Season 1, Gen X — Episode 13 — London (1994) + Robinson in Space (1997) w/Owen Hatherley

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This week, Chase and Sam at DPP are joined by architecture critic and writer Owen Hatherley [https://owenhatherley.co.uk/] to discuss British director Patrick Keiller's London (1994) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxbg6QTkmUw] and Robinson in Space [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crVFU-5B6fs] (1997).

London and Robinson in Space form the first two parts of the decade-long Robinson trilogy [https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/series/38477]. Keiller's two essay films capture Britain during the interregnum between Thatcher and Blair — an oft-forgotten period, after the end of the Cold War, but before the short-lived ecstasies of Cool Britannia.

Keiller charts a country still very much in thrall to tradition, mediating its own decline, and with a surprisingly intact industrial base. Both films feature an unnamed narrator who journeys around England with an unseen accomplice: the titular Robinson (a permanently precarious academic). Keiller's camera lingers over petrol stations, suburban business parks and other liminal spaces — a post-Thatcherite, globalised, netherworld of commercial utilitarianism.

Through a patched-together series of shots and reams of economic data, Keiller, arguably, makes the case that Gen X, not the boomers, were the UK's last industrial generation: squatting over the final flames of manufacturing during the rule of John Major — the infamous prime ministerial 'grey man.'

Major and Blair haunt the background of Keiller's work, bookending the period his films explore. The former is presented as a bland technocrat at the End of History, the latter a representative of American-style personality politics. Keiller's films place us in a British interregnum — and, to steal a line from Gramsci, 'morbid symptoms' are everywhere.

Hatherley is the author of several books, including Militant Modernism, Trans-Europe Express, Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London, Modern Buildings in Britain: A Gazetteer and, his latest, The Alienation Effect (out now with Penguin [https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/311898/the-alienation-effect-by-hatherley-owen/9780141989778]).

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