Chris Petit

Directing

Chris Petit

Born 1949-01-01 · London, England, UK

Christopher Petit was born in 1949 in London, England. He is a director and writer, known for Radio On (1979), An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1982) and Agatha Christie's Miss Marple: A Caribbean Mystery (1989).

Acting credits

No artwork available
NR

Scottish Television's film on the 40th Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1986, starring Robbie Coltrane (a former EIFF chauffeur) and featuring interviews with Bill Forsyth, Samuel Fuller and Barry Norman, among many others.

Hooray For Holyrood

1986

London Overground poster
NR

London Overground retraces legendary London writer Iain Sinclair’s journey with film-maker Andrew Kötting around the Overground railway on foot for the book of the same name. The film follows Sinclair reprising the walk over the course of a year rather than the day’s walk of the book.

London Overground

2016

Moving Pictures: J.G. Ballard poster
8.5

A film essay on Ballard's fiction, and its unrealised cinematic potential, with particular reference to David Cronenberg's (yet to be filmed) Crash, featuring an interview with the director, prior to making of his film.

Moving Pictures: J.G. Ballard

1990

London Orbital poster
7.0

A filmmaker sets out to make a voyage of discovery on London's orbital motorway, the M25. He enlists the help of several others to film the motorway from several points, drive endlessly around it and dig up stories and potential beauty behind the motorway.

London Orbital

2002

No artwork available
9.0

Chris Petit & Iain Sinclair's liminal, laminal tribute to underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead, featuring image manipulation by Dave Mckean & reminiscences from various countercultural characters. A fitting epitaph for an English margin walker.

The Falconer

1998

No artwork available
NR

Theo Valasquez's abandoned acoustic research in the Rangipo desert is narrated through fragments of an unfinished TV documentary. Meanwhile, the silence of the desert tells its own story.

Unnatural History

2014

Behind the camera

Miss Marple: A Caribbean Mystery poster
6.6

While on vacation at a resort hotel in the West Indies, Miss Marple correctly suspects that the apparently natural death of a retired British major is actually the work of a murderer planning yet another killing.

Miss Marple: A Caribbean Mystery

1989

D Is for Distance poster
NR

A film essay montage of contemporary footage, archive and cinema history, about the age of post-truth and how one young man’s childhood epilepsy became representative of the woes of the world and how he triumphed against adversity.

D Is for Distance

2026

D Is for Distance poster
NR

A film essay montage of contemporary footage, archive and cinema history, about the age of post-truth and how one young man’s childhood epilepsy became representative of the woes of the world and how he triumphed against adversity.

D Is for Distance

2026

Chinese Boxes poster
6.0

An American in West Berlin finds himself caught up in murder and intrigue after his associate is killed and a diplomat's daughter is found dead in his room.

Chinese Boxes

1984

Chinese Boxes poster
6.0

An American in West Berlin finds himself caught up in murder and intrigue after his associate is killed and a diplomat's daughter is found dead in his room.

Chinese Boxes

1984

Radio On poster
5.9

A London radio DJ receives news of his brother's suicide and travels west to Bristol to find out more.

Radio On

1979

Radio On poster
5.9

A London radio DJ receives news of his brother's suicide and travels west to Bristol to find out more.

Radio On

1979

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman poster
5.4

After finding her boss, a private detective, has committed suicide and has left her his agency, Cordelia Gray is asked to investigate the suicide of the man's son. During the course of her investigation, Cordelia becomes obsessed with the young man's memory and his increasingly suspicious death.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

1982

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman poster
5.4

After finding her boss, a private detective, has committed suicide and has left her his agency, Cordelia Gray is asked to investigate the suicide of the man's son. During the course of her investigation, Cordelia becomes obsessed with the young man's memory and his increasingly suspicious death.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

1982

No artwork available
8.0

A woman is being taken from her German hotel to be interrogated by police agents.

Flight to Berlin

1984

No artwork available
8.0

A woman is being taken from her German hotel to be interrogated by police agents.

