Radio On (Christopher Petit), 1979
Chris Petit’s cult road movie Radio On (1979) is singular in British cinema. The film, about a man who drives from London to Bristol to investigate his brother’s death, looks like nothing else shot here before or since. That’s mainly because half the crew was German. Wim Wenders was an associate producer, and, crucially, Martin Schäfer was the cameraman, and so the British landscape is partially viewed through a German lens. Watching it now, you might mistake parts of Bristol and London for Berlin in the late 1970s. The atmosphere is gloomy, the weather overcast, everything captured in grainy black and white. Of course, the synths of Kraftwerk and Berlin-period Bowie on the soundtrack help.
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