ENGLAND,

THAT DESERT ISLAND

Patrick Keiller’s Spatial Fictions

Daniele Rugo

Abstract  A recurring feature of Patrick Keiller’s work is the lack of

human presence and activity. Throughout his films, Keiller delivers
a vision of England as a desert island, depopulated and unoccupied.
Scrutinizing Keiller’s early shorts and feature-­length films, this article
argues that the absence of human subjects allows the filmmaker
to articulate a broader discourse on space, so that the films can be
described as “spatial fictions.” Keiller, by aligning his work with
various strands of utopian thinking on space — from the surrealists
to Henri Lefebvre and the situationists — forces us to think the
relationship between cinema and space and offers a geography of
absence as the precondition for the imagination of a new space. The
article shows how this framework informs Keiller’s visual grammar,
including his emphasis on a deliberate scarcity of gestures and the
invisibility of the cinematic apparatus. By withdrawing from the
production of the image, Keiller suggests that the absence of a sign
always functions as the sign of an absence.
Keywords  Patrick Keiller, spatial fiction, Henri Lefebvre, absence,
cinematic space

T he works of Patrick Keiller, from his early shorts to the

four feature-­length films produced so far, sit somewhat
uncomfortably between documentary and fiction, embedding
at once the argumentative quality of the essay, the erudite
precision of the travelogue, and the lyrical suspension of the
poem. If it is true, as Theodor Adorno (1991: 23) says, that
“the essay’s innermost formal law is heresy,” then Keiller’s
films could be said to fit within the essay film tradition.

263
Cultural Politics, Volume 12, Issue 3, © 2016 Duke University Press
DOI: 10.1215/17432197-3648834
 Daniele Rugo
However, while the influence of Chris
Marker on Keiller is evident, such clas-
sification might be too reductive, if not
misleading. As Laura Rascaroli (2008: 25)
explains, the “temptation of assigning
the label of essay film to all that is non-­
commercial or experimental or unclassifi-
able must, however, be resisted, or else
the term will cease being epistemologically
useful.” The films are indeed difficult to
classify, and one should perhaps resist the
urge to categorize them. However, they do
display recurring formal strategies. In the
shorts, the camera frames the world from
a (sometimes) mobile subjective point
of view, and the first-person voice-­over
reveals the inner meditations of a main
character. In the feature-­length films, the
camera is static, gazing at the world from
what appears to be an objective point of
view, while the voice-­over, delivered by a
narrator on behalf of a character (Robinson)
whose voice the audience never hears,
takes the filmed spaces as starting points
for personal, aesthetic, sociohistorical, and
critical observations. Here the stillness
of the frame is reminsicent of the experi-
ments that marked the advent of cinema
and of the aesthetic that dominated nonfic-
tion films from 1906 to World War I. Tom
CULTURAL POLITICS   •  12:3 November 2016
Gunning (2016: 55) describes these early
cinematic works as displaying “the ‘view’
aesthetic,” writing that “early actuality
films were structured around presenting
something visually, capturing and preserv-
ing a look or vantage point.” Keiller seems
interested in stressing the element of mere
presentation in his frames, and the result
is an emphasis on the autonomy of the
spaces and situations the camera records
from the authorial gesture. Gunning identi-
fies the goal of the “view” films precisely
in this claim for the world’s independence
from the filming subject: “ ‘ Views’ tend
26 4
to carry the claim that the subject filmed
either preexisted the act of filming (a land-
scape, a social custom, a method of work)
or would have taken place even if the cam-
era had not been there (a sporting event,
a funeral, a coronation), thus claiming to
capture a view of something that maintains
a large degree of independence from the
act of filming it’’ (55 – 5 6).
The counterpoint between image and
sound in Keiller’s films, however, is never
merely illustrative but rather structured
around a series of deferrals, subversions,
literary or philosophical references, and
personal musings. It is perhaps this
thoughtfully incongruous relation between
visual and aural elements that led Iain
Sinclair (1998: 298) to describe Keiller’s
first feature-­length film as an “essay, docu­
ment, critique, poem,” thereby avoiding
privileging one category over the others.
This deliberate disconnection points
also to Keiller’s political strategy. Through-
out his work, one finds a repeated asso-
ciation of landscape filmmaking with the
pursuit of a transformation of everyday
reality. The critical lineage with which
Keiller aligns his films is one that is com-
mitted to demonstrating via cinematog-
raphy the possibility of creating a better
world. The utopian strands that inform
this corpus, running from the surrealists to
the situationists and beyond, ground the
political import of Keiller’s work. Never­
theless, the question of whether cine­matic
images — and artistic expression, in
general — can produce the collective
radical subjectivity that surrealists and situ-
ationists saw as the goal of their projects
is never completely settled. The risk
that this type of poeticization can quickly
be absorbed and become a self-­referential
activity removed from its ultimate goal or,
worse, can be put to the service of various
forms of neutralizing cosmesis is one that
Keiller repeatedly addresses. In a text on

