excellent Rachel Moore on Patrick Keiller--



"In Patrick Keiller's films, the space that we are being asked to reconsider however is the space around us. Much like the similarly disenchanted Epicureans, we turn now for our re-enchantment to the world of matter. Earth, water sky. Bricks, mortar, steel. Rivers, tracks, roads, and, best of all, bridges. These are the plastics that shape not just how we live, but consciousness itself. And then there are causeways that emanate from the earth's core through arduously constructed landscapes of stone fences, housing estates and factory chimneys right up to the clouds; taking us from the mythic to the mundane to the majestic, from birth to banality and back again. For yes, our landscape looks sordid and tawdry. From high voltage towers that litter the countryside through the suburban shopping mall to the crumbling cement of the city, a world of effaced relationships lies dormant. These relationships are, for each of us, by turns historical, political, autobiographical, archaic, and aesthetic. Thus our task is to enliven that which lies dormant, to stir the sentient springs that portend our awakening. I think of that dormant mass as the Archive of Natural History. Access to this momentous mix of myth, nature, history and sensation lies not behind the authority and classification systems of that other archive, but in the one before us. "