Watched and listened to now, Handsworth Songs seems eerily (un)timely. The continuities between the 80s and now impose themselves on the contemporary viewer with a breathtaking force: just as with the recent insurrections, the events in 1985 were triggered by police violence; and the 1985 denunciations of the riots as senseless acts of criminality could have been made by Tory politicians yesterday. This is why it is important to resist the casual story that things have "progressed" in any simple linear fashion since Handsworth Songs was made. Yes, the BAFC can now appear at Tate Modern in the wake of new riots in England, something unthinkable in 1985; but, as Rob White pointed out in the discussion at the Tate event, there is little chance now of Handsworth Songs or its like appearing on Channel 4 now, still less being commissioned. The a.s.sumption that brutal policing and racism were relics of a bygone era was part of the reactionary narrativisation of the recent riots: yes, there was politics and racism back then, but not now, not any more...The lesson to be remembered especially now that we are being asked to defend abortion and oppose the death penalty again is that struggles are never definitively won. As the academic George Shire pointed out in the Tate discussion, many struggles have not been lost so much as diverted into what he called "the privatisation of politics", as former activists become hired as "consultants". Shire"s remarks strikingly echoed recent comments made by Paul Gilroy. "When you look at the layer of political leaders from our communities," Gilroy observed, "the generation who came of age during that time 30 years ago, many of those people have accepted the logic of privatization. They"ve privatised that movement, and they"ve sold their services as consultants and managers and diversity trainers." (See This points to one major discontinuity between now and 25 years ago. In 1985, political collectivities were in the process of being violently decomposed this was also the year in which the Miners" Strike ended in bitter defeat as the neoliberal political programme began to impose the "privatisation of the mind" which is now everywhere taken for granted. Akomfrah"s optimistic take on the current riots that those who rioted will come to const.i.tute themselves as a collective agent suggests that we might be seeing the reversal of this psychic privatisation.
One of many striking things about Handsworth Songs is the serene confidence of its experimental essayism. Instead of easy didacticism, the film offers a complex palimpsest comprising archive material, anempathic sound design and footage shot by the Collective during and after the riots. The Collective"s practice coolly a.s.sumed, not only that "black", "avant garde" and "politics" could co-exist, but that they must entail one another. Such a.s.sumptions, such confidence, were all the more remarkable for the fact that they were so hard won: the Collective"s Lina Gopaul remembered that the idea of a black avant-garde was greeted with incomprehension when the BAFC began their work. Even the sight of young black people carrying cameras provoked bemus.e.m.e.nt: are they real? Gopaul recalled police officers asking as the Collective filmed events in Handsworth and Broadwater Farm 25 years ago.
At a time when reactionaries once again feel able to make racist generalisations about "black culture" in mainstream media, the Collective"s undoing of received ideas of what "black" supposedly means remains an urgent project. In The Ghost of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective, the outstanding survey of the BAFC"s work that he co-edited with fellow Otolith Group member Anjalika Sagar, Kodwo Eshun argued that, for the Collective, "black" "might be profitably understood...as a dimension of potentiality." At the Tate discussion, which he chaired, Eshun pointed to the use in Handsworth Songs of Mark Stewart and the Maffia"s dub-refracted cut-up version of "Jerusalem": the track makes a bid for an account of Englishness from which "blackness", far from being something that can be excluded, becomes instead the only possible fulfilment of the millenarian promise of Blake"s revolutionary poem. The use of Stewart"s music also brings home the extent to which Handsworth Songs belonged to a postpunk moment which was defined by its unsettling of concepts of "white" and "black" culture. Trevor Mathison"s astonishing sound design certainly draws upon dub, but its voice loops and seething electronics are equally reminiscent of the work of Test Department and Cabaret Voltaire. So much film and television now deploys sound as a crude bludgeon which closes down the polyvalency of images. Whooshing sound effects subordinate audiences to the audio equivalent of a spectacle, while the redundant use of pop music enforces a terroristic sentimentalism. By strong and refreshing contrast, Mathison"s sound which is simultaneously seductive and estranging liberates lyricism from personalised emotion, and frees up the potentials of the audio from the strictures of "music". Subtract the images entirely, and Handsworth Songs can function as a gripping audio-essay.
Mathison"s sound recording equipment captured one of the most extraordinary moments in the film, an exchange between the floor manager and the producer of the long-defunct doc.u.mentary series TV Eye in the run-up to a special edition of the programme which was about to be filmed in front of a Tottenham audience. The exchange reveals that it is not possible to securely delimit "merely technical" issues from political questions. The producer"s anxieties about lighting quickly shade into concerns about the proportion of non-whites in the audience. The matter-of-fact tone of the discussions make this sudden peek into the reality studio all the more disturbing and illuminating.