Figure 1  Still from Robinson in Space (1997). Still courtesy BFI. London and Robinson in Space are released
together on DVD by the BFI.
psychogeography, for instance, he writes:
“I am inclined to set the growing interest in
the poeticisation of experience of land-
scapes — t ypically urban landscapes, but
also those of railways, airports, and various
other industries, even agriculture — in an
economic and political context” (2013: 70).
The context alluded to is one dominated
in Britain by a generally dilapidated, but
very expensive, built environment and by
the apparently irresistible rise of gentrifi-
cation. Keiller concludes polemically with
a quote from Witold Gombrowicz (already
used by Michel de Certeau): “Incapable
of magic architecture, we made art out
of our deprivation. I hadn’t realised it was
quite that bad. ‘When one does not have
what one wants, one must want what one
has’ ” (73). At the same time, however,
the voice-­over — frequently reminiscent of
the impassive tone of public information
films — is occasionally used as an explicitly
PATR ICK K EILLER’S SPATI A L FICTIONS
polemical tool. In London (1994), for
instance, Keiller reports someone shout-
ing “Pay your taxes, you scum,” during
a visit of the Queen to Leicester Square.
While these instances are isolated enough
to come across as “tonal disruptions”
(Bruzzi 2008: 118), when the sociopolitical
commentary occupies the foreground, it
offers the opportunity to bridge the gap
between the reflections on the past and
the problems of the present, between the
transformation sought by the views and
the political gesture that underpins them.
CULTURAL POLITICS
This constant crossing of boundar-
ies and the speculative approach to their
subject matter make the films difficult to
qualify and even more difficult to discuss.
In many ways, these films already offer a
conceptual framework that seems to leave
little room for commentary, since part
of their strategy is precisely to present a
265
discourse and offer a series of arguments.
 Daniele Rugo
And yet their political and formal inven-
tiveness, the accumulation of references,
the oblique adoption and deflection of
various theoretical positions seem to
invite endless opportunities for criticism.
However, perhaps surprisingly, the liter-
ature devoted to Keiller’s work is not as
conspicuous as one would expect. Most
critical approaches to Keiller’s London and
Robinson in Space (1997) have focused on
the films’ analyses of English capitalism
(Dave 2000, 2011, 2013; Burke 2006),
while commentaries on Robinson in Ruins
(2010) tend to rely on the film’s proposed
alliance with nonhuman forces, such as the
lichen (Xanthoria parietina) on a road sign
at Oxford’s Abingdon Road (Dave 2011;
Fisher 2010; Hegglund 2013).
There are, however, notable excep-
tions: Steve Pile, for instance, emphasizes
the phantasmagorical aspect of Keiller’s
films, describing the explorations of Lon-
don as “less about reaching a source or
a destination (the arrival at places already
known) than about the amnesias, frustra-
tions and diversions of the city” (2005: 11).
In Lights Out for the Territory, Iain Sin-
clair (1998: 298) describes London as “a
modestly ironic epitaph to Conservatism
and the destruction of the city,” a conse-
CULTURAL POLITICS   •  12:3 November 2016
quence of the triumphant “dictatorship of
the suburbs and suburban values.” More
importantly, Sinclair provides a succinct yet
illuminating précis of Keiller’s inspiration:
“He was interested in the exploration of
architectural space . . . Surrealist texts,
Czech modernist poetry, the implications
of psychogeography” (299). In a text that
provides a useful reconstruction of the
filmmaker’s scholarly work, Anthony Kinik
(2009: 108) emphasizes Keiller’s “partic-
ipation in a tradition of theoretical, histor-
ical, and practical engagements with the
built environment, one with tremendous
266
implications for cinema.” It is this cultural
milieu that Will Self (2014) emphasizes
when he writes about Keiller that “the very
manner in which he shoots his films — 
circumscribed as they are by factors of
time and money — is that of a dérive: an
arbitrary progress through town and coun-
try, with each camera set-­up an oppor-
tunity to capture the frisson, and thereby
detach the map a little more from the
territory.”1 The references to André Breton,
Louis Aragon, and Guy Debord offer the
opportunity to respond to the very manner
of Keiller’s films — their serendipitous
association of image and text — in a way
that moves from their formal specificity
rather than submitting this to the subject
matter (English capitalism, the problem of
England).
The attempt here is then to read
Keiller’s films as “spatial fictions” (Conley
2012: 147): reconfigurations of existing
spaces under the pressure of the cine-
matic gaze, itself operating under the influ-
ence of various strands of utopian thinking.
Understood in this way, these films can be
said to have as their goal the production
of a new imagination of space. Space is
also the umbrella term Keiller (2014) uses
to frame his various activities: “I usually
describe them in terms of the subject
matter, which is landscape . . . or possibly
space.” This reading therefore focuses on
the role that space (and the built environ-
ment, in particular) plays in the films and
on the ways in which these spatial fictions
are haunted in various ways by absence. It
is from the connection between these two
terms, absence and space, that the argu-
ment takes its energy. This does not, how-
ever, amount to saying that the question
of English capitalism — or, more broadly,
the reflection on why Britain is what it is
today — is sidelined; rather, it is submitted
to the scrutiny of what happens on the
screen, of the methods and mechanisms

