cultural geographies 2009 16: 409–414 cultural geographies in practice Landscape and cinematography Patrick Keiller Royal College of Art n January 2008, I began the cinematography for a work1 conceived as a search for images of landscape, and of what is conventionally thought of as nature, which would become the basis for an exploration of ideas about dwelling. I had already made three films in a similar way: the first, London,2 conceived, essentially, as a story about a man who thinks he would be happier if London were more like Paris; the second, Robinson in space,3 an exploration and, ultimately, a dismissal of the idea that the UK, or England, is a backward, failing capitalism because it has never had a successful bourgeois revolution; the third, The dilapidated dwelling,4 an exposition of the continuing failure of consumer economies, particularly the UK’s, to successfully produce and renew domestic space, and of the condition of domesticity in advanced capitalist economies. The current project had its origins in a longstanding desire to continue this kind of activity, which had been curtailed in about 1997 by the sudden disappearance of the possibility to initiate such films as public-sector cinema or remit-fodder television, and in some of the ideas I had encountered in researching the earlier projects. I Former cruise missile silos, Greenham Common, Berkshire, May 2008. © 2009 SAGE Publications 10.1177/1474474009105056 cultural geographies 16(3) In the proposal, I had quoted Martin Heidegger: ‘Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house.’5 Heidegger’s idea of dwelling, with its agricultural connotations and its emphasis on ‘the different generations under one roof’ and ‘their journey through time’6 seemed an elusive, unlikely ideal: difficult, if not impossible, to attain, especially in developed economies. On the other hand, comparable images of a peasant life now lost, as in, for example, Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Notes written one Sunday in the French countryside’7 (in 1945) still seem to be widespread and even Theodor Adorno, writing (in 1944): ‘Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible’8 might have had in mind a dwelling that, had it been possible, would have perhaps resembled that found in such imagined worlds, untroubled by capitalist displacement. At the beginning of the project, I had explored the mythology of Anglo-American capitalism, particularly the idea that freedom of movement was a factor in the early development of capitalism in England; internal mobility was not, however, some long-established structural characteristic, but the intended result of legislation: the partial repeal of the Act of Settlement in 1795 ‘in the interest of freeing hands to go where burgeoning capitalist enterprise needed them most’.9 As the project progressed, similar preconceptions were disposed of. It had already become clear that neoliberalism was, in the end, not particularly neoliberal; as Doreen Massey had pointed out, quoting David Harvey: ‘The contradictions are endless: “The two economic engines that have powered the world through the global recession that set in after 2001 have been the United States and China. The irony is that both have been behaving like Keynesian states in a world supposedly governed by neoliberal rules.”’10 Pursuing the question of why capitalism first took off in England,11 I encountered references to Karl Polanyi’s The great transformation,12 published in 1944 and conceived as a response to the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, in which Polanyi set out to describe the transformation from feudalism to capitalism, giving particular attention to the enclosure process in England and the development of the economic system at the beginning of the 19th century. During 2008, Polanyi’s book, for long ignored or derided by economists, was mentioned with increasing frequency by broadsheet and other commentators13 as a useful companion to the crisis that was unfolding perhaps more rapidly than had been anticipated even by those who had long predicted it. Arguing that laissez-faire was no such thing, but rather the intended result of political decisions, Polanyi accorded great significance to the Speenhamland system of poor relief devised, by the Berkshire magistrates who met at the Pelican Inn in Speenhamland on 6 May 1795, to alleviate distress caused by a rise in the price of grain following poor harvests, and to counter the increased labour mobility legislated for in the same year. Speenhamland is a part of Newbury, and the Pelican, or the George and Pelican, as it was in 1795, was a large coaching inn at the junction of what was then the road from London to Bath, which became the A4, and the north end of what is now Newbury’s main street. It ceased to be an inn in about 1850, the coaching trade having declined after the opening of the railway through Newbury in 1847. In 2008, it was an empty, Grade II listed building, formerly an office and, between 1900 and 1983, a bank. With all this in mind, I decided to make the Pelican the first destination for the project’s wandering cinematography. Its starting point was about 27 miles away, in a dilapidated part of Oxford, which, in December 2007, had been revealed as the city with the fastest rate of population growth (1.4% per annum) of 410 Keiller: Landscape and cinematography any in the UK,14 and has an unusually high rate of homelessness.15 I had noticed an unoccupied neo-gothic villa in a street near the centre. With an interest in the comic and other possibilities of gothic revival, and having in mind that Adorno had spent the years 1934–37 in Oxford, and had written, famously, in a passage ‘Refuge for the homeless’ in Minima moralia that ‘it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home’,16 I adopted the house as a camera subject. It had been empty for several years owing to its being, according to its former owner, a distant property company anxious to demolish it, structurally unsound; it was supported and protected by an unusually extensive construction of scaffolding and plywood, and had become an attractive site for fly-posters. In December 2007, a new owner had been granted planning permission to convert it into