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Acclaimed film essayist Patrick Keiller shot his hugely influential London in 1992. Today it appears more prescient than ever.
“Dirty old Blighty, undereducated, economically backward, bizarre. A catalogue of modern miseries with its fake traditions, its Irish war, its militarism and secrecy, its silly old judges, its hatred of intellectuals, its ill health and bad food, its sexual repression, its hypocrisy and racism, and its indolence. It’s so exotic… so home-made.” So begins Patrick Keiller’s extraordinary portrait of London, which, through its anonymous narrator (voiced by Paul Scofield) and his unseen companion, Robinson, articulates the meaning of a city through referencing its past.
Following the screening, Keiller is joined in conversation by the equally significant chronicler Iain Sinclair.
Patrick Keiller‘s films include the celebrated London (1994), Robinson in Space (1997), The Dilapidated Dwelling (2000), and Robinson in Ruins (2010). He has devised large-scale installations including Londres, Bombay (Le Fresnoy, Tourcoing, 2006) and The Robinson Institute (Tate Britain, London, 2012), the latter accompanied by a book The Possibility of Life’s Survival on the Planet. He was a Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art, London (2002–11), and has taught in schools of art and architecture since 1974.
Iain Sinclair is the author of numerous works of fiction, poetry non-fiction, including Lud Heat [1975]; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings [1987]; Downriver [1991]; Radon Daughters [1994]; Lights Out for the Territory [1997]; Rodinsky’s Room [1999], with Rachel Lichtenstein; Landor’s Tower [2001]; London Orbital [2002]; Dining On Stones [2004]; Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire [2009] and Ghost Milk [2011]; American Smoke [2014] and London Overground [2015]. Downriver won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award. He lives in Hackney, east London. His final book on the Capital – the Last London – will be published in September 2017 by Oneworld.