of the films but also of Keiller’s scholarly
work. In this case, the filmmaker and the
essayist cannot be separated.
In the following article, I will use the
idea of spatial critique as a guiding principle
to understand Keiller’s work and its relation
to the theoretical context that emerges in
his films and essays, before discussing the
solitude of space. I will use the expression
to describe how, in Keiller’s films, the
transformative possibilities of cinema are
repeatedly paired with a deliberate empha-
sis on the absence of human presence and
activity.
Spatial Critique
The interpretative framework briefly
sketched above produces a shifting of
the emphasis away from the political
events the films evoke and toward a reflec-
tion on the ways in which these events
are transfigured as part of a wider spatial
fiction, one that relies on and experiments
with the cinematic ability to change the
perception of existing spaces. Paul Dave
(2011: 19) frames the three Robinson films
as reactions to particular electoral results.
For Dave, the films could be organized as
responses to the mood of electoral cycles,
with “the first bringing with it the dismay
and shock of another Tory government
following on from the long night of
Thatcherism; the second marking the
advent of a New Labour government able
to capitalize on the intense suspense and
excitement generated by this delayed
change; and finally, the moment of May
2010, coughing up the Conservative –
 Liberal Democrat coalition” (19 – 20). What
these interpretations tend to overlook is
that the critical force of these films has a
spatial dimension that cannot simply be
reduced to the political moments they
allude to and, in some cases, document.2
These have already been mediated by the
PATR ICK K EILLER’S SPATI A L FICTIONS
Figure 2  Still from Norwood (1984) © Patrick Keiller.
Courtesy of the artist
film’s spatial critique. The prominence of
the question of space — not over the polit-
ical question but as an eminently political
question — becomes clear in Keiller’s iden-
tification of the landscape as an accurate
measure of the country’s wealth. In an
interview, Keiller (2014) says that “one of
the interesting things about the United
Kingdom is that the discrepancy between
the visible appearance of the landscape,
which looks very impoverished, and the
supposed wealth of the country . . . is
much more marked here. Maybe what hap-
pened five years ago is that actually we dis-
covered that it wasn’t very prosperous, and
that the look of the landscape was a much
more accurate measure of the United King-
dom’s wealth than the figures.” The priority
of the landscape and of a critique of space
over the milestones of political life can
CULTURAL POLITICS
be traced back to the strands of utopian
thinking mentioned above. Keiller is much
closer to the surrealist-­situationist lineage
than most commentators have acknowl-
edged and, as a consequence, to the
proposed reconciliation of Karl Marx’s politi-
cal economy with Friedrich Nietzsche’s
revaluation of all values attempted by Henri
267
Lefebvre. During Robinson’s sojourn in
 Daniele Rugo
Reading, following a “visit” to the places of
Jane Austen’s education and Oscar Wilde’s
imprisonment, the narrator of Robinson
in Space quotes Lefebvre: “The space
which contains the realized preconditions
of another life is the same one as prohibits
what those preconditions make possible”
(Lefebvre 1991b: 189 – 9 0; Keiller 1999: 5).
This short reference at the beginning of the
film ideally places Robinson’s entire project
under the aegis of Lefebvre’s “produc-
tion.” In his magisterial The Production of
Space, Lefebvre gives the term production
a double connotation that grounds his
analytical matrix. On the one hand, he
notes that space is produced: every society
and its mode of production generate a
specific spatial practice. On the other hand,
however, Lefebvre also warns that space is
itself productive. To the idea that “(social)
space is a (social) product,” he adds that
“the space thus produced also serves as
a tool of thought and of action . . . as such,
it escapes in part from those who would
make use of it. The social and political
(state) forces which engendered this space
now seek, but fail, to master it completely”
(1991b: 26). Space is therefore not just the
product of a particular mode of produc-
tion but a force with a relative autonomy,
CULTURAL POLITICS   •  12:3 November 2016
capable of reproducing the conditions it has
been designed for but also of undermining
them, of turning against them, of suggest-
ing the preconditions of another life. The
importance of spatial critique as a neces-
sary tool for any emancipatory politics was
already a central concern for Lefebvre at
the time of the publication of the first two
volumes of the Critique of Everyday Life
and his works on the urban problematic:
Right to the City ([1968] 1996), The Urban
Revolution ([1970] 2003), and La Pensée
marxiste et la ville (Marxist Thought and
the City; 1972). The Production of Space
268
systematically makes space the focus of
political struggle: “(Social) space is not a
thing among other things, nor a product
among other products: rather, it subsumes
things produced, and encompasses their
interrelationships in their coexistence and
simultaneity — their (relative) order and/or
(relative) disorder” (Lefebvre 1991b: 73).
The work ultimately dismisses the solu-
tions suggested by the surrealists, in partic-
ular “the substitution of poetry for politics,
the politicization of poetry and the search
for a transcendent revelation” (18). How-
ever, it acknowledges at the same time
that the surrealists’ attempt to “decode
inner space and illuminate the nature of the
transition from this subjective space to the
material realm of the body and the outside
world” (18) remains part of an unfinished
project. Lefebvre is equally ambivalent
about the work of the situationists. While
he assigns great significance to Debord’s
détournement, he finds the method to be
self-­defeating. Describing the appropria-
tion of the Halles Centrale between 1969
and 1971, Lefebvre writes: “The diversion
(détournement) and reappropriation of
space are of great significance, for they
teach us much about the production of new
spaces. . . . Be that as it may, one upshot
of such tactics is that groups take up resi-
dence in spaces whose pre-­existing form,
having been designed for some other pur-
pose, is inappropriate to the needs of their
would-­be communal life” (168). Despite
these significant differences, an urgency
for new beginnings, for a comprehensive
renewal, is never far from Lefebvre’s
concerns, given that, as he writes, “diver-
sion (détournement) and production cannot
be meaningfully separated” (169).3
The productive dialogue (which
often descended into a quarrel and then
a dispute) between Lefebvre and the
situationists can be seen most explicitly in
the striking affinity between the “theory

