Patrick Keiller: The view from the train
chair: Dr Katia Pizzi
Tuesday 29 June at
6.30pm
Chancellor’s Hall, Senate House South Block, 1st 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
Memory,
Empire and Technology, 29 June-3 July 2010
Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory
Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies
School of Advanced Study
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
E: [log in to unmask]
W: www.igrs.sas.ac.uk/research/CMsummerschool.html
Dr Katia Pizzi
Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies
School of Advanced Study
University of London
Stewart House
Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU.
Tel. n. 02078628962
Fax. n. 02078628672
Email: [log in to unmask]