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Legend: Red (1st expedition), Green (2nd expedition) and Blue (3rd expedition)

These expeditions usually take place in the southern and western suburbs of the city. The first one, marked with a red line in Map 5.1, begins with a pilgrimage to Horace Walpole’s house in Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, southwest of London –the place where he wrote The Castle of Otranto (1764)– after which the characters return to Vauxhall through Richmond, Mortlake, Hammersmith and Battersea. The second expedition, represented by a green line in the map, also uses literary references as points of departure and arrival: this time, the characters go to Clapham North, again in the southwest, where Apollinaire was once in search of a former lover, and then head north through Stockwell, Oval, Elephant and Castle, London Bridge, the City, Spitalfields and Shoreditch, to reach Stoke Newington, where they intend to visit Edgar Allan Poe’s school but only find the house where Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe (1719).The literary references decrease in the third dérive –the blue line in the map– in which the characters track the River Brent downstream from Wembley to Brentford. Their original purpose was to look for contemporary cultural practices in the western suburbs of the city, but once there, they realise that the growing presence of non-places does not seem to inspire any kind of artistic or literary activity.

None of these expeditions is linear in time and space, because the characters continuously stop to eat in modern supermarkets or sleep in traditional inns. Sometimes, they even return home to rest or attend public events before taking up their itinerary again. These interrupted dérives are, essentially, the backbone of Robinson’s research, his fieldwork, through which Keiller gradually addresses a series of recurrent topics: nostalgia for a future that will never happen, the perception of London as a historical palimpsest, and the slow vanishing of its identity due to its social and administrative fragmentation. Considering the political climate of the time, it is not surprising that Robinson arrives at a negative conclusion at the end of the film:

For Londoners, London is obscured. Too thinly spread, too private for anyone to know. Its social life invisible, its government abolished. Its institutions at the discretion of either monarchy or state. Or the City, where at the historic centre there is nothing but a civic void which fills and empties daily with armies of clerks and dealers, mostly citizens of other towns. The true identity of London (…) is in its absence. As a city, it no longer exists. In this alone, it is truly modern: London was the first metropolis to disappear.

This final remark suggests that absence is the key concept to explain the problem of London. Merlin Coverley has associated it with the lack of effective government, visible economic output, public space, community and even society (2010: 133), while Ian Robinson –the scholar, not the character– has interpreted it as the decline of the city as “a place of encounter, sociability, creativity, unpredictability and history” (2010: 123). Even Koolhaas and Mau agreed with this interpretation when they wrote that “London –its only identity a lack of clear identity– is perpetually becoming even less London, more open, less static” (1995: 1248). In Keiller’s documentary, this absence is more evident in the non-places inherited from Thatcherism, such as financial skyscrapers, shopping centres, new road schemas or construction sites, a set of transitory spaces in which “the sociality of the collective”, according to Ian Robinson, “is reduced to suspicion and surveillance” (2010: 118). Such perception is reinforced by Keiller’s way of framing symbolic landmarks, like One Canada Square, which is depicted as a disturbing sentinel that controls and masters the city from a position of superiority [Image 5.13]. This building and its surrounding area are a prime example of what Marie-Christine Boyer has called ‘city tableaux’: a simulated cityscape that combines the fantastic with the real to compensate the everyday failures of the city (1992: 200). “These tableaux”, according to Boyer, “are the true non-places, hollowed

out urban remnants, without connection to the rest of the city or the past, waiting to be filled with contemporary fantasies, colonized by wishful projections, and turned into spectacles of consumption” (1992: 191). One Canada Square is arguably Robinson’s nemesis, and not only because it has been built for voyeurs instead of for walkers, but above all because it symbolises the contempt for and oblivion of the genius loci.

Image 5.13: London, One Canada Square

Faced with the shallowness of city tableaux, psychogeography allows both characters and audience to rebuild an imaginary city from the material remains of all those futures that never came true. In fact, Robinson’s interest in English writers of the eighteen century and the French poets who followed Baudelaire was actually, according to the narrator, “an attempt to rebuild the city as if the 19th century had never

happened”. This agenda accounts for his nostalgia for the modernist approach to city

planning associated with the former London City Council (LCC), the first metropolitan authority to be directly elected.17 Robinson praises its legacy twice in the film, first as he passes through Elephant and Castle and then when he stops at Arnold Circus, in Shoreditch, to contemplate the Boundary Estate for hours. Over a beautiful image of

17 _{The London City Council was created in 1889 and later replaced by the Greater London Council in} 1965. Previously, the main instrument of London-wide government was the Metropolitan Board of Works, which was an appointed rather than elected body.

two children playing in the street, the Narrator explains that this place is a fragment of a golden age or a utopia to Robinson, because it is one of the earliest social housing schemes built by the LCC [Image 5.14]. Keiller holds the shot for a few seconds, turning it into a tribute to the city that could have been if the modernist approach to city planning had prevailed on the suburban approach. This nostalgia insists on the failure of London as a modernist city, a discourse that Paul Dave has related to Perry Anderson’s theses on the development of English capitalism:

The examination of public space in London (…) is influenced by the idea that the energies of the bourgeoisie have historically been contained by an aristocratic hegemony. These energies conventionally include the values of modern urbanism that the narrator remarks are absent in London, places are “either void or the stage sets for spectacles of nineteenth century reaction endlessly re-enacted for television”. Examples provided of this archaic ‘heritage’ spectacle in the film, such as the Lord Mayor’s and Trooping the Colour, are linked to the ancien régime – here Corporation of London and the Monarchy respectively. For Perry Anderson, (…) the historical explanation for the perceived failings of the national culture lies in the fact that the English Revolution was the “least pure bourgeois revolution of any European country” (1992: 17). In other words, because the aristocracy was not ultimately displaced the revolution failed to modernise the social structure and the political system (2000: 342).

