Friday, 18 March 2011
Perhaps because nowhere in Britain is more than a day’s drive from anywhere else if you put your mind to it, the UK road film is generally a species of art cinema, the inner journey of the traveller transfiguring the discovery of the landscape. In the traditional road movie, self-discovery takes place on the road. In the UK road film, no road can be long enough to put arrival out of the traveller’s mind, or the viewer’s. A road movie protagonist is tested by transition. A UK road film protagonist is tested by the threat of arrival.
The
apogee of the UK road film’s resonance was the nineteen-seventies. At
perhaps no other point in the history of film in the UK have the borders
between modes of film practice seemed so porous: the impoverished state
of the industry made commercial production almost as artisanal and
economically uncertain a venture as experimental filmmaking; in this era
Peter Sellers vehicles could sit on the shelf permanently while Stephen
Dwoskin’s films received theatrical distribution. Never since has
Rivette’s observation that narrative films are documentaries of people
acting seemed so acute.
Sometimes, the UK road film is a film about people thinking about
moving – roads of any kind scarcely appear in Barney Platt-Mills’ Private Road. At other times, the destination merges into the road, becomes defined as the catalyst of an emotional voyage. Take Me High
has only begun when Tim Matthews (Cliff Richard), previously so much an
item with the smoked-windowed Mini on whose roof he has perched to sing
(before drinking champagne alone) becomes a Birmingham pedestrian and
discovers the waterways. Ryker (George Lazenby)’s spiritual odyssey in Universal Soldier takes him from his career of perpetual travel for perpetual war to a life of rented rooms among the countercultural Left.
Radio On
is something rather different. To relate to thought as one in transit,
at home in liminal spaces, is an ambition already discernable in that
film, despite the trauma of the occurrence Robert (David Beames) travels
to confront; the logical conclusion of its drift the ceaseless movement
of Petit’s later travellers.
2 comments:
I like this -- 'the threat of arrival'.Reply
'Radio On' is on a certain mass market/niche arts cable channel tomorrow (Sunday 20th) at 10pm.- 'A road movie protagonist is tested by transition. A UK road film protagonist is tested by the threat of arrival.'
Brilliant!
The radio was on throughout Radio On, and one wonders if those behind it had tuned into the 11 Miles rite: https://www.creepypasta.com/11-miles/
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