Debra Fear: London Orbital- the film

Critical Research Essay for BA (Hons) Degree 2010 in Fine Art: Time Based

Media

Wimbledon College of Art

Abstract

London Orbital illustrates the continued blurring of boundaries between fact,

fiction and genre in moving image.

Through a critical analysis of the film’s structure and themes, this essay will

seek to locate its relevance within historical and contemporary discussions

on, for example, the nature of cinema and other debates.

Taking representations of cinematic ‘truth’ as a guideline it will consider

London Orbital’s significance as a fin de siècle/turn of the century cultural

object.
Everyone was moaning about the end of cinema, but I thought – no, this is
the beginning of something and it’s pretty interesting
Chris Petit – London Orbital

London Orbital is a film coming after, and as an adjunct to the book of the

same name written by Iain Sinclair1. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair are co-

directors of the commissioned for TV work which was aired on Channel 4

Television in 2002. They have collaborated on many projects since the 1990s

and have been portrayed as ‘exploring the counterculture through collisions of

fact and fiction’2 . It is not a ‘film of the book’ in the strictest sense; Sinclair

sees it has a ‘live action painting version’. In the book he takes a walk around

London’s orbital road (M25) in his self-labelled role as a psycho geographer3 .

London Orbital was subsequently released on DVD (2004 by Illuminations/

Channel 4 TV) and on the back cover is the following generic description of

the film as:

a road movie, a cinematic excursion into the futuristic literature of a century

past, and a film dialogue between two writers who are also filmmakers (and
vice versa)

The film is an experimental art house road movie in how it presents its aural-

visual content. It is worth noting the use of the term ‘movie’; it traditionally

meant a commercially produced film. The two terms ‘movie’ and ‘film’ have

now become blurred in their application, for the purposes of the rest of this

essay the word ‘film’ will be employed in reference to London Orbital. The

word ‘narration’ will be used instead of script due to the improvisational

method of the work according to the directors4 . A certain amount of critical

analysis – a film review of sorts, will be used in order to start the process of

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 locating London Orbital as a cultural object. This will take in a contemplation

of genre and film language and go into the philosophical implications of the

modes of representation.

Figure 1 - still from London Orbital’s split screen

Fast transitional editing from the onset stops one from trying to form a

narrative and many different moving images or photographs (35mm/16mm/

digital tape) are juxtaposed as the film advances. A car’s windscreen wiper

visually slices across the screen like a magically eraser back and forth: it is a

noteworthy compositional choice. It employs for a good part of its duration

two separate halves of the screen as curatorial areas (Figure 1) one for Petit

and one for Sinclair as suggested by its editor Emma Matthews5 .

A dilemma presents itself when the screen splits into two moving images.

The eye is first drawn naturally towards the visible presence of people on the

right hand side rather than a monotonous front view of a motorway’s lanes

being travelled. As Peter Ward says the ‘the mind tends to group objects

together into one single comprehensive image’6 . This was in consideration

for shot composition but this can be applied to editing. This is where multi-

screens become problematic – where do you focus your eyes- which screen

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is given pre-eminence? However, it is the hypnotic moving image through the

windscreen which eventually dominates and thereafter you give more space

for Petit’s philosophical musings in his narration. With these two different

‘curatorial’ points of view; are they really in competition not conversation?

Perhaps as Ward further elucidates is that new ‘perceptual research has

suggested how the visual brain relies as much on information from our

memory as from our eyes’7 .

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By simultaneously interweaving a feeling of separation by allowing the

change from dual perspectives to one screen, at times coherency can only be

made by the sound track. It has travelogue receptivity with a full mix of

diegetic8 and non-diegetic sounds. The omnipresent audio track includes

traffic reports encompassing callers into radio shows discussing the M25;

narration and one-sided interview responses. Electronic sounds like, for

example, distorted guitar, electromagnetic pulse and interference; archival

news; windscreen wipers and airport and traffic sounds are integrated into the

sound collage. A repetitious drone contained in the audio is like a last century

representation of an urban aesthetic9.