of moments” and the “practice of situa-
tions.” Influenced by his experiences with
the surrealists, Lefebvre developed in the
second volume of the Critique a theory of
moments that would respond to “the need
to organize, programme and structure
everyday life by transforming it according
to its own tendencies and laws” (1991a:
343). The theory, Lefebvre adds, “wishes
to perceive the possibilities of everyday
life and to give human beings a constitu-
tion by constituting their powers, if only
as guidelines or suggestions” (343). In its
first manifesto, the Internationale Situa-
tionniste declared that the main task of the
new group would be “the construction of
situations, that is, the concrete construc-
tion of temporary settings of life and their
transformation into a higher, passionate
nature” (Debord 2002: 44).
This spatial critique then has an intrin-
sic relation to what one could call our form
of life and, in particular, to a radical renewal
of the everyday. As Andy Merrifield (2002:
173) notes: “To change life is to change
space; to change space is to change life.
Architecture or revolution? Neither can be
avoided. This is Lefebvre’s radiant dream,
his great vision of a concrete Utopia.”
In a text on films shot by the Lumière
and Biograph companies before 1903,
Keiller (2013: 155) writes: “On looking
at them what struck me was a contrast
between their often familiar-­looking land-
scapes and the unfamiliarity of the society
glimpsed in them. In the last hundred
years, the material and other circum-
stances of the United Kingdom’s popula-
tion have altered enormously, but much of
the urban fabric of the 1900s survives.”
This passage provides an important link:
looking at the built environment offers the
opportunity to see a certain backwardness
in the way we live. The spatial elements
of the landscape allow one to evaluate our
PATR ICK K EILLER’S SPATI A L FICTIONS
Figure 3  Still from The End (1986) © Patrick Keiller.
Courtesy of the artist
way of life. While Dave (2001: 21) is right
in pointing out that Keiller shows, through-
out London, “an allegiance to traditions of
municipal socialism and a culture of cos-
mopolitanism (London under the GLC); a
support for the republicanism mandated by
theories of Britain’s incomplete bourgeois
revolution; and ‘anti-­capitalist’ style direct
action,” the renewal Keiller’s films point to
seems to go beyond the scope and prom-
ise of municipal socialism. The emphasis in
the films can be said to rest on the ability
of film or photography “to poeticise or
otherwise transform experience of every-
day surroundings” (Keiller 2013: 118). The
films’ defamiliarization of familiar locales
has in sight the possibility of catching
glimpses of a radical subjectivity capable
of engendering a revolution of everyday
life. The expression, derived from the
imaginative title given to the English trans-
lation of Raoul Vaneigem’s ([1967] 2012)
Traité de savoir-­vivre à l’usage des jeunes
générations (The Revolution of Everyday
CULTURAL POLITICS
Life), implies a radical overturning of what
is already here, a sweeping upheaval not
merely of the mechanisms and hierarchies
of the political and economic system but
of those minute gestures, habits, percep-
tions that — often implicitly — sustain and
promote it.4 While the import of this revo-
lution may seem limited, its promise is to
269
rebuild society from the bottom, showing
 Daniele Rugo
Figure 4  Still from Robinson in Ruins (2010) © Patrick Keiller. Courtesy of the artist
“the extent to which the objective condi-
tions of the contemporary world advance
the cause of subjectivity day after day.
Everything starts from subjectivity, but
nothing stays there” (Vaneigem 2012: 4).
Robinson in Space begins with the notes
of Allan Gray’s A Matter of Life and Death
(1946), followed by a voice announcing the
departure of a Great Western train to Plym-
outh. The narrator, whom we can imagine
is sitting on that very train, delivers a pas-
CULTURAL POLITICS   •  12:3 November 2016
sage from chapter 23 of Vaneigem’s book
titled “Radical Subjectivity.”
Reality, as it evolves, sweeps me with it. I’m
struck by everything and, though not everything
strikes me in the same way, I am always struck
by the same basic contradiction: although I can
always see how beautiful anything could be if
only I could change it, in practically every case
there is nothing I can really do. Everything is
changed into something else in my imagination,
then the dead weight of things changes it back
into what it was in the first place. A bridge
between imagination and reality must be built.
270
(Keiller 1999: 1)
As we hear these words, we see the view
from the train leaving London Paddington
railway station: the screen is split in half
by the Westway and the almost perfect
horizontality of the frame is interrupted by
Bicknell & Hamilton’s Canal House (also
known as the Battleship Building and
originally built as a British Rail maintenance
depot).5 The landscape is undeniably urban
but sparse and devoid of human presence.
Keiller’s revolution rests on the constant
contradiction between familiar, mundane,
everyday surroundings and the defamil-
iarization produced by the camera, the
creation of habitable space, and the obser-
vations of spaces haunted by absence.
The Solitude of Space
The relation between cinema and architec-
ture is, then, a defining feature of Keiller’s
work. In a reflection on the subject, the
filmmaker (2013: 147 – 4 8) writes that
while architects have sought to use cinema
as a source of spatial concepts, “what
initially attracted me — and continues to
attract me to the medium is that it offers

