NEWSLETTER
Winter 03/04
The
City of the Future
is a research project that attempts to develop a critique of present-day
and possible future urban landscapes by exploring archive film of the
past century. Patrick Keiller is currently an AHRB Research Fellow in
the Creative and Performing Arts at the Royal College of Art. During
the 1990s, I made three films about the UK's urban and other landscapes.
London (1994) attempted a re-imagination of already-existing
spaces of London, suggested by various literary and other treatments
of Paris. A sequel, Robinson in Space (1997) explored landscapes
outside London in which the newness of spaces characteristic of a computerised,
international consumer economy contrasted with the dilapidation of much
of the rest of the built environment. A third film The Dilapidated
Dwelling (2000) examined the future prospects of the UK's housing
stock, and included some archive film. It was partly suggested by a
study commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which pointed
out that the rate at which the UK's stock of dwellings were being replaced
was so low as to imply that every dwelling would have to last for several
thousand years.[1] The film
asked whether the application of computer and other new technologies
- which had transformed so many aspects of manufacturing, food distribution
etc., and was very visible in the landscape of Robinson in Space - was
likely to alter this outlook, and concluded that in the short or medium
term it was not, and that the predicament was more likely to intensify.
A few years later, it appears that (at least in the UK) the housing
stock of the future will be composed of nearly all the dwellings that
already exist, and a few new ones not unlike them. This longevity of
the built environment (not all buildings are dwellings, but 70% of urban
land is residential, and much of the rest of the built environment appears
to be almost as permanent) contrasts with expectations of the early
twentieth century, when there seems to have been a relatively widespread
anticipation that new technologies and social structures would - or
at least should - give rise to a radical transformation of urban space
in the decades that were to follow. About half the UK's dwellings have
been built since 1945, but most of these were additions to the stock,
and much of the built environment that existed in, say, 1910 survives
today. In the
last hundred years, city life has probably changed rather more in other
ways, often in ways that involve perception and imagination. The subjective
transformations of Surrealism and Situationism - that prompted the first
of this series of explorations, the film London - were the prototypes
of a process in which the 'discovery' of previously undervalued spaces
by artists and other creative types has become the sought-after preliminary
to urban regeneration. When viewing
archive film for The Dilapidated Dwelling, I was struck by a
contrast between the familiarity of many of the spaces glimpsed and
a feeling of distance from the lives of those who formerly inhabited
them. It was also intriguing that the onset of the apparent relative
stasis of the built environment - which seemed to have occurred, at
least in the UK, during the decades either side of 1900 - should coincide
with the beginning of moving pictures. It seems highly unlikely that
there might be any direct connection, but moving pictures are just one
of many communication and transport technologies that were developed
or became widespread at about the same time, which was also the peak
period of European emigration. These social and technological changes
might be seen as the beginning of a rapid expansion of virtual space,
which has continued with radio, television, telecommunications and the
use of computers. One can also imagine that this expansion of virtual
space might have disadvantaged actual space. At the
same time, during the last 100 years the cost of building does not seem
to have decreased relative to average earnings, and has probably increased,
whereas food, most manufactured goods and transport have become much
cheaper.[2] Much of this increased productivity has been achieved through
mechanisation, automation and economic activity in the virtual realm,
in which building has lagged far behind. In most respects (life expectancy,
for instance) the majority of people in the UK now are much better off
than the majority of the early twentieth century, but there are some
ways in which the present is impoverished. In the
1980s, I tended to assume that the increasing dilapidation of the built
environment was visible evidence that the places in which one encountered
it were becoming poorer. By the mid-1990s however, it was clear that
similar dilapidation was just as likely to be found in prosperous areas.
