Fast food, slow acting and music as emotion: a remix blog on Petit's Radio On

A bit like the way Radio On (Remix) (1998) is the director Chris Petit revisiting his Radio On film from 1979, this little blog also returns to the scene of the crime, revisiting my Radio On blog from last year. Yeah man, it's Hiss In The Signal (Remix). Because, having just hit the road again and rewatched Radio On and then also watched Petit and producer Keith Griffiths in long sit-down interviews from 2008 (part of the extras bundled with the BFI DVD), there were a few interesting bits and pieces about the amazing Radio On that lodged in my music- and film-addled brain. Yes, I'm afraid they did. Namely, these things:

*From the outset with making Radio On, Petit says he wasn't ever interested in either the characters or the plot, which, you have to say, is pretty clearly borne out by the end product. The film's central figure Robert (David Beames) is a character dialled down to almost zero. Super-low-energy and nearly always totally passive, his main mode seems to be a slow drift. Slow driving, slow (distant) talking, slowly reaching for the on/off knob of the car radio, slowly cueing the records he plays during his all-night DJ slot, like a somnambulist who accidentally finds himself in a radio station studio. He even plays an arcade video game as if he's more interested in observing the mechanics of himself losing rather than winning. When, for once, he does something requiring a momentary burst of energy - throwing a psychotic hitchhiker's stuff out of the car window and driving quickly off - it's quite a shock. Here Beames' intensely restrained acting actually involves just a little bit of performance, as he gathers himself together and motors off into the snowy countryside, calm restored. (For a good overview of Radio On's feel of ennui and alienation, check out this Posthegemony blog).  

*Petit said he recognised that without relatable characters or an involving plot "the emotion had got to come from somewhere". His notion was that the "emotion was going to be provided by the music". Interestingly, Petit - a former Time Out film critic and Melody Maker writer - reckoned that British films had nearly always ignored the UK's pop music tradition. At least in the deeper sense of properly weaving it into a film the way Radio On does. He remembers, for instance, being amazed that Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant (1972) could use the entirety of the Platters' The Great Pretender at the end of the film. Similarly, in Radio On you get all of Bowie's Heroes/Helden at the beginning of the film, plus we see as well as hear records/tapes by Lene Lovich, Ian Dury, Wreckless Eric and - of course - Kraftwerk.

*The music was very definitely of prime importance to Petit for Radio On, as was sound in general. Radio On was a soundscape first and foremost - a soundscape with images attached. Pointedly, Petit says music and other sounds were used as a "distraction" from the "underdeveloped" nature of everything else. Petit's view, which is surely right, was that films had traditionally undervalued sound, treating it as an add-on to a film's overall poetics. With car noises, a jet engine roar, radio and television bulletins (all delivering grim news), the bleeps of a video game and lashings of moody pop music, Radio On is indeed a powerful soundscape, as the very sound-focused Radio On (Remix) also helped demonstrate.

(Not) watching the detectives: David Beames puts his foot down. Sort of

*Getting the various permissions for use of the music was apparently both hard work (personally travelling to Düsseldorf to meet members of Kraftwerk for instance) and relatively easy, ie people mostly said yes. Did they take pity on this first-time director with his inscrutable low-budget Anglo-German film? In the BFI interview Petit mentions only two refusals: he'd wanted Elvis Costello's Watching The Detectives and an (unnamed) Nick Lowe song. Given that Radio On apparently involved some kind of mini-deal with Stiff Records it seems slightly strange that these two Stiff artists didn't end up on the soundtrack. Anyway, for what it's worth I reckon the final film is probably better off without either of these. 

*On Kraftwerk, whose music is obviously completely central to Radio On, Petit says they were far and away the "most cinematic" group he knew of as he came to make the film. You wonder how the final film would have sounded (and felt) if the man-machine music robots in their Düsseldorf hide-out had said Nein instead of "OK, then". 

*And also on Kraftwerk, Petit says the cryptic "We are the children of Fritz Lang and Werner von Braun ..." quote seen scrawled on a piece of paper in Robert's brother's Bristol flat is a Kraftwerk quote, which I must admit I didn't know. Evidently it's something Ralf Hütter once said.  

*The (semi-famous?) Sting cameo in Radio On doesn't seem to have been a total hit with Petit. He commends Sting for his effort and commitment - coming to do two separate days of filming on consecutive Sundays in the middle of a demanding Police tour - but clearly didn't like the final bit where Sting plays a long segment of Eddie Cochran's Three Steps To Heaven alone by the petrol pump. This was "corny", says Petit (which is true, it is), and it sounds like the shot was pretty much foisted on the director. By who, exactly, I wasn't quite clear, but I guess that's the nature of film-making - dirty deals done dirt cheap. 