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Michel Chion, an eminent French cinema scholar (known particularly for his

works on sound and its influence on the visual in film) refers to a ‘sound

bath’10. He writes in regards to ‘submerged speech’11 that ‘conversations dive

and then surface again’ – ‘it is the relativizing of human speech, it places it

within space’12. London Orbital has a multitude of conversations that are

picked up and dropped off. There is birdsong without sight of birds. We know

this refers to the natural landscape presented to us as the camera’s viewpoint

of the motorway’s verge. We accept this as an acoustic cinematic convention

(itself born from radio). It all sounds and look like the 1980’s which is when

the motorway was opened (1986) and therefore makes aural and visual

sense. London Orbital’s audio visual orchestration expresses the two

different journeys aspects - driving along the M25 and to a lesser degree

walking the M25 (with excursions to local landmarks). The camera shots for

the motorway are shot from within - looking outward in a naturalistic fashion -

with the impediments to vision included, for example, windscreen wipers

(Figure 2).

Figure 2 - still from London Orbital showing windscreen wipers

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A charm dangles from the rear view mirror and the driver’s viewpoint from the

structure of the car -despite the camera wobble – this has been well thought

out; this is a professional film maker not a make-believe amateur. Wing

mirrors are used like a camcorder’s display screen. It is the use of, for

example, softening effects or long shot lenses that indicate editing decisions

instantly making the fact into a fictitious visual.

Where is the film London Orbital located within film culture definitions of genre

and film movement from a historical viewpoint? Is it an essay or

documentary, docufiction or road film? Do we find its predecessors in cinema

vérité, direct or free cinema or something else? Let us start with the

definitions of genres/sub-genres and continue with movements in cinema

from which the most likely elements are represented. Documentary film

suggests providing a factual record via the medium of film (making this

encompass film stock, video tape and digital e.g. new media). These can be

on either computer, television, in the cinema or nowadays within a gallery or

museum environment. An example of this film is Between the tides, directed

by Ralph Keene in 1958. It is a film showing the natural world of the

seashore.

The evolution within the documentary has seen the relatively new sub-genre

called ‘docufiction’. Docufiction13 is the cinematographic union of fiction and

documentary. Cidade de Deus (City of God), 2002 is an example of

docufiction; which although a fictional story of crime in the Brazilian favelas it

included many local non-professional actors and had the feel of a

documentary. London Orbital seems closely akin to docufiction, its directors

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admit it is both fact and fiction and when it did the rounds of film festivals it

was found in the documentary slots according to Petit in the DVD’s ‘interview

extra’.

A basic definition for road films/movies is that they involve recording –fictitious

or otherwise -a journey that often follows an episodic form. Think Thelma and

Louise in 1997 as a Hollywood version or a British formula like Petit’s own

Radio On in 1979. Radio On was directly influenced by Wim Wender’s road

‘movies’ like, for example, Kings of the Road, 1976.

A film essay is a cinematic form that has no plot but will have a theme(s) and

sometimes even an argument as its premise. Chris Darke14 classified

London Orbital as an essay and it is admittedly an atypical form used by Petit

in previous work and subsequent. It has no discernible plot and comments

rather than argues. It delivers the directors’ thoughts on a platter for the

viewer to make what they want of it. The film is so personal in its aspect that

it somewhat disregards the audience. Jean-Luc Godard (1923- ) adopted

the camera/editor writing style of film in some of his work with, for example,

Historie(s) du Cinema – 1988-98, itself a journey but through cinema’s history.

Michael O’Pray in his book Avant-garde Film writes that it showed Godard’s

‘exercises of thought’15 , and in regard to his films before 1968, he wrote that

‘they are passionate essays on the world and on film-making, refusing the

solace of the narrative’16 . In London Orbital the ‘film dialogue’ is imitative to

that. Despite the interchangeable ‘job titles’ it is very much Sinclair as the

writer and Petit as the filmmaker. Petit, as a book reviewer (and film critic for

‘Time Out’ in the 1970’s) has written about Godard17 and it will become

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apparent that London Orbital has resonances with his work. The echo of

Godard can be further understood when O’Pray further on in the page says

that Godard was more journalist than novelist. So far then as a recap- London

Orbital would seem to be a form of docufiction using an essayist style in the

format of a road film but with heavy influences from Europe (which is argued

when looking at film movements).

Figure 3-still from ‘Ladri di biciclette’

Summarizing its historical context, those of a more influential impact on

London Orbital are mentioned in an abridged form - a kind of potted history

overview. Neorealism was a post-war movement; it dwelt within social

context and used non-actors to achieve a quality of realism. It had a

documentary style; used conversation and loose editing. It was less

moralistic than previous war time propaganda. Director Victorio de Sica’s

Ladri di biciclette in 1948 (Bicycle Thieves - Figure 3) is seen as a classic

example of Italian neorealist film which tells a story of a man trying to reclaim

his stolen bike which is an important possession needed to support his family.

