The View From the Train (12 page)

Since
London
, two more films of about the same length have been made in more or less the same way,
¹¹
though with tighter schedules and itineraries. In the latest film, there is more camera movement. This is not a satire, but an investigation of some aspects of housing in the UK, a documentary made for television. It was shot in digital video and includes interviews with academics and other specialists.

At the moment, it looks as if the future of this architectural cinema depends on developing ways to assemble more extensive and ambitious fictional spaces.
London
and its sequel
Robinson in
Space
set out to re-imagine actual spatial subjects. The latest film addresses the difficulty of making new spaces. The next project might explore the creation of a
new earthly terrain
like that of Kuleshov, a fictitious world made from fragments of the real one.

Film offers a kind of permanence to subjectivity. On a bad day, or in a bad light, even the architecture of Gaudí might lose its immediate appeal, but in a film, the transitory experience of some ordinary, everyday detail as breathtaking, euphoric or disturbing – a doorway, perhaps, or the angle between a fragment of brickwork and a pavement – can be registered on photographic emulsion and relived every time the material is viewed. On the other hand, when actual extra-ordinary architecture is depicted in films it's often easy to conclude that something is missing, as if the camera has nothing sufficiently revelatory to add, nothing to improve on a visit to the actual building.

At about the time I first began to think about making a film, I particularly admired the architecture of Hans Scharoun, on one hand, and
film noir
, on the other. Until recently, it never occurred to me to look for a connection between them, other than perhaps Berlin. Scharoun's Philharmonie, for example, and, say, Fritz Lang's films of the 1940s and '50s –
The Big Heat, Human Desire
, and so on – don't seem to have much in common until one remembers that both architect and film-maker share a background in the expressionism of the 1920s. Quite what, if anything, this might mean isn't clear, though it's intriguing that Scharoun's influence does seem to be present in the work of some present-day architects who attempt connections with the spatiality of film. The architecture of Scharoun and Hugo Häring might just be seen as confirming the rationality of the apparently eccentric (though I doubt that they saw it that way), whereas
noir
reveals the irrationality of the normal, so perhaps the two are in some way complementary. Certainly, both extra-ordinary experience of everyday architecture (in film, especially
film noir
) and everyday experience of extra-ordinary architecture (expressionism, Art Nouveau and so on), might be sought for similar reasons. The Surrealists, for instance, admired
both Gaudí and
film noir
. For anyone in pursuit of, let's say, the
improvement
of everyday life, a medium which offers a heightened awareness of architecture – the medium of film – might be thought at least as compelling as an actually existing architecture of heightened awareness – an
ecstatic
architecture, whatever that might be.

In the autumn of 1989 I began to research an idea for a film about London, which was subsequently commissioned by the British Film Institute and photographed over a period of about ten months in 1992. The first print of the completed film, by then called
London
, was delivered in January 1994, just in time for that year's Berlin Film Festival. It was well received in Berlin, and was released in the UK the following June, where it played in a succession of West End cinemas for most of the summer. For a film like this – without a visible cast, or even much of a narrative – to be even a minor box office proposition was extremely unusual, and its relative success was probably at least partly due to the possibility it offered audiences of finding aspects of their everyday experience represented in the cinema. The film opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in the Mall, and departing audiences walked out of the cinema into the space of one of its sequences (the rehearsal for Trooping the Colour), which had been photographed from the ICA's balcony. The film set out to document, among other things, the ‘decline' of London under the Tories, and it offered people the morale-boosting opportunity to share thoughts that had perhaps previously occurred to them only in isolation. As a portrait of the city, it was rather critical – in those days, Londoners were proud, not so much of London, but of themselves for putting up with its physical and other shortcomings. One would not be permitted to say such things today.

One of the starting points for the film was a passage from the memoirs of Alexander Herzen (1812–70):

This passage is part of Herzen's account of the period soon after his arrival in 1852, when London was physically very different from the city it is now (much more so than it was by, say, 1900), but it was easy to connect it with one's experience of London in the 1980s. Other people said similar things – I recall, for instance, Zaha Hadid's suggestion that London was a good place to work, because there were so few distractions.

The film took the form of a fictional journal (like Daniel Defoe's
Journal of the Plague Year
), an unnamed narrator's account of the project of his companion and ex-lover Robinson, a disenfranchised, would-be intellectual, petty bourgeois part-time lecturer at the ‘University of Barking'. Robinson's project was a study of ‘the problem of London', and the problem of London seemed to be, in essence, that it wasn't Paris. I had read up on the experiences of various nineteenth-century visitors from France, on the look out for further details of ‘the absence of Continental diversions', and discovered Paul Verlaine's description of London as ‘flat as a bed-bug, if bed-bugs were flat',
and his suggestion that the way people drank in pubs confirmed the ‘lamentable inferiority of Anglo-Saxons'.
²
Apollinaire's description of the south London suburbs, seen from the train, was of ‘wounds bleeding in the fog'. Wilhelm Kostrowicki, before he became Apollinaire, had visited London twice in pursuit of a young woman called Annie Playden, whose family lived in Landor Road, SW9, and who soon afterwards emigrated to Texas, where she was discovered by academics in 1951, unaware of her rejected suitor's subsequent identity.
³
Reading Enid Starkie's biography,
⁴
I found that Arthur Rimbaud probably produced a good deal of his literary output in London (there are likely images of London in, for example, the
Illuminations
), and that his last address in England was not in Scarborough, as had been suggested, but in Reading. This became the starting point for a sequel to
London, Robinson in Space
(1997), in which Robinson is exiled to the English provinces.

