Patrick Keiller: interview

Patrick Keiller offered a poetic journey through our city in his docu-essay, ’London‘, in 1994. Now he‘s curated an exhibition that uses footage of cities at the beginning of the last century to ask where we‘ve come from and where we‘re heading…

A few years ago, I had the idea that if one looked carefully at films from the past, they might reveal something about the present and also, perhaps, the future.

For the narration of ‘London’ (1994), I had written, ‘Robinson believed that, if he looked at it hard enough, he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events, and in this way he hoped to see into the future.’ The line was delivered over an image of the moving surface of the Thames.

The idea about old films was similar, and was suggested by a perceived similarity between the illusory movement of the ‘dancing’ grain of black-and-white films and descriptions of the evolving universe, by Lucretius and others, as the continual movement and collision of tiny particles.

A project followed, and the most recent result is an exhibition, ‘The City of the Future’, a ‘navigable’ assembly of 68 films from 1896 to 1909, many of them street scenes and ‘phantom rides’: views from moving trains, boats, electric trams and other vehicles. These are arranged on a network of maps and displayed on five screens suspended in the BFI’s gallery.

Visitors can wander though this landscape, both by moving about the gallery and by exploring the displays on each screen. The project’s name derives partly from the observation that so much of the city fabric visible in the films survives today: the cities in which we live are not like the twenty-first-century cities as imagined at the turn of the twentieth century, so that one wonders what happened to the idea of a ‘better’ future? As Winston Smith reads in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’: ‘In the early twentieth century, the vision of…a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete – was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person.’ In the ‘advanced’ economies, this vision had faded by the 1970s; gentrification became more familiar.

The decade of early cinema (1895-1905) was one of rapid technological change, migration, imperialist adventures, and fears of catastrophe (shipwreck, earthquake, war). It was part of a period of globalisation that began around 1880 and culminated in the outbreak of the First World War. It suggests comparisons with our own time, visible and otherwise. Trafalgar Square, for example, since its recent partial pedestrianisation, looks more like it did in 1911 than it used to. Trams, bicycles and public sculpture (until recently beyond critical credibility) have all returned to UK cities. The late nineteenth-century ‘urban Gothic’ of Stevenson, Wilde and Stoker is evoked in the London Gothic of writers such as Iain Sinclair. One can search the films of c.1900 for traces of Dracula, Professor Moriarty, or the characters of Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’, but I imagine that such figures are just as likely to be found in present-day London, where armour-plated Rolls-Royces glide in and out of corporate gateways, and some measures of inequality approach those of the 1930s. With recent rises in the price of oil and other commodities, the films have even begun to resemble sci-fi.

Early films are generally between about one and three minutes long, and consist of one or very few takes. They are extraordinary: they offer extensive views of the urban landscapes of their time, more so than later films.

Since the 1960s, the forms of early film have returned in a variety of contexts: from post-Warhol artists’ and gallery film, to what used to be known as ‘art’ cinema, mostly outside the mainstream. At the same time, since the publication of Jane Jacobs’ ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’ in 1961, architects and others have attempted to revive the spaces of the early twentieth-century city, usually, again, in opposition to the imperatives of global capital.

By re-presenting these films as an exhibition, I hope to recover their modernity and raise some questions about the predicament of present-day technological societies.

‘The City of the Future’ will be at the BFI Southbank Gallery from Nov 23 to Feb 3.