London Orbital possibly shares only a few characteristics from neorealist film

in its quasi-documentary style.

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‘Cinema Vérité’ (French for ‘cinema of truth’) was where film makers tried to

create a catalyst around a subject by provocative means, the subject was

therefore totally aware of the camera and its operator. The film set-ups would

be contrived and very stylistic. An example of cinema vérité is Jean

Rouch’s‘Chronique D’un Été (Chronicle of a Summer) in 1961 – it is a fusion

of documentary and fiction in an innovative style ‘to create a reality’18 .

London Orbital does not attempt to convey a truth in the purist sense of

cinema vérité but it is sympathetic to the form in that the digital film camera

and its editing software are not only visible but are used in a conceptual

manner. ‘Direct Cinema’19 saw the truth being brought out by detailed but

invisible, non-interference and observation of the subject. It was a North

American phenomenon; and was possible due to the increased portability of

technology that allowed a freer style of filmmaking (many have a home-made

movie quality look to them). The use of the newer, lightweight digital cameras

(at the time of filming!) which Petit discusses on film in his narration, and

editor’s (Matthews) re-filming techniques give London Orbital a feel of

roughness empathic to this style but you are always aware of the camera’s

presence.

It is particularly appropriate to look to the French New Wave wherein Godard

was a figure of ‘Le Nouvelle Vague’ filmmaking tradition with other seminal

figures like Francois Truffaut. Both Godard and Truffaut, at that time, were

seen as new wave filmmakers because they expressed complicated issues

through a personal contrived cinematic style that owed a lot initially to their

inexperience in handling the technicalities. Francois Truffaut’s ’Les Quatre

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Cents Coups’ (The 400 Blows) from 1959 is an illustration of this and was part

of a montage in Godard’s Historie[s] du Cinema (Figure 4).

Figure 4- still from Godard’s Historie(s) du cinema

Yet London Orbital comes not only from an European tradition but also is a

very British kind of film. This can be demonstrated by looking at the short

lived phenomena of Free Cinema. Free Cinema came out of England in the

mid 1950s as a sub-movement of a British version of the new wave. It had a

manifesto including ‘No film can be too personal. The image speaks. Sound

amplifies and comments’20 . This statement could have come from Godard

though he may have added ‘text’. We are the Lambeth Boys (Figure 5) by

Karel Reisz is a good example of these films. Its depiction of an era in British

society has a quintessential individual quality. London Orbital is like a series

of surreal snapshots of the last three decades of the 20th century as the UK

headed towards the millennium and the aftermath of ‘being in the future’. It is

picture postcards from the first half of the last century that dissolve into the

timeline of this century.

Figure 5-still from 'We are the Lambeth Boy's' dir. by Karel Reisz

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The ‘new wave’ film making tradition is clearly a main cultural referent for Petit

and Sinclair for its personal style. They have both indicated that the film was

quite improvisational and loose in structure. For example, there was no film

crew on location and the attendant logistics that involves. This gave them a

rare freedom to manipulate without monetary consequence21. London Orbital

is a personal diatribe on the politics of the last few decades. It also shows a

lot of empathy to the idea of the camera as a pen - when visually the night

time car lights stream like Arabic sigils or script.

In placing London Orbital within contemporary film art practice and ‘thinking’

two art movements are considered. First there is postmodernism which

literally means ‘after modern’ (modernism and its optimism can be seen as

‘killed off’ by World War[s] trauma) and as an adjective for particular works

seems still to be under debate. However, an interesting definition of

postmodern is that it is ‘A worldview characterized by the belief that truth

doesn’t exist in any objective sense but is created rather than discovered.’

Truth is ‘created by the specific culture and exists only in that culture’22 This

dispenses with the documentary as globally factual, of a true representation

of reality and leaves space open for a creative truth to be manufactured. Part

of what is considered postmodern and can be loosely defined to film is that it

indicates an anti-mainstream ethic where the ‘human’ becomes removed from

the equation. Where narrative can be discarded and fragmentation is the

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norm; it is ‘the centre cannot hold’23 mentality. London Orbital, ‘the

experimental art film’ has personal human insight but yet it glories in

humanity’s physical presence has having been ‘removed’, or replaced by the

recorded image i.e. stored on a CCTV tape. Its splintered structure and

themes of alienation and surveillance have a postmodern flavour to them

(Figure 6).

