The first part of a film trilogy presents an intoxicating mixture of documentary observation, philosophical reasoning and quasi-narrative story.

The film trilogy, London, Robinson in Space and Robinson in Ruins, is animated through narrator absent in the frame who describes the journey of a fictional character, a flâneur named Robinson. Keiller inserts his reflections into the perspectives of these dual fictional constructs and presents them in the form of travelogues (in the manner of the writer W.G. Sebald). Keiller creates comprehensive, provocative and disturbing essays on history, politics, landscape, memory and time.

Documentary
Director, Screenplay, Director of Photography: Patrick Keiller
Cast: Paul Scofield

Patrick Keiller is a prominent British filmmaker, writer and lecturer dealing with the changing image of the United Kingdom, mainly in three epic film essays London, Robinson in Space and Robinson in Ruins. His major projects include The City of the Future (2002–05), an exploration of urban space as it appears in moving pictures held in the BFI’s National Film Archive. Within the Arts and Humanities Research Council, he realised the project The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image (2007–11), an exploration of ideas about the landscape, the environment, dwelling and displacement. The project included the production of the feature-length film Robinson in Ruins (2010), first exhibited at that year’s Venice Film Festival, and later the basis for The Robinson Institute, an exhibition at Tate Britain in 2012 accompanied by a book The Possibility of Life’s Survival on the Planet. In 2013, Verso publishers published an essay collection, The View from the Train. In 1986, Keiller undertook a British Council Academic Exchange visit to Czechoslovakia to research the Czechoslovak avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s. He was a visiting research fellow at the Open University (2011–14) and was the Sir Arthur Marshall Visiting Professor of Urban Design at the University of Cambridge (2017–18).