D Is for Distance

Getting lost, falling, and then rising again: this is a dramaturgical line that marks Chris Petit & Emma Matthews’ touching D Is for Distance. The film focuses on the filmmakers’ son, Louis, coping with epilepsy, and on the whole family’s struggle to contain the devastating effects of the disease — a struggle that ultimately reveals itself to be both personal and political. On one side, the film is highly informative, thereby helping to address a severe lack both in societal awareness of the condition and in the attention granted by certain healthcare systems, such as that of the United Kingdom.

On the other hand, the film renders its criticism effective through the adoption of an artistic language. More specifically, through art — from Grünewald to Louis’ own drawings and paintings — the blurring boundaries between fact and fiction become central. Excerpts from Georges Méliès’ films or the highly inventive animated film Betty in Blunderland (1934) find a legitimate connection with figures of paranoia and postmodernity such as CIA officer James Jesus Angleton or William S. Burroughs. Petit & Matthews do not eschew the challenging reality of their son’s seizures but confront it bravely, almost embracing it or allowing it to resonate with the logic of counterintelligence and the artistic construction of reality. Is this a way of sublimating a familial and societal drama, of making it universal?

D Is for Distance demonstrates the labour of this universality insofar as it succeeds in anchoring an individual destiny in space and history. Instead of reducing disease to factual understanding and a problem-solving attitude, the filmmakers expand their experience by linking it to the history of art, cinema, and twentieth-century politics. This expansion is equally geographical, involving different countries and cultures. In this context, the journey of father and son towards the vast landscapes of the Arctic Circle is decidedly more than a dramaturgical device: it is the visible tip of a larger psychogeographical iceberg. If psychogeography is a hallmark of Petit’s filmic practice, often developed in collaboration with the writer Iain Sinclair, D Is for Distance operates an intriguing inversion of perspective: it is no longer geography that is mapped and animated by psychology, but psychology that is mapped through geographical expansion.

This expansion is also synaesthetic, as the film clearly stages its different elements — text, archival images, music — while emphasizing their individual strength. Music in particular constitutes an extraordinary thread, providing energy and positivity to the difficult trajectory of the disease. More generally, D Is for Distance explicitly exhibits its compositional dimension, also thanks to Emma Matthews’ expertise as a film editor. Here, the manipulation of time through montage signifies far more than a cinematic technique: it becomes a form of magical resistance against, and sublimation of, the painful temporality of pathology, in which every second counts. By composing and recomposing time, by anchoring the absence of epileptic seizures in geography and history, D Is for Distance courageously transforms a series of dangerous trips into a constructive filmic journey.