The View From the Train (25 page)
Read The View From the Train Online
Authors: Patrick Keiller
Despite a succession of post-privatisation operators, the North London Line still seems to be known by its old name, and has been recognised as the prototype for and already-existing fragment of what one day might be a London orbital railway. In the 1980s it was added to the underground map, since when it has no longer seemed
so exclusively the preserve of people who live and work along it. When Broad Street station was demolished, the route was extended east from Dalston to North Woolwich (via West Ham, where it crossed the northern outfall sewer, along the top of which is a path that leads to Beckton), and with this modification, the extraordinary industrial architecture of Silvertown and Beckton, and the Woolwich Ferry, became more easily accessible by train from other parts of London (at the time of writing, the line beyond Stratford is closed, to reopen as part of the Docklands Light Railway).
5
Crossing the ferry, a tourist could return to the centre through south London.
In 1979, I embarked on a postgraduate project in Peter Kardia's Department of Environmental Media at the Royal College of Art, where I began to make films and identified a canon of relevant texts, including Walter Benjamin's essay
Surrealism
(1929), in which I read that âthe true creative overcoming of religious illumination â¦Â resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration' and that
No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution â not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects â can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism. Leaving aside Aragon's
Passage de l'Opera
, Breton and Nadja are 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 âatmosphere' concealed in these things to the point of explosion. What form do you suppose a life would take that was determined at a decisive moment precisely by the street song last on everyone's lips?
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The Surrealist frisson, as a phenomenon, is described in literature (most explicitly in Louis Aragon's
Le Paysan de Paris
), but is experienced primarily as a subjective transformation of appearances. It is
easy to associate it with the impulse to take a photograph, with
photogénie
, which Christopher Phillips describes as âthe mysterious transformation that occurs when everyday objects are revealed, as if anew, in a photograph or on the motion picture screen'.
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While Surrealism may not have lived up to Benjamin's appreciation of its revolutionary potential, especially after the Second World War â Henri Lefebvre, writing in 1945, was particularly scathing
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â the Surrealist preoccupation with transfiguration, and hence with the sacred, endures for us in the now-commonplace presence of everyday objects in art, and in the subjective transformation, radical or otherwise, of everyday surroundings, the most familiar manifestations of which are the various practices of urban exploration that have become so widely established, especially in London, since the early 1990s.
My image-making developed over several years. In 1977, I began assembling a collection of colour slides documenting âfound' architecture, and discovered a precedent for this in the Surrealists' adoption of particular locations and structures in Paris. The buildings I found were certainly interesting, but the pictures were not always very successful. I had embarked on the project with the intention of extending it with moving image media, either video or film, but had been discouraged by their poor definition compared to that of photographs, and by the limits of the camera's frame. I spent several months trying to develop a technique of architectural photography and eventually, on a trip to France, made a series of photographs which became the basis of an installation combining monochrome slides and spoken narration, which was followed by another made with photographs of a high wall behind the prison on Wormwood Scrubs. These two works were fairly well received â they were later included in an exhibition at the Tate Gallery
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â and I recovered the project's initiative, which led me, a few weeks later, to cycle along Harrow Road.
Wormwood Scrubs, 1980
When I arrived at the place I had seen from the train, I found that it was overlooked by an extraordinary structure, a metal footbridge I had not noticed as the train passed beneath it. About 200 metres long, it carries pedestrians over both the main line and a branch that passes underneath it, at an angle, in a tunnel. The longer of the bridge's two spans is oriented so that Wembley Stadium is framed between its parapets. The bridge's architecture suggested a renewed attempt at moving pictures: its long, narrow walkway resembled the linearity of a film; its parapets framed the view in a ratio similar to the 4Ã3 of the camera, and its elaborate articulation, with several flights of steps, half landings and changes of direction, offered a structure for a moving-camera choreography which might include occasional panoramas.
