A train is an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by.

Michel Foucault's 1967 sketch of the ‘heterotopia’ identified one of rail travel's peculiar qualities: that mixture of attachment and detachment with the world outside the window. It's not dissimilar from what Michel de Certeau had to say in The Practice of Everyday Life, seven years later, about the ‘incarceration-vacation’ from the quotidian - ‘the train generalizes Dürer's Melancholia, a speculative experience of the world.’

In the introduction to his collected essays, Patrick Keiller telescopes his film-making career into two particular train-views: one which precipitated his first film; another that became central to the most recent. But the balance between speculative and actual engagement with the world is, for him, finally caught better on two wheels. In the volume's most recent essay, ‘Imaging’, he writes:

the slightly detached condition of cycling can encourage lengthy associations and recollections. Walking, driving and looking out of the windows of trains, buses, aeroplanes, and so on, offer similar possibilities, but there seems to be something about the experience of riding a bicycle, the way in which one is both connected to and moving above the ground, that promotes a particular state of mind.

The image is a useful one to begin with, suggesting his work's unusual poise between experience and exploration of the environment.

Keiller has been filming the English landscape since the 1980s, but it was 2011's exhibition at Tate Britain, The Robinson Institute, that most recently brought him to wider attention. This was based on a film, Robinson in Ruins, which had followed in turn from 1997's Robinson in Space, and 1994's London. An elegant book entitled The Possibility of Life’s Survival on the Planet, which, like the printed companion to Robinson in Space, functioned as both an elaboration and fellow to the film, supplemented the Tate show. Until now, these were the only printed volumes available from Keiller, although he has been consistently productive as an essayist. The View from the Train collects the bulk of this other written work, hitherto available only disparately.

The reader might be wondering quite who ‘Robinson’ is. Although it's the only one of the above films without his name in the title, it was in London that this ‘vagrant, wandering scholar’ made his first appearance. Or rather, didn't: Keiller's longer cinematic works trace journeys undertaken by Robinson, while his companion, a similarly unseen narrator, relates their experiences. Neither of them ever strays into the camera's lingering gaze, but their responses to the scenes are related in a succulent prose, laced with erudition and apposite quotation, and spiced with an eclectic reading list that includes both Lawrence Sterne and Lucretius.

The method has brought Keiller's work into comparison with the ‘essay film’, and influential exponents of the form like Chris Marker, Ross McElwee and Chantal Akerman. As the name suggests, these works tend to eschew conventional narrative structure, utilising instead a speculative, exploratory mode, in a manner reminiscent of Michel de Montaigne's use of the term ‘essai’ in the sense of ‘trial’ or ‘attempt’. Although maintaining an ostensibly documentary form, such works are highly personalised accounts, recalling Montaigne's self-conscious partiality (‘I never see the whole of anything’, he wrote). They tend to focus just as much on the array of subjectivities involved in film-making – emotional entanglement with the topic; the materiality of film itself — as on their professed object of study. McElwee's Sherman's March, Akerman's News from Home and Marker's Sans Soleil are all exemplary in this regard, although it was the latter's better-known short film, La Jetée, of which Keiller recently wrote ‘If I hadn't seen it when I did, it's quite likely I would never have made any films.’

He saw La Jetée in 1968, in London, at a screening curated by David Curtis for the London Film-maker's Co-op, and it was in the Co-op's magazine, Undercut, that the first two essays published in The View from the Train would be printed in 1982 and 1983. During the same period, Keiller's early short films were themselves appearing at Co-op screenings. Meditations on specific places and their relation to the first-person narrator's train of thought – Stonebridge Park's images take in a footbridge over the North Circular road, followed by another over the railway lines half-way towards Wembley Central; Norwood presents a series of perambulations around the South London suburb of its name – the films draw on a precedent laid down in Paris by the Surrealists in the 1920's, and the Situationists in the 1960's. That is, the exploration of urban spaces – often overlooked ones – in regard to their bearing on individual psychology and collective consciousness.

The French influence runs deeper, as Norwood isn't such an inauspicious location after all: Camille Pissarro painted several canvases in the area in the 1880s, some of which can be seen at the National Gallery. The impetus to visit the same locations that Pissarro had, a century down the line, functions as an apt way of explaining the Surrealist influence too – ‘Who am I?’ André Breton wrote in 1928's Nadja - ‘If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I “haunt”.’ On the other hand, as Keiller notes in one essay, ‘Haunting is still relatively unusual.’ Yet his approach, which combines the knowing re-tracing of another's steps with the awareness of creative activity having occurred at the same site, draws heavily on the ‘frisson’ of Breton's sometime Surrealist colleague Louis Aragon, whose Paris Peasant, a fantastical account of two specific sites in the French capital, is identified by Keiller as a formative influence. This ‘frisson’, he has elsewhere remarked, ‘always struck me as a process akin to that which might accompany the making of a piece of art’, and the camera-eye (or camera-I) is able to provide a model for such ‘poetic experience of the ordinary.’ The creative buzz is always countered, however, by the looming drabness of reality: Norwood includes an epigram from Pissarro's letters:

England, like France, is rotten to the core. She knows only one art, the art of throwing sand in your eyes.

