Sunday 22 July 2007, 13.00

Patrick Keiller's first feature-length film, London is an electrifying, slyly witty fin-de-siècle portrait of a city in decay. Part documentary, part fiction, the film re-imagines London as a series of monuments to late nineteenth-century French poets (Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Baudelaire) and eighteenth-century Romantic English writers (Horace Walpole, Laurence Sterne). Through an unnamed narrator, the film’s imaginary protagonist, Robinson, speculates that the failure of the English Revolution might explain London's decline and its litany of urban ills. Neither documentary nor fiction, the film critiques and re-imagines the capital, tracking the narrator's journey through the City, along the Thames, to the suburbs of Wembley and the arcades of Brixton Market.

Patrick Keiller, UK 1994, 85 min

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£5 (£4 concessions), booking recommended

    

This event is related to the Global Cities exhibition