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film
Robinson in Space
(1997), for which the journeys they recall were carried out. Towards the end of a previous film,
London
(1994), its fictitious narrator offers the ambiguous assertion: ‘The true identity of London … is in its absence …’ ‘Absence of what?’ the viewer might ask. One of many possible answers to this question is that London came into being and grew as a port city. Its port activity is now largely
absent
, but continues somewhere else. One of
Robinson
’s objectives was to locate some of the economic activity that no longer takes place in cities.
    Robinson in Space
(1997) was photographed between March and November 1995. It documents the explorations of an unseen fictional character called Robinson, who was the protagonist of the earlier
London
(1994), a re-imagination of its subject suggested by the Surrealist literature of Paris.
Robinson in Space
is a similar study of the
look
of present-day England in 1995, and was suggested to some extent by Daniel Defoe’s
Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain
(1724–26). Among its subjects are many new spaces, particularly the sites where manufactured products are produced, imported and distributed. Robinson has been commissioned by ‘a well-known international advertising agency’ to undertake a study of the ‘problem’ of England. 1 It is not statedin the film what this problem is, but there are images of Eton, Oxford and Cambridge, a Rover car plant, the inward investment sites of Toyota and Samsung, a lot of ports, supermarkets, a shopping mall, and other subjects which evoke the by now familiar critique of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’, which sees the UK’s economic weakness as a result of the City of London’s long-term (English) neglect of the (United Kingdom’s) industrial economy, particularly its manufacturing base.
    Early in the film, its narrator quotes from Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
: ‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.’ 2 The appearances by which the viewer is invited to judge are initially the dilapidation of public space, the extent of visible poverty, the absence of UK-branded products in the shops and on the roads,
and
England’s cultural conservatism. Robinson’s image of the UK’s industry is based on his memories of the collapse of the early Thatcher years. He has assumed that poverty and dilapidation are the result of economic failure, and that economic failure is a result of the inability of UK industry to produce
desirable
consumer products. He believes, moreover, that this has something to do with the
feel
of ‘Middle England’, which he sees as a landscape increasingly characterised by sexual repression, homophobia and the frequent advocacy of child-beating. At the same time, he is dimly aware that the United Kingdom is still the fifth-largest trading economy in the world and that British – even English people, particularly women and the young – are probably neither as sexually unemancipated, as sadistic or as miserable as he thinks the
look
of the UK suggests. The film’s narrative is based on a series of journeys in which his prejudices are examined, and some are disposed of.
    Robinson’s interest in manufacturing, however, is rooted in his quasi-Surrealist practice. Whereas
London
set out to transform appearances through a more or less radical subjectivity,
Robinson in Space
addresses the production of actual space: the manufacture of artefacts and the development of sites, the physical production of the visible. Both films attempt to change reality with a heightenedawareness in which ‘I can always see how beautiful anything could be if only I could change it’ 3 – the words of the Situationist text quoted in the opening sequence of
Robinson in Space –
but in the second, the initial interest is in the production of (at least some of) this
anything
. In the history of the modernist