IdleRich
IdleRich
Screening of Content followed by Q&A with director Chris Petit
At The Rio Cinema
Saturday 21st of May at 4pm
£5/£4 concessions
http://www.riocinema.org.uk/
Content (15)
(UK 2009) directed by Chris Petit 78 m. Digital
A beguiling autobiographical road movie and film essay conceived as a coda to his seminal Wenders inspired English road movie Radio On and as a reckoning with the economic crash of 2008. Content ended up being a deeply personal mediation on memory, on loss and renewal, as Petit began to assimilate reflections on his young son and his late father. It is, incidentally, the most witty and eloquent account of the impact of living in cyberspace and of film making in the digital age.
Chris Petit is perhaps the only British artist/fim maker who has been making a continuous road movie throughout his whole body of work. He has for 30 years been mining the many uncanny congruences between cinema and driving-the travelling shot, the extended take, the simultaneous travel through time and space that both these mediums afford. Dissatisfied by various writers and theorist’s inability to get to grip with the possibilities of the internet, he, in effect, managed to merge the themes of driving and the exploration of cyberspace; he was, in his own words ’fascinated by the withdrawal,on offer ,into a mirror-less space outside time zones, where people can create alternative lives ruled by unseen correspondents.’ The film was made in the full spirit of improvised web inter-communication. The films first person narrator was drawn from email communications between petit and writer Ian Penman, actors he never met were found on Youtube and the composer sent in the score through the wires. Radio On ended with a car ‘stalled on the edge of the future’, which we didn’t know then would be Thatcherism. That historical span ended in 2008 with the financial crash. Content is both informed by that history and major changes in technology which have occurred in the intervening time.
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