39. Chris Petit

Director's cut of a review of Content/profile of Chris Petit, originally published in The Boar.

A windscreen looking out on a grey sky, the tops of tower-blocks peeping out either side of the seemingly endless road. Wipers slip wearily across the glass. A glance, and we tumble back, momentarily, into black-and-white, grainy celluloid – the same road, towers ghost-white. The voice on the soundtrack, which belongs to director Chris Petit, tells us that London's Westway, the elevated motorway cutting through the west of the metropolis, famously memorialised in J.G. Ballard's Crash, that most extreme of modernist fictions, is “a rare example of the modern city London never became”. Now it is “a memory bank of other journeys” – cue fragments of shots from car windows from all over the globe.

The moment, at the start of Petit's new film Content – shown on More4 last month, with a theatrical release to follow – is not so much nostalgia as a haunting. The earlier footage of the Westway comes from Petit's 1979 film Radio On, following its protagonist's road-trip from London to Bristol. The film was poised on the historical brink of the advent of Thatcherite neo-liberalism, which would convert the rotting modernist housing projects into the post-modernist blocks of 'luxury apartments' that Petit frames with the rail of the neglected flyover and clawing tree-limbs. He describes Content as an “informal coda” to Radio On – which means, among other things, it's an attempt to map the distance from the moment that film captured, with all its youthful sorrows, and its now-foreclosed possibilities.

Where Radio On had a proper, if minimal, narrative, Content is closer to what might be called the 'essay film', an 'ambient road movie', following Petit and his son driving along unidentified roads, spliced with memory-footage of other road-trips – through Germany, Poland, America. Its ostensibly documentary footage is set to Petit's ruminative voiceover and interweaved with a disquisition by music-theorist Ian Penman on the nature of email and the transactions of the internet, delivered by German actor Hanns Zischler. The camera listlessly drifts over roadscapes that seem to run to nowhere; German electronic musician Antye Greie’s soundtrack covers the scenes in a melancholic haze of crackle and glitch. Interpolated into the film are Petit's collection of old postcards, mostly from Germany, where, as he mentions in the film, he spent much of his youth, his father being stationed with the occupying Allied forces – images of 1920s cityscapes, space-age buildings, autobahns. Set against this are the anonymous landscapes Petit drives through, caught in the flat light of a digital camera: container docks, industrial estates, blind warehouses, Barrett Homes developments and Prince Charles’ ‘new town’ of Poundbury, which “render architecture redundant by their anonymity”, the architectural correlate to email, untied to geography – “the apotheosis of non-place”. It brings to mind Patrick Keiller’s groundbreaking ‘Robinson’ films, particularly the static road-movie Robinson in Space (1997), and Chris Marker's cinematic meditations on cultural and personal memory, especially Sans Soleil (1983). Both are obsessed with the legacy of modernity and modernism – the terrors of the Second World War and Cold War, but also cinema, industry, socialism, the promised technological transformation of everyday life. Radio On, with its airwave-whispers of IRA attacks, Baader-Meinhof, endless strikes, and desolate electronic pop, was made in a context where the dream of the 20^th century had not yet, like Petit’s postcards, become obsolete. It’s the persistence of that past, the repressed forcing itself to the surface, which lends the films their melancholia, their spooked edge.

In a certain sense, the British road-movie was always a paradox: the genre belonged with America, its car-culture, frontier myths and vast expanses of road. Radio On was closer to an automotive derive, a back-road drift through the country’s dreams and paranoia. Content takes this further: if the road-movie was the product of modernity – it wasn’t called Fordist capitalism for nothing – then its linearity must be deconstructed, its assurance abandoned. As Petit ruefully notes, “the film-camera and the car both came of age in the 20^th century”, and now both, like Petit himself, feel the burden of age. In the neo-liberal era, the road transforms from an escape-route for the individual, a mobile utopia, to the prime network of capital's agency-less circulation and distribution. The Westway is replaced as the paradigm of the road by the M25: in London Orbital (2002), Petit’s film on the motorway with the novelist and psychogeographical writer Iain Sinclair, the camera grainily watches the passage of lorries and cars from bridges and roadsides like CCTV – passive, impersonal. The endless, raging circle of the orbital motorway matches the pedestrian fugues of the insane in the asylums that lined its passage: as soon as you enter it, you’re trapped.

Two words recur throughout the film: ‘content’ and ‘correspondence’. The former plays on the idea of contentment, of being fulfilled, able to make sense of the world, as one grows older – a hopeless task, the film suggests – and content as in information, the data contained in emails and on postcards, but also the content of everyday life, something which has been depleted in the internet age, as life has been “ironed-out”. The latter plays on the idea of communication between human beings – via the tactile medium of postcards, or email, a medium that leaves us both atomised and strangely more intimate with each other. The internet age has brought with it the condensation of space: landscape, and what traversed it – cars, cards, industry, the whole public sphere – has become obsolete. But it also refers to correspondences in history and memory: the eerie sense that our present lives ‘correspond’ with a past thought vanished, erased – and, in Petit and his son’s case, that he is re-living the life of his own late father. In that sense, the film could be thought of as a more-responsible cinematic version of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn: a beautiful, uncompromising refusal of false consolation – and a sombre testament to hope.