Radio On and British Art Cinema

Abstract

Radio On (1979) occupies an unusual position in modern British cinema. Writing upon its release, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith argued that it was sufficiently out of place within late 1970s British film culture to be considered ‘a film without a cinema’ (1979: 30). The debut of former Time Out film critic, Christopher Petit, Radio On is an existential road movie littered with self-conscious cinematic allusions, particularly to the work of Wim Wenders, who endorsed it and acted as associate producer. As a result of this all-too-clearly-acknowledged debt, many contemporary reviews of the film seemed to revolve around what Rod Stoneman and Caroline Thompson described as ‘a depressingly predictable permutation of a restricted set of components’ (1981: 19) and dismissed it as ersatz New German Cinema in English. However, such reviews failed to realise that Radio On brought what John Pym called an ‘authentic and firmly individual British tone’ (1979: 234) to the road movie genre and began to hint at what a British art film might look like. Numerous critics, including Alan Lovell (1969, 1997), Peter Wollen (1993), Eric Hedling (1997) and John Hill (2000), have commented that British cinema did not have an indigenous equivalent to the modernist European art cinema of countries such as France, Italy and Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. Several key British art films of the time, such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac (1965) were made by visiting European directors, and only the work of a handful of British and Britishbased directors – Lindsay Anderson, Joseph Losey, Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell – made works which were comparable to those of their European contemporaries. However, the same critics agree that in the early 1980s it became, for a while at least, ‘much easier to identify a recognisably British art cinema and see it as a significant strand