Director Profile: Chris Petit

There’s a moment, at the start of Chris Petit’s new film Content – shown on More4 last month, with a theatrical release to follow – where the director, driving on the Westway, seems to slip back in time, the footage transforming into black-and-white, grainy celluloid.

The earlier footage comes from Petit’s 1979 film Radio On, following a mysterious 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 modernist housing projects edging the flyover into the post-modernist blocks of ‘luxury apartments’ that plague London.

Petit describes Content as an “informal coda” to Radio On – which means, among other things, it’s an attempt to map the historic distance from that moment, to negotiate with the past and its now-foreclosed possibilities.

Content is what might be called an ‘essay film’, an “ambient road movie” as Petit describes it, following him and his son driving along unidentified roads, spliced with footage from “a memory-bank of other journeys”. Its ostensibly documentary film is set to Petit’s ruminative voiceover and interweaved with a disquisition by music-theorist Ian Penman on the nature of email, delivered by German actor Hanns Zischler.

German electronic-musician Antye Greie’s soundtrack covers the roadscapes in a melancholic haze of crackle and glitch. Interpolated into the film is Petit’s collection of old postcards, mostly from Germany, where he lived with his father, who was stationed with Allied forces – images of 1920s cityscapes, space-age buildings, autobahns. These are against the anonymous landscapes Petit drives through, caught in the flat light of a digital camera: container docks, industrial estates, 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 static road-movie Robinson in Space (1997). 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 was made in a context where the dream of the 20th 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 film its spooked edge.

The British road-movie was always a chimera: the genre belonged with America, its car-culture, frontier-myths, expanses of road. Radio On was closer to an automotive dérive, a back-road drift through the country’s dreams and paranoia.

Content takes this further: if the road-movie was the product of modernity, then its linearity must now be deconstructed, its assurance abandoned. As Petit ruefully notes, “the film camera and the car both came of age in the 20th century”, and now both, like our narrator, feel the burden of age.

In the neo-liberal era, the road transforms from an escape-route, 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 novelist and psychogeographical writer Iain Sinclair, the camera grainily watches the passage of traffic like CCTV – passive, impersonal. The endless, raging circle matches the pedestrian fugues of the inhabitants of the asylums that lined its passage: 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 able to understand the world as one grows older – a hopeless task, the film suggests – 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 form 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 anachronistic. 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.

Content is not nostalgia but a haunting, and a beautiful, uncompromising inquiry into our condition: a sombre testament to hope.