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An examination of cinema within diverse cultural, historical, social, or technological contexts. Emphasis is placed on the study of cinema from an interdisciplinary perspective. Attention may be focused on a particular era, director, genre, area, practice, or phenomenon. May be repeated as the topic changes, to a maximum of 6 credits.
There is something inherently narrative in the representation of a physical journey. The background story providing its motivation can be easily cast aside, or gets to be reduced to a flimsy pretext when compared to the experience of changing places and perspectives, and coming out of one’s regular routines and locales. The journey itself unfolds and develops organically into a story with a beginning, a middle and an ending.
In a way, road movies are the easiest to set up and articulate. Place a single character or a group of characters on the road—family members on a road trip or hitchhiking nomads hit by wanderlust, slow-traveling friends or strangers in a hurry, bored middle-aged lovers or young couples discovering the intricacies of their first true love—or better yet, place them inside the cramped interior of a vehicle, in a condition of forced, uninterrupted proximity for long stretches of time, make them stop regularly and attempt social interactions within the context of those non-places frequently found along the roads of a Western country (rest areas, gas stations, motels, minimarts, parking lots). Expose them to unexpected obstacles, or surprise them with tempting deviations from their planned itinerary, make them question the validity and relevance of their exterior destination. And you have your story, as well as endless ways to visualize it and put it on the screen.
Something else is bound to happen, when you frame your story around a journey. Little by little the characters’ road trip changes from physical to mystical, becomes a transformative experience where the difference between the point of departure and the point of arrival is more spiritual or psychological than merely geographical.
Often, especially in the new wave of road movies (see Taxi, 2015; Drive My Car, **2022; or even a TV short film such as On A Serpentine Road, With The Top Down, 2021), the narrative model of the journey is superseded and almost completely replaced by the representation of the vehicle as a radically alternative and creatively fecund space, situated dynamically across the boundaries between the inside and the outside, between the private or personal sphere and the public or social arena, a powerful vessel that envelopes, protects and thus allows the characters to venture into another dimension (speed and mobility being an intrinsic form of in-between-ness, a momentary and absolute escape from any role codified and enacted ad nauseam within a familiar place), where they are able to both confront their innermost feelings and desires, and also contemplate the potential consequences of acknowledging those feelings and letting them out in the open.
In essence, the road movie is an invitation for the spectators to open up their minds to the magical possibilities and the frightening risks of moving out of one’s locus of comfort, and initiate change by letting the outside world invade their lives.
The driving force propelling most road movies […] is an embrace of the journey as a means of cultural critique. Road movies generally aim beyond the borders of cultural familiarity, seeking the unfamiliar for revelation, or at least for the thrill of the unknown. Such traveling, coded as defamiliarization, likewise suggests a mobile refuge from social circumstances felt to be lacking or oppressive in some way. This broadly conceived notion of cultural critique functions in road movies on many levels: cinematically, in terms of innovative traveling camera work, montage, and soundtrack; narratively, in terms of an open-ended, rambling plot structure; thematically, in terms of frustrated, often desperate characters lighting out for something better, someplace else. Thus the road movie celebrates subversion as a literal venturing outside of society. (David Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie, 2002: pages 1-2)