In the 1980s, Thatcherism replaced the last attempts at modernity with a post- modern approach to city planning that hid urban decay behind the production of city

tableaux. Since then, most of the heritage spectacles mentioned by Dave have taken

place in the historical, political and financial centre of London, between Westminster and the City, an area that only appears in the journalist sequences of the film. Meanwhile, the psychogeographical dèrives explore the suburban working-class neighbourhoods in which most of the population lives, such as Vauxhall, Brixton, Clapham, Shoreditch, Notting Hill or Wembley. Many of these places are located south of the Thames, a traditionally underrepresented area in mainstream cinema that Keiller depicts as the new battleground between citizenship and capital.

Both the journalistic and psychogeographical expeditions share the same concern with the negative effects of the government’s measures on the social and urban fabric, regardless of their scale: Robinson is thus worried about the worsening living conditions in the whole city, but most especially in his own neighbourhood, Vauxhall. The best example of how Keiller uses Robinson’s individual situation to address the collective dimension is the long list of exaggerated social and personal problems that the Narrator enumerates over images of the celebration of the fourth consecutive Conservative victory in Downing Street [Image 5.15]:

Robinson began to consider what the result would mean for him. His flat would continue to deteriorate, and its rent increase. He would be intimidated by vandalism and petty crime. The bus service would get worse. There would be more traffic and noise pollution and an increased risk of getting knocked down crossing the road. There would be more drunks pissing in the street when he looked out of the window and more children taking drugs on the stairs when he came home at night. His job would be at risk and subjected to interference. His income would decrease. He would drink more and less well. He would be ill more often. He would die sooner.

For the old, or anyone with children, it would be much worse. For London as a whole, there would now be no new elected metropolitan authority. The public transport system would degenerate into chaos as it was deregulated and privatised. There would be more road schemes. Hospitals would close. As the social security system was dismantled there would be increased homelessness and crime with the police more often carrying guns. The population would continue to decline as those who could moved away and employers followed.

This passage repeats the same topics in its two parts: problems with the transportation system, social security, public safety and the job market that may jeopardise the very survival of the city and its residents. Considering that the filmmaker has explained that he wanted to turn Robinson’s deprivation into a sort of shared experience (in Dave 2006: 135), it could be said that this character embodies the experience of all the people left behind by Thatcherism. This is the reason why the film does not end with Robinson’s final remarks but with the characters’ return to Vauxhall, where the last sequence documents the visible consequences of Conservative anti-urban policies: after a spate of vandalism caused by a group of teenagers, most business, beginning with the Portuguese driving school that is right in front of Robinson’s house, had to protect their shop windows with roller shutters [Image 5.16]. Moreover, the Narrator says that Robinson’s street had just been designated a red route, a device intended to speed the flow of commuters from the suburbs to the centre. These details confirm some of Robinson’s predictions –those referred to the increase of traffic and the decrease of public safety– and close the film in an everyday environment, insisting on the subjective perception of London as a lived place.

Contrary to what may seem, the subjectivity at stake here is not individual but collective: it is a set of historical and everyday experiences that emerges from the cityscape itself as a response to the power discourse. Hence Robinson does not stand for Keiller, but rather Keiller makes up Robinson as a way of taking the pulse of public opinion at different turning points, from the last years of Tory rule in London and

Robinson in Space to the outbreak of the financial crisis in Robinson in Ruins.

Consequently, in London the filmmaker attempts to counteract the city’s lack of identity with a psychogeographical report that links past and present, looking for the spirit of time –the zeitgeist– in the spirit of place –the genius loci.

Image 5.16: London, roller shutters in Vauxhall

The Empty Centre: Urban Borders After the Fall of the Wall

Hito Steyerl is a Japanese-German video artist who understands documentary filmmaking as an extension of her artistic practice. She herself has theorised the recent interplay between documentary strategies and contemporary art as follows:

Since the early 1990s there has been a succession of various waves of an adaptation of documentary techniques in art, which have also been integrated in the mainstream with documenta X and XI.18 _{Especially in the context of institution-critical practices, a revival} of forms arose in the 1990s, which were developed primarily in the 1970s and based on practices such as research and journalistic techniques. At the same time, although there has

18 _{documenta –with lower case d– is one of the world’s most important exhibitions of contemporary art,} which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. In this excerpt, Steyerl refers to its 1997 and 2002 editions. Obviously, this footnote did not appear in the original text.

so far been little theoretical treatment of it, a zone emerged of an overlapping of video art, cinema, reportage, photo essay and other forms, in which various existing genres and formats intersect and constantly change their stylistic devices in the form of audiovisual, film, video and installation works. Didactic and realistic works alternate with reflexive documentary productions, with visual machines, which reflect on the organization of documents and organize the subjectivities thus produced (2010: 416).

