What is London Orbital’s legacy?
Having finished interviewing Iain Sinclair for our new retrospective film on London Orbital and packed up the filming equipment, we chatted to him as he told us the story of a screening of London Orbital in Milton Keynes, in which only two people turned up. One of the two was a man who had booked to see a screening of another film by Iain, but despite this left before the screening started. The other was a man who had a penchant for running down the hard shoulder of motorways and had used the event as a way to evade the police. He had seen the advert for the screening of a documentary about the M25 and had taken this as a sign. This was not just a sanctuary from the police but divine intervention from the motorway Gods! I brought this up with Chris Petit in my Zoom interview with him and his reply was, “how does he find these people?”
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What I loved about the anecdote is that it seems to typify the absurdity of London Orbital. While the initial gesture of London Orbital is itself absurd, who would want to walk or just drive around the M25, a road with no end and no beginning? As Iain reminded us, this was no less absurd than the decision to build the ring road in the first place, a decision that would have made sense in 1956, rather than when construction of the motorway was finally completed in 1986.
London Orbital has been a steady seller for us over the years. It’s undoubtedly the most ‘cult’ film we distribute. Like all cults, its practitioners can look foolish and absurd to outsiders. Iain explained to us how London Orbital’s legacy has been formed by its reconstruction. The man from Milton Keynes was a prophetic figure in this regard. People have taken up and walked their own journeys around the M25 and have remixed the film by adding their own music to it or re-creating the film in their own way. It was this latter trend, which Chris raised in my interview with him unprompted, that he would like to see a shot-for-shot re-make similar to Gus Van Sant’s version of Psycho.
What was so interesting listening to Iain and Chris discuss the legacy of London Orbital is the fact that it went against my thinking of what the film means in 2022. My reading was based on the ideas that London Orbital inhabits, perhaps best typified when I asked both of them if the Ballardian declaration that ‘the future is boring’, was no longer relevant given that the future is doom-laden and fills us with fear. And while both gave very interesting answers to this question, London Orbital’s legacy laid not in the ideas of the film but in its method.
The questions are: how to shoot the M25, how to edit the M25, and how to narrate the M25? With a circular road, what’s your point of entry? These were answered with a method of working, which arguably wouldn’t be possible to do today. As Chris mentions in the new interview, London Orbital was written afterward. There was no shooting schedule, with the film only taking form during the edit, while at the same time the edit informed the filming, with Chris and Iain going out and shooting more material as the film’s editor, Emma Matthews, gave it shape.
Despite the emphasis on the method of London Orbital, I still find myself returning to the ideas of the film. It’s a remark that Chris makes in my interview with him that is germane to this, “London Orbital contains the future in it.” Ballard comments in the film that the M25 marks a transitory zone and I think that the film reflects this, in that it finds itself right in the middle of the legacy of neoliberalism that we are still living with today.
It was made shortly after 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan but just before the invasion of Iraq. Its production was just a few short years before the creation of the surveillance state but just before the Internet transformed our lives and with it, the creation of new forms of surveillance. Indeed, I think about Chris’ comment in the film that new types of surveillance mark “a fundamental revolution in the level and type of voyeurism,” which will result in “the loss of privacy and individuality as previously understood,” speaks directly to us in 2022. Paradoxically then, the film can be seen as both a time capsule of a lost world and an index of our current one.
Tom Allen, November 2022
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