the possibility, albeit constrained, to experi-
ence non-­existent spaces and in particular
to experience spatial qualities seldom, not
yet, or no longer encountered in ordinary
experience . . . for me the medium’s allure
has always derived from its capacity to
imaginatively transform already-­existing
space.” This imaginative transformation
seeks ultimately a point from which every-
day reality can be transfigured. Filming
an environment — paying attention to its
form and materiality, its overlooked spatial
qualities, its vitality, and to the animation
that it might impose or receive — is the first
step toward changing the conditions of life.
Keiller can be said to use film not to depict
space but to critique and transform it. In
Keiller’s spatial fictions, film becomes, or,
rather, returns to being, a spatial technol-
ogy. At the opening of the essay “Archi-
tectural Cinema,” Keiller (2013: 75) writes
that “since its invention, the cinema has
offered glimpses of what Henri Lefebvre
described, in another context, as ‘the pre-
conditions of another life.’ ”
This focus on the transformative
possibilities of film can be more fully
articulated once it is paired with a second
observation: in Keiller’s films, the human
element is essentially — which does not
mean entirely — absent. The presence of
human beings is rare, and when we do
encounter this presence, we are surprised,
almost stunned. When human presences
cut across the continuum of townscape
and landscape, we experience a shock, as
if these were a startling exception (perhaps
this is what motivated Mepham [1994] to
write that “Keiller is a composer of epipha-
nies”). What one encounters on the screen
finds confirmation in the author’s words.
In describing the choice of his subjects,
Keiller (2013: 11) writes: “I began to look at
places as potential photographs, or better
still, film images. . . . This visual material
PATR ICK K EILLER’S SPATI A L FICTIONS
deliberately depicts places that are nearly
or altogether devoid of human presence
and activity, but which because of this
absence, are suggestive of what could
happen, or what might have happened.”
The films are constantly returning
to this original gesture, the creation of
absence but also its reception, to the fact
that a certain absence is already at stake
in space. Absence can been seen as
inhabiting these films in three senses: the
absence of human subjects allows space
to be reopened, to offer itself to “what
could happen,” to “what might have hap-
pened,” to what could be; the absence of
characters articulates an inability to inhabit
space (our hold on the everyday is too ten-
uous); and the absence of formal gestures
maximizes film’s transformative potential.6
Figure 5  Still from Robinson in Ruins (2010)
© Patrick Keiller. Courtesy of the artist
The camera gazes from a position that
cannot be identified with a subject within
CULTURAL POLITICS
the film, nor does it betray an “intention.”
As Iain Sinclair (1998: 302) writes, “Keiller
gazes at London with autistic steadiness.”
Absence of Human Subjects
Toward the end of London, Robinson
says that the capital is “too thinly spread,
obscured, too private for anyone to know,
271
its social life invisible.” The description
 Daniele Rugo
that Mepham (1994) attributes to London
negatively should here be reread positively:
“The population of this hauntingly beauti-
ful but unreal world is silenced.” I would
argue that this absence is not an attempt
to see the unseen but rather to see what
is already in full view. While Burke (2006:
24) writes that “the desire to see under-
lies Robinson’s investigations” and that
“Keiller’s camera frames that which usually
goes unnoticed,” what Keiller turns our
attention to is not that the secrets of the
landscape must “be gleaned from what
cannot be seen.” Everything can be seen,
if only we knew how to look. In order to
learn how to look, in order to see what
could be, we need to empty the frame of
human subjects. Similar voiding strategies
can be detected in urban science fiction, in
both its literary and filmic forms.7 It is not
surprising, for instance, that Nigel Kneale’s
science-­fiction serial Quatermass II (1955)
figures in the exhibition that accompanied
the release of Robinson in Ruins. One
could equally think of Brian Aldiss’s novel
Greybeard (1964). The book describes a
world emptying of humans where a small
group of middle-­aged survivors, rendered
sterile by a nuclear accident, trails along
the Thames Valley confronting the circum-
CULTURAL POLITICS   •  12:3 November 2016
stance that no younger generation will ever
succeed them.
However, this device could also be
seen as a response to Louis Aragon’s
emphasis on film’s restriction of vision as
a method to emphasize expression. In his
first published essay, Aragon (2000: 52)
writes that the cinema essentially relies on
two properties: an ability “to endow with a
poetic value that which does not yet pos-
sess it” and the power “to wilfully restrict
the field of view so as to intensify expres-
sion.” Aragon’s remarks, while seldom ref-
erenced explicitly, can be seen to resonate
272
with the work of a number of filmmakers in
Europe and the United States who operate
outside of conventional narrative codes and
who show a deliberate focus on landscape.
James Benning’s Four Corners (1998),
as well as his California Trilogy (El Valley
Centro [1999], Los [2001], Sogobi [2002])
and the recent RR (2007), Ruhr (2009), and
Small Roads (2011), deploy similar strate-
gies. Peter Hutton’s Fog Line (1971) and
Danièle Huillet and Jean-­Marie Straub’s
Trop tôt, trop tard (Too Early, Too Late)
(1981) are other important — albeit very dif-
ferent — instances of a tradition that insists
on the relevance of space for film and on
the ability of film to transform space.8
The absence of human subjects in
Keiller’s films offers the vision of England
as a desert island, a landscape dominated
by isolation. In Stoke Newington, north
London, the narrator of London (1994)
says: “They had gone looking for the
man of the crowd and had found instead
shipwreck and the visualisation of Protes-
tant isolation.” It is worth noting how, for
Deleuze, the island is always an act of rec-
reation. He writes that to live on an island
or to image an island is to dream “of pulling
away, of being already separate, far from
any continent, of being lost and alone — or
it is dreaming of starting from scratch, rec-
reating, beginning anew” (2004: 10). There
is an inherent impossibility in thinking of
an island as inhabited. In the same text,
Deleuze writes “that England is populated
will always come as a surprise; humans
can live on an island only by forgetting
what an island represents” (9). An island,
Deleuze continues, represents first and
foremost the origin, “radical and absolute”
(10) — a perfect place for a spatial utopia.
The island remains deserted even if pop-
ulated; the lack of human presence is, as
it were, the island’s conscience. Deleuze
adds that “those people who come to the
island indeed occupy and populate it; but

