Content (Petit, 2009): Rio Cinema, 3.45pm
Plus Q&A with director Christopher Petit
Chris Petit made the great British road movie Radio On in 1979. Look at this beautiful sequence as the principal character exits London on the Westway to the tune of Always Crashing in the Same Car by David Bowie. In 1982 he brought us the crime thriller An Unsuitable Job For A Woman. I wish I could share the opening with you, which uses a track by Chas Jankel called Reverie. Here's the music anyway.
Petit went on to make Flight To Berlin and Chinese Boxes in the early 80s but has had more success as a novelist than a feature film maker in the past couple of decades which is a shame. He has made a number of documentaries, though, often with or involving his friend and fellow writer and filmmaker Iain Sinclair.
The Rio cinema describe Content as "a beguiling autobiographical road movie and film essay conceived as a coda to Chris Petit's seminal Wenders-inspired English road movie Radio Od and as a reckoning with the economic crash of 2008. Content ended up being a deeply personal meditation on memory, 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 to date of the impact of living in cyberspace and of film making in the digital age."
This is a fascinating opportunity to see Petit's latest work and hear the director, who was film editor of Time Out back in the 1970s talk about his life in cinema and TV.
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