Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 260: Thu Sep 17

London (Keiller, 1992): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.40pm


This screens as part of the Film in London season at BFI Southbank and is also being shown on 10th and 13th September. You can find the full details here.

Time Out review:
If you didn't know Patrick Keiller's smartly rambling, tricksy walking tour of our city from 1994, you might think that his title was pompous or presumptive. But his film is anything but as he gives us a fictional, unseen narrator, Robinson (voiced by Paul Scofield), who takes us on a tour of London, known and less known, grand and grotty, around the time of the film’s making, taking in such references as the 1992 general election and the IRA bomb at Bishopgate in 1993. Cinematic psychogeography, you might call it, but that’s a bit, well, pompous for a film that is endlessly self-mocking, witty and perceptive. If only British cinema produced more such films that dance merrily on the border between fact and fiction – but, then, again, Keiller’s film – the first in a trilogy – is so unique in tone that imitators would easily be caught out.
Dave Calhoun

Here (and above) is an excerpt.

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