Toward a New Aesthetic: Radio On and the Europeanisation of a British Film - Essay Example

? Toward a New Aesthetic: ‘Radio On’ and the Europeanisation of a British Film by Christopher Petit’s howlof existential angst represents much more than a stylistic and technical departure from the traditional British realist aesthetic. Professor Geoffrey Nowell-Smith described Radio On, Petit’s remarkable achievement as “a film without a cinema,” a subjective odyssey through a decayed industrial landscape the likes of which British film-goers had never seen – at least those unfamiliar with the stark and gritty German film ethic that Radio On evinces (1979-80). Radio On plowed entirely new ground, with the versatile social realism and verisimilitude characteristic of British post-war cinema nowhere in evidence. Petit offers an entirely new form of British filmic expression, of narrative and perspective. One cannot view Radio On without calling to mind the alienation and aimless wanderlust of Paris, Texas (1984) and Kings of the Road (1975), landmark Wenders films and part of an important genre to which Radio On very much belongs. Petit’s protagonist makes his way through a bleak landscape in a brooding travelogue that unwinds amid hulking manifestations of Britain’s economic malaise. “Petit is less interested in narrative than in new and un-English ways of looking and seeing. He and Schafer are in love with the sensual delight of a camera moving forward through space” (Patterson 2004). Radio On introduced an entirely new narrative structure for British film, a radical departure from traditional forms of storytelling. Petit’s film is “a disillusioned portrayal of the environment…a search for new narrative forms - and the role of music in conjunction with the cinematic journey” (www.filmmuseum.at). A new, Anglo-German cinematic synthesis hovers over it all. Poised on the eve of the Thatcher/Kohl/Reagan era, “the drifters in these movies appear as prototypes of a post-Fordist lifestyle. Always keeping a certain distance, they bear witness to a crumbling 2 industry…the postmodern transformation of cityscapes, and a changing social order” (www.filmmuseum.at). Radio On anticipates a dissatisfaction with the traditional direct realist message that would come to typify British cinema in the 1980s. One may well argue that Radio On heralded the onset of an entirely new aesthetic in the British film canon. John Hill wrote that films such as Radio On introduced a fundamental shift in both technique and content. “Significant changes took place in the socially aware British cinema in the 1980s in terms of both aesthetic strategies and thematic concerns, which meant that it was no longer possible to describe it as ‘working-class realism’” (Ashby & Higson 2000, 275). Radio On marks a break both with linear storytelling and with the traditional concern for working-class culture and values, though one may well consider Radio On an “underclass” film, though one that breaks new ground in terms of technique and content. The extended, gloomy and foreboding opening shot through the the flat of R’s dead brother introduces us to something unmistakably new, announcing as it does a startlingly different narrative approach. Subsequent panoramic vistas provide a dark, running commentary. “Between them Petit and Schafer attempt to remake our understanding of British urban space, much as Godard discerned contemporary Paris’s futuristic foreignness in Alphaville” (Patterson 2004). Minimal dialogue imbues the film with an atmospheric vacuity, into which point-of-view has free rein to impose itself on the story. Petit and Schafer have left the convention of dense and layered story construction of traditional post-war British cinema behind, fading into the dim past like the crumbling edifices that B can see in the rear-view mirror of his car. 3 The film’s arresting visual texture that speaks to another departure from Britain’s cinematic legacy. As John Patterson noted, Radio On was a film that defied categorization, even description. If there was one predominant reason for its evident strangeness, it lay in its patent un-Englishness, its Germanic miasma. The collaboration between Petit and German film icons Wim Wenders and Martin Schafer was itself something new for British cinema. The result of this creative collaboration - Petit’s first outing as a director – produced what some observers labeled a new Northern European aesthetic, rather than a palpably British film. “(Radio On) would be better described as a European rather than British road movie. Unlike its American counterparts, in which the road most often represents freedom and possibility, you just know that the road in Radio On is going to run out” (Connolly 2010). Music (without which any road movie would be unthinkable) gives Radio On its momentum, and the film’s soundtrack reflects its combined English and German influences. The opening shot progresses through the dead man’s flat to the chugging pace set by David Bowie’s “Heroes,” sung in English as well as in German (the song is credited as “Heroes/Helden”). But the most notable musical contribution to Radio On comes from the legendary German new wave group Kraftwerk. Petit’s synthesis of English and German music and cultural influences enhanced the film’s sense of European cinematic expressionism. His grand aim was, evidently, too far ahead of its time to take root. “Radio On projected a rapprochement anticipated in the 1970s art pop (Kraftwerk, Bowie) used so prominently in the film. Petit imagined a British cinema that, like that music, could assert its Europeanness not by 4 rejecting America, but by confidently absorbing American influences” (Fisher 2010). Petit’s vision may not have reached full flower, but its manifestation in Radio On undoubtedly influenced a British cinema on the verge of a thematic and technical evolution that would reflect the social and economic change of the 1980s. In Patterson’s view, the significance of the Petit-Wenders-Schafer collaboration lies in its reaction to Hollywood “and the false security of a shared language,” and a film “drenched in