cultural geographies 2009 16: 409–414

cultural geographies in practice

Landscape and cinematography

Patrick Keiller
Royal College of Art

I n January 2008, I began the cinematography for a work1 conceived as a search for images
of landscape, and of what is conventionally thought of as nature, which would become the
basis for an exploration of ideas about dwelling. I had already made three films in a similar way:
the first, London,2 conceived, essentially, as a story about a man who thinks he would be happier
if London were more like Paris; the second, Robinson in space,3 an exploration and, ultimately, a
dismissal of the idea that the UK, or England, is a backward, failing capitalism because it has
never had a successful bourgeois revolution; the third, The dilapidated dwelling,4 an exposition of
the continuing failure of consumer economies, particularly the UK’s, to successfully produce and
renew domestic space, and of the condition of domesticity in advanced capitalist economies. The
current project had its origins in a longstanding desire to continue this kind of activity, which had
been curtailed in about 1997 by the sudden disappearance of the possibility to initiate such films
as public-sector cinema or remit-fodder television, and in some of the ideas I had encountered in
researching the earlier projects.

Former cruise missile silos, Greenham Common, Berkshire, May 2008.

© 2009 SAGE Publications 10.1177/1474474009105056

cultural geographies 16(3)

In the proposal, I had quoted Martin Heidegger: ‘Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the
Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the
self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness
into things, ordered the house.’5 Heidegger’s idea of dwelling, with its agricultural connotations
and its emphasis on ‘the different generations under one roof’ and ‘their journey through time’6
seemed an elusive, unlikely ideal: difficult, if not impossible, to attain, especially in developed
economies. On the other hand, comparable images of a peasant life now lost, as in, for example,
Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Notes written one Sunday in the French countryside’7 (in 1945) still seem to be
widespread and even Theodor Adorno, writing (in 1944): ‘Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now
impossible’8 might have had in mind a dwelling that, had it been possible, would have perhaps
resembled that found in such imagined worlds, untroubled by capitalist displacement.
At the beginning of the project, I had explored the mythology of Anglo-American capitalism,
particularly the idea that freedom of movement was a factor in the early development of capitalism
in England; internal mobility was not, however, some long-established structural characteristic,
but the intended result of legislation: the partial repeal of the Act of Settlement in 1795 ‘in the
interest of freeing hands to go where burgeoning capitalist enterprise needed them most’.9 As
the project progressed, similar preconceptions were disposed of. It had already become clear
that neoliberalism was, in the end, not particularly neoliberal; as Doreen Massey had pointed
out, quoting David Harvey: ‘The contradictions are endless: “The two economic engines that
have powered the world through the global recession that set in after 2001 have been the United
States and China. The irony is that both have been behaving like Keynesian states in a world
supposedly governed by neoliberal rules.”’10 Pursuing the question of why capitalism first took
off in England,11 I encountered references to Karl Polanyi’s The great transformation,12 published
in 1944 and conceived as a response to the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, in which
Polanyi set out to describe the transformation from feudalism to capitalism, giving particular
attention to the enclosure process in England and the development of the economic system at
the beginning of the 19th century. During 2008, Polanyi’s book, for long ignored or derided by
economists, was mentioned with increasing frequency by broadsheet and other commentators13
as a useful companion to the crisis that was unfolding perhaps more rapidly than had been
anticipated even by those who had long predicted it.
Arguing that laissez-faire was no such thing, but rather the intended result of political decisions,
Polanyi accorded great significance to the Speenhamland system of poor relief devised, by the
Berkshire magistrates who met at the Pelican Inn in Speenhamland on 6 May 1795, to alleviate
distress caused by a rise in the price of grain following poor harvests, and to counter the increased
labour mobility legislated for in the same year.
Speenhamland is a part of Newbury, and the Pelican, or the George and Pelican, as it was in
1795, was a large coaching inn at the junction of what was then the road from London to Bath,
which became the A4, and the north end of what is now Newbury’s main street. It ceased to be
an inn in about 1850, the coaching trade having declined after the opening of the railway through
Newbury in 1847. In 2008, it was an empty, Grade II listed building, formerly an office and,
between 1900 and 1983, a bank. With all this in mind, I decided to make the Pelican the first
destination for the project’s wandering cinematography.
Its starting point was about 27 miles away, in a dilapidated part of Oxford, which, in December
2007, had been revealed as the city with the fastest rate of population growth (1.4% per annum) of

