Actividades: secuenciación y temporalización

I interviewed Patrick Keiller on Friday 12^th December 2008 the Royal College of Art where he is currently a research fellow. I had seen both London (Keiller 1994) and Robinson in Space (Keiller 1997) a number of times and recognised their importance for my own project. More recently I had heard Keiller speak about his video installation project Londrés-Bombay (2006) and had seen his DVD installation constructed from archive films in conjunction with the BFI – City of the Future (Keiller 2007). Both of these projects resonated with my thoughts about archive and technology as far as the essay film is concerned. The questions I asked were similar to those I asked ten Brink, but more focused around Keiller’s background in architecture and how that had led to making multiscreen installation work for galleries. For all the connections I thought were apparent, Keiller, as many practitioners seem to be when faced by the prospect of being boxed into any one category, seemed hesitant to speak directly about what I considered to be the rather obvious essayistic nature of his practice:

Well, I wasn’t really aware of it until people started telling me that I was in it, which isn’t as though that I wasn’t aware of the films. But I wasn’t aware that it was an established term, and it possibly wasn’t as established then as it is now…I hadn’t come across the notion that, for instance, ‘Sans Soleil’ might be an essay film, a sort of film, but I don’t mind. I think I would take exception to the term city symphony, but an essay film, it sounds a bit... there is a slight worry about it, which is that one has somehow committed one’s self to a genre, which I wouldn’t like to think that I’d done, mainly because one does what one can. And the idea that you’ve actually chosen […] I think that’s the thing that’s objectionable about it. The idea that one has chosen the path that is called the essay film, I would find that a bit awkward (Keiller 2008).

We spoke at length about the process of making his individual films and projects, his thoughts on subject material, the background to his practice and touched on his observations on the relationship between filmmaking and art and ideas of database cinema in relation to his work.

Keiller’s training as an architect remains a central motif in his filmmaking. He began making films through developing a relationship between slide material and writing narratives based firstly on the slide sequences and eventually moving image. Ideas of collecting and the relationships to early surrealism were important foundations to his later practice: ‘my slides were a bit odd. Well, they weren’t odd but they were not the usual sort. They were not art. They were more things for an artist to collect. And I discovered this connection or this similarity with what members of the early

surrealist group had been doing in Paris’ (Keiller 2008). He doesn’t describe his early collections of photographs as an archive, but rather a collection – interestingly, for Keiller an archive was

specifically something that was old: ‘it wasn’t a typology; it was just a collection. It wasn’t really an archive because it wasn’t old, but it was a collection, but it was presented with captions’ (Keiller 2008).

The search for a subject and an experimental approach to finding the subject through the work, as well as through the technologies used to make the work are common threads Keiller has with ten Brink. As Keiller writes of his early forays into filmmaking ‘ […] by that time I had assembled some brief narration with the still, with slides made from black and white negatives [...] quite by chance really I discovered a subject ‘(Keiller 2008). The subject in question was an old railway bridge, seen from a train window and subsequently visually investigated by Keiller. Throughout this process, Keiller brought an architect’s eye to the limits of the film frame, commenting that ‘the other problem about the cine camera was that not only could you not see anything but even what you could see was only a minute fragment of what was around you, so it was completely un-architectural’ (Keiller 2008). Further he commented that ‘the films came about from thinking, well, what can I do with this stuff? So there were these, let’s call them, takes of more or less architectural material. The question then arose, well, what are you going to do with it?’ (Keiller 2008). What Keiller discovered through his early films was that ‘nobody knows how to make an architectural documentary for cinema. That was quite obvious. It was an attempt to find out I suppose’ (Keiller 2008).

The attempt of the essay, the evolution of a subject matter and a particular use and view of technology in the uncovering of these aspects seem yet again linked. It wasn’t until Keiller began making the installations that the problems of spatialisation seemed to be, if not solved, then

certainly placed on a more useful trajectory. Speaking of City of the Future (2007) Keiller commented

‘the main thing was the spacialisation of this, which was a way out of making films. The great thing was about that, but that was why it was a real discovery, because it solved the problem. You don’t have to do it anymore. You don’t have to make films anymore’ (Keiller 2008).