Thus far, the film was a fairly Eurocentric, even Anglocentric project, which attempted to combine two strands of critical thinking. On one hand, there was what one might call the ‘urban' literature of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Louis Aragon, Walter Benjamin and so on, which had become influential in architectural discourse during the 1970s and '80s, in the context of which London appeared to be a city where certain kinds of urban experience that one might see as characteristic of European cities were difficult, if not impossible, to find. On the other hand were the various ‘declinist' scenarios of English capitalism, in particular the idea that England is a backward, failing economy because it has never had a successful bourgeois revolution, and that the City of London's dominance and priorities reinforce this failure. This view was fairly widespread at the time, and was attractive to people in the art and design professions since it offered an explanation (and, in the context of the political ‘debate' about the UK's role in Europe, a cure) for the problematic nature of so many aspects of English visual and material culture – the UK's attitude to public space and cities; its apparent inability to produce adequately designed buildings, cars and other consumer goods; its unattractive food and problems with agriculture; the predicament of public services like education and transport; and a whole range of other features of everyday life that might be seen as consequences of laissez-faire.

Landor Road, from
London
(1994)

Alongside these predictable concerns, however, was the awareness that Baudelaire, for instance, was just as fed up with the
quartier latin
as Robinson claimed to be with London. His problem was not really London, but ‘The Great Malady, Horror of Home'.
⁵
Perhaps, one thought, this feeling of
restlessness
that seemed to be so characteristic of life in London was not really such a problem after all. Perhaps it was something to be valued. London might be uncomfortable to live in, but it avoided the more stupefying aspects of
dwelling
that a less spatially impoverished, more ‘architectural' city might encourage. Perhaps London was even, despite its obvious anachronisms, rather modern. Even someone as narrow-minded as Robinson could hardly fail to notice the increasingly cosmopolitan make-up of its population.

Without ever really losing sight of its architectural and other preconceptions about London as a physical structure, and with occasional references to the life and work of Baudelaire
⁶
and Rimbaud, the film explored these ideas in various more or less convincing, sometimes rather touristic, ways, beginning with its narrator's introduction of himself as a returning seaman (albeit only a photographer on a cruise liner). Robinson's first fictional excursion (to Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill in Twickenham) was provoked by the appearance of a non-fictional Portuguese driving school opposite his flat, one of several new undertakings in the neighbourhood that had accompanied the rapid expansion of the Portuguese community in south Lambeth after Portugal joined the European Union in 1987. By the river in Twickenham, near Alexander Pope's Grotto, the film's protagonists meet two Peruvian musicians, Aquiles and Carlos Justiniani, whose singing accompanied their walk downstream as far as Kew. Aquiles had been actually encountered busking with a colleague in Vauxhall Underground station, and we had arranged to include one of his recordings in the film.

Emerging from the arcades of Brixton market, where he had hoped to confirm a visit by Apollinaire in 1901, Robinson noticed a ship depicted on the sign of The Atlantic, the famous public house opposite, which enabled him to mention the arrival of post-war emigrants from Jamaica on the SS
Empire Windrush
, and the fact that they were initially housed in the deep (air-raid) shelters under Clapham Common. There were similar episodes in cafés and restaurants in the neighbourhoods of Ealing Road, Wembley and Cranford, on the A4 near Heathrow, and a visit to Southall during Diwali. Amid the cultural diversity of Ridley Road market, in Dalston, Robinson ‘became much happier and relaxed, and began to talk more positively about London's future', though his companion continued: ‘I was not convinced by this: London has always struck me as a city full of interesting people most of whom, like Robinson, would prefer to be elsewhere.' This remark was based on the idea that the actual attainment of a cosmopolitan London was somehow restricted, despite the heterogeneity of its population, either by spatial characteristics – an emphasis on private, exclusive spaces, perhaps – or by something else. In an interview in Reece Auguiste's film
Twilight City
(Black Audio Film Collective, 1989), Paul Gilroy had spoken of ‘an extraordinary change, in which people are able to inhabit the same space, to be physically proximate and yet to live in different worlds'. In the 1980s I had also become used to a characteristically London conversation in which the participants would share their longing to be somewhere else, with each party nostalgic for a different place – the Caribbean, southern Europe, or perhaps a different part of the UK – usually, though not always, somewhere the speaker might regard as
home
.