The Global Road Movie

Description

The road movie is one of the most tried and true genres, a staple since the earliest days of cinema. This book looks at the road movie from a wider perspective than ever before, exploring the motif of travel not just in American films—where it has been most prominent—but via movies from other nations as well. Gathering contributions from around the world, the book shows how the road movie, altered and refracted in every new international iteration, offers a new way of thinking about the ever-shifting sense of place and space in the globalized world.

Through analyses of such films as Guantanamera (Cuba), Wrong Side of the Road (Australia), Five Golden Flowers (China), Africa United (South Africa), and Sightseers (England), The Global Road Movie enables us to think afresh about how today’s road movies fit into the history of the genre and what they can tell us about how people move about in the world today.

Introduction: From American Roads to Global Highways

Timothy Corrigan and José Duarte

 

Section 1: The Americas

Chapter 1: Learning to Drive: Midcentury Guidance Films and the  Middle-of-the-Road Politics of the American Road Movie by Devin Orgeron

Chapter 2: The Colombian Road Movie: Uses and Abuses of a Film Genre by Jamie Correa

Chapter 3: Notes on a Journey from Guantánamo to Havana: Guantanamera Revisited as Winds of Change Hit US-Cuba Relations by Hermínia Sol

 

Section 2: Africa 

Chapter 4: Departing from Anti-Colonialism, Arriving at Afropolitanism: Africa United as an African Road Movie by James M. Hodapp

Chapter 5: The Road and Transatlantic Currents in the Cinema of Licínio Azevedo by Sara Brandellero 

 

Section 3: Asia and Australia 

Chapter 6: The Palestinian Road(block) Movie: Interrupted Journeys in Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention by Drew Paul

Chapter 7: Song of the Big Road: Negotiating Scale in the Road Films of Twenty-First-Century India by Lars Erik Larson 

Chapter 8: Provincializing the Road Movie: Realism, Epic and Mobility in Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik by Moira Weigal

Chapter 9: Navigating Gender, Ethnicity and Space: Five Golden Flowers as a Socialist Road Movie by Ling Zhang

Chapter 10: Genre at a Crossroads: The Korean Road Movie by Joseph Pomp

Chapter 11: Wrong Side of the Road: Crossing Cultures, Traversing Forms and the Blackfella Road Movie by Keith Beattie 

 

Section 4: Europe 

Chapter 12: Et in Arcadia Ego: Precarious Romaniticism and the English Road Movie by Neil Archer

Chapter 13: Bumps on the ‘Road to Europe’: Remaking the Road Movies and Re-mapping the Nation in Post-2004 Central Europe by Micheal Gott and Kris Van Heuckelom

