The Camera-I

Abstract

Abstract The opening chapter, ‘The Camera-I: Patrick Keiller’s Early Short Films and Essays’, reconstructs Keiller’s early career and his shift from architecture to film-making, reading the use of ‘subjective camera’ and the creation of ‘subjective townscape’ in his early experimental works as crucial to the developing sensibility of his later docu-narratives. Excavating a history of the ‘London Film-makers’ Co-op’ and examining Keiller’s early essays before looking at the short films Stonebridge Park (1981) and Norwood (1983), it explores the ‘atmosphere of unemployed reverie’ and paranoiac, noir methods that provided a footing for the later Robinson series. At the same time, it offers a view of the exciting world of political agitation and experimental film of 1960s London.