ABSTRACT
We know it’s London. The opening shot precisely frames Tower Bridge; Tower Bridge, in turn, perfectly frames the flowing river. Between the towers of the bridge, we can just about see something – a ship of some sort – moving upstream, towards us. Unmistakably, this is London. One building is enough to tell us it is so. As it would be with Sydney’s Opera House, or Paris’ Eiffel Tower, or Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers. Sometimes, a fragment is enough of a clue. As if the iconic architecture wasn’t enough to tell us where in the world we are, almost before we’ve had time to settle, the title of Patrick Keiller’s (1993) film appears in bold white letters against a black background:
On this cue, the narrator enigmatically, wearily intones: ‘It is a journey to the end of the world’. And, in this way, we are placed at the intersection of many stories; stories with beginnings, specific ends and a curious return (to the ‘heart of darkness’?). In part, this short chapter is about these journeys through London; journeys that are, we can say, emblematic of city life in the way they mark particular trajectories in space and time. But the film is directed towards a deeper problem in city life, and this has to do with London itself: how to explore the experiences of the city, how to evoke its moods? The problem is, partly, that London – like any city – has too many experiences and too many moods; partly, that many of these experiences appear to be wholly absent, secret, invisible, hidden, intangible, tacit, forgotten, unfathomable; and, partly, that experiences of the city are at their sharpest at the point of disappearance, already dissipated by the time a story about them can be told. The focus of this chapter is on a particular experiment in the problem of cities; an experiment which might be described in general terms as psychogeographical; an experiment which is, in this case, on film.
