Radio On by Chris Petit

Review by: Peter Hogue

Film Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Winter, 1982-1983), pp. 47-52
Published by: University of California Press
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Lagoon families, for instance, are still living
down the shame of the trial and the tragedy
of wasted time. The play also stirredcontro-
versy when it played in Texas, where many
Chicanosare ashamedof the West Coastpa-
chuco image. And in New York, the Broad-
way version of the stage play failed. Luis
Valdez speculates that to many New York
Hispanicsthe pachuco image connoted noth-
ing more than "dangerous dude." He also
thinks the $25 ticket price was too steep for
manyin the play'spotentialaudience.
"Some people have said to us, 'You're
exposingour secrets-why make a play about
this stuff?' And some havetold us we'reglori-
fying gang warfare," said Valdez. "But I
think it's a production that doesn't have a
simple message. It makes Chicanosthink as
muchas it does anyone.
"Theater and film can reveal the human
side of these vast social issues. Zoot Suit is
just one in an encyclopediaof worksthat need
to be made. The US is becoming an Anglo-
Hispanicculture-and I mean that linguistic-
ally-and we can't afford to be ignorant of
eachother."
Luis Valdez claims a double allegianceto
his art and to his culture, and rejects any
mechanicalrelationshipbetweenthe two, even
in the interests of placating his closest con-
stituency.Daniel Valdezis equallyconcerned
to developculturallyrich art, with his musical
talents. He dreamsof producingan opera on
the subjectof the conquestof Mexico.
And Zoot Suit is impressivetestimony to
theirgoals. El Pachucocracksthroughinsular
Anglostereotypes.Morethanthat, he is power-
ful proof of the force, and the limits, of cul-
turaldefenses.
But the faintheartedfirst-run distribution
of the film, whichwas marketedfirstto major
Hispaniccentersandthententativelyandbriefly
given a national break, has given it little
chance to transcend the cultural barrio of
"the Hispanic market." It got a second-time-
around chance on cable and continues to pop
up on odd weekends at neighborhood thea-
ters. But still, Zoot Suit's lackluster distribu-
tion contrasts painfully with its snappy pro-
duction. -PAT AUFDERHEIDE
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RADIO
ON
Martin
andscript:ChrisPetit.Camera:
Direction GreyCity
Schaffer.Distribution:
Films.
Weare the childrenof FritzLang and Werner
von Braun. We are the link betweenthe 20's
and the 80's. All change in society passes
througha sympatheticcollaborationwith tape
recorders,synthesizers,and telephones. Our
realityis an electronicreality. -KRAFTWERK
Radio Onis somethinglike an extensionof the
New Wave/Punk look and its music-with
that mixtureof anomieand defiance-into the
time and spaceof film narrative.Whatpeople
seem to remembermost about Petit's film is
that it's a movie full of emptiness-the rock
musickeepsplayingand the protagonistkeeps
going down the highway, but the quick pay-
offs of the rock ethos never materialize,and
we startthinkingabout the music as recorded
soundand the journeyas just anothercar ride.
Thereis perhapssome Brechtiandistanciation
in all this, and yet Radio On has none of the
didacticdirectnessof Brechtor Godard(though
Godard'sinfluence is evident in a variety of
otherways).
But what makes the film exceptionalis its
disruption of the conventional relationship
between mise en scene and representationof
characterand milieu in movies. By focusing
attentionon its mise en scene, Radio On be-
comesa speciesof structuralistfilm-it shows
us its protagonist'sworld but in a way that
forces us to analyze the ways in which that
characterand that world are presented.Thus,
the action of Radio On is less a matter of a
purposive narrative-journeythan of several
otherkindsof eventfulness-spatial,temporal,
visual, aural, musical, emotional, cinematic,
etc.-which fill and animatethe variousvoids
so studiously provided by the narrativede-
velopment.
In Radio On, a young man, one RobertB.,
learns that his brother has died, and he jour-
neys by car to the city where the death occurred.