The screening and the discussion at the Tate were a reminder that "mainstream media" is not a monolith but a terrain. It wasn"t because of the largesse of broadcasters that the BBC and Channel 4 became host to popular experimentalism between the 60s and the 90s. No: this was only possible on the basis of a struggle by forces which were political at the same time as they were cultural that were content neither to remain in the margins nor to replicate the existing form of mainstream. Handsworth Songs is a glorious artefact of that struggle and a call for us to resume it.
"Tremors of an imperceptible future":.
Patrick Keiller"s Robinson in Ruins.
Sight & Sound, November 2010.
In Ellis Sharp"s short story "The Hay Wain", a Poll Tax rioter in 1990 takes refuge in the National Gallery and "notices what he has never noticed before on biscuit tins or calendars, or plastic trays on the walls of his aunt"s flat in Bradford, those tiny figures bending in the field beyond." Constable"s supposedly timeless painting of English landscape ceases to be a kind of pastoral screensaver and becomes what it always really was: a snapshot of agricultural labour. Far from being some refuge from political strife, the English landscape is the site of numerous struggles between the forces of power and privilege and those who sought to resist them. Sharp replaces the dominant pastoral image of the English countryside, not with a deflated quotidian realism, but with a different kind of lyricism, one coloured by revolt: fields and ditches become hiding places or battlegrounds; landscapes that on the surface seem tranquil still reverberate with the unavenged spectral rage of murdered working cla.s.s martyrs. It is not the sunlit English afternoon that is "timeless", but the ability of the agents of reaction to escape justice. When the Poll tax rioter is clubbed by police and his blood starts to stain Constable"s emblem of English nationhood, we"re uncomfortably reminded of more recent episodes. "He was resisting arrest, right? Right mates? (Right, Sarge.)... We used minimal force, right? ... Don"t p.i.s.s yourself and we"ll see this thing through together, right mates?...Everyone"ll be on our side, remember that. The commissioner. The Federation. The papers. And, if it comes to it, the Coroner. Now f.u.c.king go and call for an ambulance."
Patrick Keiller"s latest film, Robinson in Ruins, the long-awaited sequel to his two 1990s films, London (1994) and Robinson in s.p.a.ce (1997), performs a similar politicisation of landscape. Or rather, it exposes the way in which the rural landscape is always-already intensely politicised. "I had embarked on landscape film-making in 1981, early in the Thatcher era, after encountering a surrealist tradition in the UK and elsewhere, so that cinematography involved the pursuit of a transformation, radical or otherwise, of everyday reality," Keiller wrote in 2008, as he was preparing Robinson in Ruins. "I had forgotten that landscape photography is often motivated by utopian or ideological imperatives, both as a critique of the world, and to demonstrate the possibility of creating a better one." London was a melancholy, quietly angry study of the city after 13 years of Tory rule. Its unnamed narrator, voiced by Paul Scofield, told of the obsessive researches undertaken by Robinson, a rogue and fictional theorist, into the "problem of London". London was the capital of the first capitalist country, but Keiller was interested in the way that the city was now at the heart of a new, "post-Fordist" capitalism, in which manufacturing industry had been superseded by the spectral weightlessness of the so-called service economy. Robinson and his narrator friend bitterly surveyed this brave new world with the doleful eyes of men formed in a very different era: a world in which public service broadcasters could commission films of this nature.
London was as remarkable for the unique way that it combined fiction with the film-essay form. The film was composed of a series of striking images captured by Keiller"s static camera, which unblinkingly caught the city in unguarded epiphanic moments. Robinson in s.p.a.ce retained the same methodology, but broadened the focus from London to the rest of England. Rural landscapes featured in Robinson in s.p.a.ce, but as something which Keiller"s camera looked over rather than at. In the first two films, Robinson"s interest was in the cities where capitalism was first built, and in the non-places where it now silently spreads: the distribution centres and container ports that are unvisited by practically anyone except Robinson and his narrator-companion, but which web Britain into the global market. Keiller saw that, contrary to certain dominant narratives, the British economy was not "declining". Rather, this post-industrial economy was thriving, and that was the basis of its oppressive and profoundly inegalitarian power.
London and Robinson in s.p.a.ce were made in the s.p.a.ce between two political non-events, the general elections of 1992 and 1997. 1992 was the year when change was supposed to come the end of Tory rule was widely expected, not least by the Conservative Party itself, yet John Major was re-elected. 1997 saw the longantic.i.p.ated change finally arrive, but it turned out to be no kind of change at all. Far from ending the neoliberal culture that Keiller anatomised, Tony Blair"s government would consolidate it. Robinson in s.p.a.ce, largely a.s.sembled in the dying days of the Major government, was made too early for it to properly register this. Yet its focus on the ba.n.a.l, Ballardian infrastructure of British postFordist capitalism made it a deeply prophetic film. The England of Robinson in s.p.a.ce was still the England presided over by Gordon Brown a decade later.