Such a swift interchange between states, elation or despair – the fragility of the marvellous – picks up on the Surrealist conception of ‘convulsive’ beauty, and is fittingly characterised by a favourite quotation of Keiller's, from the Belgian Situationist Raoul Vaneigem's 1974 tract, The Revolution of Everyday Life:

Although I can always see how beautiful anything could be if only I could change it, in practically every case there is nothing I can really do. Everything is changed into something else in my imagination, then the dead weight of things changes it back into what it was in the first place. A bridge between imagination and reality must be built.

This part of Vaneigem's text originally appeared in English in Christopher Gray's 1974 Situationist Compendium, Leaving the Twentieth Century, which Keiller calls ‘an essential text for any would-be literate punk rocker of the 1970s’. He used the quotation again at the opening of 1997's Robinson in Space, voiced languidly by Paul Scofield while the camera, train-mounted, slowly rolls westward from Paddington station. A gamut of similarly well-chosen maxims follow, from Henri Lefebvre, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan-Doyle and others.

While London had been firmly situated in the capital, then suffering ever-greater dilapidation under the auspices of seemingly eternal Conservative governance – ‘we were living in a one party state’ – Robinson in Space explored the rest of the country, in a manner deliberately reminiscent of Defoe's Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, to get to the root of ‘the problem of England.’ What did a country look like that declined to manufacture its own goods; that saw its future solely in financial services, ‘heritage and tourism’? The answer is, again, fairly drab. A quotation from the geographer Doreen Massey's features prominently:

amid the Ridley Scott images of world cities, the writing about skyscraper fortresses, the Baudrillard visions of hyperspace ... most people actually still live in places like Harlesden or West Brom.

In the essay from which this was drawn, Massey goes on to argue for an overlooked sense of gridlock within the much-theorised ‘flux’ of modernity, where ‘Much of life for many people, even in the heart of the first world, still consists of waiting in a bus-shelter with your shopping for a bus that never comes.’ Her caustic humour aptly frames Keiller's tone, which, for all its seriousness, is abundantly witty and inflected by a disarmingly ironic melancholia.

But Keiller was keen to remedy a potential misreading of the film: in the essay ‘Port Statistics’, included here, he stated its implicit findings in plainer terms: the appearance of ever-increasing dilapidation was ‘symptomatic not of economic failure, as was often assumed, but of the successful operation of an unattractive economic model’ – a conclusion far more subversive than that suggested by the misreading.

Between this and the next Robinson film came a separate project for Channel 4 about the condition of housing in the UK. The Dilapidated Dwelling wasn't broadcast in the end, but is occasionally screened today. At the ICA recently, the house was full. For those who missed it, the eponymous essay acts as a companion piece and plugs the long interval before Robinson's return in a less substantial form, in Robinson in Ruins, which opens with the discovery of canisters of film and a notebook in a recently vacated caravan in Oxfordshire. Ruins was part of a broader research project with Massey and the cultural historian Patrick Wright, whose own investigations of urban and rural space, notably in A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London and On Living in an Old Country, runs in a similar vein to the imagistic ‘research’ of Keiller's projects.

Elsewhere in The View from the Train, the essay ‘London - Rochester - London’, which documents a journey made with the architect Cedric Price to Charles Dickens's Swiss chalet in Kent, as well as the superb ‘Popular Science’, are outstanding examples of Keiller's digressive, acerbic, humorous tone. Others seek to establish a more nuanced, academic understanding of visual critiques of the built environment, bringing early film and electronic imagery into the discussion. In particular, ‘Phantom Rides’ and ‘Architectural Cinematography’, investigate a contemporary situation in which ‘dilapidated everyday surroundings [are] juxtaposed with the possibility of immediate virtual or imminent actual presence elsewhere, through telecommunications and cheap travel.’ Keiller is fond of Walter Benjamin's comments on film and modernity, the idea that it

burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling.

But the duplicitous attributes of film, documenting the spaces of modernity whilst apparently contributing to their destitution, is a recurrent issue, as Keiller sets about justifying the use of the camera as an ‘instrument of criticism’.

An essential document from a vitally important artist, thinker and theorist, The View From The Train deserves to be read widely, and is a worthy companion to the well-established work of Massey and Wright, as well as the interventions of figures like Owen Hatherley. As a collection, the book might be criticised for its recurrent use of the same quotations and references, but it isn't so much that it repeats itself; rather that it circulates around persistent themes and ideas, each of which are validated by an abiding relevance. Ultimately it is an impressive volume, elucidating the situation of Keiller's output as a uniquely incisive exploration of Vaneigem's ‘bridge between imagination and reality’. A portable train-window, it might even be that bridge itself.

David Anderson is a senior editor at Review 31.

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