England, that desert island. Patrick Keiller's spatial fictions

Abstract

A recurring feature of Patrick Keiller’s work is the lack of human presence and activity. Throughout his films Keiller delivers a vision of England as a desert island, depopulated and unoccupied. Scrutinizing Keiller’s early shorts and feature-length films this article argues that the mentioned absence of human subjects allows the filmmaker to articulate a broader discourse on space, so that the films can be described as ‘spatial fictions’. By aligning his work to various strands of utopian thinking of space – from the Surrealists to Henri Lefebvre and the Situationists – Keiller forces us to think the relationship between cinema and space and offers a geography of absence as the precondition for the imagination of a new ‘space’. The article discusses how this framework informs Keiller’s visual grammar and his emphasis on a deliberate scarcity of gestures and the invisibility of the cinematic apparatus. By ‘withdrawing’ from the production of the image Keiller suggests the idea that the absence of a sign always functions as the sign of an absence