The traumatic event which reverberates through Robinson in Ruins is the financial crisis of 2008. It"s still too early to properly a.s.sess the implications of this crisis, but Robinson in Ruins shares with Chris Pet.i.t"s Content a film with which it has many preoccupations in common the tentative sense that a historical sequence which began in 1979 ended in 2008. The "ruins" which Robinson walks through here are partly the new ruins of a neoliberal culture that has not yet accepted its own demise, and which, for the moment, continues with the same old gestures like a zombie that does not know that it is dead. Citing Fredric Jameson"s observation in The Seeds of Time that "it seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations", Robinson nevertheless dares to hope, if only for a moment, that the so-called credit crunch is something more than one of the crises by which capitalism periodically renews itself.
Perhaps strangely, it is the "thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and nature" that seem to give Robinson some grounds for hope, and the most evident difference between Robinson in Ruins and the previous films is the emergence of a radical Green perspective. In part, Keiller"s turn towards Green themes reflects changes in mainstream political culture. At the time of the previous two Robinson films, Green politics could still appear to be a fringe concern. In the last decade or so, however, anxieties about global warming in particular have come into the very centre of culture. Now, every corporation, no matter how exploitative, is required to present itself as Green. The emergence of ecological concerns gives Keiller"s treatment of landscape a properly dialectical poise. In the opposition between capital and ecology, we confront what are in effect two totalities. Keiller shows that capitalism in principle at least saturates everything (especially in England, a claustrophobic country that long ago enclosed most of its common land, there is no landscape outside politics); there is nothing intrinsically resistant to capital"s drive to commoditisation, certainly not in the "natural world". Keiller demonstrates this with a long excursus on how the prices of weight increased in the immediate wake of the 2008 crisis. Yet from the equally inhuman perspective of a radical ecology, capital, for all that it may burn out the human environment and take large swathes of the nonhuman world with it, is still a merely local episode.
Environmental catastrophe provides what a political unconscious totally colonised by neoliberalism cannot: an image of life after capitalism. Still, this life may not be a human life, and there is the feeling that, like the narrator"s father in Margaret Atwood"s coldly visionary novel Surfacing, Robinson may have headed off into some kind of dark Deleuzean communion with Nature. As with Surfacing, Robinson in Ruins begins with a disappearance: Robinson"s own. Paul Scofield having died in 2010, the narration is no longer handled by Robinson"s friend, but by Vanessa Redgrave, playing the head of a group seeking to reconstruct Robinson"s thinking from notes and films recovered from the caravan where he was last known to live. If the Redgrave narration doesn"t quite work, then that is partly because there is a feeling that Keiller has slightly tired of the Robinson fiction, or it has ceased to serve much of a function for him. For what seems like large parts of the film, the Robinson framing narrative disappears from view, to the extent that it can be something of a jolt when Robinson is mentioned again. Lacking Paul Scofield"s sardonic insouciance, Redgrave"s narrative is often oddly tentative, her emphasis not quite mustering Scofield"s a.s.sured mastery of Keiller"s tone.
In tracking the historical development of capitalism in England, and the sites of struggle against it, Robinson in Ruins shows a sensitivity to the way that landscape silently registers (and engenders) politics that echoes the concerns of Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. As in Straub-Huillet"s films, Robinson in Ruins returns to landscapes where antagonism and martyrdom once took place: Greenham Common, the woodland where Professor David Kelly committed suicide.
Keiller"s decision to retain film rather than switch to a digital medium carries more charge now than it did when he used a cine camera for London and Robinson in s.p.a.ce. In many ways, even in 1997, we had yet to really enter the digital realm; now, with cybers.p.a.ce available on every smartphone handset, we are never outside it. The return to film made him appreciate the materiality of the medium in a new way. "Compared with videotape," Keiller has written, "film stock is expensive to purchase and process, and the camera"s magazine holds only 122m of stock, just over 4 minutes at 25fps. Film hence tends to involve a greater commitment to an image before starting to turn the camera, and there is pressure to stop as soon as possible, both to limit expenditure and to avoid running out of loaded film. Results are visible only after processing, which, in this case, was usually several days later, by which time some subjects were no longer available and others had changed, so as to rule out the possibility of a retake. I began to wonder why I had never noticed these difficulties before, or whether I had simply forgotten them. Another problem was that, with computer editing, it is no longer usual to make a print to edit. Instead, camera rolls are transferred to video after processing, so that the footage is never seen at its best until the end of the production process. This hybridity of photographic and digital media so emphasises the value of the material, mineral characteristics of film that one begins to reimagine cinematography as a variety of stone-carving."
