Postcards from the Apocalypse: Patrick Keiller’s London and the Legacies of Victorian Realism

Abstract

This article examines the way Patrick Keiller’s ‘Robinson’ film trilogy – and in particular the film London – draws on forms, images, and ideas from Victorian literary and visual culture. Like many Victorian texts that focus on the British capital, Keiller’s London uses antithetical scales. The fragmentary perspective of the visual–verbal sketch tradition, exemplified by Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, and the panoramic overview to which Victorian writers and artists aspired, are used in tandem to understand the details of everyday urban life in the context of global capitalism and to imagine a world outside it.