flats, so it seemed likely that the scaffolding and plywood might be dismantled at some point during the coming year. By the end of November 2008, I had accumulated about 4½ hours of 35mm negative, having made an erratic circuit, anti-clockwise, around this starting point,17 stopping when I arrived at another at-risk domestic structure, a ruin which suggested a plausible ending for a narrative and another allusion to The great transformation. Themes that emerged during the cinematography include oil, nuclear weapons, space exploration and, perhaps unsurprisingly, agriculture; I had been particularly keen to make some footage of the wheat harvest, which was slow, late and damp, continuing until the end of September, in the context of a high, if volatile, price inflated by increased demand and speculation in international markets. I had not worked with a ciné camera since 1995, and to begin with found it quite difficult to identify camera subjects, wary of producing footage that too closely resembled that of the earlier film and because, while the latter’s subject had suggested many locations, most of them fairly easy to get a picture out of, the present project’s theme was much less obviously imageable. I recalled a sentence in the introduction to Fredric Jameson’s The seeds of time: ‘It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.’18 The most successful camera subjects seemed to offer the possibility of overcoming this weakness, either as Near Islip, Oxfordshire, October 2008. 411 cultural geographies 16(3) clues to how the present, unsustainable economic reality had developed, or by suggesting alternatives,19 however unlikely. I noticed that many of what I considered successful images were of signs, markers, routes or views from high viewpoints, as if they might amount to a non-sedentary perception. The choice of 35mm as the originating format for the pictures was made despite knowing that the resulting work would be viewed most commonly in some reduced electronic format. Landscape photography has traditionally favoured large formats which successfully represent the detail characteristic of landscape subjects,20 such detail being one of several qualities that can combine to create the illusion of three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional image. In comparison, even the largest moving-picture format, IMAX, is small and 35mm, the largest practically portable format, offers an emulsion area of only 22x16mm, of which only about 21x11.33mm is seen when projecting in the now-conventional 1.85:1 widescreen ratio. Landscape and architectural photography is often further characterized by finely differentiated contrast and shadow, which also contribute to a mimicked stereoscopy.21 These latter qualities are often achieved with film, typically monochrome photographed in sunlight, but also colour, especially when this offers high levels of contrast and colour-saturation as in, for example, the legendary colour films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, which utilized the three-strip technicolor process.22 The most likely electronic alternative to 35mm would have been HDCam, a high-definition format used as a lower-cost alternative to 35mm origination of feature films, with the results transferred to 35mm negative from which prints are made for cinema distribution. I had originated an installation as HDCam in 2006, but its spatial qualities had never quite matched those of 35mm, and the equipment would have been very expensive to hire for the period anticipated for the present project, purchase being out of the question. The final decision rested not so much on these considerations as on the materiality of the photographic image. Digital images are, ultimately, data stored on a device in which their originality is not physically located, so that they require continual management, and electronic image and digital file formats are prone to rapid obsolescence. The last ‘film’ I had made was originated as Beta SX, a broadcast-quality digital video format introduced in 1996, for which cameras and editing equipment are no longer produced. In comparison, a photographically originated ciné frame is a reassuringly visible, physical original in a format that has survived for over 110 years and seems likely to continue, if only as a basis for successive electronic copies. Compared with videotape, film stock is expensive to purchase and process, and the camera’s magazine holds only 122m of stock, just over 4 minutes at 25fps. Film hence tends to involve a greater commitment to an image before starting to turn the camera, and there is pressure to stop as soon as possible, both to limit expenditure and to avoid running out of loaded film. Results are visible only after processing, which, in this case, was usually several days later, by which time some subjects were no longer available and others had changed, so as to rule out the possibility of a retake. I began to wonder why I had never noticed these difficulties before, or whether I had simply forgotten them. Another problem was that, with computer editing, it is no longer usual to make a print to edit. Instead, camera rolls are transferred to video after processing, so that the footage is never seen at its best until the end of the production process. This hybridity of photographic and digital media so emphasizes the value of the material, mineral characteristics of film that one begins to reimagine cinematography as a variety of stone-carving. 