Publications Index | Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’s Internet Archive
Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 177 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 177, July/August 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
London
Dir: Patrick Keiller
The never seen narrator of this film and his awkward ex-lover, Robinson, plan three pilgrimages to London’s romantic past, only to discover the present butting in. The modern city soon becomes the film’s real content, and its examination involves an amusing assault on the Tory government and royal family which is all the more biting for being delivered in precise, deadpan prose.
Returning to London after seven years at sea, the narrator is surprised how Londoners accept the city’s curious routines – its bombs, its beggars, its inequality – with such a matter of fact, unquestioning shrug.
His camera works to defamiliarise the city. It dwells on commonplace things until they seem strangely alien. The use of shot and sound reverse expectations: a polluted river becomes beautiful; the celebration of an election victory an eerie dumbshow.
The film’s juxtaposition of images again undermines received wisdoms. The husk of a City building bombed by the IRA is filmed, the wind blowing its blinds in delicate patterns. The film then shows the rubble of a building being knocked down, described as the ‘wreckage’ of Tory policy.
The narrator is indignant that a tunnel under the Thames between MI5 and MI6 buildings will cost £250 million. While he notes its absurdity we see a sign for a Magritte exhibition and then a green hedge hatted by the Canary Wharf building, a frame which, on reflection, is designed like that painter’s work.
As well as this attack on the government there is a second and deeper theme. Robinson’s (interrupted) research into the past is motivated by a desire for community – an asset broken up with each bend of the capitalist economy. By a number of funny montages we realise that this past cannot be retrieved.
What hope there is for the city clearly only begins when the Tories are dispatched, and the 1992 miners’ marches are welcomed. However, walking at the back of the march the pair only arrive in an empty Hyde Park hours after the rally has finished: a sign both of its great size, but also a symbol for its feared absence. The film draws no conclusions here.
This is an ingenious and sensitive piece of work: highly recommended.
Socialist Review Index | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 9 May 2017