in reality, were they sufficiently separate,
sufficiently creative, they would give the
island only a dynamic image of itself, a
consciousness of the movement which
produced the island, such that through
them the island would in the end become
conscious of itself as deserted and unpeo-
pled. The island would be only the dream
of humans, and humans, the pure con-
sciousness of the island” (10). Inhabitation
begins when the illusion of mastery of the
island is renounced in favor of letting the
space realize a consciousness of its own.
One could then see the films themselves
as acts of spatial re-creation; they gesture
toward a re-creation of space. Keiller’s
work traces the history of England’s “occu-
pation” through the instants immediately
following its evacuation. Some passers­by,
very few indeed, remain, but one imag-
ines them on their way to ferries, trains,
airplanes, cars, and bikes that will take
them to other shores, returning England
to its natural status: a desert island, with
fragments of built environment — as if
England were actually only an experiment,
a temporary settlement, a millenarianist
avant-­garde. In order to reimagine our
space, we have to insist on its invisibility
to us, on its absence from our life and, as
a consequence, on our absence from it.
Thus Keiller’s attention turns first and fore-
most to what Lefebvre (1996: 103) calls
“practico-­material morphology.” This mor-
phology, for Lefebvre, offers a number of
possibilities, virtualities, and potentialities
that must be cultivated: “The virtualities of
actual societies are seeking, so to speak,
their incorporation and incarnation through
knowledge and planning thought . . . if they
do not find them, these possibilities go
into decline and are bound to disappear.”
In other words, unless certain possibilities
that remain latent and only reveal them-
selves negatively in the built environment
PATR ICK K EILLER’S SPATI A L FICTIONS
Figure 6  Still from London (1994). Still courtesy BFI.
London and Robinson in Space are released together on
DVD by the BFI.
are not nurtured and “realized” by knowl-
edge (in this case, by film), they disappear,
leaving one without alternatives. Keiller’s
films are devoted to, and practice, these
very alternatives.
Absence of Characters
It should also be noted that the characters
that animate Keiller’s films are all, in differ-
ent ways, on the verge of disappearance.
Rather than inhabiting their spaces, they
haunt them, gazing at streets and buildings
as if they already belonged elsewhere. The
shorts produced prior to his first feature-­
length work are particularly significant. The
character that narrates Stonebridge Park
(1981) declares, after having committed a
violent crime, a longing for “the safe world
CULTURAL POLITICS
that exists only between railway stations;
and only demands the passive acceptance
of the view out of the window.” He then
continues: “Why was it that existence
always implied that one should intervene
in the world? Why could one not some-
how contrive to remain a spectator of the
picturesque bungling of others?” In Nor-
273
wood (1984), the audience learns that the
 Daniele Rugo
narrator is actually dead and musing from
beyond the grave. In The End (1986), the
narrator professes an excess of powerless-
ness and admits to being unaware even of
his own (“assured”) inexistence. The voice
from The Clouds (1989) begins his story by
observing that his mother “lived as if in a
trance, a mere receiver of thoughts” and
concludes by describing himself as “weary
of life before even having entered upon it.”
Robinson himself — this most pene-
trating researcher, half Franz Kafka, half
Daniel Defoe, with the physiognomy of
Manfred Blank from Straub and Huillet’s
Klassenverhältnisse (Class Relations)
(1983) — never speaks with his own voice;
he rather listens to his thoughts uttered
by his partner (see Keiller 2012: 6). While
in London we learn from the narrator that
Robinson starts fearing for his well-­being
as a consequence of John Major’s victory
in the 1992 election (“There would be
more drunks pissing in the street when
he looked out of the window and more
children taking drugs on the stairs when
he came home at night. His job would be
at risk and subjected to interference. His
income would decrease. He would drink
more and less well. He would be ill more
often. He would die sooner”), in Robinson
CULTURAL POLITICS   •  12:3 November 2016
in Space his isolation has become com-
plete (“He seemed to know no-­one in the
town, and he had no telephone. His only
reassurance was the presence of eighteen
undeniably utopian Routemaster buses,
operated by enthusiasts in a deregulated
market”) (Keiller 1999: 6). By the time his
demise has become the thematic under-
pinning of a third film (Robinson in Ruins
[2010]), he has vanished. All that is left of
him is the result of his research: “19 film
cans and a notebook found in a derelict
caravan.” If in the first two films, Robin-
son controls the counterpoint of image
274
and sound by proxy — through the voice of
Paul Scofield — in the third installment, his
absence has become more radical; he is
now an “influence.”
It is worth recalling how Lefebvre
pairs space and the everyday along diverg-
ing lines. The two concepts are linked and
yet estranged, because either the built
environment does not take the living into
account or because the everyday flattens
the built environment and foregoes the
stories it embeds (this particular dis­
association has been extremely productive
in the work of Nigel Thrift, Edward Soja,
Derek Gregory, and Edward Casey but
also, in different ways, in Michel de Cer-
teau, Guy Debord, and Marc Augé). The
absence of humans and of characters from
space shows that space is itself invisible
from our life, its effects uncalculated, but
more importantly, it shows that space
can be seen differently. If space can be
seen differently, in the tradition that Keiller
inherits, then the everyday, life itself, can
be seen differently. The utopia here is
precisely in thinking that space itself
must be changed before society can be
changed, and that once the fabric of space
is seen in a different way, then this
change takes hold. Keiller (2009: 413)
himself writes that attention to landscape
functions “both as a critique of the world,
and to demonstrate the possibility of creat-
ing a better one, even if only by improving
the quality of the light.” Within the same
text, Keiller declares that when he first
started, landscape filmmaking “involved
the pursuit of a transformation, radical or
otherwise, of everyday reality” (413).
Absence of Gestures
In this cinema of abeyance, one is then
presented with a redoubling of absence.
Existing space can be observed only in
absence of its inhabitants, and simultane-
ously, the one who observes can do so

