The Measures Taken

Patrick Keiller, The City of the Future

In or about December 1910, human character changed. All human relations have shifted - those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change, there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.
Virginia Woolf, 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown', 1923



We have been cheated out of the future. Patrick Keiller's films have always carried this disappointment about them, the shabbiness of London or the security landscape of Robinson in Space filling the gap where the Ville Radieuse could have been. This was tackled in what Keiller now refers to as his 'naughty film', the seemingly impossible to see The Dilapidated Dwelling, on the increasing tendency of the 21st century to live in the houses of the 19th or 18th century: something those centuries would have found inconceivable.


It still feels like a peculiar gesture though, to follow these films with a project made up of around 60 films from the 1900s, which are then spun into a coherent narrative on the one hand, or on the other affixed to map of the world, with highlighted cities or streets taking you via a click to footage of that area in the first decade of the 20th century. We are in fairly Borges-like territory here, wheeling from Shanghai to New York to Liverpool, zeroing in on discrete streets with lunatic exactitude. It isn't entirely clear what this project is, and what he presented at University College's Engineering Building - fittingly, up a steely, Solarisesque corridor - could have been the material for several films, installations (it has been presnted as such) or as a CD-ROM in the vein of Chris Marker's Immemory. It does help, perhaps, to have Keiller himself - small, self-effacing, perhaps surprising some by a lack of resemblance to his usual narrator, Paul Schofield - talk you through the city.



One of the more immediately striking things about Keiller's work has always been the static nature of the camera. A tripod is plonked somewhere, the film runs, edit to next static shot. There is, more or less, only one other precedent to this technique, and that would be in the prehistory of cinema. In the form as it existed before editing, camera movements, before the impostion of obvious intention onto the image, roughly between 1900 and 1910. Such a film might be 'Busy London', one of the cogs of Keiller's future city. This is a view of a traffic intersection from the top of the Mappin & Webb building at Mansion House, in the square mile. A wall of buses, people hanging by the staircases, horse & carts and the occasional car, all dispassionately watched by the camera eye. This film is well-known enough- it shows in the Museum of London, in fact - but its strangeness needs recontextualisation to be appreciated.



What happens to this corner half a century or so later is interesting for these purposes. The corner from which this sliver of a film was taken was bought by a property developer in the 60s, who asked one of the most famous proponents of the city of the future, Mies van der Rohe, to design a tower for the site. He finished this design just before his death in 1969. After a decade or two of wrangling, the proposal was eventually defeated, partly by the intervention of Prince Charles. The Mappin & Webb building he and his ilk wanted to save was demolished regardless, and replaced by James Stirling's #1 Poultry, an ice cream coloured example of 'fun' architecture that, unlike Mies, respected the street pattern, was striking but not too unfamiliar, and most importantly pleaded continuity. Hence, as Keiller points out, what is new doesn't feel new, it cleaves to the same patterns and shapes, makes its apologies to the old. This was true earlier in the century. Classicists, because of their pleas of continuity, have always been more inclined to demolish masterpieces than have Modernists, always rather wary of doing so to avoid the cries from stage right: a Corbusier who would bulldoze half of Paris was always quite rare.



In the 1920s John Soane's Bank of England and Nash's Regent St were knocked down by traditionalists, who would nonetheless replace them with something unthreatening. Though without the aesthetic distinction of what they demolished, they at least didn't shock, they didn't evoke the city of the future. Reginald Blomfield, demolisher of Regent St, was a prominent lambaster of 'Modernismus', deriving as it did 'from the dubious continent of Europe' and a Trojan Horse for Bolshevism. This is more or less what most streets are like now: mostly the old stuff, some things a bit like the old, with the walkways, hovercars and skyscrapers we were promised fenced off in self-contained little future reservations like the Isle of Dogs or the riversides, playgrounds for the plutocracy.



This is shown most stunningly by a series of images - which may or may not be in the eventual film - which present typical British 20th century cityscapes with an overlaid image from 100 years earlier in the middle, emphasising the continuity between the two. The differences that there are can be extremely telling, mainly in the case of traffic. In 1907 (or whenever) the city folk walk around the roads, maybe weaving in and out of the path of a bus. Now one of two things has happened: either the traffic makes the street fundamentally impassible, or the area is pedestrianised, being an area where commerce necessitates a conditional taming of the car. There are places where this just wouldn't work: Shanghai, looking unrecognisable in one of the short films, or Canary Wharf: but the British city seems to be the real target here, for all its gestures of internationalism. The national specficity of the blank neo-Georgian London brick terrace in Muswell Hill where Litvinenko was presumably given his dose of Polonium 210.



The impotence in the face of the past, and the forelock-tugging at the delapidated is very much a British phenomenon, and a fairly recent one: something possible by dint of distance from the petty grimness of the 19th century. Keiller, as a former pupil of Reyner Banham, was from the generation 'when St Pancras station was ugly'. The city of the future, which, as he quotes Orwell quoting 'Bernstein' (read: Trotsky) in Nineteen Eighty Four's book-wthin-a-book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchal Collectivism, would be made of snow white concrete, steel and glass. Keiller, a little parochially, dates this as ending in the early 70s when the London County Council stopped building it. This is where the Victorian revival starts. Jarvis Cocker talked in Mojo last month about how in the 60s and 70s people were throwing out their Victoriana and repalcing it with Formica, only to bring the wooden fireplaces back in the 1980s. And as Keiller points out, the revival of 19th century architecture would precede by 5 years or so the revival of Victorian economics.



From 1900 to 1910 is where the possibilities emerge for the city of the future, and at its cut off point is where the future actually begins, before the First World War sets it stumbling. Lefebvre is invoked, making a similar point to Woolf that something, almost imperceptibly but irrevocably was shattered in those few years. You can look at these short films, with their panoramas from moving trains or buses of Liverpool Docks, Ealing suburbs, Nottingham precincts, and try and guess at this shattering. Perhaps most fascinating here is the narrative film Keiller has made out of the future material: a La Jetee counterfactual, where a time traveller tries to avert many of the 20th century's horrors by taking out a German travel writer and proto-Nazi, the fiction suddenly giving a horribly sinister air to the protagonists who would look merely cute when presented by Dan Cruikshank glossing Mitchell & Kenyon. The slowness of the films helps with this. Static, they allow thought, and with it the sense of the mutability of space, of history. The fact that the cul de sac we're marching up could still be a geometric walkway, criss-crossing the city of the future.