German references,” including easily recognizable German contemporary music (Patterson 2004). For those eager to laud any influence which steers British cinema away from formulaic Hollywood filmmaking, an infusion of Germanic sensibility was a welcome and re-invigorating change. In a 1977 interview, Wenders tried to explain the post-war angst of the German film industry. “Never before and in no other country have images and language been abused so unscrupulously as here. Nowhere else have people suffered such a loss of confidence in images of their own, their own stories and myths, as we have” (Kaes, in Nowell-Smith 1997, 614). This meant nothing less than the creation of an entirely new cinema and the artistic freedom that came with it; freedom from external economic pressures and the establishment of a new cinema “ex nihilo, in negation of history and tradition,” in so doing laying the groundwork for the German avant-garde which Radio On so clearly recalls (Kaes, in Nowell-Smith 1997, 614). For British cinema, this was entirely new ground, not only in the seamlessness of the creative collaboration that produced Radio On, but in the fact that it unofficially raised the curtain on New Wave cinema in Great Britain, comparatively late in coming though it was. “The 5 Thatcher years provoked a long-delayed efflorescence of British films, still largely unrecognized in Britain itself. It can be seen…as a ‘British New Wave,’ coming long after the idea of a New Wave had crumbled away in other European countries” (O’Pray 1996, 240). The British, O’Pray writes, were notoriously tardy in discovering a new voice, and New Wave trendsetters in other countries were highly critical. No less an authority than Francois Truffaut asked, “Aren’t the words ‘Britain’ and ‘Cinema’ incompatible?” Radio On helped change all that. The very notion of modernism was slow in coming to Britain. The country’s experience as the pioneer of manufacturing capitalism and absolutism left it ill-disposed to modernistic views (O’Pray 1996, 240). The socio-cultural and economic factors that would help fuel avant-garde film movements in France and Germany were quite different than those that played out in Great Britain. The interposition of German filmmakers Wenders and Schafer brought to light the possibilities inherent in a post-modern British cinematic movement. As well, the combination of more liberal censorship and the onset of recession in Britain fostered an environment in which a first-time director such as Petit could challenge cultural norms and the conventions of British filmmaking itself. One finds an irresistible incongruity in the idea of a British road movie, a genre typically identified with American cinema and influenced by 20th-century American literary giants such as Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck. Whereas the American road offered a passage to new possibilities, R’s odyssey through a ruined English landscape in Radio On is accompanied by a vaguely elegiac aspect of remorse, if not nostalgia, for a lost past, for lost potential and a longing 6 for something new and re-invigorating. In either case, the road movie builds a singular episodic narrative structure through a sequence of events, eliciting an irresistibly romantic mystique (Graf 2002, 48). Petit, whose background is “straightforward middle class,” brought the unique insight of a Briton for whom the country’s traditionally stultifying social stratification was second nature, and repressive, to a film that seems at once to yearn for change while hinting that the time for such change has come and gone (Hedgecock 1999). Petit’s dark film affirms the efficacy of film as a medium for new and vibrant forms of expressing alienation amid the bleakest of circumstances. As such, Radio On stands as a signpost pointing to new possibilities after decades of films affirming the inviolability of Britain’s realist tradition. Wenders spoke of the unprincipled abuse of symbology and images in German cinema; one may well make the case that a similar, though more subtle, form of exploitation has characterized post-war British cinema, which has in general affirmed and upheld the country’s social order. Radio On is a bold and radical departure from that one-dimensional thematic tradition. Radio On stands alone among British films. “British” in name only, it is, in fact, a Europeanised film, chronicling an alienated society through the cinematic vehicle of the road movie, but a road movie defined by a thoroughly Northern European aesthetic. If there were any doubt, the cryptic note seen in the film’s opening shot says, “We are the children of Fritz Lang and Wernher von Braun” (Petit 1979). The international collaboration between Petit and Wenders produced a texture and narrative form unprecedented in the annals of British cinema. Its impact would be felt in a more diverse, stylistic approach to filmmaking in the Thatcher era. 7 References Ashby, J, & Higson, A. 2000, British Cinema, Past and Present, Psychology Press, East Sussex, UK. Connolly, J. 2010, Spotlight: Six British Road Movies Worth Seeking Out, The Big Picture Magazine, viewed 11 January 2010, http://www.thebigpicturemagazine.com. Drifter. Road/Movie: 1974-2007, filmmuseum, viewed 11 January 2012, http://www.filmmuseum.at. Fisher, M. 2010. Grey Area: Chris Petit’s ‘Content,’ Sight and Sound, viewed 12 January2012, http//www.bfi.org.org.uk. Graf, A. 2002. The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway, Wallflower Press, London, UK. Hedgecock, A. 1999. Interview with Chris Petit. The Edge Online Magazine, viewed 11 January 2012, http://www.theedge.abelgratis.co.uk. Kaes, A. 1997, The New German Cinema, in The Oxford History of World Cinema, Oxford University Press, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed), Oxford, UK. O’Pray, M, 1996, The British Avant-Garde Film, 1926-1995: An Anthology of Writings, John Libbey Media, Luton, UK. Patterson J, 2004, A Film Without a Cinema, The Guardian, viewed 10 January 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk. Radio On, 1979. Film. Directed by Christopher Petit. UK: BFI. Read More