Road Movies



INTERNATIONAL ROAD MOVIES

Inflected by westerns and the Depression, the road movie, with its roaming hippies and young lovers on

Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991) is a feminist variation of the road movie.
the run, seems distinctly American. There are, however, international traditions. Some road movies from the European art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s examine spiritual identity rather than rebellion, crime, or the spectacle of driving cars. Roberto Rossellini's Voyage in Italy (1953, Italy), Federico Fellini's La Strada (1954, Italy), and Ingmar Bergman's Smultronstället ( Wild Strawberries , 1957, Sweden) all illustrate this existential sensibility. French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard comes closer to the American genre's tone with Pierrot le Fou (1965) and Weekend (1967); but these journeys too are punctuated by philosophical digressions of a European bent. Agnés Varda's Sans Toit Ni Loi ( Vagabond , 1985) is another unusual French take on the road movie, mixing documentary and fiction modes to suggest the social causes of the death of a young homeless woman. Having emerged from the New German cinema movement of the mid-1970s, Wim Wenders established his reputation through the road movie. Most of his early films, such as Alice in den Städten ( Alice in the Cities , 1974), Falsche Bewegung ( The Wrong Movement , 1975), and especially Im Lauf der Zeit ( Kings of the Road , 1976), seem to filter nomadic excursions through a pensive Germanic lens. Typically, Wenders's characters are somber drifters coming to terms with their internal scars.

It is perhaps not surprising that filmmakers in both Australia and Canada have employed the road movie for articulating tensions around national identity and modernity. Like the United States, both nations possess a vast wilderness that constitutes an important facet of their cultural heritage. Canadian and Australian road movies often employ this frontier adventure space to engage social conflicts between indigenous and colonial cultures or between urban modern and mystical rural environments. Directed by Australian Bruce Beresford and set in the wilds of 17th century Canada, Black Robe (1991) embodies this framework as it follows the doomed journey of a French Jesuit priest on a mission to convert native tribes. The Australian Mad Max films (1979–1985) have become canonical for their dystopic reinvention of the outback as a post-human wasteland where survival depends upon manic driving skills. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) is a watershed gay road movie that addresses diversity in Australia. Walkabout (1971), Backroads (1977), and Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) use the Australian outback journey to confront white-aboriginal political relations. Bill Bennett's Kiss or Kill (1997) is a hip and clever Australian take on the outlaw couple. Canadian director Bruce McDonald has worked the rock 'n' road movie repeatedly, with Roadkill (1989), Highway 61 (1991), and most notably Hard Core Logo (1996), a mock documentary about a punk rock band's reunion tour. David Cronenberg's notorious Crash (1996) seems a fitting end-of-millennium road movie: its head-on portrayal of perverse sexual arousal through the car crash experience drove the genre over the edge for some viewers (like media mogul Ted Turner, who successfully lobbied against its US theatrical release).

Road movies from Latin America share traits with the European approach. Generally speaking, Latin American road movies focus on a community of characters rather than star individuals, on mature quests rather than young outlaw narratives, and on national issues related to North-South and urban-rural divides. A good example is Subida al Cielo ( Mexican Bus Ride , 1951), where Luis Buñuel brings his European sensibility to bear on a peasant's strangely enchanting bus journey to the city to attend to his dying mother. As in Fellini's La Strada , Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957), and Buñuel's other road movies Nazarín (1958, Mexico) and La Voie Lactée ( The Milky Way , 1969, France), the journey here is episodic, a kind of carnivalesque pilgrimage. Such a "travelling circus" quality is visible in later Latin American road movies, such as Bye Bye Brazil (1979, Brazil), Guantanamera (1995, Cuba), and Central do Brasil ( Central Station , 1998, Brazil). Conquest-era journey narratives are also popular in Latin American cinema, Cabeza de Vaca (1991, Mexico) being one of the finest examples. Profundo Carmesí ( Deep Crimson , 1996, Mexico) and El Camino ( The Road , 2000, Argentina) are intriguing riffs on the outlaw couple road movie. With its focus on the sexual experiences of two young male buddies with an older woman during a road trip, Y Tu Mamá También ( And Your Mother Too , 2001, Mexico) represents a turning point for the American-style road movie, and, predictably, was a huge success in the United States.

As twenty-first-century film continues to thrive under the power of digital technologies, it is safe to assume that more inventive road movies will appear on the horizon.

SEE ALSO Action and Adventure Films ; Crime Films ; Genre

Cohan, Steven, and Ina Rae Hark, eds. The Road Movie Book . New York: Routledge, 1997.

Corrigan, Timothy. A Cinema Without walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road . New York: Viking Press, 1957.

Kolker, Robert Phillip, and Peter Beicken. The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire . Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Lackey, Kris. RoadFrames: The American Highway Narrative . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

Laderman, David. Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie . Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.

Lewis, Tom. Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life . New York: Viking Press, 1997.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita . Paris: Olympia Press, 1955.

Sargeant, Jack, and Stephanie Watson, eds. Lost Highways: An Illustrated History of Road Movies . London: Creation Books, 1999.

David Laderman



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