Radio On

came across this database entry by accident. saw the movie 25 years ago and still can find its traces in my memory - amongst these the strongest when Robert and a hitchhiker drive along a forest of power line pylons and find them awful. Robert says something like "years from now when only a few of them are left we might say they're beautiful" (sorry, a 25 year old memory is not the best base for correct quoting) Christopher Petits influences of the early Wim Wenders road movies can be traced down best in " I'm Laufe der Zeit (Kings of the Road) " from 1976 - its in b/ w as well. But to me there is as well a link to Jarmush's " Stranger than Paradise " from 1984 (more acting and dialogs but the same slow glide thru scenic black& white landscapes)

Opening scene: like a badly lit YouTube video with camera tracking around a dingy flat in the dark.

A lot of dinge. Silences devoid of talking but staring from back of head off out into alienated nowheres.

Perpetual gloom is hungover every scene. This is England of 1979. Looking as bleak and despondent as I remember it. Thatcher the milk-snatcher had just come to power.

Not just dark and dim, but dull the first time i saw it. The plot is minimal and pointless (i.e beside the point) Concerned more with observational detachment than motivational character development. It's got a morose London Dj driving his Rover past monolithic tower-blocks out towards the desolate west country. Listening to Kraftwerk tapes sent by dead brother.

Dj like an alienated mopey nobody passively drifts into and out of various encounters of estrangement with other alienated mopey no-bodies (Sting still tries to be Sting though as a solitary and subdued petrol attendant singing Eddie Cochran on guitar).

This is Wim Wenders country. The existential road movie switched from soul-less autobahn to empty A4. Wenders cinematographer (Martin Schafer) is doing all the b/w monochrome melancholy with the camera. Even got Liza Kreuzer from Alice in the Cities looking for her daughter Alice (from Alice in the Cities?). Maybe she's in Weston-Super-Mare. Lets go there.

This has become a cult film. Critics liked it because it tried to be different, i.e the same as their beloved Wim. A cool German art-house sensibility transplanted to 1970′s England. Makes it feel like a depressingly depressive place. Even more depressingly depressive than it is now.

I had the pleasure of attending a screening of 'Radio On 'presented by its director Chris Petit.

Often described as "austere", and rightly so, the influence of Wim Wenders is immediately clear, but unlike Wenders' which films try to hide a sense of self importance behind lengthy banality it is this film's very understatedness that is the key to its (limited) success.

Halliwell's described this as a film "barely able to summon up any interest in its characters" although it is the very detached and unemotional stance of Petit towards his lead that makes this such an unbearably real portrayal of disenchantment, we begin to feel disenfranchised with humanity itself.

Pointless Trivia: At the premiere screening of this film no one recognised the lead actor amongst the crowd as he has a shock of orange hair undetectable in a black and white movie).

It comes as no surprise to see Wim Wenders name in the credits. As in most road movies much of this simply consists of a loner staring into space. But former critic Christopher Petit has taken the message "We are the children of Fritz Lang and Werner von Braun" to heart.

As benefits a film that's half-German half the dialogue is in German and the credits are bi-lingual (we even hear David Bowie singing 'We Can Be Heroes' in German), and Petit employs black & white photography to transform North London into an alien environment combining 'Metropolis' and 'Alphaville' (complete with a sinister voice like Alpha-60 emanating from a radio).

Like the earlier films by Lang and Godard it all seemed very modern at the time, but the references to Northern Ireland like Godard's to Algeria and a cameo by Sting make it today look just as much of a period piece as the earlier film. The charmingly archaic computer game seen in a pub is also evocative of an era long ago.

The road movie is among my favorite genres, and "Radio On" ranks with the best of them. Co-produced by Wim Wenders, the master of the existential road movie (whose production company is called "Road Movies," no less), it was made in 1979 by Christopher Petit, who had been a film critic for London's "Time Out" and received funding from Wenders and the British Film Institute to make this film. One very clearly sees an admiration here for Wenders' road trilogy, particularly "Kings of the Road," but "Radio On" extracts the essence of Wenders' style and the soul of the road movie and forms a sort of concentrate from it. This is a meditation *on* the road movie, but on lots of other things, too.

In a film with very long shots and many lonesome scenes with no dialogue, nothing feels superfluous. Lengthy, lingering shots from behind the driver's seat of a moving car with music from Kraftwerk's "Radio-Activity" could very well come across as empty, but in this movie, they don't. Each shot is given ample time to sink in, and they do. Petit has made a movie, rich in its sparseness, that depicts alienation and inward-seeking as effectively as any Wenders film, and like Wenders, there are echoes of Edward Hopper's paintings here in the evening streets lit by streetlights, and in the beautiful moment where we see two characters, British man and German woman, each standing behind separate hotel room windows, staring out pensively as we pass by from a motorway bridge.

The man in the window is Robert, the film's central character, and he is traveling from Camden to Bristol to seek information about the death of his brother. That his name is Robert will likely slip the viewer's mind, as what's important about "Radio On" and the road movies of Wim Wenders is that the central characters are not too sharply drawn, and only a vague set of circumstances are established to give their journey the semblance of purpose. This way, the characters are ciphers, blank slates, and we take this journey with them by inhabiting them, by projecting our own sensibilities onto them, and to that extent, films like "Kings of the Road," "Radio On," and Wenders' later and similar "Until the End of the World" are as purging as a road trip itself.

All of the characters in "Radio On" look like they are brooding, but they don't talk about why, they simply brood and they keep moving while doing so.

Angst and alienation are both factors, but so is the fact that the world is changing. From a small, wintry spot on the globe, change is just around the corner and the characters feel it in their bones, if not yet in their heads.

The energy of the music of David Bowie, Wreckless Eric, Devo and others penetrates the meditative pace and makes these imminent changes palpable in the film's ambiance, or more accurately, in its aura. The movie's calm is an eerie and temporary one, like when the shoreline recedes prior to a tidal wave.

As the title would suggest, the music is one of the principal elements here.

I will indelibly associate Bowie's "Heroes" and Wreckless Eric's "Whole Wide World" with this film. Here, they are like the sun of a new decade rising to melt the snow of the 1970s. Or like a curtain call for an age.

And there is genuine poetry in the dialogue.

The German tourist explains to Robert that her friend hates men. Robert observes, "There's no word for that in English. The only word is for a man who hates women," and we understand that there is sadness in this fact, even if we can't articulate why.

The movie is beautifully conceived and structured, and it is structured both loosely and mindfully. It moves slowly, but it's spontaneous. Sting appears briefly as a filling station attendant, in a wonderful scene where he talks about the death of Eddie Cochran, strums his guitar, and sings "Three Steps to Heaven" from the back of his camper. The film ends as we hear Kraftwerk's "Ohm Sweet Ohm" beaming out from a car radio on the edge of a cliff, and home sweet home is precisely nowhere. This movie is quiet, slow, low-key, but it gets under the skin and is ultimately quite stirring.