London
Orbital
Chris Petit & Iain Sinclair | UK | Producer: Keith Griffiths
| 76 min. | video | 2002 | Featuring J.G. Ballard, Rachel Lichtenstein,
Renchi Bicknell, John
Sergeant | Toronto Premiere
Not since the Via Appia has one road undergone the kind of insistent
examination that Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair bring to the M25,
the “ring road” constructed around London during the
Thatcher era.
London Orbital takes off from Sinclair’s visionary
book of the same title, which took the writer on a walk around the
120-mile route of this infernal circuit, excavating the histories
of the sites through which it passes (or which were destroyed to
enable its passage). But rather than recreate Sinclair’s perverse
perambulations, Petit took to the road, holding out until the tediousness
of a drive without beginning or end began to produce visions: of
Stoker’s vampires; of J.G. Ballard’s Shepperton; of
Margaret Thatcher’s cozy conversations with Augusto Pinochet;
of secret toxic dumps and ragged, dazed wanderers at the edge of
the future’s past. 
Preceded by |