He may be taking the familiar film noir jour-
ney in hopes of solving a crime, but it is not
clear that a crime has taken place and the
journey resolves nothing. The young man has
a variety of encounters, and he has had his
female companion walk out on him before the
journey has even begun. But his failure to
connect is not exactly the point either, though
47
it may seemso in termsof conventionalnarra-
tive expectations.
A variety of themes-social and political
despair, the problemsof language,pervasive
fear-are absorbedin the overalldrift of the
film, and still others-particularly a kind of
urban,post-industrialgloom-simply seem as
pervasiveas the autoways and the weather.
The Irishtroubles,Britishmilitarism,refugee
life, feminism, prejudice, mechanization,
English imperial tradition, generationgaps,
the plight of factory workers, the consumer
culture, and the mass media all crop up as
concernsin the film, though less as "issues"
than as definitiveelementsof the modernter-
rain. Petit's approachis focused above all on
formal matters, and so Radio On uses those
themesand the snatchesof dialoguethat make
them explicit rather as it uses the various
snatchesof rock music recordings-what we
see and what we hear seem to interpenetrate
in constantlyevolvingways.
The film opens with a lengthy hand-held
shot moving into and through an apartment
in whichwhatwouldnormallybe the climactic
detail-the discoveryof a corpsein a bathtub
-is treatedat first as if it were no more sig-
nificantthan any otherdetailin the shot. This
shift of emphasis-from the corpseto themise
en scene of the shot in whichit appears-alerts
the vieweras to how the film shouldbe watched
(as well as listened to-Since David Bowie's
"Heroes/ Helden" is blaring throughoutthe
shot). But strikingas this pre-creditsprologue
is, the film's special characteristicsestablish
themselveseven more trenchantlyin the first
sequence after the credits. The young man
who turnsout to be the film's main character
sitsin his caron a city streetat nightand opens
a postalpackage.We soon see thatthe package
contains three Kraftwerktapes and a brief
birthdaymessagefrom the young man's bro-
ther. He beginsto play one of the cassetteson
his car's tape deck, then shuts it off; he turns
on the windshield wipers as if preparing to go
somewhere, but the car remains stationary
and there seems to be no rain. He restarts the
tape, glances out at the laundromat nearby,
and gets out of the car without shutting off
the tape; the camera holds on the now "empty"
interior of the car and the music on the tape
deck continues; then there is a cut to an exterior
view of the car as the young man drives it
48
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throughthe streets;eventuallyhe parksit and
entersa buildingnextto a theaterwithEmpire
of Passion on the marquee;as we soon dis-
cover,he has comehome.
This particularsequence turns out to be
central to Radio On in several respects:the
deliberateundercuttingof purposefulness(the
windshieldwipers;the music playedbut only
partly listened to); the disjunctiveness(the
jump cut from motionlessnessto motion);the
interplayof sound and silence (not only the
coming-and-goingof the music on the tape
deck, but also the windshieldwipers and a
passingsirenas soundswhichwe areimplicitly
askedto respondto on a level usuallyreserved
for sound-tracksongsin movies);the sustained
attention to detail independentof narrative
purpose (the long take that continues even
afterits humanfigure-its conventional"con-
tent"-has disappeared). Thefact thatthe tapes
arefroma brotherwhomRobert(DavidBeames)
hasn't seen for some time and who will turn
out to have been dead by the time they are
receivedwill assume some importance,espe-
ciallyin retrospect,as will the latterrealization
that what Robertis coming home to are evi-
dently the last stages of the painfullydrawn-
out collapse of his relationshipwith a live-in
femalelover. But the sequencedistancesitself
from these contributionsto characterization
in a way that focuses attentioninsteadon the
film's way of presentingitself.
Radio On is not, however, a "pure" exer-
cise in style. If it focuses attentionprimarily
on form, it does so in a way which remains
linked to a concernwith significantaspectsof
the milieu in which Robert B. finds himself.