Figure 6- still from London Orbital showing CCTV footage

Secondly, the self labelled retro ‘remodernist’ film style harks back to what it

sees as the good old days of modernism. It was birthed out of the fin de

siècle movement of Stuckism24 (a predominantly painters group) which is

anti-conceptual art. A remodernist film manifesto states that ‘cinema should

NOT be thought of as being ‘all about telling a story’. Story is a convention of

writing, and should not necessarily be considered a convention of

filmmaking25’. This statement that literary conventions can somehow occlude

cinematic conventions perhaps illustrates the difficulty the writer filmmaker

has, but, is not storytelling a very human practice? London Orbital barely tells

a story it only explores how people are located in this M25 world of

surveillance and motorway driving. Any narrative is fractured by the dual

screens moving images. The artists/writers that periodically join in the

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investigation of the M25, as invited by Sinclair, to penetrate its form/to

understand its existence do not follow a path that is necessarily easy to trace.

It is process not plot but it is not the absolute core of retro modernism.

Perhaps it is by looking at some of the themes employed that its true nature

may be clarified. London Orbital is a film that contradicts itself and reveals

the directors own ambivalence over its subject and the topics and themes

they explore. Its themes are diverse but as cited by themselves and others26

one major theme explored is of JG Ballard’s ‘futuristic literature’ with

pronouncements on death of the future and ‘the future is boring’ (Ballard).

The Ballardian future is for the directors and Ballard who appears in the film,

typified by the M25 and adjacent Heathrow airport corridor of new office

buildings. It is when you consider the critical cultural impact of the ‘fin de

siècle zeitgeist’27 carried into the new century (the film’s post production) that

you begin to comprehend how the themes relate.

There is a blending between fact (M25’s existence) and fiction (Dracula) and

a metaphor of the road as a blood carrying artery - clogged by congestive

heart failure – which is a somewhat weak device. This is on the psycho

geographer’s premise that Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, had one of the

vampire’s properties near to where the M25 runs at Purfleet. In the narration,

Sinclair, composes his own diatribe of fictitious metaphors of vampire

predatory politicians. This is between the ex Chilean president Pinochet, who

was in power during the UK’s hostilities with Argentina over the Falklands

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(1982), and Thatcher whose voice is heard thanking him in some of the

sequences. It could be argued that this demonization of Thatcher is a 1980’s

time trapped cliché reviving Sinclair to his past.

Besides Stoker, Sinclair references authors such as HG Wells and his works

The Time Machine (1895) and War of the Worlds (1898), a turn of century

fiction novel; it is the ‘futuristic literature of a century past’. Memory is

reiterated with talk of asylum buildings that once skirted the M25 being

renamed or demolished (erasure of purpose) or the repositioning of an iconic

Fleet Street gate (late in the 1980s most national press newspapers moved

from their historical home) to illustrate how memories can be misplaced or

transplanted - that they travel in time. The analogue world supersedes the

digital world. The nature of film and cinema; truth or fiction; the poetic and the

literary and socio-political comment create a density of dialogue and thought

that threaten to overwhelm the film in their repetitiveness. Memory as time

travel and of a constant circling merges the truth of the personal with the

fiction of existence. It is in essence ‘who am I?’ and ‘where am I going?’ in

this new century. The old analogue world has become virtually redundant

(the preserve of the collector or artist), superseded by a digital world of sound

and image.

Fins de siècle28 collide into Godard’s declared ‘fin de cinema’ 29. London

Orbital is a phantom journey- a Gorkian ‘not life, but the shadow of life’30 . It is

the ubiquitous journey to nowhere and a cultural transit is experienced as a

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non-event - of waiting for something to happen - in a non-place or space. A

"non-place" refers to places of transience like motorways or underpasses (by

nature part of urban renewal) that are too insignificant as spaces to be

regarded as named places; as a result they almost do not exist. London

Orbital has an affinity with turn of the century questioning pieces like the film

‘Non Places’ of 1999 (Figure 7), by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler with its

depiction of the bleakness of modern place/space.