412 Keiller: Landscape and cinematography One of the aims of the project is to investigate the significance of the spatial qualities of landscape photography and cinematography, as I have never encountered much written or other enquiry as to why illusory three-dimensionality might be valued to the extent that it seems to be. I had embarked on landscape film-making in 1981, early in the Thatcher era, after encountering a surrealist tradition in the UK and elsewhere, so that cinematography involved the pursuit of a transformation, radical or otherwise, of everyday reality.23 I recently came across a description, in Kitty Hauser’s Bloody old Britain, of O.G.S. Crawford’s photography: ‘Like photographers of the New Objectivity, clarity was his goal. Like them, he favoured stark contrasts, with no blurring or mistiness. His focus, like theirs, was on the object or the scene in front of him, which it was his aim to illuminate as clearly as he could. [. . .] It was commitment that lit up his photographs [. . .] Such photographs suggest a love of the world that was almost mystical in its intensity.’24 I had forgotten that photography is often motivated by utopian or ideological imperatives, both as a critique of the world, and to demonstrate the possibility of creating a better one, even if only by improving the quality of the light. Biographical note Patrick Keiller studied architecture at University College London and fine art at the Royal College of Art, where he began to make films. Recent works include Londres, Bombay, an exhibition at Le Fresnoy: Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing (13 October 2006–24 December 2006), featuring a 1000m2 30screen moving-image reconstruction of Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, and The city of the future, at BFI Southbank, London (23 November 2007–3 February 2008), an assembly of maps and early topographic films as a five-screen navigable landscape of the UK in c.1900. email:
[email protected] Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 One of several projected outcomes of The future of landscape and the moving image, a research project in the AHRC’s Landscape and Environment Programme, based at the Royal College of Art, in which Professor Patrick Wright of Nottingham Trent University and Professor Doreen Massey of the Open University are co-researchers, and Matthew Flintham the project student. Patrick Wright is preparing a monograph, a critique of past and present ideas of deep settlement and their engagement with landscape, and Doreen Massey will produce an essay, an interaction with the film, its subjects and the process of its production. Matthew Flintham’s related PhD project is Parallel landscapes: a spatial and critical analysis of military sites in the United Kingdom. See: http://www.landscape.ac.uk/research/larger/future_of_landscape_moving_ image.htm and links. London (85 mins, 1994), for the British Film Institute. Robinson in space (82mins, 1997) for the BBC and the British Film Institute, adapted and extended as Robinson in space, and a conversation with Patrick Wright (London, Reaktion, 1999). The dilapidated dwelling (78 mins, 2000) for Channel Four Television. Martin Heidegger, ‘Building dwelling thinking’, in Poetry, language, thought (New York, Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 145–61, p. 160 (emphasis in the original). Ibid. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of everyday life (Volume 1) (London, Verso, 2008), pp. 201–27. Theodor Adorno, ‘Refuge for the homeless’, in Minima moralia (London, Verso, 2005), p. 38. 413 cultural geographies 16(3) 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 John Torpey, The invention of the passport: surveillance, citizenship and the state (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 67. Doreen Massey, World city (Cambridge, Polity, 2007), p. 213; David Harvey, A brief history of neoliberalism (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 152. ‘Sweezy reminds us that capitalism failed to catch on in a number of places before it finally arrived in England; and that if actually existing socialisms go down the drain, there will be other, better ones later on’: Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: or, the cultural logic of late capitalism (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1991), p. 264; for the Dobb-Sweezy debate, see Rodney Hilton, ed., The transition from feudalism to capitalism (London, New Left Books, 1976). Karl Polanyi, The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time (Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 2002). See, for example, Madeleine Bunting, ‘Faith. Belief. Trust. This economic orthodoxy was built on superstition’, The Guardian 6 October 2008, p. 31. Cities Outlook 2008 (London, Centre for Cities, 2007), p. 29. Homelessness strategy 2008–2013: A brief summary (Oxford City Council, October 2008). Adorno, ‘Refuge for the homeless’, p. 39. Some of the more distant camera subjects are, to the north, Launton, near Bicester, the site of a meteorite fall in 1830, and the former Rocket Propulsion Establishment at Westcott; to the west, RAF Brize Norton; to the south, Henry ‘Hangman’ Hawley’s house at West Green, Hampshire and, to the east, the disused chalk quarry of a former cement works at Chinnor. Not all the locations photographed will necessarily be seen in the finished work. Fredric Jameson, The seeds of time (New York, Columbia University Press, 1996), p. xi. Which might involve hopes for a sustainable energy supply; national self-sufficiency in agriculture; a revival of manufacturing industry; a radical reform of the design and construction of dwellings and settlements, including the gradual replacement of much of the existing built environment; a radical reconfiguration of humanity’s relationship with the rest of the biosphere; novel political forms to bring all this about, etc. See, for example, John Davies, The British landscape (London, Chris Boot, 2006). Cecil Hepworth, the British film pioneer, described the three-dimensional look that characterizes a sideways view with a moving camera as ‘the stereoscopic effect’. Movement, contrast and detail are qualities of images, especially but not exclusively monochrome images, that contribute to the illusion of depth. For a possible explanation of why this might be, see Margaret S. Livingstone, ‘Art, illusion and the visual system’, Scientific American 258(1), 1988, pp. 68–75. One of the subjects of the project team’s discussions has been the tendency of film to suggest a homogeneity – primarily, but not only, of appearances – which is at odds with lived experience. See, for example Ian Walker, So exotic, so homemade: surrealism, Englishness and documentary photography (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007), pp.160–86. Kitty Hauser, Bloody old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the archaeology of modern life (London, Granta, 2008), pp. 143–4; p. 146, p. 147; see also note 22, above. 414