City of the Future (2007) is a multi-screen video installation with a DVD navigational interface through which visitors can select journeys around various towns and cities in the UK and a limited number of cities around the world, using old film material sourced from the BFI. The project was made in partnership with the BFI who gave Keiller access to the film material. I asked Keiller about the source material:

They’re early films. No one’s forgotten about them. They weren’t just in the archives; they were quite well known and many of them were quite frequently screened. And they were not footage either, which is what I started out looking for, but there isn’t really much footage as such in the film archives. They throw it away. Nearly everything that I’ve come across in film archives is films, finished films (Keiller, 2008).

It was interesting to me that for Keiller’s experience demonstrating that from an archival perspective only whole films were kept; the orphan material – the fragments were thrown away. I asked him about whether he saw City of the Future as a kind of database film and his thoughts about

reconstructing films from fragments. Keiller suggested a working method that was intuitively rule-based and located within the traditions of archival research:

So going back to the database; that was partly generated by a database because there was an enormous amount of catalogue research that threw up the rather obvious conclusion that the only films that were going to be of any use in making anything were these early ones, which looked like footage even though they weren’t. Everything else had already been ruined by the time it got made. I wasn’t going to take Humphrey Jennings’ films to bits. I wasn't going to take even colonial, step-by-step filmmaking to bits. I wasn’t going to take run of the mill films to bits, in the way that one wouldn’t do that, as an archive researcher (Keiller 2008).

In Keiller’s practice, ‘database cinema’ is inscribed in the research phase of his projects, which cross between linear films to installations. His early attempts to make an architectural documentary now find resonance in larger scale works such as Londres-Bombay and City of the Future, suggesting that spatialising the image can only be solved by moving outside of the conventions of linear screen narrative, but that this brings with it a number of other problems, one of which is the commercial viability of projects which are difficult to exploit financially as ‘products’.

4.2.3 Chris Petit: Interrogating the image

I emailed Chris Petit over the winter of 2009 / 10. Having worked as a production manager on Petit’s film Unrequited Love (2006) I was interested to follow up on what seemed to be Petit’s natural inclinations toward interrogating the image. Writing books, reviews and criticism, I was interested in Petit’s thoughts about the relationship between text and image. Unrequited Love was a film utilising domestic film technologies, as well as text and images from mobile phones. Technological

experimentation has been a significant part of his practice since abandoning mainstream moving image practice.

Petit works between writing and filmmaking and his working practice seems to embody the type of

‘cine writing’ envisaged by Astruc. I asked him about the relationship between text, moving image and audio and whether his style of writing is somehow reflected in the way he works with moving image:

I think that one of the developments of the internet is that image and word are becoming more interchangeable if not synonymous. The downsizing of equipment means it is possible to be more contemplative and less premeditated as a filmmaker, making it a process that can be more like writing, in that you find out what it is that you are doing through the process of doing it. That said, TV and film executives are very wary of this method, wanting to know exactly what they are going to see from the first meeting. On a wider scale, some of the novels I have written can be read as “prose films” (eg Robinson and The Hard Shoulder).

I followed on by asking what kinds of qualities he looked for in an image and in his opinion what makes an image different from sound or writing in the way that it 'tells a story'? Petit stated that for him:

Much of it is unquestioning and more a matter of instinct than theory or practice. Dealing in images, for me anyway, comes down to ways of looking. Film is the art of seeing, Wim Wenders once said. So any manipulation of image is an extension of that argument: how do we make ourselves “see” as opposed to just looking. So the judgement is when to interfere with an image and when to leave it alone. Of the three you mentioned, I think sound is the most imaginative medium because the listener fills in the gaps, and I think that partly explains why it has always interested me in relation to film. A film like Radio On could be said to be sound led and so can the work done with Bruce Gilbert (The Carfax Fragment, Radio On [remix]) and with AGF in Content.