Figure 7- still from Non Places- Mirza and Butler

It is a new millennium contemplative visual analysis approach where

architecture can be desolate; beautiful and pregnant with significance. In

London Orbital the Siebel building (Egham) with its bland inoffensive design;

unguarded by obvious security becomes a non-place, next to the non-space

of the M25 – seemingly uninhabited or if so by the 'undead'. Butler and

Mirza’s work is according to AL Rees31 an ‘unpacking’ of the concepts offered

in Marc Auger’s highly influential book ‘Non-Places: Introduction to an

Anthropology of Supermodernity’(1995). He also offers a succinct but

complex phrase of non-place as ‘the absent space signifier’32 . Non-space

and place as memory ‘traps’ underlines London Orbital.

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In London Orbital there are scenes from M25 offshoots areas like, for

example, car parks where the people inhabit a grey ghost world of the

degraded image of CCTV; only the buildings seem solid. Aurally the

electronic tones in its soundtrack utilise the convention of expressing cosmic

affiliations or supernatural presence, in this case, literally electromagnetic

ghosts in the wires/air from pylons etc along the motorway’s route. Even the

car’s wing mirrors show the non-place ghosts behind or as Sinclair notes ‘the

rear view mirror is fiction’.

“modern technology of images like cinematography and telecommunications

enhances the power of ghosts and their ability to haunt us”
Jacques Derrida from an interview in the film ‘Ghost Dance’, dir. K McMullen, 1983

Derrida, a philosophical thinker, mainly from a psychoanalysis perspective,

talks in McMullen’s improvisational film about how ’the cinema is the art of

ghosts, a battle of phantoms’ and of ‘memory of past that never had form in

the present’. Derrida is referring to an idea that instead of the ghosts of the

past diminishing - or even of them existing in the past as a form in the present

- it is in fact the opposite. This is a treatment of ghost from a psychoanalytic

aspect of film making. With the contemporary increase, for us now, of digital

equipment, phantoms of the ‘real’ or ‘self’ have more opportunity to proliferate

according to this theory. London Orbital, conceivably enforces that premise,

in revealing the ever-present CCTV camera as the ghost making machine of

our times and connects this to an idea of the death of cinema- the anti-

cinema of CCTV and of ‘Big Brother’ on the motorway. Film from surveillance

cameras shows a man wielding a knife at someone in some grey ghost-like

fight enacted on the screen; it is a detached alienated viewpoint. The

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directors themselves let us spy on their own tape footage of video clips of

CCTV footage; they are nested images strengthening the idea of a looped

journey into a ghostly space.

The film is process-led and matches the physical journey that underscores

the mental journey. Time-Memory-Space; these are partially represented by

bringing attention to the ‘editorial process’.

Figure 8- still from London Orbital of editing

In the narration script Sinclair speaks and you ‘see’ the frequencies of his

voice on the audio software interface. Incorporated into the film is Petit

relating his attempts to film the M25 and by the post production screen shots

of the editing software’s timeline (Figure 8). A similar visual device was used

by Godard in ‘Historie[s] du cinema’ when you see him on the screen at work;

the film history ‘montager’. It was suggested to him in an interview with

Youssef Ishaghpour that ‘the editing console is seen as a machine for

exploring time’.33 For London Orbital it is not just about Ballardian man-made

spaces but a Godardian aesthetic of time travel with space as the signifier.

Film substitutes memory - the idea of memory erasure comparable to the

visible degradation of emulsion film. The strategy of digital image distortion

using techniques such as re-filming (the look of which the viewer accepts as
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cinematic convention/cliché of a certain decade) is an attempt to treat the

digital tape to a similar process. It is specifically used, for example, with

Margaret Thatcher (who as Prime Minister opened the M25) talking during a

televised speech. It is filmed off the monitor it is viewed on, expressing a

1980s aesthetic of motion and form. The analogue electromagnetic pulses of

pylons and the interference of old electrical equipment alongside the M25, in

the film’s narration and underlying soundtrack ties itself to the idea of video as

being interfered with. Bill Viola, the artist filmmaker, has written how ‘the

video image is a standing wave pattern of electrical energy, a vibrating

system composed of specific frequencies as one would expect to find in any

resonating object’34 . Petit reflects this in how he talks of the M25 as anti-

cinema and digital tape as anti-image, he speaks of emulsion film’s

shadowing that give depth to cinema and how digital tape is flat but yet he

vibrates this flatness to give depth.

