Chris Petit
A portrait of film critic Manny Farber, featuring interviews with Farber and art critic Dave Hickey, as well as inventively displayed clips of the films that Farber discusses.
London Overground retraces legendary London writer Iain Sinclair’s journey with film-maker Andrew Kötting around the Overground railway on foot for the book of the same name. The film follows Sinclair reprising the walk over the course of a year rather than the day’s walk of the book.
A collection of films from an eclectic array of contributors commissioned to raise funds for the Bristol independent cinema The Cube.
Based on an English academic’s memoir on stalking and being stalked, a digital film essay on cinema and absence, on Hitchcock and Antonioni, on cinema and cities. It is a story of waiting, self-delusion, panic, fear of violence, and of modern technologies which define the urban stalker as they do the new terrorist.
An abstract film, collecting together the 6 rooms Dave McKean made for Chris Petit to reshoot, cut-up, and generally abuse, in pursuit of images for his film 'Asylum', made in collaboration with the writer Iain Sinclair.
A filmmaker sets out to make a voyage of discovery on London's orbital motorway, the M25. He enlists the help of several others to film the motorway from several points, drive endlessly around it and dig up stories and potential beauty behind the motorway.
Asylum is a film very much derived from chaos, expressing implicitly the ideas conjured up by its title. A strange mix of both documentary and fiction, where in the future a group of people are looking back at the twentieth century. A virus has wiped out most of the culture of the twentieth century, leaving just fragments of a project called 'The Perimeter Fence' to be pieced together. These fragments make up a documentary about an exiled group of disparate yet similar minds.
Chris Petit & Iain Sinclair's liminal, laminal tribute to underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead, featuring image manipulation by Dave Mckean & reminiscences from various countercultural characters. A fitting epitaph for an English margin walker.
A vagrant is taken in by a south London surgeon, who subjects him to a series of violent procedures, in the hope of recovering the inner daimon, the spark of light.
‘The Cardinal and the Corpse' marks the beginning of Petit’s loose partnership with writer Iain Sinclair. There’s a nod towards narrative here involving a book-search launched by graphic novelist Alan Moore and a dealer (the dapper but barking Driffield), but it’s little more than an excuse to showcase a number of authors and other miscreants.
Smile, smile, smile - a witty and informal look at the life and times of the air hostess. Feature-film maker Chris Petit , of Radio On fame, turns his eye to the world of flying, "trolley-dollies", duty-free lives, emergency, sex and shopping. Cabin doors to manual! Welcome aboard!
A film essay on Ballard's fiction, and its unrealised cinematic potential, with particular reference to David Cronenberg's (yet to be filmed) Crash, featuring an interview with the director, prior to making of his film.
While on vacation at a resort hotel in the West Indies, Miss Marple correctly suspects that the apparently natural death of a retired British major is actually the work of a murderer planning yet another killing.
Scottish Television's film on the 40th Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1986, starring Robbie Coltrane (a former EIFF chauffeur) and featuring interviews with Bill Forsyth, Samuel Fuller and Barry Norman, among many others.
An American in West Berlin finds himself caught up in murder and intrigue after his associate is killed and a diplomat's daughter is found dead in his room.
In this enigmatic thriller, Susannah (Tusse Silberg) is suddenly herded out of an apartment in the middle of the night and brought to a police station for extensive questioning about why she was in a place that belonged to a known criminal. What the police do not know is that Susannah has been somehow involved in the death of a woman and has reunited with her sister Julie (Lisa Kreuzer) in Berlin. Julie herself has some rather unusual friends -- including Eddie Constantine the American-born French actor and singer who plays himself. It is these characters and their dialogue and asides, and even background action and scenery, that form the real body of this specialized film -- not the plot. For these reasons, this type of film is best limited to those who are more interested in avant-garde than in commercial cinema.
After finding her boss, a private detective, has committed suicide and has left her his agency, Cordelia Gray is asked to investigate the suicide of the man's son. During the course of her investigation, Cordelia becomes obsessed with the young man's memory and his increasingly suspicious death.
Some of Petit's works were made for television. In this session, the three films are about three major figures in the English universe: filmmaker Peter Whitehead, novelist and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, and writer J. G. Ballard. In these cinematographic portraits, Petit explores the potentialities of the hybridization between fiction and documentary, building elaborate stories - supported in genres such as the police story - to better define the characters. In the biography of Ballard, we have a curious participation of David Cronenberg about to embark on the adaptation of Crash.
