Architecture Foundation: London / Driftwood + Patrick Keiller Q&A November 16, 2009

Architecture on Film | Architecture Foundation

London

A unique film equal parts fiction and documentary, London captures the capital in a portrait of sly wit and surreal insight, at a moment of disenchantment before Cool Britannia and the Millenium Bridge. The film’s two wandering flâneurs see Rimbaud in Canary Wharf, and egalitarianism in the Routemaster bus, as they meander, on foot and in the imagination, through tableaux of a decaying city that never had the revolution it deserved. In this vital piece of cinema from ex-architect Keiller 18th century romanticism collides with contemporary urban alienation, in an experimental travelogue narrated by Paul Scofield."

UK, 1994, Dir Patrick Keiller, 85 min

"We are delighted to present Patrick Keiller, director of London, in conversation with Joe Kerr, Critical & Historical Studies, Royal College of Art, following the screenings."

Driftwood: The capital and capitalism collide in celebrated artists

"Relph and Payne’s first film – an acerbic musing on “a city so assured of its brilliance that it constantly forgets to do anything noteworthy,” at the fin-de-siècle. Described by critic Jerry Saltz as “a love song to their native London… sung in the key of spleen,” this short film offers a generational response to Keiller’s London, in its charting of the city’s continuation of disorderly ‘pack-donkey’ urban chaos."

UK, 1999, Dir Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, 23 min. Courtesy Herald St, London and Gavin Brown's Enterprise, NYC

Official Website: http://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/programme/2009/architecture-on-film/driftwood-london