It’s curious that the short film The Carfax Fragment is almost never shown, considering that it investigates Purfleet where Dracula bought the manor from whence he set out to spread terror and unleash desires. The small town is also home to a Roll-on/Roll-off ferry port, making it a key place for Britain’s container industry.
Which gets us to the tv documentary Content where the velvety violent anonymity of places like Felixstowe, another prosaic sheds-pocked cargo hub, has replaced the melancholia full of promise-of-what-exactly that hovered through the industrial wasteland of Radio On. Among many other things, Content is a service economy continuation of Petit’s original Journey to England, with other aesthetic means for a post-analogue world. If the earlier film was laconic, with little talk and a lot to watch, then the latter work induces a despair-dense trance through a steady stream of aphorisms, ideas and notions set against images too digi-glitchy to offer any respite from this maelstrom of loneliness.
If in some future a curious creature would like to know how The West truly felt after a decade of unrestrained economic Liberism , then Content will provide the disquieting answer.
Olof Möller
FILMS
The Carfax Fragment (Netherlands, 2001)
Content (United Kingdom, Germany, 2010)