The Practice Exchange: Retelling the city
Keith Piper and William RabanDate: Wednesday 20th June 2012, 5-7pm
MLG06, London College of Communications, Elephant and Castle.
Present: Sonya Boyce, Nerma Cridge, Lorrice Douglas, Maria Kheirkhah, Elizabeth Manchester, Keith Piper, William Raban, Charlotte Webb and five others.
William Raban introduced his film The Houseless Shadow that he made and exhibited earlier this year. He explained that the film was commissioned by the Museum of London and was a long time in its gestation. Its origins were the Canary Wharf Film Festival a few years ago where William showed his films of east London. After seeing these, a curator from the Museum of London suggested that William did something for them to commemorate Charles Dickens 200 years after his birth. William hated Victorian things and found it all terrifying, having grown up with heavy ecclesiastical architecture (his father was a vicar). Nonetheless, he read some biographies of Dickens. Peter Ackroyd had discovered that Dickens had done a lot of night walks and William started to think that it would be great to put Dickens’s writings about his walks in juxtaposition with images of London today. Most appropriately, William found that Dickens had written an essay in 1859 entitled ‘Night Walks’. The Museum of London needed a film no longer than twenty minutes but Dickens’s essay is 4,000 words, so William realized he would have to halve it in order to make a film the right length. He thought that with a very careful edit he would be able to stay true to Dickens’s language.
In December 2010 there was a meeting of Museum of London Dickens experts, including Professor Ian Christie, and they found some money to pay for William’s film. David Cunningham did the sound track and one of last year’s graduates from LCC did the editing. William used his own voice (reading Dickens’s essay) to save money.
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There was a rich discussion following both films, and it was noted that there were several common themes and an interesting relationship between the works, particularly in relation to the artists’ positions as narrators, and in the psycho-geographical treatment of cities:
Charlotte Webb asked William how he felt about using language from Dickens’s world which is so very different from the contemporary one – this stood out as particularly relevant in relation to Dickens’s reference to a young man as a pitiful object. This question stimulated a discussion about the problems of using/transferring outdated worlds and attitudes.
Keith Piper commented on the striking links between the two films. Maria Kheirkhah developed this in relation to the imagery of water in the city. Both films deal with the problems and politics of constructing histories, and of the culturally embedded nature of the narrator.
Sonya Boyce commented that she found the subtitles difficult and estranging – that she had had to jump over them because she felt she didn’t know the other that William was speaking about. She stayed with the voice because it felt more known.
Lorrice Douglas commented that the camera seemed to be invisible. William/his voice was the shadow. People shown in the film seemed to be unaware of the camera, utterly unaware of being filmed. William explained that he had learnt how not to draw attention to himself while he is filming. For example people don’t look at people in wheelchairs, so it is a good place to be if you want to do some undercover filming. In this position, he never holds his camera up to his face but has it on his lap.
Sonya commented that to hear Dickens talking in twentieth century London is very powerful, drawing parallels between the city as it was then and how it is now. For example, Waterloo used to be a cardboard city, not so very long ago. She had a question for both Keith and William about making work from the social context that they come from. Both speakers began their presentations with comments about their childhood. Both have evangelical backgrounds of a sort. She asked: can you abstract yourself from your social context?
Maria also commented on the connections between Keith’s and William’s films and suggested that their coincidentally similar Christian upbringing may have influenced the way that both artist-filmmakers had decided to narrate the city and the people within it.
William responded that he is fascinated by life on the street, the amazing scenes that you find. He loves working, spends a lot of time doing it, but never ever looks through the viewfinder while he is filming but rather looks the other way (this is another one of his strategies for filming invisibly under people’s noses). He often gets wonderful things without knowing or meaning to – by happy accident.
Keith commented that we all have access to an ever-expanding archive – there is always more we can tap into. At the same time personal memory is important as an active chosen material.
Maria suggested that it would be interesting if artists were to make work about the 2011 summer riots in relation to the Olympics. Keith replied that a lot has already been done and we can find the examples on Youtube.
The issue of cleansing – purifying fire – was discussed. Sonya mentioned that everyone is filming everything on their mobile phones and there is no way of monitoring it. An erasure of class, culture and identity is taking place [not quite sure how?]
Maria commented on the position of William’s camera, saying that it is amazing that he never got stopped by the police although he was filming in sensitive places. But his gaze is not in any way confrontational or judgmental – it feels as if William is on the same level as the people he is filming as his camera is below eye-level.
Sonya agreed that this is also because people are not looking at the camera. She referred to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious – the things that are happening within the frame that you’re not actually looking at – this is why for her the subtitles were in the way. This led to a conversation about the problem with the subtitles – having text on the screen – getting in the way of the visual elements/image.
Keith said that for him, they worked well together. Sonya replied that maybe she has a problem with Dickens – he was a kind of gatekeeper.
Charlotte brought up a BBC series about London in which people were recounting their memories about what it was like living in different bits of London. William responded that for him tv is formulaic and he’s not interested in formulas.
Keith Piper is an artist and academic living and working in London. He has contributed to numerous national and international projects, specialising in issues around race, historical narrative, technology and post-colonialism. He is currently Reader and Programme Leader for the MA in Fine Art at Middlesex University.
Using his video 'The Perfect City' as a starting point, Keith will continue his examination of urban space through methods of mapping, coding and mythologisation.
William Raban is a British artist and an experimental filmmaker, known primarily for his landscape, performance and multi-screen based films. He is currently Reader in film at the London College of Communication (University of the Arts London). His most recent film The Houseless Shadow was commissioned by the Museum of London for their exhibition Dickens and London commemorating the 200th anniversary of the writer’s birth in February 2012.
‘It's a good idea to begin the new Dickens and London exhibition right at the end, where William Raban's short film The Houseless Shadow runs on a 20-minute loop. To the accompaniment of Dickens' haunting essay "Night Walks", we see shots of modern London at night. There's no Dickensian kitsch here, no gas lamps, carol singers or jolly fat men, just drunks and homeless people sheltering from the rain, with the shops' mannequins looking cosy inside and the security cameras staring down. They are familiar enough images and yet made unfamiliar by the meditative, noticing gaze of Raban's camera, which matches the solicitude of Dickens' text, where sympathy is pushed to the point of identification with London's poor and homeless.’(Professor John Bowen, Times Higher Education, 8/12/11)