A prime example of this tendency would be Steyerl’s film Die leere Mitte (The Empty

Centre, 1998), which documents the changing cityscape of Berlin after the fall of the

Wall. This work deals with the experience of the border inside the city itself, paying particular attention to the external and internal boundaries that still separated Berliners in the 1990s. The title refers to the area where the Wall stood, the ‘death strip’, a no man’s land located right in its former political centre. There, Steyerl filmed the redevelopment of symbolic places and landmarks in which several layers of historical meaning overlap one another. Postdamer Platz, for example, recalls the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Cold War and even the future, four periods that are respectively related to the Haus Vaterland,19 _{the New Reich Chancellery, the Wall and the Daimler complex. All these}

buildings, with the sole exception of the last one, have currently disappeared, which suggests that the urban surface of Berlin has become a palimpsest where “borders and

boundaries shift constantly”, as Steyerl says in the commentary.

This idea inspired the main formal strategy of the film, the visual palimpsest, a technique consisting in combining two images taken from the same camera position through a slow dissolve, in which the first image –filmed in 1990, when the Wall still stood– fades out while the second one –filmed in 1997, when the Wall had already been demolished– simultaneously fades in [Images 5.17 & 5.18]. As the frame remains the same, both images overlap for a few seconds before revealing the most evident changes in the cityscape, beginning with the significant replacement of the wall woodpeckers by construction workers in the 1997 footage. This technique has currently become a common transition in digital cinema, but Steyerl pioneered its analogical form by filming The Empty Centre in 16 mm. Before this documentary, William Raban had already achieved a similar effect in Thames Film when comparing his boatscape with old representations of the London waterfront, although he related these images by

19 _{This building housed a 2,500-seat café, a 1,400-seat movie theatre, a large ballroom and several theme} restaurants, including an American bar, an Italian osteria, a Turkish cafe, a Japanese teahouse and a Spanish winery. Built in 1928 to replace the Haus Potsdam –a similar but smaller place– the Haus Vaterland remained open until 1943, when it was partially destroyed by fire.

means of a match cut instead of a dissolve. Steyerl, on the contrary, rewrites her own shots a dozen times to create a visual metaphor for the interregnum between the fall of the Wall and the German reunification, a short period during which the communist and capitalist systems coexisted for a few months.

Images 5.17 & 5.18: The Empty Centre, visual palimpsest –the death strip in 1990 (left) and 1997 (right)

The real winner of the Cold War was first and foremost transnational capital, which took advantage of the disintegration of the Soviet bloc to enter new markets. At the beginning of the 1990s, when Steyerl began to work on this film, Berlin was becoming a testing ground for the internationalisation of land markets due to the systematic privatisation of public properties in East Berlin. There, urban developers attempted to delete the architectural traces of both the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic by choosing the Prussian architecture of the early 19th century as aesthetic model, a tradition that had determined the form and image of the city until World War II. Consequently, the former death strip was redeveloped as a series of city tableaux in which, according to Boyer, “the reiteration and recycling of already-known symbolic codes and historic forms (…) contain a schema or program that generates a narrative pattern, a kind of memory device that draws associations and establishes relations between images and places, resemblances and meaning” (1992: 188). The resulting cityscape, however, was partly a fake, because it hid those episodes that the new urban owners preferred not to remember. In fact, city tableaux are actually built to forget rather than to remember, as Manuel Delgado has stated:

Major monumentalisation policies usually pursue a clear goal: to superimpose institutionally appropriate symbolic productions to those that real life continuously generates by filling

urban space with countless memories. These monumentalisation policies are actually of and for a fib memory, a great makeup operation in which memory becomes a parody based on replica and simulacrum, an evocation of non-existent spaces that contrasts with the proliferation of de-memorised spaces, a massive loss of meaning on behalf of a reified and fraudulent pseudo-memory. Overall, such policies of memory undertaken by the authorities are usually policies of and for oblivion (2007: 106, my translation).

Images 5.19 & 5.20: The Empty Centre, squatter camp (left) versus construction site (right)

In the particular case of Berlin, the local government strived to restore the old urban fabric, but the end result of its urban renewal was ultimately determined by private interests, as Muñoz has explained: “urban developers make spaces available to the community that, without being in private ownership, are subject to regulations established by those who bear their cost of construction and maintenance” (2010: 89, my translation). This means, in practice, that public space was privatised, as happened, for instance, with the Sony Centre in Potsdamer Platz. In view of this tendency, Steyerl gives voice to the people opposed to the sale of the death strip to large corporations, beginning with a group of squatters camped there who claimed their right “to decide

what is going to be built”. The most meaningful part of their interview is when Steyerl

asks the squatters “how do you think Berlin will look in nine years, in 1999?”, to which they immediately answer “you won’t find us here”. After this sentence, in another