Chapter 14: The Road Movie in Portuguese Cinema by Filipa Rosário

Notes on Editors

Notes on Contributors

Sujets

• Media Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Película fotográfica
• General officer
• General
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 09 avril 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783208784
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2018 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2018 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2018 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Anna Corrigan
Production manager: Faith Newcombe
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-877-7
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-879-1
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-878-4
Printed and bound by Short Run Press, UK
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: From American Roads to Global Highways Timothy Corrigan and José Duarte
Section 1: The Americas
Chapter 1: Learning to Drive: Midcentury Guidance Films and the Middle-of-the-Road Politics of the American Road Movie Devin Orgeron
Chapter 2: The Colombian Road Movie: Uses and Abuses of a Film Genre Jaime Correa
Chapter 3: Notes on a Journey from Guantánamo to Havana: Guantanamera Revisited as Winds of Change Hit US-Cuba Relations Hermínia Sol
Section 2: Africa
Chapter 4: Departing from Anti-Colonialism, Arriving at Afropolitanism: Africa United as an African Road Movie James M. Hodapp
Chapter 5: The Road and Transatlantic Currents in the Cinema of Licínio Azevedo Sara Brandellero
Section 3: Asia and Australia
Chapter 6: The Palestinian Road(block) Movie: Interrupted Journeys in Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention Drew Paul
Chapter 7: Song of the Big Road: Negotiating Scale in the Road Films of Twenty-First-Century India Lars Erik Larson
Chapter 8: Provincializing the Road Movie: Realism, Epic and Mobility in Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik Moira Weigel
Chapter 9: Navigating Gender, Ethnicity and Space: Five Golden Flowers as a Socialist Road Movie Ling Zhang
Chapter 10: Genre at a Crossroads: The Korean Road Movie Joseph Pomp
Chapter 11: Wrong Side of the Road : Crossing Cultures, Traversing Forms and the Blackfella Road Movie Keith Beattie
Section 4: Europe
Chapter 12: Et in Arcadia Ego : Precarious Romanticism and the English Road Movie Neil Archer
Chapter 13: Bumps on the ‘Road to Europe’: Remaking the Road Movie and Re-mapping the Nation in Post-2004 Central Europe Michael Gott and Kris Van Heuckelom
Chapter 14: The Road Movie in Portuguese Cinema Filipa Rosário
Notes on Editors
Notes on Contributors
Index
Acknowledgements
Timothy Corrigan: Thanks to Anna Corrigan for her many contributions, including her stunning cover image. I also want to thank Zé Duarte for his original conception of this book and his rigorous leadership through its many stages.
José Duarte: I would like to thank Timothy Corrigan for believing in this project. I would also like to thank Anna Corrigan (for the cover image and other contributions), and to Ana Daniela Coelho and Teresa Cid for their valuable input. This work is dedicated to Lili, with love.
Introduction
From American Roads to Global Highways
Timothy Corrigan and José Duarte
R evisions, expansions and displacements have informed all film genres since 1895, as the varied courses of history and different shapes of cultures have changed these genres. Once considered a quintessentially American genre, the road movie is no exception, and has become an especially dramatic and widespread example of how genres evolve through history to reflect new values, different social and geographical parameters and new technological advances in cinematic (and video) representations. Indeed, well beyond its place in American film history, the road movie has, not surprisingly, travelled through time and around the world with significant and illuminating variations – most especially, perhaps, in the contemporary global film environment.
Motifs and Structures
Within this flux of time and place, what continues to make road movies such a popular and powerful practice – revised, expanded and displaced – has been their incisive and flexible explorations of the human identities of rebels without causes, wanderers away from home, lost souls seeking new lives and road warriors escaping oppressions. Often understated desires without clear objects propel these figures and often directionless movements towards a vague horizon define their paths. As these figures historically and culturally evolve, three prominent motifs and structures have emerged to characterize this genre:
1. At the heart of these films is a distinctive set of questions about subjectivity and identity. No doubt most narratives engage with these kinds of questions, but road movies tend to highlight and distinguish these questions as especially destabilizing in relation to the past, community, gender and home, frequently as encounters with some Other which in turn becomes an encounter with self.
2. Partly because of how road movies accentuate movement, they also foreground space as a primary figure in their dramas of identity. The spaces of nation and nature, with their shifting borders and boundaries, become far more than just a background mise-en-sc è ne . Rather, they become, through visual imaging and narrative presence, a measure to position the genre within old and new values. Very often in road movies, space and place assert themselves as a metaphorical character, sometimes as a kind of companion, sometimes as an antagonist.
3. In many road movies, there is an implicit or explicit alignment of the technology of automobiles (or other vehicular frameworks) with the technology of cinematic representation. Seeing the world through the frames of an automobile as a moving image appears analogous to seeing the world as a movie image. Many times, the result is a logical reflexivity within many of these films, which, depending on the film, can make road movies as much about the challenges and crises of cinematic representation as about the challenges and crises of the self.
While these thematic and structural parameters help identify some of the specificities of the road movie genre, they serve mainly as a foundation that would be shaped in many different ways, especially in the postwar years of the twentieth century. On this foundation, distinctive variations would galvanize the genre across the US and, more and more, around the world.
The American Story
Many convincing arguments have identified other cultural origins for the road movie than America, from those associated with a world literature since Homer’s The Odyssey to other early film cultures, such as that in Brazil. A common critical assumption over the years, however, has been that American culture, geography and film history have produced the largest body of road movies and have mapped their evolution over many decades. At the heart of this assumption has been an American history fixated on open frontiers – beginning with literary precedents from Zane Grey’s westerns to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), frontiers asking to be explored, escaped into, battled, conquered and possibly resettled.
Film immediately embraced those frontier narratives about movement, escape, rebellion and quest, and precedents for the American road movie appear even in early twentieth-century travelogues and later in the cinematic fascination with the newly arrived automobiles of the twentieth century. The 1930s, however, feature more visible versions of the road movie in films such as Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934), Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937), John Ford’s adaptation The Grapes of Wrath (1940) from Steinbeck’s novel, and Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941). 1
Although the central trope of ‘being on the road’ characterizes all these films, the extremely restless energy and existential crises that would become a salient part of the genre arises out of the wreckage of the Second World War and its resonances through the 1940s and 1950s. More specifically, two contextual forces pressure this conjunction between the road movie and the 1950s: (1) the psycho-social aftershocks of the Second World War rattle traditional positions about individuality and identity and (2) the exponential growth of car culture, especially in the US and fuelled by a robust economy, generates a migration of US families from the urban centres to the suburbs which in turn unmoors many of the traditional social fabrics (such as family and community). In 1946, a movie by an American immigrant from Austria, Edgar Ulmer, Detour (1946) thus describes an angst that is both social and sexual and that would colour the many road films that begin to emerge in 1950s. Similarly Nicolas Ray’s They Live by Night (1949) follows two lovers whose flight from the law is as doomed as their relationship, in a dark parable about romantic outlaws with no place to go.
The 1960s through the 1980s witness the arrival of many of the films usually deemed the classic American road movies. These include Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the tale of two desperado outlaws in the 1930s; Easy Rider (1969), about the ride across America by two counter-cultural bikers; Two Lane Blacktop (1971), a race from Los Angeles to Washington D.C., in two hot rods; and Badlands (1973), the surreal story of serial killings by two young lovers through the Great Plains of the US. In these and other road movies from this period, the undercurrent of violence that haunts earlier road movies erupts in a particularly graphic and ideological fashion.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, American road movies proliferate, now often with the highly ironic and self-referential edge associated with postmodernism. David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) recreates, as an equally fantastic but much more threatening version, the road trip of the 1939 Wizard of O