 |
 |
Dear colleagues, Please note that the room for Patrick Keiller's talk on 29 June has changed. It will now take place in the Beveridge Hall on the ground floor of Senate House South Block. All the best, Ricarda Vidal Please come and join us for a lecture by filmmaker, lecturer and writer Patrick Keiller Patrick Keiller: The view from the train chair: Dr Katia Pizzi Tuesday 29 June at 6.30pm Beveridge Hall, Senate House South Block, ground floor, University of London, Malet Street In his essay Surrealism (1929), Walter Benjamin wrote that 'the true creative overcoming of religious illumination ... resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration ...' and of 'the lovers who convert everything we have experienced on mournful railway journeys (railways are beginning to age), on Godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian quarters of the great cities, in the first glance through the rain-blurred window of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action. They bring the immense forces of 'atmosphere' concealed in these things to the point of explosion.' Photography and the railway journey both date from the 1820s: the Stockton and Darlington Railway was inaugurated in 1825; Joseph Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras was made in 1826. One might see cinema as their belated combination. The first moving-camera film is supposed to have been a view of Venice photographed from a gondola, but it was closely followed by the first of the railway panoramas and phantom rides that are among the forms most strikingly characteristic of the first decade of cinema. In my experience, the view from the train also features as a way of finding subjects that can be visited later, on foot or otherwise, for more extensive exploration. This lecture will revisit a few examples, beginning with an account of a bicycle journey along Harrow Road, in north-west London, in August 2008. Patrick Keiller is a filmmaker, writer and lecturer. His films include London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997), a study of the UK's landscape extended as a book in 1999. Recent works include Londres, Bombay, an exhibition at Le Fresnoy: Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing (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 (2007-8), a five-screen navigable landscape of the UK in c1900. A forthcoming film was photographed during 2008. The lecture is free and open for all, but please email me at [log in to unmask] if you would like to come. The lecture is organised by Dr Katia Pizzi and Dr Ricarda Vidal for the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies and is part of the Summer School "Memory, Empire and Technology". http://www.igrs.sas.ac.uk/research/CCM.html http://www.igrs.sas.ac.uk/research/CMsummerschool.html