“London is All Waste”: Rubbish in Patrick Keiller’s Robinson Films

Introduction

Mary Douglas’s classic study Purity and Danger states that “Whenever a strict pattern of purity is imposed on our lives it is either highly uncomfortable or it leads into contradiction if closely followed, or it leads to hypocrisy. That which is negated is not thereby removed” (163). This article discusses two films that focus on things that have been negated but not removed. London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997), written and directed by Patrick Keiller, deal with problems of negation, exclusion, obscuring, discarding, and persistence. To highlight the importance of these themes and processes I will give a brief discussion of the films’ content and style.

London and Robinson in Space are a complementary pair of fictionalized documentaries featuring two characters named Robinson and “the Narrator.” Each film takes the form of a travelogue. In the first, Robinson, a part-time employee of the (fictional) University of Barking, determines to investigate the problem of London, and enlists the Narrator to be “the witness and chronicler of these explorations in what he thought might be the last months of his life.” They embark on a series of expeditions beginning with a pilgrimage to the sources of English Romanticism, and ending with a disillusioned Robinson declaring London to be “the first metropolis to disappear.” The second film begins when Robinson, now teaching English in a Reading language school, receives a commission from “a well-known international advertising agency […] to undertake a peripatetic study of the problem of England.”² The narrative unfolds similarly to London, as the pair roam across the landscape, tracing its past and present uses, noting associations with writers, scientists and artists, and keeping a keen eye on how each of the sites they visit functions within the matrix of global economics and industry. As in the previous film, Robinson becomes progressively more disturbed by his findings, and by the end it is he, rather than his subject, who seems to disappear. “I cannot tell you where Robinson finally found his utopia” says the Narrator at the film’s conclusion (R, 203).

The films’ characteristic shot is an “insistent stare,” “both fractured and static,”³ which mixes an unflinching, critical gaze with a lingering glance, “concerned with framing and putting lines round reality” (R, 231). Often its focus is on things that do not usually occupy the center of frame in mainstream cinema: manhole covers, road signs, a discarded drinking glass, vacant and working industrial sites—objects that tend to be overlooked, places that can be found “at the ends of roads” (R, 233). I shall argue here that the films’ fascination with routinely unseen objects and places forms part of an exploratory critique of the subjectivities and forms of consciousness available to the human subjects who inhabit a post-revolutionary world. In a 2007 lecture with the subtitle “Was life better before the Revolution?,” Keiller playfully offers 1968 as the approximate date of a revolution in which modernity gave way to postmodernity and neo-liberalism, an equivalent to the widely-theorized revolutionary onset of modernity circa 1910. Both such revolutions, Keiller suggests, “smashed” the world as it was and left a trail of debris in their wake. London and Robinson in Space anticipate this theme by (re)constructing English history as a continuum of conservative revolutions successively militating against the “continuous revolution” whose absence makes art both necessary and difficult.⁴ One of the most important materials used to signify the destructive effect of such counterrevolutions, and to conduct the investigation into their aftermath, is rubbish, which I am using here to denote a category comprising not only discarded objects but also wasted spaces and damaged, displaced persons. In these films rubbish both acts as the residue of this destructive order and suggests how a positive, reconstructive response to that order might begin to pick up the pieces. This dual function emerges in a conversation between Keiller and Patrick Wright:

PW: [T]here’s Robinson, looking for Rimbaud at the beginning, and digging up all sorts of cultural references as he goes. Is history just disconnected debris...