British mainstream cinema retreated from modernity after 1979

Evidence

‘Radio On,’ Petit said in a recent interview, ‘ended with a car ‘stalled on the edge of the future’, which we didn’t know then would be Thatcherism.’ Ahead lay a bizarre yet banal mix of the unprecedented and the archaic. Instead of accelerating down Kraftwerk’s autobahn, we found ourselves, as Petit puts it in Content, ‘reversing into a tomorrow based on a non-existent past’, as the popular modernism Radio On was part of found itself eclipsed by a toxic-addictive confection of consumer-driven populism, heritage kitsch, xenophobia and US corporate culture. In this light, Content stands as a quiet but emphatic reproach to the British cinema of the last 30 years, which in its dominant variants – drab social realism, faux gangster, picture-book costume drama or mid-Atlantic middle-class fantasia – has retreated from modernity. It isn’t only the poor and the nonwhite who are edited out of Notting Hill, for example – it’s also the Westway, west London’s Ballardian flyover, which now stands as a relic of ‘the modern city that London never became’. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 502

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘reversing into a tomorrow based on a non-existent past’ is the book’s core hauntology thesis — this is an early concrete instance of it. Also the Notting Hill point connects naturally to prior work on taste/immodesty themes in the addendum articles only loosely; better xref is Fisher’s larger corpus. — connects to: British cinema overlooks ready-made post-Fordist landscapes it could still use — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 503; Britain had a popular-modernism network that irreversibly vanished in the Eighties — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2287
• SEED: ‘The modern city that London never became’ as a lens for reading what gets erased from popular cinematic cityscapes — not just who, but what infrastructure and which architectural forms are edited out — could be an essay on the politics of the urban imaginary.

Broader Connections

• British cinema overlooks ready-made post-Fordist landscapes it could still use #expands (0.78) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 503