Robert B.'s anti-adventureis, among other
things,a stringof failedrelationships.Because
Petit does not give customary emphasis to
them,thesefailuresseemless a pointthe movie
is tryingto make than one it simplytakes for
granted. The landscape through which the
characteris moving is crowded with machinery,
buildings, music, and-to a lesser extent-other
people, but Robert B.'s relation with all this
is at once barren and full-barren in tradi-
tional terms of narrative emotion, full in post-
modernist terms of redirected sense experi-
ence. Robert B.'s encounters suggest the rich-
ness of possibility of a picaresque novel: a
man sleeping in a solitary parked car, a guitar-
playing gas station attendant, a nervously
cocky and very youthful Punk, two young
Germanwomen, the mother-in-lawof one of
the Germans,a Scot who has been stationed
in Northern Ireland and who plans to go
AWOL, the female companion of Robert's
late brother,and Robert'sown estrangedlover
(who is first seen staring at three TV sets
bankedagainsta wall of theirapartment).But
the "sleeping" man drives away after failing
to acknowledgethe strandedRobert'splea for
help, and Robert ditches the soldier, appar-
entlyfor his angerand arrogance;the brother's
companionupsetsall of Robert'sassumptions
about his dead brother (and, consequently,
about the journey he has taken), and one of
the German women notes that she thought
Robert was going to sleep with her but he
didn't.Thegas stationattendantandthe young
Punk both seem to share Robert'sinterestin
rock music, but Robertpays for the gas with
money which he admits he's stolen from the
station till, and he must bribe the youngster
(by paying for a hot dog) to get directionsto
a rock club. The Germanwoman talks about
languagebarriersand the feelings of the dis-
possessed, but Robert seems almost as pecu-
liarlydetachedfrom her as he is from the Scot
soldierwhenhe sayshe neverreallyunderstood
the Irish"troubles."
"Robert B."-is that punk-chicor Kafka
revivedor both? Words, and languagein gen-
eral, exercisea certainmysteryin Radio On,
whilethey are also given a certainmateriality.
Theprotagonist'shit-and-misscommunication
with his German-speaking companionsevokes
a "failureto connect," but even more it gives
rise to a linguisticaspect of the film's mate-
rialist/deconstructionistdimension. Despite
the languagebarrier,Robertand the German
woman (Lisa Kreuzer)understandeach other
rather well-there is considerablesympathy
between them and their not making love is
perhapsa "failure"only in termsof the audi-
ence expectationswhichthe movie is exposing
by frustrating.Both play with each other's
language,and a scene in which they read to-
getherfrom a German/Englishtourist guide-
book plays with the idea of languageas both
a link and a differencebetweenpeople. Later
Robertis pointedlyexcluded(as is an English-
speakingaudience)from a conversationwith
the woman and her bilingualmother-in-law,
when the latter angrily switches to German
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David Beames and Liza Kreuzer: RADIOON
(for which, here as elsewhere,the film sup-
plies no subtitles). This latter scene is con-
cernedwith a generationgap (one whichRob-
ert denies, saying that "everyone's afraid"
nowadays),but the gap is evident regardless
of the languageused. Thoughhe usuallyseems
to speakonly reluctantly,Roberthas a certain
talent for serious wordplay:at one point, he
views Britishers'attractionto the seashoreas
a tendencytoward "last resorts," and at an-
other, he graduallypermutesa quoted line,
"She's delicate,she seemslike Vermeer,"into
"She seemslike the mirror."Both the mallea-
bilityandthe intractabilityof languageemerge
fromtheseaspectsof the film, and allthislinks
up with a concernwith codes (misreadingsof
otherpeople'squotidianbehaviorrecur).*But
much of what occursin the film "translates"
quite well: Radio On is Englishand yet it fre-
quently looks far more "German" (Wim
Wendersis the film's associateproducer,and
echoesof his films arenot hardto find) as well
as "French"(Bresson,Hanoun, Rivette, and
the Godardof Alphavilleand Masculin/Femi-
nin seempertinentinfluencesas well).
