WHO is he?
British author, cinematographer, installation artist, urban geographer and filmmaker who has written and directed four feature-length and half-a-dozen short-length experimental documentary films since the early eighties. Keiller studied and trained as an architect before taking to filmmaking and this, in fact, forms the backbone of his cinema. Keiller has also taught art and architecture at universities.
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Keiller’s highly multi-faceted and discursive films toss one idea against another, segueing from reflections on contemporary architecture in London, to critiques of Thatcher’s policies, to semi-autobiographical recollections and to providing historical insights into conditions of the present. One broader question that his work comes back to is the failure of England’s industrial economy in shaping human-friendly cities. There is always a dialogue between private emotions and public locations, between the material and the intangible, between psychology and sociology and between aesthetics and ethics.
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Keiller’s films are characterised by densely knit, single-person voiceovers that serve as humorous, analytical and critical commentaries bolstering the freely associated imagery, which is often shot with a static or handheld camera. There are hardly any human figures in these films, with buildings being the principal objects of interest. These edifices, sometimes pathetic, sometimes threatening, are photographed head-on from a distance. Pseudo-dystopian urban cityscapes, decaying industrial and domestic structures, mutated landscapes and highways are some of the most familiar images in Keiller’s films.
WHY is he of interest?
With the contrapuntal relationship between the image and the sound that marks them, Keiller’s projects come across as genuinely dialectical Essay Films and are situated in the line of French essayists like Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard. Keiller is one of the few high-minded and intellectually piercing film artists to examine the relation between the spaces we inhabit and the weight of history that bears upon them. He excavates, as it were, the invisible past from the surfaces of the present.
WHERE to discover him?
More of a conventional documentary than his other films and thus more easily accessible, Dilapidated Dwelling (2000) focusses on the British housing industry. Probing why modern capitalism, which continuously promises luxury and leisure, has failed to provide decent, affordable shelters to the inhabitants of the country, the film goes on to investigate the failure of utopian urban planning and the ideological, political and social nature of domestic spaces.