The View From the Train (2 page)

I was anxious to emphasise this outcome of the project, and concerned that reviewers might interpret the film as an account of industrial decline, which they sometimes did, perhaps in accordance with their expectations. In autumn 1996, when
Robinson in Space
was practically complete, I began an essay in which I hoped to give a more detailed exposition of what I thought the film had demonstrated. I met one of the co-editors of a book, then in preparation, and he asked me to send him the completed essay. The book was eventually published in 2001 as
The Unknown City
, in which the essay
⁷
was grouped with contributions from Doreen Massey and Patrick Wright, my co-researchers in a later project.

By this time, I had adapted
Robinson in Space
as a book.
⁸
I continued to write, when asked, usually in connection with a
current or previous project, until early 2007, when I began the work preliminary to
Robinson in Ruins
(2010). During this long interval, I was mostly occupied with a project about the likely future of the UK's housing stock and another, developed from it, that set out to examine the built environment more generally. The first of these involved the production of a film,
The Dilapidated Dwelling
(2000); the second the development of a navigable assembly of early topographical films (including many views from moving trains), a virtual landscape of circa 1900 which became the basis for a series of exhibitions.
⁹
Much of the writing arose from these two projects. The essays are arranged in the order in which they were written, which is not always that in which they were published, or of the projects they relate to. Some were written in response to requests and invitations from academic or cultural contexts in which I thought I would be largely unknown, so that I explained myself from the beginning, and as a result there is some repetition, especially of quoted texts, that I have not attempted to edit.

During the interval between the completion of
Robinson in Space
and the commencement of
Robinson in Ruins
, I sometimes mentioned or alluded to a semi-fictional body, the Robinson Institute, most explicitly in an essay of that name, in which I suggested I might be one of its employees. This Robinson Institute – there are at least two others – was conceived in July 1999 with the aim of continuing the work of the protagonist of
London
and
Robinson in Space
, there being then, it seemed, no possibility to make another film in which he might continue the work himself. Robinson had been first imagined in June 1990, and was deployed as a way of allowing the films' narrators to put forward ideas that one might entertain but would perhaps not wholeheartedly adopt. His name was borrowed from one of the two itinerants in Kafka's
Amerika
, though at the time I wrote that he had been born in Shropshire.

As a series, the essays accompany the evolution, since the late 1970s, of an idea most recently restated in an introductory text for an exhibition, also called
The Robinson Institute
, at Tate Britain in 2012,
¹⁰
beginning: ‘The Robinson Institute aims to promote
political and economic change by developing the transformative potential of images of landscape.' Thirty-five years earlier, I had set out with what was essentially the same aim, expressed slightly differently.

February 2013

The desire to transform the world is not uncommon, and there are a number of ways of fulfilling it. One of these is by adopting a certain subjectivity, aggressive or passive, deliberately sought or simply the result of a mood, which alters experience of the world, and so transforms it.

There is nothing particularly new or unusual about this. The subjectivity involved is that of the wandering daydreamer – Edgar Allan Poe's in ‘The Man of the Crowd'; Baudelaire's
flâneurs
and dandies; Apollinaire's Baron d'Ormesan, the inventor of amphionism; Louis Aragon and his contemporaries in
Le Paysan de Paris
. The thrill they all seek is the frisson Aragon termed ‘a feeling for nature', their realm is the street, and the common object of their speculation the phenomenon of place.

I began to pursue the ‘feeling for nature' several years ago. My starting point was that of an architect, and my motivation the desire to find, already existing, the buildings that I wanted to build but for a number of reasons was unable to.

The more I looked the more I found, and the more I found the more I looked, but gradually my interest shifted from the instant transformation of a building (object), to the discovery of a deeper sensation of place (space) akin to the
stimmung
that Nietzsche discovered during his last euphoria in Turin, and that so affected de Chirico.

Coal hopper, Nine Elms Lane, London SW8, 1979

The present-day
flâneur
carries a camera and travels not so much on foot as in a car or on a train. There are several reasons for this, mostly connected with the decline of public life and urbanism (another kind of
flâneur
lives on in fiction – the private investigator – though his secrets are well hidden behind the street fronts), but also because there is something about a photograph or a shot in a film that exactly corresponds to the frisson that Aragon identified. As early as 1918, in his first published writing, he wrote: ‘Likewise on the screen objects that were a few moments ago sticks of furniture or books of cloakroom tickets are transformed to the point where they take on menacing or enigmatic meanings.'
¹

I became a sort of architectural photographer and film-maker, trying to produce photographs and film footage that interpreted the objects of my desire as I saw them. It occurred to me that a
common aspect of these interpretations was a kind of analogy that saw the places I ‘discovered' and photographed in terms of other places that I knew, or knew of, and it also occurred to me that much of this experience of other places was gained from looking at photographs and films. The image of a place on the screen is transformed in exactly the same way as the objects to which Aragon refers – by the photography itself, by the images that precede and follow it, and by the narrative.