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any in the UK,14 and has an unusually high rate of homelessness.15 I had noticed an unoccupied
neo-gothic villa in a street near the centre. With an interest in the comic and other possibilities
of gothic revival, and having in mind that Adorno had spent the years 1934–37 in Oxford, and
had written, famously, in a passage ‘Refuge for the homeless’ in Minima moralia that ‘it is part
of morality not to be at home in one’s home’,16 I adopted the house as a camera subject. It
had been empty for several years owing to its being, according to its former owner, a distant
property company anxious to demolish it, structurally unsound; it was supported and protected
by an unusually extensive construction of scaffolding and plywood, and had become an attractive
site for fly-posters. In December 2007, a new owner had been granted planning permission to
convert it into flats, so it seemed likely that the scaffolding and plywood might be dismantled at
some point during the coming year.
By the end of November 2008, I had accumulated about 4½ hours of 35mm negative, having
made an erratic circuit, anti-clockwise, around this starting point,17 stopping when I arrived at
another at-risk domestic structure, a ruin which suggested a plausible ending for a narrative
and another allusion to The great transformation. Themes that emerged during the cinematography
include oil, nuclear weapons, space exploration and, perhaps unsurprisingly, agriculture; I had
been particularly keen to make some footage of the wheat harvest, which was slow, late and
damp, continuing until the end of September, in the context of a high, if volatile, price inflated by
increased demand and speculation in international markets.
I had not worked with a ciné camera since 1995, and to begin with found it quite difficult to
identify camera subjects, wary of producing footage that too closely resembled that of the earlier
film and because, while the latter’s subject had suggested many locations, most of them fairly
easy to get a picture out of, the present project’s theme was much less obviously imageable. I
recalled a sentence in the introduction to Fredric Jameson’s The seeds of time: ‘It seems to be easier
for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the break-
down of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.’18 The most
successful camera subjects seemed to offer the possibility of overcoming this weakness, either as

Near Islip, Oxfordshire, October 2008.