Throughall this, RobertB. engagesinterest
in severalways. The film's tendencyto limit
itself more or less to his point of view is a cru-
cial if obvious factor, but even more impor-
tant arehis relationto the film's vividlyappre-
hended landscape and his small gestures of
revolt. The latteris couchedvery much in the
film's rockculturalbackground,yet its impact
shouldbe unmistakable evenwitha lessinitiated
audience. While tending to his disc jockey
*I am indebted to Marion Bronson on this and other points.
49
duties, he reads over the air a request for
"Help Me Make It Throughthe Night," but
promptlyannouncesthat "Here's something
better," and plays Ian Dury's "Sweet Gene
Vincent"instead.This little revolt againstthe
proprieties of commercial broadcastinghas
meaningeven if one is not awarethat Robert's
coolly impudentchoicerepresentsa New Wave
rejectionof AM-radiosentimentality.And the
gesturehas specialmeaningpreciselybecause
it is a violation of broadcastingdecorum:the
"electronic reality" which the film evokes
throughthe virtualomnipresenceof recorded
rock music is crucial to the tension which
exists in the film's vision, and Robert B.'s
small gesture constitutes a glimmer of defi-
ance whichseemssadlymissingin muchof the
rest of the film's social landscape-until the
final scene,at least.
Thesettingsincludea videogamesemporium,
a couple of roadside pubs, a run-downgas
station, a seaside resort, a car-dealer'sshow
room, a couple of apartmentsand a hotel
room, a car wash, and an abandonedquarry.
Transiencymarksall of these settings,and the
charactersinhabitthem like the sullen, lonely
travellersthey tend to be. And the trulydomi-
nant settings, an automobileand a string of
highwaysandsideroads,areevenmorepatently
associatedwith transiency.All of this, in turn,
also marksRadio On as a "road movie," or
seems to: for insofar as Robert B.'s journey
and quest lead nowhere,this story invertsthe
road movie's tendencyto use its passing set-
tings as a colorful, varied backdrop for its
protagonist'sadventures;on the contrary,in
Petit's film, the setting seems to move to the
foregroundwith Robert's anti-adventurebe-
coming a more or less static emotionalback-
drop. The overall result is ratherlike a rock
culture variation on Antonioni, a latter-day
black-and-whiteversionof Red Desert'smut-
edly sci-fi landscape:questions of character
may be at an impasse, but so much in the
character's surroundings is seen with such
acuity, such first-person freshness, that the
movie offers up a precise, defamiliarized kind
of awareness which is implicitly available to
the central character as well. When Robert
and the German woman drive through a sunny
landscape "marred" by large transmission-
line pylons, the question of survival-of hu-
manity as well as of its technological artefacts
50
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-arises, but only in ways that raisequestions
rather than answeringthem or linking them
up with otherobservationsin the film. Human
survivaldoes seemin doubt,andyet the pylons
have a peculiarbeautyeven as they are viewed
as inanimateobjectswhichmay "survive"the
humanrace'sdecline.That "peculiarbeauty,"
which comes in part from being more and
more at home in a world of manufactured
objects, seemsto informthe beautifulstrange-
ness of Radio On itself.
Petit does occasionally use his settings to
make a discursivepoint-as with the distant,
impersonalviewsinsidea factorywhile "Sweet
Gene Vincent" plays on the sound track or
with the soddengas-stationsequencein which
Robert'sdour, tentativeencounterwitha man
(Sting, of The Police) improvisinga versionof
EddieCochran's"ThreeStepsto Heaven"on
an unpluggedelectricguitarcontraststhe musi-
calimpulsewiththe dampgloomof the weather
and the junk-yardclutterof the stationitself.
