Robinson in Space

Robinson in Space – Robinson may be Daniel Defoe’s desert isle dweller. We don’t see him in Patrick Keiller’s 1995 film. In fact, we don’t see much of anyone – the ninety minute picture consists entirely of footage showing industrial landscapes at various places in the United Kingdom. There are innumerable shots of collieries, nuclear power plants, scrap metal yards, and barren, horizontal wastelands burdened with huge, windowless factories. Keiller’s camera doesn’t enter these places but scrutinizes them from the curb. In many instances, it is sufficient for him to show a traffic sign or a corporate marquee. Interspersed with this imagery of industry and commerce are shots of famous colleges, manor houses, some inscrutable monuments, and, very occasionally, an image of a famous tourist attraction – for instance, a couple shots of the Lake Country, the White Cliffs, the Rude Man of . The film’s conceit is that a mysterious “employer” has hired Robinson and his sidekick, the narrator, to tour Britain, making seven transits of the island based on a walking tour documented by Defoe in one of his many books. The narrator describes in telegram-style some of the places scene, supplying information as to where wealthy Tory members of Parliament live, listing statistics on labor unrest and the productivity of factories and shipyards. The narration is mildly witty but mostly objective and factual. If there is a slant, it seems left-leaning. Periodically, the narrator refers to poets and writers and seems to have an interest in Rimbaud – who apparently lived in England for a while – and Sherlock Holmes. Several times, the narrator describes himself and Robinson as “materialists” – which is an understatement. There is a hint that Robinson’s interest in Rimbaud is based on the fact that he, too, is gay. Almost all the landscapes are empty and devoid of people. The film shows a particular interested in polluted estuaries and huge bridges. The effect is something like the travel books of Ian Sinclair, the British writer who hiked the loop freeways around London and documented the “visionary desolation” that he found in the suburbs in London Orbital. I have no idea what the film is supposed to accomplish. It is interesting for forty minutes, but, thereafter, too repetitious. After the seventh trip, the narrator and Robinson are fired and that ends the film. I assume that Keiller wanted to show merrie olde England buried under the weight of capitalist greed, its “green and pleasant land” drowning in post-industrial detritus. But, of course, the problem with this strategy is that industrial wastelands have an element of the sublime in them (Burke is quoted once) and, often, outshine the less glamorous bucolic vistas. And the UK was booming in 1995 – everywhere the camera is pointed there is evidence of fantastic growth and prosperity. What these places would look like today makes me shudder. Inadvertently, Keiller has done the exact opposite of what he seems to have intended: he has created nostalgia for the good old days when Capitalism still produced wealth and goods. (Robinson in Space, narrated by Paul Scofield, is a sequel of sorts to London, which apparently has the same structure; in 2010, Keiller released through the British Film Institute Robinson in Ruins, which is narrated by Vanessa Redgrave and seems to be more of the same).