Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/22/22

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, August 22, 2022

Radio On (Christopher Petit, 1979)

Cast: David Beames, Lisa Kreuzer, Sandy Ratcliff, Andrew Byatt, Sue Jones-Davies, Sting, Sabina Michael, Katja Kersten, Paul Hollywood. Screenplay: Christopher Petit. Cinematography: Martin Schäfer. Art direction: Susannah Buxton. Film editing: Anthony Sloman.

The road movie is a modern version of the quest romance, tales whose protagonists set out in search of something and wind up discovering much about themselves and their world. The protagonist of Radio On is Robert, a radio disc jockey who sets out from London in his somewhat unreliable car on a journey to Bristol to find out the truth about his brother’s recent death. Along the way he encounters various people in various states of alienation, including a deserter from the British army, an aspiring musician, and a German woman whose husband has left her, taking their 5-year-old daughter with him to England. Robert’s trip is underscored by music on the radio, including such ‘70s artists as David Bowie, Kraftwerk, and Devo, but also by the news, which tells of a Britain plagued with labor problems and the unrest in Northern Ireland. The film owes much to the road movies of Wim Wenders, like Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976), which isn’t surprising, since Wenders is credited as an associate producer and Martin Schäfer, who was an assistant cameraman on those films, is the cinematographer for Radio On. The film is a melancholy treat for those willing to absorb the essence of a period when the world seemed to be coming apart at the seams. In the end, Robert abandons his quest and his car, taking the train back to London. As Pogo might put it, He has met the anomie and it is his.