Academia used to
be the perfect place for introverts.
Now it often favours boasters, publicity seekers, performing clowns and
people who like doing admin.
Thinkers,
writers and artists in late-nineteenth-century Europe were impelled by their
distrust of the growing materialism of their age towards a search for truths
that were of personal and universal significance.
Milner, John. (1971), Symbolists and
Decadents, Studio Vista: London
Robinson In Space. d. Patrick
Keiller, 1997
Like London, the film
layers static images, music, narration and quotation. At the beginning and end
of the film, we hear Allan Gray's haunting prelude from A Matter of Life and Death (d. Michael Powell/Emeric
Pressburger, 1946), a film made at the very beginning of the postwar period of
English optimism, whose hero traverses the gap between the worlds of wartime
reality and the afterlife. Robinson seems to be telling us that though the
foundations of the world are material, reality itself is beautiful only insofar
as our imagination transforms it.
A picture of Kevin Ayers
