Ruins and Nation

We saw the final instalment of the magical 'Robinson' sequence by Patrick Keillor, at the Rio in Dalston. There was a dreadful burden of excitement on my part, having been entranced and suffused with my own and multiple other histories during "London" and particularly "Robinson In Space". Keillor again tries to weave obliquely traumatic commentary on the entanglements of an itinerant, sexually complex researcher; this ticker-tape of news is now planted within a painfully slow, politically incontinent narrative of localised and architecturally located protest. The tear-jerking timing of the cuts from Vauxhall Park to the Thames, Reading town centre to Aldermaston, that propelled the gradual realisation in the first films that these are distracted, obsessional, admirable, lonely people making the film, are here in the third part sadly absent. Multiple longeurs of mould on signs, dusty flora, lose faith with the momentum needed to keep us caring about the reportage of these landscapes.