Figure 7  Still from Robinson in Ruins (2010) © Patrick Keiller. Courtesy of the artist
only by insisting on his own absence from
this space, by turning this absence into
the point of view. Iain Sinclair (1998: 302)
writes that the experience of watching
these films “is like the very beginning of
cinema, when an audience was thrilled
by watching the representation of a train
arriving at a station.” Keiller is therefore
producing the point of view as an overlook,
both in terms of deliberately choosing to
frame overlooked space and in terms of
looking over and over again. A grammar
of overlooking can be traced in Keiller’s
frequent cuts from wide shots to close-­ups
and extreme close-­ups or in the biography
of the lichen from Robinson in Ruins.
The overlook registers absence at two
levels. An attention for space — a certain
insistent look at it — demands the denial
of human presence, as if individuals had
to be removed from the space they use
before this can be “read.” As Sinclair
(1998: 302) writes, “Keiller is shooting
surveillance films with a postcard camera.”
At the same time, the imagined space
can be extracted from the actual only if an
absence is registered within the image, the
PATR ICK K EILLER’S SPATI A L FICTIONS
absence of lived life. Absence is therefore
a result of the overlook Keiller adopts and
of its commitment to the (emancipatory,
radical, utopian) ideas informing this prac-
tice. His images produce a space without
people because they try to produce a
space that does not exist by redoubling
the absence within existing spaces:
these are not for us, they are not how we
want them, they can’t be inhabited, they
don’t stop — even when inhabited — being
deserted. Keiller’s films cultivate the ambi-
tion of “creating spatiality” (Alvarez 2015:
37). The relation with the profilmic space
is both faithful (the places are observed in
detail, gazed at through durational shots)
and completely imagined (through the
lens of what one could call a geography of
CULTURAL POLITICS
absence). The absence is both observed in
the space and projected on it; as a conse-
quence, one feels that this absence really
does exist and yet is completely “imag-
ined” (produced by “the filmic image”).
The potential for transformation can be
occasioned not in the gathering of crowds
but in the solitude of a profane illumination.
275
 Daniele Rugo
The Tenderness of Space
The narrator of London confesses that
“Robinson believed that, if he looked at it
hard enough, he could cause the surface
of the city to reveal to him the molecular
basis of historical events, and in this way
he hoped to see into the future.” The refer-
ence here is to Lefebvre’s (1991b: 39)
representational space: “the dominated
space . . . passively experienced — which
the imagination seeks to change and
appropriate.” Cinema is a technology of
space; it is not a representative device
but a spatializing technology. Lefebvre
famously condemns images (an indictment
that would be echoed by his former assis-
tant Jean Baudrillard) with a critique that,
at times skirting on iconoclasm, is directed
not at a particular type of image but at
visual media themselves: “Where there is
error or illusion, the image is more likely
to secrete it and reinforce it than to reveal
it. No matter how ‘beautiful’ they may be,
such images belong to an incriminated
‘medium.’ Where the error consists in a
segmentation of space, moreover — and
where the illusion consists in the failure to
perceive this dismemberment — there is
simply no possibility of any image rectify-
ing the mistake. On the contrary, images
CULTURAL POLITICS   •  12:3 November 2016
fragment; they are themselves fragments
of space” (1991b: 96 – 97). However,
he also points out that “occasionally an
artist’s tenderness transgresses the limits
of the image.” When this transgression
is occasioned, something else altogether
emerges, “a truth and a reality answer-
ing to criteria quite different from those
of exactitude, clarity, readability and
plasticity” (96). By negotiating a position
between the absence of signs and the
signs of absence, Keiller’s spatial fic-
tions return space to its potentiality, thus
consigning it to its own tenderness, an
276
exactitude beyond measure.
Notes
1. Iván Villarmea Álvarez (2015: 82) develops a
similar reading and describes London’s
interrupted dérives as “the backbone of
Robinson’s research, his fieldwork.”
2. See, for instance, the night of John Major’s
victory in 1992, which Keiller introduces in
London with a series of shots from a high
viewpoint, a compositional strategy widely used
in the tradition of landscape painting. The
narrator offers no consolation but a mix of shock
and depressed resignation:
It seemed there was no longer anything a
Conservative government could do to
cause it to be voted out of office. We were
living in a one party state . . . Robinson’s
first reaction was one of spleen. There
were, he said, no mitigating circumstances:
the press, the voting system, the
impropriety of Tory Party funding — none
of these could explain away the fact that
the middle-­class in England had continued
to vote Conservative because in their
miserable hearts they still believed that it
was in their interest to do so.
3. In an interview from 1983, Lefebvre reflects on
his relation to the situationists: “I was close
friends with them. The friendship lasted from
1957 to 1961 or ’62, which is to say about five
years. And then we had a quarrel that got worse
and worse in conditions I don’t understand too
well myself, but which I could describe to you.
In the end, it was a love story that ended badly,
very badly. There are love stories that begin
well and end badly. And this was one of them”
(Lefebvre 1997: 69).
4. Vaneigem remains loyal to a Nietzschean version
of Marxism, one that aims to contaminate
political economy with the politics of desire.
5. Built in 1969 by two architects who had designed
other examples of municipal modernism
(including the new Harlow railway station), the
Canal House is visibly inspired by the work of Eric
Mendelsohn.
6. This absence of gestures is precisely the gesture.
In this, Keiller belongs to a tradition of landscape
filmmaking that also includes James Benning;

