CRASSH

The films and video-installations of Patrick Keiller offer themselves to be read as a suggestive phenomenology of the site -specific, a theoretical exploration of the experience of the places of the everyday. This includes the city as well as the landscape surrounding it. His carefully arranged long static shots of chosen sights/sites, paired with the highly stylized and complex text offered through a distinctly present voice over, are both carefully orchestrated with music and sounds in such a way as to offer a new way to cinematically experience the latent, or hidden (/forgotten) dimensions of the urban experience. Keiller’s films reintroduces the city as a place that is just as much about the temporal as about the spatial, allowing for the layers of historical strata to collapse into each other and, at the same time, re-enchant the site by refusing to separate the fictional (/mythical) from the factual (/mythical). This opens the field for a (de)tour that includes extra-cinematic elements such as the Situationists’ notion of psychogeography, as well as the literary works of Ian Sinclair and W.G. Seebald. Drawing on comparisons with, not only such documentary cinema classics as films by Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttmann, but more importantly with, for example, Thom Andersen’s suggestive Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), Claude Lelouch’s Parisian ghost ride C’était un Rendez-vous (1976), and Terrence Davies’ lyrical portrait of Liverpool, Of Time and the City (2008), this paper suggests, by ways of Keiller’s work, a path towards a new sensibility in representing the city in documentary media, towards suggesting a New City Symphony.