Allotments, Wembley, 1980
View from footbridge, Wembley, 1980
The resulting film had two parts, the second of which was photographed a few weeks after the initial visit to the bridge, by walking a hand-held camera across it during a continuous ten-minute take. By this time, I think I had already decided to write fictional narration to accompany the picture. I discovered another footbridge, a square of walkways above the nearby junction of Harrow Road and the North Circular, with a spiral ramp at each corner, and photographed another ten-minute moving-camera walk, which became the first half of the film. This bridge was demolished in about 1992, when an underpass was built at the junction. The film was called
Stonebridge Park
(1981). Its narrative, such as it is, recalls the context, in the first part, and the immediate aftermath, in the second, of a theft committed by the narrator.
* * *
This rudimentary film was neither made nor conceived in a
moment
, but it originated in the unusual, unexpected experience that produced the photograph from which it evolved. Becoming more experienced in making images, I came to rely less on anything resembling the experiential phenomena of Surrealism, and became increasingly uncertain about their political significance. Exceptional moments of natural light seemed to offer similar conceptual transformations, and produced better pictures; for many who work with photographic media, the weather is not merely analogous with a state of mind. I have sometimes wondered whether I might have addressed these questions better if more of Henri Lefebvre's writing had been translated into English sooner than it was.
La Production de l'espace
was first published in 1974, but did not appear in English until Blackwell published Donald Nicholson-Smith's translation in 1991. I first encountered the book in 1994, before which I knew of Lefebvre and his relationship with the Situationists only from a brief mention in
Leaving the Twentieth Century
(1974), Christopher Gray's anthology of Situationist writing, an essential text for any would-be-literate punk rocker in the 1970s, in which I had found Gray's translation of part of Raoul Vaneigem's
Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations
(1967), known in English as
The Revolution of Everyday Life
, from which I often quoted:
although I can always see how beautiful anything could be if only I could change it, in practically every case there is nothing I can really do. Everything is changed into something else in my imagination, then the dead weight of things changes it back into what it was in the first place.
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Nicholson-Smith's 1983 translation is closer to the original:
though not everything affects me with equal force, I am always faced with the same paradox: no sooner do I become aware of the alchemy worked by my imagination upon reality than I see that reality reclaimed and borne away by the uncontrollable river of things.
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Lefebvre's assertion that âthe space which contains the realised preconditions of another life is the same one as prohibits what those preconditions make possible'
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is a thought not unlike that in Vaneigem's paragraph. I wondered if the prohibition that Lefebvre identifies is sometimes suspended within the spaces of a film, and, if so, whether this might explain some of the attraction, and the seemingly utopian quality, of so much film space, and why some people are willing to devote so much time and effort to making films.
In Volume 3 of his
Critique of Everyday Life
(1981, published in English in 2005), Lefebvre wrote of
Intense instants â or, rather, moments â it is as if they are seeking to shatter the everydayness trapped in generalised exchange. On the one hand, they affix the chain of equivalents to lived experience and daily life. On the other, they detach and shatter it. In the âmicro', conflicts between these elements and the chains of equivalence are continually arising. Yet the âmacro', the pressure of the market and exchange, is forever limiting these conflicts and restoring order. At certain periods, people have looked to these moments to transform existence.
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Lefebvre often writes of âmoments'. âWhat is Possible', the final chapter of Volume 1 of the
Critique
, written in 1945, includes:
Mystics and metaphysicians used to acknowledge that everything in life revolved around exceptional moments. In their view, life found expression and was concentrated in them. These moments were festivals: festivals of the mind or the heart, public or intimate festivals. In order to attack and mortally wound mysticism, it was necessary to show that festivals had lost their meaning, the power they had in the days when all their magnificence came from life, and when life drew its magnificence from festivals.
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Later, in
The Production of Space
, he identifies another kind of
moment
, in which âaround 1910 a certain space was shattered'.
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This observation first appeared in English translation in 1990, its paragraph
quoted by David Harvey in
The Condition of Postmodernity
, also published by Blackwell, and Harvey quoted it again in his afterword for Blackwell's edition of
The Production of Space
. Harvey's interest in the passage arises, I assume, from its identification of the beginning of a period that ended with the âprofound shift in the “structure of feeling” ' that signalled the onset of postmodernity in the early 1970s, with the break-up of the Bretton-Woods fixed-exchange-rate system and the subsequent slide to neoliberalism. In the autumn of 2008, it began to seem possible that this period might be giving way to another.
