"I'm in love with the modern world"

"To my surprise,I find myself driving through the bleak flatlands of late middle age."


Chris Petit once said that Britain was too small a place for road movies. Nowhere was far enough away from anywhere else to allow for a journey of any worth. In Britain motion was measured by a social scale - up and/or down the class ladder - rather than the speedometer.
And yet he has made a film career - albeit one heavy on long pitstops over the years - making road movies. From Radio On to this week's More 4 documentary Content, Petit has constantly filmed the world from the driver's seat.
He's described Content as "an ambient 21st-century road movie" and it's the ambience I liked about it. It's not short of content - thoughts on technology, the war, his own past, Pokemon, the death of modernism, time passing, the out-of-town shopping centre and its ancillary architecture - all bound together in a kind of free-form loop; some of it intriguing, some of it fatuous ("the new religion of flat-packing" he says of our IKEA obsession, which rather overstates the case surely).
But none of this is what I respond to in Content. It's the drift of images that compels. The world seen through the windscreen; tail lights, wipes sloshing rain, the white line up the middle of the road, the graphics of roadsigns. A vision most of us see every day.
You can see a similar fascination with the view from the car window in Woodrow Phoenix's graphic novel Rumble Strip which is a brilliant look at the way the car has transformed our vision of the world, the dangers inherent in that and the consoling seductions the road offers.
But film offers the extra consolation of motion itself. Petit: "The movie camera and the car came of age in the twentieth century, and if you put the two together you had a perfect fusion for a while. A projection, a hymn to the virtues of the extended shot, suspended space, stillness and motion, false security that now seems less about the road ahead than the spproach of the speeding car in the rearview mirror. A flight from the past, though the question 'what are you driving from?' - whose answer is perfectly obvious - remains unasked in the panic of all the disembodied voices in the radio. We all find ways of losing ourselves."
This is the way the world looks. Or did look like. Petit pays nearly as much attention to the view of the computer screen, a virtual vision that may be replacing the one we see from the car as primary way we view the world. A different type of screen. The click of the mouse replacing the tick-tick-tick of the indicator.
And yet it's the pulse of the road that holds me in Content; the clotted movement of traffic now and again giving way, thankfully, to snatches of effortless forward motion,the road opening before us.
Road movies never need a destination. They're always about the road. About the white lines stretching out like a dotted line to the future, or better yet, an eternal present. No destination. The only purpose of motion being motion itself. Content is nostalgic for that.

Road runner

Just a quick heads-up. There's a new film from film-maker, essayist and sometime novelist Chris Petit on More4 next Tuesday (March 9, 10pm). Part of the True Stories series, Chris Petit's Content is something of a road movie - yes, another one - using old footage, new footage and fictional elements. It's followed by his ealier film London Orbital. It's all about motion in Petit's lens. Sight & Sound talks about the new film here.
Can I ask the BBC to look out London Labyrinth, his wonderful essay on the capital city made entirely of found footage. One to return to next week hopefully.