DRIFT by Simon Barker and Jason Wood

Drift: A possible movie

 

The best way to think of Drift perhaps is as a possible movie. Or at the very least a screenplay for a movie now destined to exist only in the imagination. You can also think of it as a series of Polaroids, snapshots of a British landscape languishing in stasis. When Chris Petit thought about turning from film criticism to filmmaking he conceived of a synthesis of the German road movies he admired transposed to a dreary, late 1970s England. Drift does something similar in a more contemporary setting, but rather than a soundtrack of Kraftwerk, the sonic backdrop would be later Scott Walker and dub.

 

What began as a script depicting a journey from South London to the English coast of a man who had decided to disappear from his own life became a storyboard and then an art project of sorts as we attempted to convince financiers to make it. As the possibility of this happening began to recede we decided to keep refining it to best approximate the kind of film that given the opportunity we might have made.

 

Drift is ultimately about an identity crisis, but it is also a document of an artistic endeavour that though unrealised managed to metamorphosise into something else. Some have described it as having the same psychogeographic wanderings of Iain Sinclair and Andrew Kötting. And we’ll certainly take that. But it’s also about persevering and creating something that although had a different final destination makes for an interesting journey nonetheless.

 

If none of the above is persuasive, here is a list of other things  not mentioned in the text above that if you like may attract you to this book:

Performance, Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell

Kings of the Road, Wim Wenders

King Midas Sound

J.G Ballard’s Concrete Island

London, Robinson in Space and Robinson in Ruins, Patrick Keiller

The View from the Train and other Landscapes, also Keiller

The music of Land Observations

Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell