Patrick Keiller:
The City of the Future
23 November 2007 – 3 February 2008
BFI Southbank
London SE1
The City of the Future is an exploration of urban space at the turn of the 20th century, a virtual landscape composed of 68 early actuality films from the years 1896-1909, arranged in the gallery on a network of maps from the period.
Until the mid-1900s, most films were between one and three minutes long and comprised one or very few relatively lengthy ‘takes’. The majority were actualities, including street scenes and views from moving vehicles. In comparison with films of later decades, early films offer unusually extensive views of a landscape that was being transformed by technological, political and economic developments. When moving pictures, too, changed in the mid-1900s, this view of city spaces was diminished. Early films offer us a brief but significant glimpse of the urban landscape at the turn of the twentieth century, before the rise of the oil economy and the outbreak of World War I, a period that suggests some comparisons with our own.
The exhibition stems from a research project that began by suggesting that many of the spaces glimpsed in historic footage look unexpectedly familiar, and asked why this might be so. Keiller’s identification of many previously unknown locations enabled him to locate the films in the spatial array that is the exhibition’s organising concept. Visitors are invited to explore this landscape, both by moving among its various screens, and by departing from the sequences displayed on them to create an individual journey using the ‘menu’ functions of a DVD.
Patrick Keiller is a Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art, where The City of the Future was realised with the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the collaboration of the BFI.
FREE admission
