Film and the repossession of rural space

Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Ruins was shot on location in and around the Cherwell Valley in rural Oxfordshire. Keiller offers insights into his filmmaking practice – in particular his technical choices when it came to filming the landscape. He also explains how far the film was prompted by what appeared to him to be a discrepancy between, on one hand, the cultural and critical attention devoted to experience of mobility and displacement and, on the other, a tacit but seemingly widespread tendency to hold on to formulations of dwelling that derive from a more settled, agricultural past.