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 static.

When it was released, the film barely touched the mainstream. It drifted onto the art-house circuit in 1980, often doubled on the bill with Buñuel’s once-banned L’Âge d’Or. Imagine that pairing: one film that had been locked away for half a century because it was considered too dangerous, and another that seemed to vanish almost the moment it arrived. A critic at the time quipped that he’d had both his best and worst cinema experience of the year on the same evening. That feels right for Radio On; it frustrates, it mesmerizes, and sometimes it does both in the span of the same shot.

This is a road movie, but it is also an autopsy of Britain at the end of the 1970s. Petty bureaucracies hum through radio broadcasts of football results dated March 10, 1979. Factories loom, but they are not symbols of progress; they are relics, humming machines surrounded by a workforce already uneasy about what the next decade will demand. In Robert’s journey from London to Bristol, you feel the weight of a country unraveling itself: post-industrial, post-imperial, not yet Thatcherite but already bracing. It’s no wonder Wim Wenders was an associate producer; his fingerprints are everywhere. Martin Schäfer, Wenders’ cameraman, shot the film in monochrome, and Lisa Kreuzer, who plays Ingrid, had already embodied European drift in Alice in the Cities. Even the character Sting plays, “Just Like Eddie,” echoes a joke from Wenders’ Kings of the Road. The references aren’t coy winks; they’re signals that this isn’t just Britain’s road film, it’s Europe’s too, a shared language of dislocation.

The camera doesn’t hurry. It follows headlights, the rhythm of tires, the slow dissolves of night into gray morning. Where an American road movie might swell with myth, here the road feels blank, drained of promise. Robert is less Kerouac, more Ripley, a man in motion who doesn’t seem to belong anywhere. Even the women he encounters, Ingrid searching for her daughter Alice, Kathy adrift in shabby flats, seem less like characters than echoes of the people he cannot reach, most of all his dead brother. What moves is not the plot but the atmosphere: a haze of grief, suspicion, and a kind of numb attention to the passing world.

Not many saw it at the time, and those who did were often divided. Some dismissed it as inert, too cold, too European in its restraint. Others found themselves transfixed, recognizing that its refusal to hurry was, in itself, the point. Decades later, in Nick Gilbert’s 2022 book Roadrunner, the film’s route is retraced and its resonances revived, proof that sometimes a work ignored in its moment lingers longer than anyone expects. Films metabolize differently: some explode, some disappear, and some simmer quietly until another generation stumbles across them and feels the temperature shift.

For me, Radio On is less about Robert’s investigation than about what it reveals when nothing quite happens. It’s about absence: of brother, of purpose, of a country sure of itself. It is a reminder that sometimes the emptiest landscapes reveal the most profound truths. Watching it, you feel how soundtracks can become characters, how headlights can feel like sentences, how silence can carry the weight of a whole era’s unease.

It is not a film that entertains. It is a film that waits. And in that waiting, in the static between songs, in the hum of roads that lead nowhere, you begin to hear something we rarely let ourselves sit with: the quiet grief of a society passing from one age to another. You may leave it bored, you may leave it restless, but you will not leave it unchanged.

And maybe that is what makes it matter still, that this strange, stubborn film refuses to resolve itself, and instead leaves us with a question we carry long after the credits fade: what do we hear when we finally listen to the silence between stations?

Film still from Radio On (1979), directed by Christopher Petit. Featuring Sting as “Just Like Eddie.” Used here under Fair Use for purposes of commentary and criticism.