When we hear early on in the film that Robinson has made contact with a series of "nonhuman intelligences", we initially suspect that he has finally succ.u.mbed to madness. Yet the "nonhuman intelligences" turn out not to be the extra-terrestrials of a florid pulp science fiction-inspired psychosis, but the intra-terrestrial lifeforms that an ecological awareness reveals growing with a silent stubbornness that matches the brute tenacity of capitalism. In one of the many slow spirals that typify Keiller"s approach in Robinson in Ruins, the lichen that his camera lingers on in an early shot, apparently for merely picturesque effect, will eventually come to take centre stage in the film"s narrative. Lichen, Robinson comes to realise, is already the dominant lifeform on large areas of the planet. Inspired by the work of American biologist Lynn Margulis, Robinson confesses to a growing feeling of "biophilia", which Keiller seems to share. While his camera lingers tenderly on wildflowers, the film"s verbal narrative is suspended, projecting us for a few long moments into this world without humans. These moments, these unnarrativised surveys of a nonhuman landscape, are like Keiller"s version of the famous "Straubian shot", the cut-aways to depopulated landscapes in Straub and Huillet"s films. Robinson is drawn to Margulis because she rejects the a.n.a.logies between capitalism and the biological that are so often used to naturalise capitalist economic relations. Instead of the ruthless compet.i.tion which social Darwinians find in nature, Margulis discovers organisms engaging in co-operative strategies. When Keiller turns his camera on these "nonhuman intelligences", these mute heralds of a future without humanity, I"m reminded of the black orchids in Troy Kennedy Martin"s Edge Of Darkness, those harbingers of an ecology that is readying to take revenge on a humanity that thoughtlessly disdained it. Kennedy Martin"s inspiration was the anti-humanist ecology of James Lovelock, and Lovelock"s apocalyptic message seems to haunt Robinson in Ruins too. Keiller finds extinction looming everywhere species dying off at a far faster rate than scientists had thought possible only a few years ago. The emphasis on extinction means that the concerns of Robinson in Ruins rhyme with the preoccupations that have emerged in speculative realist philosophy, which has focused on the s.p.a.ces prior to, beyond and after human life. In some respects, the work of philosophers such as Ray Bra.s.sier and Tim Morton re-stages the old confrontation between human finitude and the sublime which was the former subject of a certain kind of landscape art. But where the older sublime concentrated on local natural phenomenon such as the ocean or volcanic eruptions which could overwhelm and destroy the individual organism or whole cities, speculative realism contemplates the extinction, not only of the human world, but of life and indeed matter itself. The prospect of ecological catastrophe means that disjunction between the lived time of human experience and longer durations is now not just a question of metaphysical contemplation, but a matter of urgent political concern, as one of Robinson"s touchstones, Fredric Jameson, noted. "[A]s organisms of a particular life span," Jameson writes in his essay "Actually Existing Marxism", we are poorly placed as biological individuals to witness the more fundamental dynamics of history, glimpsing this or that incomplete moment, which we hasten to translate into the alltoo-human terms of success or failure. But neither stoic wisdom nor the reminder of a longer-term view are really satisfactory responses to this peculiar existential and epistemological dilemma, comparable to the science-fictional one of beings inhabiting a cosmos they do not have organs to perceive or identify. Perhaps only the acknowledgement of this radical incommensurability between human existence and the dynamic of collective history and production is capable of generating new kinds of political att.i.tudes; new kinds of political perception, as well as of political patience; and new methods for decoding the age as well, and reading the imperceptible tremors within it of an inconceivable future. (Valences of the Dialectic, Verso, 2010, pp369-70) Amongst its requiem for neoliberal England, Robinson in Ruins gives us some intimations of those imperceptible tremors and inconceivable futures.
Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the public and the figure of the intellectual. Former public s.p.a.ces both physical and cultural are now either derelict or colonized by advertising. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who rea.s.sure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpa.s.sive stupor. The informal censorship internalized and propagated by the cultural workers of late capitalism generates a ba.n.a.l conformity that the propaganda chiefs of Stalinism could only ever have dreamt of imposing. Zer0 Books knows that another kind of discourse intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist is not only possible: it is already flourishing, in the regions beyond the striplit malls of so-called ma.s.s media and the neurotically bureaucratic halls of the academy. Zer0 is committed to the idea of publishing as a making public of the intellectual. It is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before.
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