Somewhat inadvertently, I began to use the word 'Orwellian' to refer
to the expansion of virtual space, and to describe dilapidation that
was not a result of economic failure, but merely an aspect of the prevailing
economic reality. There was a similarly 'Orwellian' aspect to the landscape
of the film Robinson in Space, in the contrast between the spaces
of global finance and consumerism - new office towers, airports, shopping
malls, supermarkets and so on - and the increasing neglect of so much
of everything else. I had
not read Nineteen Eighty-Four since leaving school, but recalled
its protagonist's conversation with an old man in a pub who has tried
to insist on being served a pint of beer, by then sold only in litres
and half-litres, following which: Winston
sat for a minute or two gazing at his empty glass, and hardly noticed
when his feet carried him out into the street again. Within twenty
years at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question, 'Was
life better before the Revolution than it is now?' would have ceased
once and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable
even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world
were incapable of comparing one age with another.[3] For us,
'the huge and simple question, "Was life better before the Revolution
than it is now?"' might suggest, if anything, a comparison with
the mid-1970s. The revolution - whether a digital revolution, the onset
of neo-liberalism or the 'shift in the structure of feeling' with which
modernity gave way to postmodernity, or all of these - is usually located
around the time of the 1973 oil crisis.[4] In advanced economies, reductions
in the cost of consumer items, air travel and so on might suggest that
people are generally better off now than during the 1970s, but is not
difficult to argue otherwise. Later
in the novel, when Orwell's protagonists present themselves as recruits
to a rumoured underground resistance, they drink 'to the past'. Their
contact sends them a copy of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical
Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, which includes: The
world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with
the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared
with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked
forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society
unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly and efficient - a glittering
antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete - was
part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person.[5] Even
in this dystopian context (and Goldstein's book is a fiction within
a fiction, as it turns out to have been written by a member of the Thought
Police) the comparison with 'the world that existed before 1914' might
seem surprising,[6] but Orwell does appear to see the past as subversive,
even if its material attractions are a trap.[7] If one is a film-maker,
one might wonder how a film of the past - as both an artefact of the
past, and a record of people and artefacts of the past - would qualify
these ideas. One of
the first films I encountered that recalled such questions was Panorama
of Ealing from a Moving Tram, photographed by William Kennedy-Laurie
Dickson in 1901 for the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company. This
is a view looking forward from the upper deck of an electric tram passing
east along The Broadway, The Mall and Uxbridge Road alongside Ealing
Common, a short length of the former Oxford to London coach road in
the neighbourhood of Ealing Broadway railway station. The National Film
and Television Archive's viewing copy is a 35mm print, but the original
was photographed with the 68mm Biograph electric camera which ran at
40 frames per second, and in bright, clear sunlight. The left
side of the street is visible, lined by what look like plane trees about
30 feet tall, behind which most of the shops have awnings. There are
a great many flags and banners, some of them very large Union flags,
others less easy to decipher, and a lot of people out walking who appear
rather smart, as if the day is a public holiday or weekend of some national
or other significance. It is
easy to forget how little of the actuality of the past is documented
in films. Even today, whether in fiction, documentary, news or even
the recordings of surveillance cameras, very little of ordinary, everyday
life appears in moving pictures. Exceptional circumstances - if only
those accompanying the camera - will almost certainly have attended
the making of any film. Even in the 26 hours of the Mitchell and Kenyon
collection, the motives of the film-makers nearly always condition and
sometimes create the events seen in the films. The first
three electric tram routes in London began operating on 4 April 1901,
from Hammersmith to Kew Bridge, from Shepherd's Bush to Kew Bridge via
Chiswick, and from Shepherd's Bush to Acton. With the completion of
the latter route's extension to Ealing and Southall, the entire network
was inaugurated on Wednesday 10 July, which was also the day on which
Ealing celebrated its Charter of Incorporation as a Borough, the first
in Middlesex. Electric trams were popular both as public transport and
as representing the benefits of electrification and modern technology.[8]
As moving camera platforms, they offered film-makers the possibility
for striking spatial simulations, which in return publicised the trams
and identified their modernity with that of cinema. The film is one
of four Biograph films that recorded the Ealing tram inauguration on
10 July.[9] In 1901,
Ealing was a well established suburb, as the tree-lined streets seen
in the film suggest, but still new enough not to offer much evidence
of decay. As 'Queen of the Suburbs' it was also relatively prosperous,
probably more so than it is today. Like much surviving domestic architecture
of the period, the landscape of the film appears to confirm the relative
prosperity of the late Victorian and Edwardian middle class. All this
might be said of a number of films of the period, but few seem to suggest
that the summer of 1901 was an enjoyable time to be alive in the way
