Belgrave Gate Project 8: Circulating Memories / The Films Of Chris Petit

A few posts back, I mentioned my current enthusiasm for shooting video footage through the windscreen whilst driving around the area encompassed by my ongoing ‘Belgrave Gate Project’.  It’s very early days in my sideline as an Artist Film Maker, (ahem), and, as I’m still at the raw footage stage, there’s nothing worth showing in public as yet.  I’m also knee deep in a full scale painting with which I’ll probably see the year out but, hopefully, over the Winter break I’ll also have time to properly assess what I’ve got and commence the video editing process in search of something coherent.  In the meantime, I thought I’d mention a couple of films that seem to have influenced my current adventures in moving imagery.

'London Orbital':

‘London Orbital’ (2004) [1.] is a film made as a collaboration between Author, Iain Sinclair and Film Maker, Christopher Petit and devised as a visual companion to Sinclair’s book of the same name [2.].  As I discussed in a previous post, the overall project marks an exploration of the M25 London Orbital Motorway and, not surprisingly given the pedigree of these two, is a deeply psychogeographic enterprise.  Whilst the original book charts a long multi-staged walk around the road’s audible catchment, with numerous tangential meditations on the places it bypasses, the film centres far more on the experience of actually driving the same route.

Iain Sinclair, (With Bridge)

Christopher Petit, (With Another Bridge)

It’s difficult to shrug off the overriding impression of the M25 as a road to nowhere or a vast solution to a logistical problem that was rendered almost unusable as soon as it had opened.  To drive around it, is to orbit one of the planet’s most significant cities without ever touching it; to short circuit a liminal tract of pocket landscapes, forgotten sites, suburbs and dormitory towns without earthing anywhere definitive; to trace an immense zero on the landscape.  One could circle around this baffling racetrack for eternity if the congestion would allow it.

Still From, Chris Petit & Iain Sinclair, (Dirs.), 'London Orbital' 2004

Chris Petit’s task was to somehow capture something of this through the lens of his relatively unsophisticated video camera, and his solution was a simple but highly effective one.  Although it employs a variety of different modes of filming, the passages that make the greatest impression on me are those in which Petit shoots through the windows of the moving car.  The resulting images create a kind of endless flux in which vehicles stream by a viewpoint that is itself dynamic, and through a range of lighting and weather conditions.  Nothing is fixed and there is a sense of endless travel with no prospect of arrival, of being perpetually on the way to somewhere, (or nowhere), else.  It seems to suggest a very contemporary state of being and is rendered even more hypnotically nebulous whenever the lens is deliberately unfocussed.

Stills From: Chris Petit & Iain Sinclair, (Dirs.), 'London Orbital' 2004

My own experiments have included numerous examples of deliberate unfocussing; of shooting in different conditions at day and night; of exploiting the found filters of condensation, frost and rogue reflections on the glass.  Without really thinking about it, I now realise just how influenced I have already been by Petit’s camera work.  As I disappear up my own tail pipe, repeatedly orbiting around Leicester’s Belgrave Circle and the Burleys Roundabout, it even feels like I might be emulating his and Sinclair’s circular journey in microcosm.


'Radio On':

The second film, ‘Radio On’ (1979) [2.] was also directed by Petit, and feels like it actually relates my own personal history.  In essence, it is a strange, autistically emotionless, Post Punk take on the European road movie, and is heavily influenced by the early work of Wim Wenders, (who co-produced).  It is also a portrait of a country mired in recession and decline with no clear idea of how to proceed.  With relatively little by way of plot, it follows the protagonist’s physical and mental journey between London and Bristol, then beyond to the Severn Estuary.

Title Sequence From:  'Radio On', Chris Petit (Dir.), 1979

I first watched the film whilst living in Bristol myself, in the early 1980s, and was struck by its dream-like sense of a perpetual stranger passing through a series of inexplicable landscapes.  The opening title sequence cleverly co-opts the chasing illuminated text on the front of Bristol Hippodrome, which is even more significant if you know that it stands on the colloquially named 'Racetrack' - an elongated circuit that cars could, potentially, drive round for ever.  However, the most memorable motif from Bristol is the conjunction of a hotel and stark elevated roadway.  It’s one of the first things I ever saw on my own arrival in the city and was not so different in impact from the flyovers and surrounding buildings that now fascinate me in Leicester.  I was also struck by the odd (and very British), choice of vehicle to share centre stage, - an ageing Rover P4, just like the one my father once drove.  The unreliable car is ultimately abandoned on the precipice of a quarry that I’ve convinced myself I once stumbled across on a long walk years ago.

Still From: 'Radio On', Chris Petit (Dir.), 1979

In the context of this post, there are two points about ‘Radio On’ that particularly interest me.  The first is Petit’s deliberate use of a car’s windscreen as an analogue for the movie screen.  Unlike the camerawork in ‘London Orbital’, Petit keeps his camera generally facing ahead, emphasising the sense of forward progress through a landscape and echoing the transitory procession of images, glimpses and impressions that pass before a driver's and a cinema audience’s eyes alike.

“Petit is less interested in narrative than in new in un-English ways of looking and seeing.  He and [Director of Photography] Schäfer are in love with the sensual delight of a camera moving forward through space.  The film is peppered with long, coldly stirring shots from B’s clapped out Rover, moving through a series of defamiliarised, Ballardian English landscapes….Between them Petit and Schäfer attempt to remake our understanding of British urban space, much as Godard discerned contemporary Paris’ futuristic foreignness in ‘Alphaville’” [3.].

That sense of the view from a moving vehicle is definitely something that coloured my own responses to the Belgrave Gate subjects.  My most vivid impressions of Burleys flyover, the Equinox Tower adjacent to it and, indeed the preposterous lime green supermarket opposite, may well be those I first gained during my daily commute to work.

Still From: 'Radio On', Chris Petit (Dir.), 1979

Burleys Flyover & Equinox Tower, Leicester, 2013

Burleys Flyover & Equinox Tower, Leicester, 2013

The other point worth making here about ‘Radio On’ is the pivotal role that music plays within in it.  Petit very self-consciously uses a pretty cool soundtrack comprising tracks from the period, (Kraftwerk in particular).  Much of this music is selected or played by the characters themselves, emphasising its integrality to the ‘plot’ and the actual journey taken within the film.  Of course, it’s hardly original to point out the relationship between music and driving.  Nonetheless, I now realise how rarely I drive without music playing and just how important it is in stimulating the meditation of travel, and in turning even the most routine journeys into private little road movies.

Still From 'Radio On', Chris Petit (Dir.), 1979

Thinking about all this, it strikes me how closely related are films to both dreams and memories. My own memories tend to be very visual and can run like little film clips, (quite often within dreams).  Just like film, these resonant little illusions usually take on great subjectivity, often becoming considerably removed from actual 'reality'.  In the case of  particularly affecting films, images from them can even come to feel more like personal memories.  Just like some of the images in films like 'Radio On', it can be difficult to untangle which really came first, the memory, the visual representation or the memory of the visual representation, and all can stay with me over decades, becoming increasingly divorced from their original context.  It is one of the fascinating features of the overall creative process how such material can gain renewed significance years later, in a different life, and in the context of a nominally 'new' project.

[1.]:  Christopher Petit & Iain Sinclair, (Co Dirs.), ‘London Orbital’, Illuminations, 2004

[2.]:  Christopher Petit (Dir.), ‘Radio On’, BFI Production Board/Road Movies Filmproduktion GmbH, 1979

[3.]:  John Patterson, ‘A Film Without A Cinema’, London, The Guardian, 2 October 2004