Disenchantment

Tonight we watched Patrick Keiller's London at Tate Britain. Keiller's fin-de-siècle film tracks a narrator's meandering journey along the River Thames -- from the City, through the Wembley suburbs, to the markets of Brixton -- during the tumultuous and low-point year of 1992: the year of John Major's election as Prime Minister, a spate of IRA bombings, the Black Wednesday

European monetary crisis, and the "fall of the house of Windsor". The film is rooted in a long literary history of the capital and references London's many chroniclers, such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, H G Wells and Horace Walpole.

The London depicted here during the Tory years is overwhelmingly one of decline, isolation, failure and disappearance: in one shot, a huge, inflatable Ronald MacDonald bobs alone above a burger joint; in another, blinds flutter in the wind through the blown out windows of a bombed City office block. However, the film does identify moments of comfort and liveliness, such as in the suburbs of Wembley, or the hustle and bustle of the Brixton and Stoke Newington markets and Brent Cross shopping mall.

Beautifully melancholic, though very much rooted in the social politics of a particular time. As Screen Online points out:

"Nearly ten years after the film's release, London is a different city. A Labour government has given it back a governing body, and new social architecture. The Millennium Bridge and Tate Modern have reshaped London's face, and [the narrator's] worst predictions have not come true."

Afterwards, we ate in Brixton's wonderful Eritrean restaurant Asmara, where the owners remembered and asked after my parents who ate with me there last year!

Related link:
+ Patrick Keiller profile