London (UK 1994)

by Allan Fish

London (UK 1994 81m) DVD2

A testimony to Rimbaud

p Keith Griffiths d/w Patrick Keiller ph Patrick Keiller ed Larry Sider narrated by Paul Scofield

The style is a familiar one. Patrick Keiller’s equal part billet doux and j’accuse to the capital introduced us to the fictional alter ego of Robinson, or at least did so by proxy. Keiller would make more films about Robinson, but the first remains easily the most poignant.

A narrator, a weary traveller, working as a seaman on a cruise ship, docks back in London on the request of his old friend, cohabitee and lover Robinson, whose urgent summons has our traveller guessing at what is troubling him. He hasn’t seen Robinson for seven years when he arrives in January 1992, and finds him in despondent mood, hoping for a change of government in the forthcoming General Election, but fearing the worst. We are told that Robinson lives meagrely, not because he has to, but because he prefers it that way, eking out an existence on the money he earns lecturing in art and architecture at the University of Barking.

What follows is a document of the expeditions, as they are termed, and events of 1992 in London, as seen through the eyes of a melancholy narrator, who feels he’s there to chronicle the upcoming months in Robinson’s life, acting as Plato to his Socrates, Boswell to his Johnson, Watson to his Holmes, Virgil to his Dante. Yet he’s not only delivering Robinson’s death sentence for London but his own, referring to “dirty old Blighty; under-educated, economically backward, bizarre, a catalogue of modern miseries.” It would be easy to dismiss these as the rants of a grouchy old man, but there’s a real sense of the elegy to Keiller’s film, a sense of something passing. History is always there on hand in London, and ‘Robinson and I’, as it might have been called, takes time to visit the site of the execution of Charles I outside Banqueting House, as well as visiting landmarks only notable for being places where writers, artists and philosophers once stayed when in London, stopping off occasionally to engage in something altogether English, like a session’s play in a county championship game at The Oval, with the now gone gas tower casting its shadow over the ground. Then there are remembrances of the Blitz, either via recollections of Humphrey Jennings documentaries with the then Queen listening to a Myra Hess concert with Kenneth Clark, or via the erecting of a statue to Bomber Harris, and our commentator remarks on the Queen Mother being heckled at the ceremony. No monarchist, then, but that was taken for granted, for we’re told early on that Robinson is a passionate believer in constitutional reform, and mourns the failure of the 1649 revolution and how it still casts a shadow on the imperialism that led to the troubles in Northern Ireland. And while on the subject let us not forget that this was documenting the height of the IRA mainland bombing campaign.

There are so many influences here, but a special doff of the hat must be given in the direction of Peter Greenaway, Chris Marker and, especially, Derek Jarman, who not only shared the political views of our protagonists but their homosexuality, and who sadly died in the period between the film’s shooting and premiere. The London of the Big Tour buses is not to be found. This is a hidden London, a personal view, one which Peter Ackroyd would recognise; predictions of decay, passing the haunts of the old Fleet Street hacks, the one-time Bedlam hospital site, the bridges of the upper Thames, the old Roman city, and the death notice read out on the night of John Major’s victory, declaring Britain a one party state. It seems like a different world now, but as I write it’s 2015, Jeremy Corbyn has been elected Labour leader and Britain seems more a one party state now that it ever did in 1992. Tony Blair and New Labour seem like an interregnum, a rose mirage over an otherwise sea of blue conservatism. To these eyes, it seems to be more relevant than ever, but even for those who disagree with Keiller’s political points, it can be treasured purely for the towering command of its narrator, Paul Scofield, himself a staunch Labour man, which gives it a poetry beyond its mere visual juxtaposition.
London

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