To a certain extent, I began to look at places as potential photographs, or better still, film images, and even the still photographs took on the character of film stills.

This visual material deliberately depicts places that are nearly or altogether devoid of human presence and activity, but which because of this absence are suggestive of what could happen, or what might have happened. They are places in which events might
take place
, and the events are seen rather as possible contemporary myths. But the myths have a history – maybe they
are
history – and this history can be constructed as a narrative – a reconstruction of a past daydream or the construction of a new one – which links still images or provides a setting for the film, in the same way as the locations provide a setting for the action in other films. The aim is to depict the place as some sort of historical palimpsest, and/or the corollary of this, an exposition of a state of mind.

Such is a summary of the development of this activity up to now. What follows is an attempt to map out the tradition that has supported this development. There are different aspects to this: the literature of the wandering daydreamer, whom I perhaps inaccurately term the
flâneur
; the visual arts tradition of the reinterpretation of everyday objects and landscapes, which might be termed Surrealist realism, though it probably has more to do with photography as a way of seeing than any particular mode of thought; and a way of depicting places in literature and film where they are inextricably bound up with the state of mind of the characters who inhabit or observe them.

The
flâneur
as a literary motif appears in two modes, or rather can be seen as signifying two types of experience. The first of these is that of a wanderer, perhaps a dandy, who takes the city as his salon, strolling from café to bar in search of amusement and perhaps romance. His chance encounters are largely with people; his haunts chosen for the company they provide, rather than any melancholy architectural quality, and the oneiric quality of his experience is largely the result of his surrender to the randomness of urban life.

The other type of
flâneur
drifts through the city as if it were the substance of a dream, marvelling at the transformations that this brings about. He may meet others, he may fall passionately in love, but this is not his motive, it merely enhances his experience by enabling it to be shared.

There is also the lonely life of the street photographer, who acts the
flâneur
in the hope of recording little glimpses of the marvellous with his camera. His is a difficult task, for poetic insights so rarely survive their capture on the emulsion. But I digress.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote, in 1840, a short story, ‘The Man of the Crowd'. The narrator, a convalescent, sits in a coffee house in London observing the thronging pedestrians passing the window. With that new vision often granted to those recently recovered from illness, he is enjoying finding distinct types among the passers-by, when an old man who fits none of these captivates his curiosity. He leaves the coffee house and follows the man as he wanders through the streets with no aim other than to be constantly in a crowd. The afternoon turns to evening, and the evening to night. Still the old man walks on and still the narrator follows fascinated, trying to discover what the old man is about. On the evening of the following day he gives up his pursuit, knowing that it will never end: ‘ “This old man,” I said at length, “is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone.
He is the man of the crowd.”
'
While Poe's attitude to the old man is far from any sympathetic identification, here I believe for the first time we see some recurring themes in ‘urban dream' writing: the narrator's convalescent state, a heightened state of awareness: ‘one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of
ennui –
moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs'
²
– and his resultant rather alienated observation through the window of what came to be called ‘modern life'; his subsequent pursuit of an enigma; the description of the streets through which they pass, the low-life – they enter a gin-palace at dawn – and above all the emerging sensitivity to the erotic implications of crowds.

Poe's reputation in Europe was considerably enhanced by Baudelaire, who praised and translated his works. He quotes ‘The Man of the Crowd' in ‘The Painter of Modern Life'. Baudelaire's writing is full of awareness of ‘the poetry of modern life', the life of the streets and boulevards and other public places, but specific references to townscape are rare. His encounters are with people, or spirits, but not places. In the letter to Arsène Houssaye, which serves as the preface to
Paris Spleen
, he writes of his desire to create the poetic prose of which the book is composed: ‘It was, above all, out of my exploration of huge cities, out of the medley of their innumerable interrelations, that this haunting ideal was born.'
³

Apollinaire produced the most demonstrative of
flâneur
writings. In
The Wandering Jew
the story is not unlike ‘The Man of the Crowd', but here the enigma guides the narrator through Prague until it transpires that he is several centuries old.

The most prophetic of Apollinaire's stories here is ‘The False Amphion', one of the
Stories and Adventures of Baron d'Ormesan
.
⁴
The Baron is an old acquaintance of the narrator, who thinks he is a tourist guide, but the Baron, on the contrary, has invented a new art form, amphionism:

Now this is all very ironic, but the irony is directed not at the idea of poetic wandering, but at the Baron's insistence that the art consists of composing the journeys, rather than on the one hand building the buildings, or on the other concretising the poetic experience of wandering among them – in other words, that the art depended on the sensibility of the artist, not what he did with it. The Baron's adventures are full of similar misunderstandings, such as the film-makers who, for the sake of realism in their film, pay a man to actually murder a couple.