Static on the Motorway: Listening to Radio On
It begins in silence and in static. A long stretch of English motorway, black-and-white and endless, spooled across the screen like a half-forgotten dream. Radio On , Christopher Petit’s 1979 road film, doesn’t rush to explain itself. It doesn’t even seem to want to. It drifts, it lingers, it waits for you to either give in or walk away. Watching it today feels a little like stumbling across a ghost transmission, a message left running after its sender has gone to sleep. The story, if you want to call it that, belongs to Robert, a DJ who leaves London for Bristol to piece together the fragments of his brother’s suicide. But the plot here is skeletal, almost an afterthought. What remains are landscapes: factories sliding past train windows, petrol stations glowing in the dark, washed-out fields, and the perpetual hum of radios tuned to Kraftwerk, Devo, and David Bowie. The music becomes more present than most characters, as if the country itself is narrating in synthesizers and sta...