘London Calling’, interview in Frieze 78 (October 2003), pp78-81.

The Robinson Institute, an eBook in the series Species of Spaces for www.diffusion.org.uk, 2002.

‘Popular Science’ in the catalogue Landscape, edited by Ann Gallagher (London: British Council, 2000), pp. 60-67, reprinted in Informal Architectures: Space and Contemporary Culture, edited by Anthony Kiendl (London: Black Dog, 2008), pp. 92-97.

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