Lecture date: 1998-02-12
A seaport is a pleasant place for a soul worn out by life’s struggles – Charles Baudelaire. What are the connections and differences between ports and houses? How do they relate to the idea of new and old spaces? Film-maker (and former architect) Patrick Keiller raises these questions in a talk interspersed with clips from his film Robinson in Space.
Since the early 1980s, Keiller has made a series of films involving urban and other landscapes. Developing the device of a highly literate narrator delivering a quasi-fictional voice-over dense with cultural and political references and statistics, London and Robinson in Space extended the form and content of his earlier work and anatomised the mutations of the English psyche while also documenting the consequences of the era of Thatcherite economics for Britain’s social, urban, commercial, and industrial spaces.