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clues to how the present, unsustainable economic reality had developed, or by suggesting alter-
natives,19 however unlikely. I noticed that many of what I considered successful images were of
signs, markers, routes or views from high viewpoints, as if they might amount to a non-sedentary
perception.
The choice of 35mm as the originating format for the pictures was made despite knowing
that the resulting work would be viewed most commonly in some reduced electronic format.
Landscape photography has traditionally favoured large formats which successfully represent
the detail characteristic of landscape subjects,20 such detail being one of several qualities that can
combine to create the illusion of three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional image. In comparison,
even the largest moving-picture format, IMAX, is small and 35mm, the largest practically port-
able format, offers an emulsion area of only 22x16mm, of which only about 21x11.33mm is seen
when projecting in the now-conventional 1.85:1 widescreen ratio. Landscape and architectural
photography is often further characterized by finely differentiated contrast and shadow, which
also contribute to a mimicked stereoscopy.21 These latter qualities are often achieved with film,
typically monochrome photographed in sunlight, but also colour, especially when this offers high
levels of contrast and colour-saturation as in, for example, the legendary colour films of Michael
Powell and Emeric Pressburger, which utilized the three-strip technicolor process.22
The most likely electronic alternative to 35mm would have been HDCam, a high-definition
format used as a lower-cost alternative to 35mm origination of feature films, with the results trans-
ferred to 35mm negative from which prints are made for cinema distribution. I had originated an
installation as HDCam in 2006, but its spatial qualities had never quite matched those of 35mm,
and the equipment would have been very expensive to hire for the period anticipated for the
present project, purchase being out of the question.
The final decision rested not so much on these considerations as on the materiality of the
photographic image. Digital images are, ultimately, data stored on a device in which their originality
is not physically located, so that they require continual management, and electronic image and
digital file formats are prone to rapid obsolescence. The last ‘film’ I had made was originated
as Beta SX, a broadcast-quality digital video format introduced in 1996, for which cameras and
editing equipment are no longer produced. In comparison, a photographically originated ciné
frame is a reassuringly visible, physical original in a format that has survived for over 110 years
and seems likely to continue, if only as a basis for successive electronic copies.
Compared with videotape, film stock is expensive to purchase and process, and the camera’s
magazine holds only 122m of stock, just over 4 minutes at 25fps. Film hence tends to involve a
greater commitment to an image before starting to turn the camera, and there is pressure to stop
as soon as possible, both to limit expenditure and to avoid running out of loaded film. Results
are visible only after processing, which, in this case, was usually several days later, by which time
some subjects were no longer available and others had changed, so as to rule out the possibility
of a retake. I began to wonder why I had never noticed these difficulties before, or whether I had
simply forgotten them. Another problem was that, with computer editing, it is no longer usual
to make a print to edit. Instead, camera rolls are transferred to video after processing, so that the
footage is never seen at its best until the end of the production process. This hybridity of photo-
graphic and digital media so emphasizes the value of the material, mineral characteristics of film
that one begins to reimagine cinematography as a variety of stone-carving.

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One of the aims of the project is to investigate the significance of the spatial qualities of land-
scape photography and cinematography, as I have never encountered much written or other
enquiry as to why illusory three-dimensionality might be valued to the extent that it seems to be.
I had embarked on landscape film-making in 1981, early in the Thatcher era, after encountering
a surrealist tradition in the UK and elsewhere, so that cinematography involved the pursuit of a
transformation, radical or otherwise, of everyday reality.23 I recently came across a description, in
Kitty Hauser’s Bloody old Britain, of O.G.S. Crawford’s photography: ‘Like photographers of the
New Objectivity, clarity was his goal. Like them, he favoured stark contrasts, with no blurring
or mistiness. His focus, like theirs, was on the object or the scene in front of him, which it was
his aim to illuminate as clearly as he could. [. . .] It was commitment that lit up his photographs
[. . .] Such photographs suggest a love of the world that was almost mystical in its intensity.’24 I
had forgotten that photography is often motivated by utopian or ideological imperatives, both as
a critique of the world, and to demonstrate the possibility of creating a better one, even if only by
improving the quality of the light.

Biographical note
Patrick Keiller studied architecture at University College London and fine art at the Royal College of Art,
where he began to make films. Recent works include Londres, Bombay, an exhibition at Le Fresnoy: Studio
national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing (13 October 2006–24 December 2006), featuring a 1000m2 30-
screen moving-image reconstruction of Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, and The city of the future, at
BFI Southbank, London (23 November 2007–3 February 2008), an assembly of maps and early topographic
films as a five-screen navigable landscape of the UK in c.1900. email: patrick.keiller@rca.ac.uk