the literary parallel would be Georges Perec’s
Species of Spaces and An Attempt at Exhausting
a Place in Paris.
7. For more on the topic, see Sobchack 2004.
8. For more on this, see Sitney 1993. For a
comprehensive list of filmmakers working on
landscape in the United States, see MacDonald
2001.
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Filmography
The Clouds. 16 mm. Directed by Patrick Keiller.
London: BFI Production Board, 1989.
The End. 16 mm. Directed by Patrick Keiller. London,
1986.
London. 35 mm. Directed by Patrick Keiller. London:
British Film Institute, Koninck Studios, 1994.
Norwood. 16 mm. Directed by Patrick Keiller. London,
1984.
Robinson in Ruins. 35 mm. Directed by Patrick Keiller.
London: BFI Video, 2010.
Robinson in Space. 35 mm. Directed by Patrick
Keiller. London: BFI Video, 1997.
Stonebridge Park. 16 mm. Directed by Patrick Keiller.
London, 1981.

Redmond, 78 – 87. New York: Wallflower Press.

Daniele Rugo is senior lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences, Media, and
Communications at Brunel University London. He is the author of two books, Philosophy
and the Patience of Film (2016) and Jean-­Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness (2013),
and his articles have appeared in Angelaki, Film- ­Philosophy, Asian Cinema, and the Journal
of Italian Cinema. He is the recipient of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Innovation
Grant for the project Following the Wires, which uses film to examine postconflict scenarios
in Lebanon. He’s currently editing (with Nikolaj Lübecker) a volume on the work of James
278

Benning.