The future of landscape and the moving image

Project outline

'The future of landscape and the moving image' was a collaboration between three researchers – a geographer, Professor Doreen Massey of the Open University; a cultural historian, Professor Patrick Wright of Nottingham Trent University and a film-maker, Patrick Keiller of the Royal College of Art – that set out to locate economic, social and political aspects of the current global predicament in the UK's landscape. 

The researchers proposed to collaborate in the production of several works; Patrick Keiller was to research, photograph and write a feature-length film; Patrick Wright to produce a monograph; and Doreen Massey to write an essay to accompany the film. 

The project investigated ideas about belonging and other, related subjects, by exploring part of a familiar though not always sympathetically viewed landscape – the southern English ‘countryside’ – equipped with a 35mm ciné camera. It was prompted by what appeared to be a discrepancy between, on one hand, the cultural and critical attention devoted to experience of mobility and displacement and, on the other, a tacit but seemingly widespread tendency to hold on to formulations of dwelling that derive from a more settled, agricultural past. While the former was extensive, it often seemed to involve regret for the loss or impossibility of the latter, and hence to reinforce, rather than rethink, some easily questionable ideas.

It was conceived as a successor to an earlier project by Patrick Keiller for a similarly exploratory film, Robinson in Space (1997), and a book of the same name (1999), which had managed to dispel an initial, fairly widespread perception of the UK’s material economy, and the supposed decline of its manufacturing sector, in favour of a more accurate understanding. The project was also influenced by previous works by Patrick Wright: On Living in an Old Country (1985), A Journey through Ruins (1991) and The Village that Died for England (1995), and Doreen Massey's influential essay 'A global sense of place' (1991), and her books For Space (2005) and World City (2007). The researchers' collaboration dated from Keiller's Robinson in Space, which was informed by Massey's essay, and its expansion into a book included a conversation between Keiller and Wright.

Achievements

The project team discussed the temporalities and reconciliatory aspects of landscape and images of landscape, how these figure in cinema, and various alternative ways in which landscape can be conceptualised. These discussions have been developed in meetings and other conversations, and by exchanging images and texts.

Patrick Keiller undertook 35mm cinematography for a feature-length film. Robinson in Ruins is an account of a journey made by a wandering, erratic scholar, through landscapes in the south of England. It begins with a series of captions: "A few years ago, while dismantling a derelict caravan in the corner of a field, a recycling worker found a box containing 19 film cans and a notebook. Researchers have arranged some of this material as a film, narrated by their institution's co-founder, with the title Robinson in Ruins." Its fictional narration, written after the picture had been edited, begins: “When a man called Robinson was released from Edgcott open prison, he made his way to the nearest city, and looked for somewhere to haunt.” Robinson “was equipped with an ancient cine camera, with which he made images of his everyday surroundings”. The film consists of these views. 

The cinematography began on 22 January 2008, the day after the first of many global stock market crashes during that year, and continued until the middle of November; its period includes most of the principal events of the 2008 banking crisis and ends just after the US elections. The ‘wandering' encountered several locations that demonstrate the past and continuing presence of the United States military in the UK and the hiving off of strategic public-sector assets to private sector, often US/UK-owned, consortia, until it reached what seemed an appropriate destination: a deserted village, the site of an agrarian rebellion against land enclosure in the 16th century and, nearby, a present day commercial satellite communications station, the scene of the gruesome execution of some of the 16th-century rebels. The film is narrated by Vanessa Redgrave and is the third in the 'Robinson' series directed by Patrick Keiller. Vanessa Redgrave's narration includes references to the deepening economic crisis, climate change and mass-extinction, but manages to reach an optimistic conclusion. The film had its debut in September 2010 at the Venice Film Festival, and its first UK screenings were at the London Film Festival on 19th and 21st October 2010.

Patrick Wright's monograph, entitled England's Itch, is  a critique of past and present ideas of deep settlement and their engagement with landscape.

Doreen Massey's contribution is an essay to accompany the film, examining its method and form, and outlining the project's challenges to commonly-held assumptions about the current economic and ecological crises.

Matthew Flintham's doctoral research Parallel Landscapes: A spatial and critical study of militarised sites in the United Kingdom, involved fieldwork at various military sites around the country including the Ministry of Defence's Shoeburyness weapons testing and disposal complex, Salisbury Plain training ground and the naval port of Portsmouth. Links were aldso made with the 'Militarized Landscapes' large project.

Ongoing influence

The film is now available for theatrical and other exhibition, distributed by the British Film Institute. The project team and 'Robinson in Ruins' toured the UK in 2011, and stopped in Nottingham in June for a workshop organised by the Impact Fellowship. The DVD was released on 20th June 2011. The project website will continue to be maintained.

Matthew Flintham has completed his PhD and is hoping to continue his research through a post-doctoral research position.

Patrick Keiller was chosen to fill the central space of Tate Britain during the Olympic year (2012). Tate Britain director, Penelope Curtis, said: "Patrick Keiller's sustained interest in understanding the British landscape and how it is represented strikes a perfect chord with the Tate Collection." The installation 'The Robinson Institute' opened on 27th March 2012.