Journeyman directors need a box of matches to light up their projects ; mavericks like Haggerty set a huge bonfire

Journeyman directors need a box of matches to light up their projects ; mavericks like Haggerty set a huge bonfire to dance around. His films from the eighties, Mall Time and Robotopia, are about consumerism and mindlessness. In the first half of the nineties, Haggerty gave Los Angeles, hit adopted home, a few more pokes in the eye. Two films about California - LA Requiem and Cyberville - portray a state in the throes of extreme equivocation. The surface of LA Requiem suggests it is about the funeral industry in the city of dreams. But in addressing Hollywood's methods of disposal of the dead it also digs up the remains of a culture steeped in spiritual decay. One of the paradoxes of America is how the decay co-habits with a remarkable optimism. Cyberville is that very rare zeitgeist film which captures the mood of history. As its working subtitle suggests (it was called Once Upon A Time In Cyberville) it is about the fairytale birth of the internet, surely the most profound and life-changing event of our lives. Remember the year it was shot. We are talking of 1994. There was no detailed coverage of the IT revolution on British television. No one knew how online media might develop. There was no Google, no YouTube, no Facebook, no Amazon. We were in a strange wilderness of expectations. So Cyberville was the first film on its subject and it was so visually stunning and so brilliantly subversive that other film-makers dared not make another film on the same subject for years to come. For someone who has hated cars all his life, Haggerty's Homes On Wheels is an oddity, a celebration of the sheer size of the American playground and an analysis of the American love-affair with the open road. Stitched together from some great archive footage of classical trailers and caravans together with the lives and vehicles of modern mobile-home dwellers, it presents us with a country of restless can-do adventurers.

Cast & Crew

Director: George Haggerty

Producer: Mike Wallington

Additional Details

Label: Screen Edge

Genre: Documentary

Language: English

Run Time: 156 mins

Region: 0

Release Date: 12/12/17

UPC: 718472999691