Thereand elsewherePetit is establishinga dia-
lecticbetweena patentlysterilewastelandsetting
and the transformativepossibilitiesevokedby
the sheerpresenceof the music. That this dia-
lectic elicits a potential for defiance in the
film's environmentbecomesespeciallyclearin
the quarry scene at the end. There Petit's
protagonistconductshimselfon firsta descent
and thenan ascent,both by automobile,before
drivingthe car to the edge of the precipice,
whereuponhe-partly by accident,it seems-
comesto the point of a suicidalgesture,which
he neverthelessdoes not make. Instead,having
discoveredthat his car is irretrievablypoised
on the brink, he puts one of his brother'sgift
cassettes on the tape player and walks away
(presumablyto catch the train which we see
arriving and then departingin a final long
take at a rural crossroads).Here again, but
more dramatically than before, the music
(Kraftwerk's"Ohm, Sweet Ohm") is used to
transform a situation: the sound virtually
"fills" an "empty," barren visual image; the
transformative music and Robert's abandon-
ment of the car and the tapes change his quest's
dead end into an ironic defiance, a negation
of negation.
At the same time, Petit's mise en scene does
much to evoke the paradoxical spirit of this
final "positive" gesture of futility: while long
takes are the film's definitive mode, this last
 vp
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sequence fairly bristles with montage; the
heightened awareness of duration persists,
but the suddenprofusionof shots endowsthe
action with a subtle rhythmicintensity that
would be "conventional"at this point wereit
not devotedto yet anotherof the film's anti-
climacticpassages.Whereassuch rhythmsare
customarilyused to arouseinterestand expec-
tations, Petit uses them once again to deny
expectations and to focus attention, in yet
anotherway, on a level of eventfulnessusu-
allyignoredby moviemakers.
Even in light of its qualities as an anti-
adventure, Radio On's most dramatic ele-
ments of formal play have to do with its use
of rockmusic.Themusic,an arrayof excerpted
"New Wave" recordings,is especiallysignifi-
cant becauseso much of it is chosen and lis-
tened to by the main character,but also be-
causeso manyof the film'smoststrikingeffects
have to do with the complex interplayof the
possible relations between the visual images
andthe soundtrack.Someof the music,quietly
and somewhatironically,mirrorsthe action:
WrecklessEric's "Veronika," a song about
a soldier missing his girlfriend,turns up on
the car radio while Robert is riding with the
hitch-hikingsoldier;David Bowie's "Always
Crashingin the Same Car" is played in one
of the film's lengthy sequenceswith Robert
alone in the car on the highway. Bowie's
"Heroes/Helden" is ironic in that Robert is
so patentlyanti-heroicand appositein that the
film's dialogue, like the song's lyrics, is in
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qqr
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both German and English. The electronic
sounds of Robert Fripp and Kraftwerkpro-
vide an eerilyfuturisticatmospherein keeping
with the post-Alphavillecontemporaneityof
this film in which the camera pauses over a
handwritten quotation which begins, "We
arethe childrenof FritzLangand Wernervon
Braun."
But Petit's subtlestand most intriguinguse
of themusichasto do witha distancingmanipu-
lation of the sound track. In one continuous
highway sequence, Petit alternates interior
shots without music and exterior shots with
music: the effect is to make us conscious of
the arbitrarinessof the conventionby which
movie shots of cars on highwaysare almost
always accompaniedby upbeat music. In a
later sequence, the music accompanies the
image while the car is in motion, but when
the car is stoppedfor a trafficlight, the music
ceases; the car is viewed from a distance in
long take as it waits for the light to change;
whenthe light does changeand the car begins
to move again, the music resumesthough the
distant long take continues. Right after this,
in an overheadlong shot, the same music (at
a lowervolume)is heardas the car negotiates
a freewayturn past some huge modernapart-
mentbuildings;the music fades as the car dis-
appearsinto the industrializedlandscape,but
the shot is held and distant railway noises
emergeon the sound track as a train crosses
the freeway and adds unexpected elements
of order and movementto what is alreadya
51
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complexvisualcomposition.Againthis makes
us awareof musicusedas an expressivedevice:
the long take at the traffic light insists on the
validity of silence and motionlessnessas a
kind of anti-mattercounterpointto the overly
familiar cars-and-musiccombination. And
the high angle cityscape-with-freewaytreats
expressionistic/subjective sound (the music)
and realistic/objectivesound(the trainnoises)
as contrastingforms of artifice which have
equal validityas expressivecontrivances,and
which make us aware of how selective the
sound track is-given a shot in which many
more sounds might have had a justifiable
place in the aural element of the film. And
the literaldistancingof both shots comments
on the roleof musicin the movieand in Robert
B.'s life: the music which accompanieshis
journeyis at once a figmentof his mechanized
electronicenvironmentand a means of trans-
forminghis experienceof it.
