Film Screening - Reviews

LONDON
Dir: PETER KEILER
Year: 1992

Be prepared to take a long London tour through the thoughts and takes of fictional character Robinson, a self educated architecture professor, who teaches in Barking and also work at a Brixton café to make ends meet.
Our guide and narrator to this tour is the a friend of Robinsons. His speech is accompanied by long shots depicting various scenes of London, taken throughout 1992. Although the link between images and text is often loose, it adds character and depth to the film, building some of it's humour and charm. On the opposite, the soundtrack is mostly literal and used to punctuate the narration - one of the weak points of the film in my opinion.
Going back to the story, it seems that director Peter Keiler uses Robinson to embody the frustrations, nostalgia and longing for a lost and romanticised past of London's conscious, left-oriented middle class. Robinson, as we are told, wishes to be a flâneaur, to be able to travel and have different experiences, however, he feels entangled with London and unable to live. On the one hand, Robinson admires and is exited about the city's past, history, legends, anecdotes and meanings, on the other hand, there are evidences that London has become something that Robinson can not bare facing for what it really is at the present day. Therefore, in a attempt to see the world his way, Robinson rewrites the meaning of everything that seems to be out of place or against his beliefs. For instance, even a meaning for London itself is created. Robinson decides to view the city as a monument to Rimbaud, a tragic poet, unrecognised at his time, who left London, travelled the world and suffered a premature, painful death.
As the movie progresses, the 1992 election is covered through Robinson's eyes. The outcome is a heavy blow for Robinson. The conservative win, backed by middle class voters that - in Robinson's view - where the greatest victims of the Thatcher year, seems to strip Robinson out of his romanticism and onirical takes on London.
Finally, we are offered a bleak picture, as we tour the heart of London - it's historic centre, the City. Any hopes Robinson showed about a bright, illuminist future of the City goes down the drain when he concludes that London is a city characterised by it's absence and it's lack, for it's historical centre became a private void, flooded in and out by a daily migration of workers. In his words:"London is the first Metropolis which disappeared".

Interesting quotes:

"Interesting people in London would prefer to be elsewhere".