that the Ealing film does. I suspect that this is as much a result of
the film's cinematography, especially the unusual quality of light,
as of anything else - there is a similar emancipatory feeling in Pissarro's
paintings of Bedford Park in 1897. About
ten days after first seeing the film, I was travelling upstairs on a
bus which unexpectedly diverted eastward along Uxbridge Road, and found
myself passing through the space depicted in the film. It was a dull
day in November. The bank is still a bank, now a branch of the NatWest,
and many other buildings on the north side of the road survive, but
the view from the bus certainly suggested that something other than
mere age had impoverished the landscape. Ealing is still a prosperous,
successful London suburb, so, as before, one wonders what to make of
this apparent impoverishment. In 1901, poverty was often shocking and
never very far away - Dickson's film of Ealing is approximately contemporary
with Jack London's account of the East End in The People of the Abyss,
published in 1903.[10] Ten years later Maud Pember Reeves's Round
about a Pound a Week detailed the domestic conditions, child mortality
and inadequate budgets endured by women in north Lambeth whose husbands
earned between 18 and 30 shillings (£0.90 - £1.50) a week,
not unusually low wages for unskilled workers.[11] In 1914, skilled
workers - bricklayers, electricians, engineering pattern-makers, shipwrights,
engine drivers - earned around two pounds a week,[12] seemingly about
average earnings. Skilled workers today tend to earn rather more than
the average, and the middle class is much bigger and relatively less
well off, but reduced wage differentials or increased scarcity of certain
skills seem unlikely to be the underlying causes of a change in the
material quality of the built environment. The qualities
of space one seems to see in Dickson's film are those that attract tourists
to Notes 2. Earnings
have increased about three times as much as prices. A study by Encyclopaedia
Britannica published in 1999 suggested that between 1899 and 1999, retail
prices increased by a factor of 57.5, while average earnings rose from
£1.95 (39 shillings) per week to £384.50. 3. George
Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Penguin, 2000): 96. 4. See,
for instance, David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge
MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). The early 1970s also saw the end of large-scale
urban redevelopment, at least in the UK, as with the successful resistance
to the GLC's plan to redevelop Covent Garden. 5. Orwell:
196. 6. Orwell
was born in 1903. During much of his childhood, his family lived in
the Thames valley near Henley, a landscape which appears in positive
contexts in the novel. 7. The
space in which these are encountered - the junk-shop 'to the north and
east of what had once been St Pancras Station' (pp85-86) - is the site
of the novel's protagonists' entrapment. 8. Though
Ealing's council had opposed the introduction of the trams. As cheap
public transport, they were perhaps seen as a threat to the suburb's
exclusivity. 9. The
other films were Distinguished Guests Leaving the Power House,
The First Trams Leaving Shepherd's Bush for Southall and Panorama
at Ealing Showing Lord Rothschild Declaring Line Open. See Richard
Brown and Barry Anthony, A Victorian Film Enterprise - The History
of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company 1897-1915 (Flicks
Books, 1999), 295. This gives the date 10 July 1901 for all four titles.
10. Jack
London, The People of the Abyss (London: Pluto, 2001). 11. Maud
Pember Reeves, Round about a Pound a Week (Virago 1979). 12. British
Labour Statistics, Historical Abstract 1886-1968. Another
version of this article will appear in the Nottingham British Silent
Cinema Festival volume for 2004 (Flicks Books)
THE
CITY OF THE FUTURE
Patrick
Keiller
Near the beginning of the film, the tram passes the London and County
Bank (previously the Town Hall), which has put out two large flags,
and later a music shop with a sign 'pianos'. Towards the end of the
film, an open-topped electric tram passes in the opposite direction,
fairly full on top, with several of the passengers carrying parasols,
as are many people in the street. There are cyclists on the road, a
pony and trap and other horse-drawn vehicles, but not many tradespeople
and no motor cars. The non-panchromatic stock probably exaggerates the
brightness of the weather a little, and Dickson might have used a red
or yellow filter, but the people's dress, the large number of parasols
carried, and the degree of movement of the flags and the leaves of the
trees, together with the celebratory atmosphere, suggest an unambiguously
euphoric, breezy non-working day in summer. The unusually sharp definition
of the image - which I assume is a result of both the original large
format and the good condition of the archive's 35mm copy - together
with the extraordinary lighting effect, create a degree of heightened
photographic realism, so that it is not difficult to imagine that the
film might be a fragment of a costume drama made in the 1940s.
less 'advanced', or socialist economies. Given that the UK's economy
in 1901 was less 'advanced', it is hardly surprising that one should
detect such qualities in the film. Perhaps their absence from the space
today can be seen as a predicament of the local in a culture in which
power is increasingly located elsewhere. The disempowerment of local
government, for example, leads to dilapidation, so that it seems appropriate
that Dickson's film might have been partly suggested by Ealing's becoming
a borough. London's public transport flourished under the control of
the London County Council, and public transport is a major priority
for its successor, the Greater London Assembly. On 29 May 2002, Ken
Livingstone, the Mayor of London, announced the decision to construct
two new tramways, one of them from Shepherd's Bush to Uxbridge, via
Ealing.
1. Philip Leather & Tanya Morrison, The state of UK housing
(Policy Press, 1997). In the 1970s, a similar calculation produced an
implied life of 250 years, then considered problematic.