Notes
1 One of several projected outcomes of The future of landscape and the moving image, a research project in the
AHRC’s Landscape and Environment Programme, based at the Royal College of Art, in which Professor
Patrick Wright of Nottingham Trent University and Professor Doreen Massey of the Open University
are co-researchers, and Matthew Flintham the project student. Patrick Wright is preparing a monograph,
a critique of past and present ideas of deep settlement and their engagement with landscape, and Doreen
Massey will produce an essay, an interaction with the film, its subjects and the process of its production.
Matthew Flintham’s related PhD project is Parallel landscapes: a spatial and critical analysis of military sites
in the United Kingdom. See: http://www.landscape.ac.uk/research/larger/future_of_landscape_moving_
image.htm and links.
2 London (85 mins, 1994), for the British Film Institute.
3 Robinson in space (82mins, 1997) for the BBC and the British Film Institute, adapted and extended as
Robinson in space, and a conversation with Patrick Wright (London, Reaktion, 1999).
4 The dilapidated dwelling (78 mins, 2000) for Channel Four Television.
5 Martin Heidegger, ‘Building dwelling thinking’, in Poetry, language, thought (New York, Harper & Row,
1975), pp. 145–61, p. 160 (emphasis in the original).
6 Ibid.
7 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of everyday life (Volume 1) (London, Verso, 2008), pp. 201–27.
8 Theodor Adorno, ‘Refuge for the homeless’, in Minima moralia (London, Verso, 2005), p. 38.

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9 John Torpey, The invention of the passport: surveillance, citizenship and the state (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1999), p. 67.
10 Doreen Massey, World city (Cambridge, Polity, 2007), p. 213; David Harvey, A brief history of neoliberalism
(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 152.
11 ‘Sweezy reminds us that capitalism failed to catch on in a number of places before it finally arrived in
England; and that if actually existing socialisms go down the drain, there will be other, better ones later
on’: Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: or, the cultural logic of late capitalism (Durham, NC, Duke University
Press, 1991), p. 264; for the Dobb-Sweezy debate, see Rodney Hilton, ed., The transition from feudalism to
capitalism (London, New Left Books, 1976).
12 Karl Polanyi, The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time (Boston, MA, Beacon Press,
2002).
13 See, for example, Madeleine Bunting, ‘Faith. Belief. Trust. This economic orthodoxy was built on
superstition’, The Guardian 6 October 2008, p. 31.
14 Cities Outlook 2008 (London, Centre for Cities, 2007), p. 29.
15 Homelessness strategy 2008–2013: A brief summary (Oxford City Council, October 2008).
16 Adorno, ‘Refuge for the homeless’, p. 39.
17 Some of the more distant camera subjects are, to the north, Launton, near Bicester, the site of a
meteorite fall in 1830, and the former Rocket Propulsion Establishment at Westcott; to the west, RAF
Brize Norton; to the south, Henry ‘Hangman’ Hawley’s house at West Green, Hampshire and, to the
east, the disused chalk quarry of a former cement works at Chinnor. Not all the locations photographed
will necessarily be seen in the finished work.
18 Fredric Jameson, The seeds of time (New York, Columbia University Press, 1996), p. xi.
19 Which might involve hopes for a sustainable energy supply; national self-sufficiency in agriculture; a
revival of manufacturing industry; a radical reform of the design and construction of dwellings and
settlements, including the gradual replacement of much of the existing built environment; a radical
reconfiguration of humanity’s relationship with the rest of the biosphere; novel political forms to bring
all this about, etc.
20 See, for example, John Davies, The British landscape (London, Chris Boot, 2006).
21 Cecil Hepworth, the British film pioneer, described the three-dimensional look that characterizes a
sideways view with a moving camera as ‘the stereoscopic effect’. Movement, contrast and detail are
qualities of images, especially but not exclusively monochrome images, that contribute to the illusion of
depth. For a possible explanation of why this might be, see Margaret S. Livingstone, ‘Art, illusion and
the visual system’, Scientific American 258(1), 1988, pp. 68–75.
22 One of the subjects of the project team’s discussions has been the tendency of film to suggest a
homogeneity – primarily, but not only, of appearances – which is at odds with lived experience.
23 See, for example Ian Walker, So exotic, so homemade: surrealism, Englishness and documentary photography
(Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007), pp.160–86.
24 Kitty Hauser, Bloody old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the archaeology of modern life (London, Granta, 2008),
pp. 143–4; p. 146, p. 147; see also note 22, above.

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