Figure 9- Gilles Deleuze

What counts is that the mobile camera is like a general equivalent of all the
means of locomotion that it shows or that it makes use of – aeroplane, car,
[...] Wenders was to make this equivalence the soul of his two films ‘Kings of
the Road’ […] thus introducing into the cinema a part concrete reflection on
the cinema.

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Gilles Deleuze – Cinema 135

Intellectuals like Gilles Deleuze (Figure 9) recognised how intrinsically linked a

filmed journey/road movie can be to the philosophy of how moving image

situates itself theoretically. A static camera records the journey’s progress; or

the mobile camera pans across a motorway. His citation of Wim Wenders is

an interesting coincidence - it resonates with the film as reflective but it is a

good theoretical construct for the M25 as subject. Petit has ‘orbited’ back to

Wenders influence.

London Orbital is not a precise representation of Deleuze’s theories on ‘le

image-mouvement – the movement image’ per se (excepting the odd

bastardisation of clichéd action). It has more in common with his philosophic

projection ‘l’image-temps’ - the time image36 from Cinema 2. According to

Deleuze there are two major time images – aural and optical. In the film there

are continual interruptions in the sound - against the image seen - and vice

versa. For example, three lanes of cars are artificially stopped and started in

editing, they are counterpointed by a heartbeat-like rhythm and radio talk

background but there is a periodic intrusion of distorted electronics It renews

the images in the viewer’s eyes. In Paulo Marrati’s book on Deleuze he

writes of Deleuze’s attachment to Henri Bergson’s37 postulations on ‘circuits

of memory and circuits of reality’38 within his ‘time image’ theory. Memory and

reality as circuits are the impact of ripples of a stone thrown into water. Near

the end of the film Sinclair says his experience of the M25 ‘was the closing of

a circuit’.

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Space and not time I finally realised was the key to the M25, just as space
and the movement of the camera is the real secret of cinema, the road behind
is joined with the road ahead
Chris Petit – London Orbital

Figure 10- Jean-Luc Godard

A connection to Godard (Figure 10)

comes back, for in Cinema 2, Deleuze writes of Godard’s development in

respect of image representation as being ‘a new, direct time-image’- a series

in/of time, a ‘becoming’. The image ‘has to include a before and after’ and

under this evolution ‘it involves the cinema of fiction and the cinema of

reality’39 and differences become hazy. This is also of the differences

between the movement and time-image and of fiction as truth and fact as

real. He further writes that ‘descriptions become pure, purely optical and

sound, narrations falsifying and stories, simulations’. Marrati interprets the

influence of Bergson’s ever increasing circuits on Deleuze as an assemblage

of both movement and time-images. London Orbital has as its subject a

looped road; it is a circuitous film containing within it systems of circuits.

Visually vehicles and people enter and exit and move in seemly non-

predetermined ways, and the imagery connects the moving car bodies- to the

vehicles moving bodies - to the moving images of the cinema. It is the roads

ability to make boredom an instrument to enter a meditative state - ‘the

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transcendental boredom’ Ballard attributes to the future. It is almost like Petit

could be the movement image and Sinclair the time image, a curatorial car

crash of theories. However, is there an inherent flaw to the argument, for are

they not interchangeable, is it not the abstraction of image and sound

occurring that is fundament to the relationship? The audio and visual

manifests disjointed personal memories and creates an ambivalent and

contradictory film.

London Orbital is a fin de siècle/turn of the century cultural object from its

aural and visual structures, genre format, themes and contextual background.

In trying to resolve issues, within a critical analysis of the film, has thrown up

intrinsic difficulties. It can send you literally in circles. By looking at how the

film plays out its duration and whether the split personalities of it are resolved

is to lead to some sort of conclusion. For Sinclair contradicts himself – ‘it

goes on forever [the motorway] … you end up at Bluewater which is the

conclusion of everything’. The psycho geographer has travelled the road’s

loop to a point where there is no longer a road but ‘a doorway to another

reality’. The Arabic tent-like architecture of Bluewater Shopping Centre meets

his past and is shown alongside old colour film of Kabul from half a century

ago. Memory, film, fact and fiction are disjointed in such a fashion that the

argument becomes as winding as the motorway. For Petit the subject resisted

his usual filming/editing techniques; he is a detached observer. London

Orbital has been assigned a genre classification as docufiction but defied a

consistent theoretical basis. It exists in simple terms purely as a cultural

object for a residual fin de siècle-1999 state of mind despite being made in
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2001.

