To the Roxy on Borough High Steet with Ms Shanthi and her friends Helen & Matthew. It’s a rather cosy lounge bar with sofas and a proper-sized cinema screen at one end, and it hosts all kinds of film events, art house and popcorn alike. Although there’s a membership scheme, you can just turn up and pay on the door. If I lived closer, I’d make it my local.
Tonight’s event is a screening of Patrick Keiller’s 1994 film ‘London’, with a Q&A from the director. It’s followed by the premiere of a similarly themed art piece, ‘LON24’, by The Light Surgeons.
‘LON24’ was made to be part of an installation at the newly refurbished Museum Of London, and is a giddy parade of very up-to-date images: distributors of free newspapers on the street, the Gherkin at sunrise, people getting in and out of modern buses and tube trains, and so on. It does use a lot of ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ style timelapse effects, though, which I find distancing. The slow and static style of Patrick Keiller’s films, coupled with their wordy narration by Paul Schofield, may render them relatively obscure and difficult to market, but it also makes them more personal; which I like.
Funny how speeded-up footage always feels anonymous, and never the work of one particular artist.
Well, unless it’s Benny Hill.
***
Although it’s been a while since his last film, ‘Robinson In Space’, Mr Keiller mentions that he’s in the editing stage of another: ‘Robinson In Ruins’. It was made during 2008, and covers rural areas of Britain that year.
‘I was asked to give it a… “tag line”, he says drily, wincing at the phrase. ‘So I supplied the following:
“A marginal individual sets out to trigger the collapse of neo-liberalism by going on a walk.”‘
He was going to make ‘London’ in black & white, but plumped for colour because ‘it brings out irony much better’.
With a nice sense of symmetry, ‘London’ covers the city from the perspective of fictional flaneur Robinson, and happened to be made in 1992, so we get his angry feelings before and after that year’s general election. It was the last time the Conservatives won until May 2010. And so here we are again.
Aspects of 1992 that ‘London’ reminds me about: the last sighting of bowler hats on older City workers, a Concorde flying over Heathrow, and the old Routemaster buses – although this week’s news says they’re coming back, with a sleek and futuristic redesign.
Most of all, though, I’d forgotten just how regular the IRA bombs were. The film features three: the major one in the City that blew out the windows of several skyscrapers, but also one on Wandsworth Common and one at B&Q in Staples Corner. As the narrator says, Londoners were so used to the devices by now, there were sometimes eight explosions in a single week that year, and people didn’t turn a hair. Even when the bombs actually killed people. There’s also an Eddie Izzard routine from about the same time where he remarks how Tube travellers just shrug at such news and re-jig their route home in their heads.
A London where eight bomb explosions in a week was no big deal. Today, it feels as distant as the Blitz.
Tags: London, patrick keiller, the roxy
