Not Adaptation but “Drifting”: Patrick Keiller, Daniel Defoe, and the Relationship between Film and Literature
Robert Mayer, Oklahoma State University
Volume 16, no. 4, July 2004
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Two recent films by British filmmaker Patrick Keiller — London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997) — are mindful of and indebted to two works by Daniel Defoe — Robinson Crusoe (1719) and A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26). The films raise important questions about Defoe’s texts and the link between film and literature. In the twentieth century, that relationship has further complicated the always complex borderline status of the novel, and while some filmmakers and theorists have argued against any kind of continuity between literature and film, more have linked them in a variety of ways … Keiller’s films emphatically problematize the distinction between documentary and fiction films. Drawing upon the work of situationist thinkers such as Raoul Vaneigem, they also implicitly move the discussion of the link between film and literature beyond any narrow consideration of adaptation and point to a fresh understanding of that relationship, one that is rooted not in literary but in cinematic theory.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Daniel Defoe” include:
A Life of Continu’d Variety: Crime, Readers, and the Structure of Defoe’s Moll Flanders
by KATE LOVEMAN (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
Real Robinson Crusoe
by MICHAEL GAVIN (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
Zealous for Their Own Way of Worship: Defoe, Monarchy, and Religious Toleration during the War of the Quadruple Alliance
by MORGAN STRAWN (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
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