The film speed slows down and the scenery passing by becomes a blurry

merge but it is almost of time quickening up. As London Orbital comes to a

close the cultural reference of ‘time travel’ become so persistent on the retina.

It is reminiscent of the time lapse photography used to convey time travel in

the 1960’s film version of HG Wells ‘The Time Machine’40 ; where the machine

moved in a maelstrom of imagery. Finally you are left with black and white

deteriorated film footage of Sinclair as a child which dissolves into a night

time motorway car journey.

In real time the present is no longer recognized, no longer sought; the poetic
possibility – achieved once again despite everything by Godard – of seeing it
as more that it is in order to see it fully for what it is, has gone. There is no
longer a present, just a perpetual disappearance that never joins the past

Youssef Ishaghpour41

1 Sinclair, I. 2002. London Orbital a walk around the M25.

2 The Edge Interview with Chris Petit

3 Pyscho geography as described by Guy Debord as the ‘study of the precise laws and
specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the
emotions and behaviour of individuals’-from Introduction to a Critique of Urban
Geography, 1955 – originating conceptually from the word Dérive meaning passive
movement through space in every day life

4 From the London Orbital DVD interview extra where Sinclair and Petit discuss the film

5 Romney, J. (2004) Man on the outside.

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6 Ward, P. 2003. Picture composition for film and television, p 350

7 Ibid, p. 34-5

8 originates from the source of the on-screen action

9 Partially akin to Walter Ruttman’s ‘Weekend’(1930) but more like a weird mash between
compositions from Mika Vainio and Carsten Nicolai

10 Chion, M., Audio-vision sound on screen, p. 181

11Within a soundtrack of a crowded street, a piece of speech is allowed to be heard distinctly

12 Altman, R. 1992. ed. Sound theory, sound practice, p. 108. {Note: the chapter ‘Wasted
Words’ by Chion is a virtual transcript from Audio-vision with a few additional comments}

13 or docu-fiction, often confused with docudrama-all neologisms

14 Darke, C,(2003) Letter from London, Senses of Cinema

15 O'Pray, M. (2003). Avant-garde film forms, themes and passions, p. 69

16 Ibid., p. 72

17 Petit, C,(2008) One big act, The Guardian, 9th August

18 Bruni, B, Jean Rouch, Cinema-verite -Chronicle of a Summer and the Human Pyramid

19 This is interesting in that it compares direct with ‘truth’ cinema. Callison, C., (2000) Truth in
Cinema -comparing Direct Cinema and Cinema Verité,

20 The manifesto was drawn up by Lindsay Anderson and Lorenza Mazzetti. This brief
movement covers six programmes of short documentaries show at the NFT (National Film
Theatre now know as the British Film Institute -bfi) and included films by Roman Polanski
and Francois Truffaut.

21 Unless otherwise indicated this sort of information has come from the DVD extra’s
interview’s dialogue

22 Postmodernism- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism - quoted from McDowel, R &

Hostetler, B, (1998)The New Tolerance, p. 208

23 Yeats, WB (1920), The Second Coming from The Collected Poems of WB Yeats, p.158

24 The Stuckist manifesto –see bibliography

25 The 15 point manifesto was issued on behalf of remodernist filmmakers by Jesse Richards
on 27th August 2008

26 London Orbital DVD interview extra

27 Witt, M. (1999) The death(s) of cinema according to Godard, p. 331-346

28 19th century to 20th/20th to 21st century

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29 Ibid – Godard throughout his career has declared the death of cinema and then changed
his mind.

30 Secondary source of Maxim Gorky quote when watching a Lumiere film for the first time:
from Horne, P, (2008) Kingdom of shadows: double exposure in vampire films

31 Rees, AL (date not given) Non Places : a film by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler

32 Ibid.

33 Marrati, P.( 2008). Gilles Deleuze cinema and philosophy. p. 108

34 Viola, Bill. (1990). The Sound of One Line Scanning. p. 39-54

35 Deleuze, G. 1992. Cinema 1: the movement-image

36 Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: the time image

37 Famous French philosopher- see bibliography

38 Marrati, p. 69

39 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 149-50

40 The Time Machine (1960) Directed by George Pal.

41 Godard, J.L. & Ishaghpour, Y. 2005. Cinema the archeology of film and the memory of a
century, p.121

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