In the BFI interview the producer Keith Griffiths says that making Radio On was physically very hard work, with a small crew of 12 labouring to set up numerous outdoor shots in cold wintry conditions. In this it sounds like Petit was very much to blame. He says he was specifically interested in architecture and the weather, as opposed to dreaded character and plot. Either way, it works, from the inky-noir exterior of the Camden Plaza cinema in Camden High Street (a site now occupied by a hellish mix of Itsu, Vans, Superdrug and Holland & Barrett), to the Ballardian Shepherd's Bush slip-road off the A40 Westway, to the forlorn Hillside Garage petrol station in Chippenham and the ominous (Antonioni-like?) rain-lashed quarry at the end. (See this site, btw, for a good collection of screen captures with shoot location info). Petit says with Radio On he wanted to make a "Euro" film in an "English" setting, and he surely succeeds in this, tapping into the dessicated feel of Antonioni and Wenders, with a little bit of Fassbinder, Herzog and Godard thrown in, not least with its use of music. In 1979, says Petit, as you drove out of London you basically "journeyed into the past" (from inner-city tower blocks to end-of-pier Victoriania, from high-tooled late-70s Kraftwerk toward bubblegum pop late-50s Cochran), and Radio On rather brilliantly uses place, buildings, music and movement to demonstrate some of this. Chugging along the English Autobahn in his tank-like Rover, the affectless David Beames is repeatedly seen silhouetted against the car's highly cinematic windscreen, his biker jacket and post-punk semi-spiked hair (a "real" haircut from the haircut scene [21:25-22:30], specifies Petit) suggesting a futurity continually thwarted by Britain's staid backwardness. One minute the Langian modernity of art-deco factory buildings, the next a decrepit petrol station or gloomy pub. If there's any way to escape this gloom and decrepitude it's probably something to do with foreignness: the warmth of the German character Ingrid (Liza Kreuzer, played as a real flesh-and-blood human being compared to the humanoid Robert, Robert the Robot), and the strange allure of Kraftwerk's music and Devo's frenetic Satisfaction. With his car stranded in the quarry, Robert finally escapes from the dead zone of Bristol, trekking along a strange pebble-beach coastline and crossing a railway track to board a train at a deserted station, presumably about to head back to London. Back to 1979 and back to the possible future of post-punk and "somewhere to hear some music". Yeah, put that on your soundtrack, you budding film-maker/film critic. Two final film thoughts to end with. The scenes at the quarry and then along the remote coastline might well be oblique references to the closing coal-slag scene of Get Carter, a film which Petit mentions as an influence in his interview (he particularly liked the famous opening credits on the train, with the jazz score and Caine's well-dressed menace). And in Bristol, when Robert talks to the streetwise punk-urchin character (Paul Hollyood, incredibly enough) outside a hot dog stand, it feels to me like a link to the hot dog stand scene between Bruno Ganz and Peter Falk in Wenders' 1987 Wings Of Desire (maybe Wenders remembered Petit's scene?). What with hot dog stands later cropping up in Kaurismaki's films and greasy frankfurters being Franz's favourite food in Fassbinder's Fox And Friends (1976), I reckon you could do a whole thing about how this disgusting food item links European arthouse cinema. You could do, but er, should you ...? 

        

'What is there to do round here? Nothing'

PS: my cranking up the old Rover for another spin with Petit's mini-masterpiece happened to coincide with Radio On backer Wim Wenders making headlines with his stupid remarks at the Berlin Film Festival about how films should "stay out of politics". Hmm. I admire quite a bit of Wenders' work (his early road movie stuff, Paris Texas, Wings Of Desire and the excellent Perfect Days), but this comment is too idiotic for words. No, films should be as political as they wish to be. Let them be heavily partisan, propagandist and ideological if that's their intent. It should go without saying that many so-called "mainstream" films with no overt political bent are themselves often the most political, not least with their implicit endorsement of the status quo and the capitalist world in which we (unfortunately) live. So no, Wim, you need to STFU on this. It's a big world and there's room for all sorts of film-making - from hyper-political films about Gaza or the abomination of Trumpian imperialism, through to the gentle pleasures (and subtle politics) of Perfect Days or the music-based Brit-noir of Radio On. END OF POST-SCRIPT [Bowie's Heroes/Helden slowly fades out ...].