London Orbital

Streaming video - 2014

'Maverick British director Chris Petit has produced one of this year's eeriest and most haunting films, London Orbital, a threnody to the M25.' Sunday Telegraph. 'It is a mediation on the M25 and gives an intriguing history of the occult archaeology of London that the ring-road discloses ... Petit has witty and playful apercus for every mile he covers.' The Guardian. London Orbital is an extraordinary and visionary film by Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair about the world's largest by-pass, the M25. London Orbital is 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). London Orbital is, among other... things, a meditation on the difference between driving and walking. On Bram Stoker's "undead", on H.G. Wells and J.G. Ballard. On time and memory. On the difference between film and tape, sound and image. On trance states and the terror that lies beyond boredom; on shopping and terrorism; on Kabul and the leisure mall. On the invisible triangle of Thatcherism (covert arms deals, Essex gangsters, and drug dealing). On Pinochet and Thatcher as vampire lovers. Iain Sinclair is the author of London Orbital, a book about his walk around the 120-mile road. Chris Petit elected not to make 'the film of the book' and chose instead to drive, and to capture in images the peculiar hallucinatory state that driving provokes.--Kanopy. more