An Interview with Patrick Keiller

The great film-maker on static cameras, capitalism, and the book he still wants to write

In recent months, I have become preoccupied with thoughts of mortality. Two people I know have terminal cancer — their lives extended by experimental chemotherapy drugs — and I can’t help but imagine how I would live differently if I were in their shoes.

Would I consolidate my life or seek out new experiences? Would I tidy up or make a mess? The book I reviewed last week, FASHION by Mark Power, felt like an attempt to leave a legacy; to take all the ephemera of a working life and package it into something monumental. It smelt of mortality.

Earlier in the year, Julian Barnes stated that his latest novel would be his last. He didn’t want to risk dying mid-chapter and having an editor ruin it. For some reviewers, this is exactly what happened with the new Christopher Priest biography of J.G. Ballard, which was finished by Priest’s wife, after his death, as a tribute.

Barnes, Ballard, Priest: these are writers whose work has given me enormous pleasure over the years, yet only one of them is still alive to answer questions. The message is clear: if you want to speak to one of your heroes, you must do so while you still can.

The phrase “don’t meet your heroes” is often taken to mean that those heroes will inevitably disappoint. But in my experience, the biggest danger is you being a disappointment to them. Hopefully, that is not the case with today’s interview with one of my favourite filmmakers, Patrick Keiller.

This time last year, I published a piece about Keiller’s London in rapturous terms, writing:

The first time I saw London was a revelation. It was unlike anything I had seen before. I watched it with the ecstatic pleasure of an obsessive identifying their obsession. In this case, the obsession is psychogeography, that strange alchemy of place, history, and psychology.

Even now, just seeing a brief clip from the film is enough to make the city come alive in my imagination.

Subsequently, I got in touch with Patrick Keiller to see if he would be willing to do an interview, and he kindly agreed to answer my questions via email.

Neil Scott: I have long been fascinated by your work, so it was wonderful when Fuel published a photobook of London. It was interesting to see your BFI Top Ten films and to find News from Home and La Jetée on the list. Could you tell me how you came to make films with a static camera?

Patrick Keiller: The first couple of films I made were 16mm monochrome, short, and photographed with a ‘subjective’ camera, handheld, often walking – something like a clumsy imitation of human vision, perhaps that of a Frankensteinian creature or a poorly constructed robot. The films are very rudimentary and technically fairly inept. In the third film [The End (1986)], there isn’t much walking camera, though there are other camera movements, mostly spontaneous. By the fifth [The Clouds (1989)], I was using longer focal length lenses, and began to use a tripod (to avoid camera shake, more intrusive with long focal length lenses). I’d become more preoccupied with framing.

With the move to 35mm, although I did make some handheld footage, in the finished films the camera is nearly always on a tripod, and nearly always static. There are a few pans in Robinson in Space. The footage is largely of spatial subjects, which tend not to move — framed in rectangular frontal images, within which movement occurs. I was always in pursuit of illusory three-dimensionality, and the illusion of depth in a two-dimensional image depends to a large extent on definition — sharpness. 35mm is potentially much sharper than 16mm, but more likely to lose this quality if one moves the camera. Unfortunately, this preoccupation is a bit beside the point when the films are viewed as standard definition DVDs, but two of them are offered in HD, and hopefully one day Robinson in Space will be too.

Another thing is that, despite the films’ relatively slow pace, we were always in a hurry, having often waited for the right light, the right kind of bus, clouds, wind, etc., and being anxious to move on as soon as possible, whereas moving the camera requires a little planning and takes longer. Instead, I got into the habit of changing the lens, which is why there are so many cuts on axis (all the films were made with prime lenses).

There are, of course, plenty of films in which the camera doesn’t move, so it’s never struck me as particularly unconventional.

You recorded the decline of Britain in the Major years. Yet watching them today is an exercise in nostalgia: no matter how grim things are, they can always get worse. Private equity now owns care homes, water companies, funeral parlours, and student flats ... the Robinson films were extremely prescient about all this. What, if anything, are you nostalgic for from that period?

I’m not sure nostalgic is the right word, but I miss the sense that in making Robinson in Space I’d discovered something. London had more or less confirmed what I already suspected about the city, but the sequel was different. I set out with the idea that Britain was a backward capitalism because it had never had a bourgeois revolution (the Nairn-Anderson thesis), but by the end it seemed rather that, while English capitalism is an unpleasant reality for many of us, on its own terms it is not at all unsuccessful. It was only after I’d made the film that someone alerted me to Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, in which she asks ‘Is Britain, then, a peculiar capitalism or is it peculiarly capitalist?’ and argues that it is the latter.

What developments would a fourth Robinson film address?

About twelve years ago, after Verso had published a book of essays that I’d written for various publications between 1997 and 2010, I determined that my next item should be another book.

Julian Barnes recently wrote what he says will be his last novel, explaining that he didn’t want to run the risk of leaving one unfinished. What unfinished projects do you have that you’d still like to finish?

I would like to finish the above. I’d imagined, initially, it would explore the aftermath of 2008, anticipating slow decline, but not the more immediate disasters of the last ten years. I began by trying to discover how, despite a litany of socio-economic and other problems, the UK still manages to sustain a remarkably high level of material prosperity — measured, that is, in conventional terms – and whether it could continue to do so.

In 2025, for example, in a ranking of GNI PPP per capita (Gross National Income per capita adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity), the World Bank placed the UK at number 30, between France (29) and Italy (31), and six places above Japan. Moreover, the UK’s GDP per capita, adjusted for inflation, is now about 35 per cent greater than it was in 1997.

What, I wonder, are the material flows underlying such claimed prosperity, which seems so hard to credit, both for the UK and elsewhere – all this in the context of cognitive dissonance with respect to the conflict between the increased consumption that comes with growth and the reality of the climate crisis.

Pages from London (2020)

A while back, in Dundee, I stumbled upon a place called The Keiller Centre. It did not, alas, contain academics dedicated to your themes (it is a shuttered shopping mall). However, if it did, what kind of questions would you set for researchers?

I stumbled upon it myself one evening in 2019, with a friend. I’m not sure whether or not he knew it was there. We were later able to wander into the Caird Hall, where we caught the last few minutes of a gig by the Bombay Bicycle Club, who we learned hail from Crouch End. I was in Dundee to visit the art school the next morning. I need to fill it (the centre, that is), perhaps with physicists, who might be able to help me in my work.

Thank you, Patrick.

To learn more about Patrick Keiller’s work, check out his website.

Read my earlier post here:

The Photobook of the Film