Sleep Walk Sleep Talk
Time capsules usually stay sealed, but I’m happy this one is open. Sleep Walk Sleep Talk is Suki Chan’s atmospheric film essay on post-crash London. Shot in 2009, it’s back online at FVU for the next month.
Suki’s film combines beautiful images of London after dark and the voices of Londoners talking about urban life, night work, freedom and routine.
She also interviewed me, in the kitchen of my old Hackney flat, and you can hear my voice weaving in and out of the audio mix, as I talk — a little hesitantly — about how cities work.
I was in the early stages of my PhD in 2009, reading a lot of urban economics and a lot of critical urbanism, both of which turn up in the commentary. Listening back today I sound both a lot younger and a lot less sure of my ideas — perhaps they weren’t really mine at the time — but it still holds up much better than I’d feared.
The film captures a particular moment in the capital, too, right down to the Burial-esque soundtrack. But it also manages to live outside of that time. As Steven Bode suggests in his superb companion piece, we see ‘the future non-stop city in embryo’. And Suki brilliantly captures that particular feeling of moving — immersed, but detached — through illuminated, emptied-out spaces, then back into the dark metropolis.