Flight to Berlin

1984

The Film That Buys the Cinema poster
NR

A collection of films from an eclectic array of contributors commissioned to raise funds for the Bristol independent cinema The Cube.

The Film That Buys the Cinema

2014

Moving Pictures: J.G. Ballard poster
8.5

A film essay on Ballard's fiction, and its unrealised cinematic potential, with particular reference to David Cronenberg's (yet to be filmed) Crash, featuring an interview with the director, prior to making of his film.

Moving Pictures: J.G. Ballard

1990

London Orbital poster
7.0

A filmmaker sets out to make a voyage of discovery on London's orbital motorway, the M25. He enlists the help of several others to film the motorway from several points, drive endlessly around it and dig up stories and potential beauty behind the motorway.

London Orbital

2002

No artwork available
9.0

Chris Petit & Iain Sinclair's liminal, laminal tribute to underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead, featuring image manipulation by Dave Mckean & reminiscences from various countercultural characters. A fitting epitaph for an English margin walker.

The Falconer

1998

No artwork available
9.0

Chris Petit & Iain Sinclair's liminal, laminal tribute to underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead, featuring image manipulation by Dave Mckean & reminiscences from various countercultural characters. A fitting epitaph for an English margin walker.

The Falconer

1998

The Telephone poster
NR

A young woman enacts an imaginative revenge on her boyfriend for playing away. Director Chris Petit made this three-minute short to test a new super 16mm Kodak film stock to be used on Peter Greenaway’s upcoming feature The Draughtsman’s Contract.

The Telephone

1981

The Cardinal and the Corpse poster
9.0

‘The Cardinal and the Corpse' marks the beginning of Petit’s loose partnership with writer Iain Sinclair. There’s a nod towards narrative here involving a book-search launched by graphic novelist Alan Moore and a dealer (the dapper but barking Driffield), but it’s little more than an excuse to showcase a number of authors and other miscreants.

The Cardinal and the Corpse

1992

The Cardinal and the Corpse poster
9.0

‘The Cardinal and the Corpse' marks the beginning of Petit’s loose partnership with writer Iain Sinclair. There’s a nod towards narrative here involving a book-search launched by graphic novelist Alan Moore and a dealer (the dapper but barking Driffield), but it’s little more than an excuse to showcase a number of authors and other miscreants.

The Cardinal and the Corpse

1992

Asylum poster
9.0

Asylum is a film very much derived from chaos, expressing implicitly the ideas conjured up by its title. A strange mix of both documentary and fiction, where in the future a group of people are looking back at the twentieth century. A virus has wiped out most of the culture of the twentieth century, leaving just fragments of a project called 'The Perimeter Fence' to be pieced together. These fragments make up a documentary about an exiled group of disparate yet similar minds.

Asylum

2000

Asylum poster
9.0

Asylum is a film very much derived from chaos, expressing implicitly the ideas conjured up by its title. A strange mix of both documentary and fiction, where in the future a group of people are looking back at the twentieth century. A virus has wiped out most of the culture of the twentieth century, leaving just fragments of a project called 'The Perimeter Fence' to be pieced together. These fragments make up a documentary about an exiled group of disparate yet similar minds.

Asylum

2000

Content poster
5.0

Content is an ambient 21st-century road movie, an associative film essay inspired by driving’s trancelike state rather than any linear unfolding of the road.

Content

2010

No artwork available
NR

Chris Petit's experimental take on "Dracula".

The Carfax Fragment

2001

No artwork available
7.0

Some of Petit's works were made for television. In this session, the three films are about three major figures in the English universe: filmmaker Peter Whitehead, novelist and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, and writer J. G. Ballard. In these cinematographic portraits, Petit explores the potentialities of the hybridization between fiction and documentary, building elaborate stories - supported in genres such as the police story - to better define the characters. In the biography of Ballard, we have a curious participation of David Cronenberg about to embark on the adaptation of Crash.

Rudy Wurlitzer

1994