Capital Celluloid 2017 - Day 206: Thu Jul 27

Radio On (Petit, 1979): Close-Up Cinema, 7.30pm

This 35mm screening is part of Close-Up Cinema's 'On the Road' season. You can find all the details of the season here.

Chicago Reader review:
A British film about alienation, asphalt, and narrative disconnections, coproduced by Wim Wenders's German company. Director Christopher Petit, a former film critic, slips into Wenders's style—the cool, austere black-and-white images, the blank underplaying—as if he were taking it for a test drive: he wants to see what it can do, what its strengths are and where its weaknesses lie. Seizing on an archetypal Wenders situation—a car trip that becomes a metaphor for an emotional pilgrimage—Petit inspects and abstracts Wenders's ideas. The film is dull and distant, though not objectionably so—it seems to be the effect Petit has in mind. The relationships between his isolated, distracted characters are reproduced in the movie's low-key appeal to its audience. With David Beames and Lisa Kreuzer (1979).
Dave Kehr

Here is Mark Kermode introducing the film.