1992LONDON

COMMENT

A personal portrait of London, shot by experimental filmmaker Patrick Keiller over a period of twelve months in 1992, which saw the election of John Major as prime minister, renewed IRA bombings, the 'Black Wednesday' European monetary crisis and the "fall of the house of Windsor". The fictional (and unseen) tour guide, Robinson, takes a 'psycho-geographic' tour through the city, growing ever more disenchanted with early-nineties London

But 'London' is much more than a straight historical document, displaying explicitly its debt to Humphrey Jennings in both style and content. A series of tableaux held in frame for minutes at a time, Keiller allows the big city to revel in its everyday surreal side. But whilst Jennings revelled in the Wartime spirit and a Blakean romantic vision of an urban Jerusalem, Keiller finds a depressed London decaying under the watch of a Tory government who resent London for precisely the reasons Jennings and Keiller celebrate it.

Claiming to be an attempt at stirring the residents of London to revolt, the film repeatedly makes reference to 19th Century poets like Rimbaud and Baudelaire, attempting to reinterpret London's buildings as a lost 19th Century Utopia. That such poetic reference points are entirely predictable to anyone with a basic reading of Surrealist theory gives Keiller's film a wonderful sense of irony. And yet despite this, we do accept the urban sprawl as intensely beautiful, especially a breathtaking shot of a bombed-out tower in the City of London quietly flapping in the breeze

C'London' is documentary with fiction sprinkled over it to allow a new look at reality, but really it is much more than either documentary or fiction. The rigid structure of wide shot after wide shot, cold ambient sounds added in the edit, and Robinson's militant schedule, provides a contrast that reflects the unique living chaos of London, and showcases the city in a manner infused with Surreal conviction. That the relatively recent London of 1992 seems so alien and grey to us is a glowing tribute to the changes that have taken place in it since. But as well as being a document of the year, London is also of a documentary of a timeless urban state of mind.

Robinson's graphic lingering 'style' was common in the early nineties; series such as the 'Ato B of Motoring' and films like 'Lido' to mention just two. This flat, widescreen, observational style will eventually be seen as a 'movement', but at present it is out of favour as a rather archly intellectual interference with 'reality'

Keiller followed up this film with Robinson In Space (1997), a tour around England based on the writings of Daniel Defoe

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