One of the pleasures of the trilogy is that each
part has its own intrinsic qualities, allowing them to be viewed
separately or has a whole without diminishing their power.
Another strength is that, although recognisably different from the
formal approaches of earlier work, there is a consistency of tone that
suggests a line can be traced back to Thames Film (and beyond) through to
his latest piece MM (2002).
The primary focus for MM is the Millennium Dome in Greenwich and, as
Canary Wharf can be coded as a comment on Thatcherism, the Dome is used as
a visual metaphor to critique New Labour. The piece again refuses easy
didactics and collapses together old black and white shots of the building
of the Blackwall Tunnel, footage that Raban took in 1987 of the blowing up
of the power station where the Dome now stands, film of the 1999 Eclipse,
Millennium celebrations and a light show from the first New Year after
Canary was built in 1992. The film conveys the inherent strangeness of
the Dome as a monument in its particular space and time and also as a
cipher for attempts at constructing a national ideal. Echoing the poetic
dimension, MM is subtitled 'a film poem in eight stanzas' and acts as a
kind of coda, extending themes developed in Thames Film and the trilogy
and re-framing them in the context of the Millennium.
As his most recent works, MM, After Duchamp and the works in progress
Wild Sea and The Straits of Dover show, two strands of Raban remain
constant - a commitment to formal experimentation whilst at the same time
being unafraid of revisiting thematic and conceptual ground. Different
facets - landscape, narrative, documentary, experiments with process and
duration - can be teased from his films at any point and in many
combinations. In terms of consistency, it is in his exploration of gaps
and spaces, be they between the organic and mechanistic, image, object and
representation, painting and film, race and identity, historical and
present. His work continues, asking questions and lifting traces.
