130) London Orbital

London Orbital (2002)

Directors: Christopher Petit, Iain Sinclair

Starring: J.G. Ballard

The second film we watched in this weeks screening for Screens, Images, Ideas was Christopher Petit and Iain Sinclair's London Orbital. It was in a similar vein to Lost Book Found in so much as it dealt with the experience of a particular location, this time the London Orbital motorway, the M25.

Inspired by Sinclair's book of the same title, in which he walked a lap of the 120 mile long M25, the world's largest ring road, Petit sets out on a similar task. He drives continuously around the London Orbital seeking to discover the beauty of this motorway which is a source of great frustration to so many.

This film starts out kind of interesting. It is an odd concept, driving laps of a motorway, but you are willing to go with it, at least initially. We get some interesting little stories and anecdotes which spring out of his journey along the M25; he passes the house where Dracula was supposed to have moved to in Bram Stoker's novel and riffs on that for a while, he talks about Margaret Thatcher's relationship with Augusto Pinochet (Thatcher was Prime Minister when the M25 was built). But after a while you realise this film is not progressing. It is not building towards anything. It is not going anywhere.

London Orbital is boring and repetitive, although it is entirely possible that this was the point. It is seeking to be experiential rather than informative. While those little stories and anecdotes are there, the film is not seeking to tell us the history of the motorway. Rather it wants us to feel what this journey is like. Petit and Sinclair seek to replicate the experience of driving around and around the M25, an experience that is boring and repetitive. So they have no doubt succeeded in their intention, but it begs the question; is something that is intentionally boring and repetitive any better than something which is accidentally boring and repetitive.

The film sits more towards the video art end of the documentary spectrum. Most of the film is done in a really off putting split screen, with the left and right sides of the screen showing different images. You feel like you don't know what you are supposed to watch, but then there isn't actually anything you are supposed to be watching.

The narration starts to ware on you after a while. It is all delivered in such a way that it seems intended to be poetic, thought provoking or profound, but it kind of falls short of that mark.

While Lost Book Found's run time of 35mins was appropriate for the type of film that it was, London Orbital ran for a torturous 77mins. I usually give films a chance. I'm always looking for positives in each film I see, but I really struggled with this one. It was monotonous and pretentious and it just couldn't keep my attention.