After finishing Chris Petit’s wonderfully dark 1993 novel Robinson – as wet, grim, and seedy depiction of London as I’ve come across – in which the title character attempts to make “the Citizin Kane of porno movies, I’ve begun to try to think of other works of fiction in which the author attempts to imagine an experimental cinema unlike anything actually existing, but the only two novels that come to mind are William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Paul Auster’s Book of Illusions. 

I read the following montage passage from Robinson, in which the book’s narrator searches through tapes of footage for the title character’s film, a dozen times:

I saw a woman swinging out her right arm.  William Blake walking down Poland Street, shadowed by a dog.  The gunmen waiting on the grassy knoll. I saw all the doors in my life (save those with her). Blind Borges wrote: I saw a tattered labyrinth (it was London). I saw myself as a child standing at a window and the shadow of my mother, her voice saying, ‘Come away now’; Cookie and the sly look of the wild, feral girl. A moving walkway at Gatwick airport; tank manoeuvres in the desert. I saw the children I never had; Marlene Dietrich telling Orson Welles, ‘Your future’s all used up.’ Traffic lights changing in empty streets. Lee Marvin walking through LAX, his footsteps like gunshots. I watched a game show host position his guests on the camera mark. A Texaco station on a road out of Felixstowe, overhead a jet plane on its penultimate flight before crashing. I saw Germaine Greer Fuck Warren Beatty; Lotte and Iain on the sofa; a first edition of For Love and Hunger. I saw Princess Diana’s sideways look to her husband on her wedding night. Broken glass on the hard shoulder, train tracks running east to Poland. I saw a photograph of Rainer Werner Fassbinder directing Veronica Voss, watched George Best send a goalkeeper the wrong way. In the wake of a power cruiser, children run on Hampstead Heath. Test crash footage of wired-up dummies in cars. Brendan Behan drunk and roaring, ‘At least I don’t fuck my own dogs.’ The wall against which the Ceausescus were shot. Weeds on a building site; the rolling credits of a TV comedy (the last one); the slap of the Thames against London Bridge. Cars cruise high above the narrative. The pavement outside the Magdala Tavern. Robinson in Dresden. Dirk Bogarde shopping alone. A dropped glove. The only person not laughing in an audience. A tie my father wore. Engine oil stains and painted white lines on concrete. A line of poplars on Bredon Hill. A woman hoovers in a tower block. Shop dummies float in the Grand Caledonian canal. The hum of an empty refrigerator. Ruth Ellis’s botched hanging, the one that Pierrepoint wouldn’t talk about. A smile of invitation never followed up. A politician lying. Tweezers on a dressing table. I saw the false entries in Donald Crowhurst’s log. A line from a song: Much older now, with hat on, drinking wine. The white chalked outline of a body once mine on a pavement, from on high the chalk blurring in the rain.