Robinson in Ruins (2010)

 

Director: Patrick Keiller

Screenplay: Patrick Keiller

Cast: Vanessa Redgrave

An Abstract Candidate

 

As films go, Robinson in Ruins will be very unconventional for many even with a taste for "abstract" films. An essay film, Ruins was my first film from Patrick Keiller, closing out a trilogy he began in the nineties. At the start of the 1990s Patrick Keiller, who is also a lecturer and writer, created a character named "Robinson" for a pair of essay films documenting the sociological state of Britain, first with London (1994), focused on the capital, and Robinson in Space (1997), expanding out into the rest of England. Robinson himself was never heard from, and the unnamed narrator, played by the late Paul Scofield, was our guide into Robinson's excursions. Keiller belongs with a film like Robinson in Ruins in the territory called "psycho-geography", a concept of interpreting a concept of interpreting geography in their history and sociological terms, alongside what has transpired in both in their creation and shaping. I became fascinated by this concept, at the right age in my early twenties, from Ian Sinclair, a filmmaker and author whose London Orbital (2002), chronicling a series of trips he took tracing the M25, London's outer-ring motorway, on foot left a rewarding mark. Despite the inherent weight to that text, dealing with the ramifications of Britain's political elite on the landscape, which Robinson in Ruins also does, there is also something very British in a profound, profane and quaint way in both examples, where there even the most seemingly banal of motorways, as London Orbital was about, allowed one to peel back the historical and sociological influences that marked the landscape, all the tensions also found here, able to be peeled back even in the pipeline markers spotted in land overgrown by nature itself.

Robinson in Ruins, which is made in knowledge Paul Scofield passed away in 2008, was left without the voice from the films before, and in context of Robinson being depicted here now as a literal ghost having left his mark, we are also in the midst of the 2008 economic crisis that happened in real life. A huge event globally that left a lasting effect, this is also when Robinson, before he vanished was assigned to a project on environmental collapse, industrial capitalism becoming his obsession, only to disappear. Film canisters and his diaries are found in his last know living place, a caravan, and those who found it have put the material together, the narrator (as voiced by Vanessa Redgrave) connected to this project as the original narrator's lover. Contextually this is, as with London Orbital, seemingly banal to the extreme, as the brown and green land collides and one of the first locations seen a Lidl, a supermarket chain found where I was growing up and is something you would living in ordinary working class England without batting an eye at its symbol. Then the narration brings up their problematic work practices, and you see the layers being peeled back of how even the banal is marked in tensions.

The metaphor which ties together the film, which could win a person over even if they find Robinson in Ruins too dry in its construction, is the repeated image of lichen, a fungal species here, repeated with the same one, that has survived and adapted to human progress with ease as the rest of nature has; the image in question has lichen growing on the letters of a motorway sign, curling around the letters itself, as we see the struggle between the natural landscape and human development in a severe economic downturn. Having grown up with autism, my own spatial awareness of environments as a result has made a concept like psycho-geography compelling for me, where so my awareness of environments is always with intrigue having to adapt to new stimulus, even old sights gaining new layers and emotions depending on that particular day. This film itself finds layers where political and social tensions have broken out, and been left, in the tranquil shots of natural landscape in agricultural and motorway territories, evoking old Peter Greenaway experimental shorts from early in his career without the critique of the filming structure.

This film, in truth, does feel dry, entirely because whilst London Orbital, as a novel or the Chris Petit adaptation co-directed with Ian Sinclair as a 2002, was a freewheeling and expansive work which could include pithy put-downs and humorous comparisons as it dealt with the seriousness of some of its subject matter. In contrast, Robinson in Ruins, shot in celluloid film, is structured around spatial shots of isolated locations, with only the natural landscape and Redgrave's narration the closest to a soundtrack. This in itself is enough to easily put some off who may find the subject - the death knell of post-liberalism in this economic downturn - still fascinating, because there are lengthy pauses literally examining a field, buildings and plant life among other details, contemplative in a minimalistic form with no human beings ever depicted onscreen baring vehicles. If you can find your way past this, as I did, there is to these images a contemplative and peaceful form matched by a rich narrative text which would have to be picked through over multiple viewings of. It is a project, baring the use of celluloid film, that could have been an ambitious YouTube video, but the moments which strike out in look - the close up of a spider weaving its web over a monologue about the economic collapse itself, to watching farming machinery working in the field - are also contrasted by what the narration reveals about seemingly banal images. The wasteland of derelicts, power stations and even poster covered boards with penises crudely sprayed on them in graffiti would be ignored by most people, but here gain more weight as this fictional narrative with real world essay material adds context to the images. We pass rape seed oil crop fields, and their connection to importation, to nuclear missile silos from the nineties, to 18th century traveller inns turned into banks. The irony of British opium fields we see onscreen, for medicinal purposes, is contrasted by the narration bringing use the opium fields found in Afghanistan, which is later developed as heroine imported into Britain itself.

Even if re-creatable with the modern technology of digital phones, even at this time in 2010, there is a beauty in Keiller's film to contrast its vast text of intersecting worlds, one that would fill a cinema screen with its minimalism. Thematically it is of its era, the economic crisis at the time still having a lasting impact but something that was once such an impactful concept in the news, and this film also name checks Britain Conservative politician Boris Johnson, who here is just the newly elected mayor of London, not the future Prime Minister into the decade after. The environmental concerns have sadly not aged, still severe in the text here as its talk of the dying throes of neo liberalism, contrasted by fears of environmental destruction which are now creeping up to us in mainstream conversation. In contrast, however, it was always surprising how relaxing watching this film actually was, a perverse serenity to an extreme close up of lichen, turned into these bio-alien life forms that Robinson possibly can hear here as is talked of. As much as this rings the dreaded bell of our fault in damaging the Earth itself, it is mirrored against scenes of woodland; whilst there is a legitimate fear still with us of environmental collapse, you however see nature still finds a way to continue. Orchids still grow near motorways, and even in the fingerprints of human interference, creeping in-between the areas once newly built but merely in the background or even abandoned.

The contrast in its peaceful veneer against the chaotic history the film talks of - nuclear protests by wives in the nineteen eighties, protests in the 19th century about claim to land - is something which requires patience with, but if you can find it is compelling. It could be ignored if you struggle with the seemingly ultra minimalistic aesthetic the film has. With the visuals and the narration together however, the film does gain a great deal to it. For a film that was clearly a holdover of the 2000s in culture, it is surprisingly relevant still. The landscape baring a few differences is the same still in Britain, and the environmental concerns are growing every day. Certainly as well, though Patrick Keiller might raise an eyebrow to this, the film even as the most stoic in presentation does have an innate eccentricity to its advantage. There is some deadpan humour still here, and again, the choices of locations, seemingly the less profound choices to talk about the history of, has something innately eccentric to them as choices if with a real significance found. It is not Swandown (2012), director Andrew Kötting's own travel essay film in which he, with guest stars like famous comic book/graphic novel/novel writer Alan Moore and Ian Sinclair himself, pedalled a swan-shaped pedalo from the seaside in Hastings to Hackney in London, via the English inland waterways. There is, however, something still very English let alone British in a film like Robinson in Ruins, where someone made an essay film like this in which lichen on a road sign is the main selling point in the trailer, and actually proves the most symbolically synchronizing point to tie its themes together.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None