I saw Chris Petit's new film Content yesterday. It's a beautiful, complex, oblique, fragile, highly personal, poetic ragbag road movie of a film. I've been watching and admiring Chris' work for thirty years now, ever since his 1979 feature Radio On -- to which the 75-minute Content forms a kind of acknowledged coda. I've been reading his film criticism for longer than that, ever since his Time Out reviews were a formative influence on my filmgoing at university. I've worked with him on the BBC films negative space and Millennial Fever, and we publish and distribute his London Orbital and Unrequited Love. So you're not going to get objectivity here. Nor will you get a conventional review. Instead, and at the risk of contributing my most pretentious post to date, I can offer a first list of associations...

J G Ballard / Hannover / middle-age / Catholicism / John F Kennedy / R W Fassbinder / Berlin / Barbican / Atom Bomb / Abraham Zapruder / John Ford / Manny Farber / dis-content / fathers / Pokemon / postcards / Polaroids / Cold War / mortality / memory / Walter Benjamin / big sheds / Primo Levi / e-mail / YouTube / Google / conspiracy theories / Theodor Adorno / W G Sebald / Auschwitz / virtuality / sex / Dallas / Kurt Schwitters / Caspar David Friedrich / Johann Wolfgang von Goethe / mitteleuropa / cinema, both the beginnings of and the end of / childhood / Monument Valley / Orfordness / the Westway / guilt / Chris Marker / Agnes Varda / non-linearity / happiness / Jack Kerouac / memory / Iain Sinclair / Gaston Bachelard / time / space, always space... and the way Chris describes the film (in contrast to Radio On) as 'a road movie in which you don't meet anyone'.

Content is an Illuminations Films production, edited by Emma Matthews with (wonderful) music by Antye Greie aka AGF, and produced by Keith Griffiths. The film will receive its European premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam later this month. Content will be shown on More4, which part-financed the film, in March.