we visited lincoln's inn fields and he asked some of the residents to pose for him. i was shocked at the increase in the numbers of people sleeping out in the seven years id been away but robinson seems quite accustomed to it. he rarely gives anyone money, at least not when im with him. he took me to the war museum, formerly bedlam, the bethlehem royal hospital for the care of the insane. he told me that many of the homeless who sleep out in central london are ex-servicemen and women or former psychiatric patients. london, he says, is a city under siege from a suburban government which uses homelessness, polution, crime, and the most expensive and run down public transport system in any metropolitan city in europe as weapons against londoners' lingering desire for the freedoms of city life.
london, a film by patrick keiller, is a surreal look at early nineties tory-governed england, in the form of a videodiary of london over the course of a year. it prominently features a fictional tour guide, robinson, who expresses a romantic view of the city in his desire for bohemian reclamation. the film is interesting in a number of ways, firstly the distinct style in which it is filmed, with the use of wide angle shots across the city and the camera only ever moving in one scene. also in the combination of the score, the narrator's voice, and the script, london in 1992 seems more like 70 years ago than 17.
watch it
here
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