Throughout,Radio On immersesitself and
its storyin the most emblematicparaphernalia
of post-WorldWarII youth:pop music,auto-
mobiles, anomie, and mechanicalrepetition.
And perhapsRobertis one of the childrenof
FranzKafkaand the Sex Pistols-have it both
waysand see whatyou get: an electronicghetto
where, as the protagonistsays, "everybody's
afraid." Robert'spun about Britishers'attrac-
tion to "last resorts"is actuallyvery much in
keepingwith the film's pervasiveair of sullen
end-of-the-linedesperation. When a tough,
pool-shooting female knocks Robert off his
barstool("You ruinedmy fuckingshot"), he
attemptsno defense of his inadvertentact: he
lives on the other side of empireand its male
prerogatives,and his nervoussystemis tuned
not to machismo and male pride but to the
social circuitryof the juke box and the pinball
machine.Robertis an alien in the presenceof
the sturdywomanwith the pool cue, and if he
appearsto her to be a klutz ratherthan a sort
of visitor from the near-future,it's perhaps
because he, like the movie, operates best in
terms of invisible action (the recorded music)
and visible inaction (the stillness of a mechan-
ically transported form). The movie fills itself
up the way an empty house gets filled up when
you turn on the stereo or the TV. There is no
trick here-we see the machinery's inner
workings all along, and Robert B. seems to
show that a certain breed of alien being is in-
52
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creasingly common, increasinglyless alien.
It's only rock and roll and it's only TV and
tape cassettes,but you're differentafterward
and so is the world.
Few films since the heroic period of the
Nouvelle Vague have been so richly in touch
with the nuancesof contemporaryexistence.
Petit's biggestachievementis to have created
a film whichboth evokesand respondsto that
contemporarysense of things. Socially and
cinematicallyit bespeaks a weariness with
conventional angles of vision. The slowed-
down, sprungrhythmsof its narrativereflect
the exhaustion of conventional narrativein
the face of contemporaryexperiencewhile its
defamiliarizedattentivenessprovidesan alter-
native to that exhaustion. Its consistentsuc-
cess in makingits world look both alien and
ordinary gives new and unexpected life to
Paul Valery'sclassical-modernistdictumthat
nothing is true unless it is strange. And if
Petit's movie is a BritishAlphaville, a colli-
sion betweenthe past movingforwardand the
future moving backward, it is also a post-
Brechtianmusical which challengesits audi-
ence and createsits own tactics in ways that
Performanceand O Lucky Man!, two other
masterpiecesof this almost nonexistentgenre,
can't match.Both of those earlierBritishfilms
used rock music and a young man's journey
to push a sense of crisisto the point of a call
for restructuring consciousness.But Radio On
begins on the other side of that point and
opens up new aestheticterritoryin ways that
matterand for reasonsthat are never merely
aesthetic. -PETER HOGUE
BARBAROSA
Director:Fred D.Witliff.
William
Schepisi.Script: lanBaker.
Photography:
Fred Schepisi'sBarbarosalooks like a West-
ern, but at heart it's a ghost story. It opens
with a magnificentdesertlandscape,a compo-
sitionof rocks,mesas, sky, and open landthat
looks hard-edgedand immutable-and then it
begins to change. The light keeps shifting-
the backgrounddarkens,thenthe foreground,
the middle ground lights up like a radiant
stripeacrossthe screen,then it's all reversed,
and a shadow seems to darkenbouldersone
at a time, in abrupt, unpredictablejumps-
changing in ways we can't quite follow, or