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Title: | England, that desert island. Patrick Keiller's spatial fictions |
Authors: | Rugo, D |
Keywords: | Landscape film;Patrick Keiller;Gilles Deleuze;Henri Lefebvre;Space;England on Film;London |
Issue Date: | 2016 |
Publisher: | Duke University Press |
Citation: | Cultural Politics, 12(3): pp. 263 - 278, (2016) |
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 mentioned absence of human subjects allows the filmmaker to articulate a broader discourse on space, so that the films can be described as ‘spatial fictions’. By aligning his work to various strands of utopian thinking of space – from the Surrealists to Henri Lefebvre and the Situationists – Keiller 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 discusses how this framework informs Keiller’s visual grammar and 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 the idea that the absence of a sign always functions as the sign of an absence |
URI: | http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/13891 |
DOI: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/17432197-3648834 |
ISSN: | 1751-7435 |
Appears in Collections: | Dept of Social and Political Sciences Research Papers |
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