Aroad movie is afilm genre in which the main characters leave home on aroad trip, typically altering the perspective from their everyday lives.[2] Road movies often depict travel in thehinterlands, with the films exploring the theme of alienation and examining the tensions and issues of the cultural identity of a nation or historical period; this is all often enmeshed in a mood of actual or potential menace, lawlessness, and violence,[3] a "distinctlyexistential air"[4] and is populated by restless, "frustrated, often desperate characters".[5] The setting includes not just the close confines of the car as it moves on highways and roads, but also booths in diners and rooms in roadside motels, all of which helps to create intimacy and tension between the characters.[6] Road movies tend to focus on the theme of masculinity (with the man often going through some type of crisis), some type of rebellion,car culture, and self-discovery.[7] The core theme of road movies is "rebellion against conservative social norms".[5]
There are two main narratives: the quest and the outlaw chase.[8] In the quest-style film, the story meanders as the characters make discoveries (e.g.,Two-Lane Blacktop from 1971).[8] In outlaw road movies, in which the characters are fleeing from law enforcement, there is usually more sex and violence (e.g.,Natural Born Killers from 1994).[8] Road films tend to focus more on characters' internal conflicts and transformations, based on their feelings as they experience new realities on their trip, rather than on the dramatic movement-based sequences that predominate inaction films.[1] Road movies do not typically use the standard three-act structure used in mainstream films; instead, an "open-ended, rambling plot structure" is used.[5]
The road movie keeps its characters "on the move", and as such the "car, thetracking shot, [and] wide and wild open space" are important iconography elements, similar to aWestern movie.[9] As well, the road movie is similar to a Western in that road films are also about a "frontiersmanship" and about the codes of discovery (often self-discovery).[9] Road movies often use themusic from the car stereo, which the characters are listening to, as the soundtrack[10] and in 1960s and 1970s road movies, rock music is often used (e.g.,Easy Rider from 1969 used a rock soundtrack[11] of songs fromJimi Hendrix,The Byrds andSteppenwolf).
While early road movies from the 1930s focused on couples,[6] in post-World War II films, usually the travellers are male buddies,[4] although in some cases, women are depicted on the road, either as temporary companions, or more rarely, as the protagonist couple (e.g.,Thelma & Louise from 1991).[9] The genre can also be parodied, or have protagonists that depart from the typical heterosexual couple or buddy paradigm, as withThe Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), which depicts a group ofdrag queens who tour the Australian desert.[9] Other examples of the increasing diversity of the drivers shown in 1990s and subsequent decades' road films areThe Living End (1992), about two gay, HIV-positive men on a road trip;To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), which is about drag queens, andSmoke Signals (1998), which is about two Indigenous men.[8] While rare, there are some road movies about large groups on the road (Get on the Bus from 1996) and lone drivers (Vanishing Point from 1971).
The road movie has been called an elusive and ambiguous film genre.[7] Timothy Corrigan states that road movies are a "knowingly impure" genre as they have "overdetermined and built-in genre-blending tendencies".[12] Devin Orgeron states that road movies, despite their literal focus on car trips, are "about the [history of] the cinema, about the culture of the image", with road movies created with a mixture of Classical Hollywood film genres.[12] The road movie genre developed from a "constellation of “solid” modernity, combining locomotion and media-motion" to get "away from the sedentarising forces of modernity and produc[e] contingency".[13]
Road movies are blended with other genres to create a number of subgenres, including: road horror (e.g.,Near Dark from 1987); road comedies (e.g.,Flirting with Disaster from 1996); road racing films (e.g.,Death Race 2000 from 1975) and rock concert tour films (e.g.,Almost Famous from 2000).[8]Film noir road movies includeDetour (1945),Desperate,The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947) andThe Hitch-Hiker (1953), all of which "establish fear and suspense around hitchhiking", and the outlaw-themed film noirsThey Live by Night (1948) andGun Crazy.[8] Film noir-influenced road films continued in theneo noir era, withThe Hitcher (1986),Delusion (1991),Red Rock West (1992), andJoy Ride (2001).[8]
Even though road movies are a significant and popular genre, it is an "overlooked strain of film history".[5] Major genre studies often do not examine road movies, and there has been little analysis of what qualifies as a road movie.[14]
The road movie is mostly associated with the United States, as it focuses on "peculiarly American dreams, tensions and anxieties".[14] US road movies examine the tension between the two foundational myths of American culture, which are individualism and populism, which leads to some road films depicting the open road as a "utopian fantasy" with a homogenous culture while others show it as a "dystopian nightmare" of extreme cultural differences.[15] US road movies depict the wide open, vast spaces of the highways as symbolizing the "scale and notionally utopian" opportunities to move up upwards and outwards in life.[16]
In US road movies, the road is an "alternative space" where the characters, now set apart from conventional society, can experience transformation.[17] For example, inIt Happened One Night (1934), a wealthy woman who goes on the road is liberated from her elite background and marriage to an immoral husband when she meets and experiences hospitality from regular, good-hearted Americans who she never would have met in her previous life, with middle America depicted as a utopia of "real community".[18] The scenes in road movies tend to elicit longing for a mythic past.[19]
American road movies have tended to be a white genre, withSpike Lee'sGet on the Bus (1996) being a notable exception, as its main characters are African-American men on a bus travelling to theMillion Man March (the film depicts the historic role of buses in the US civil rights movement).[20] Asian-American filmmakers have used the road movie to examine the role and treatment of Asian-Americans in the United States; examples includeWayne Wang'sChan Is Missing (1982), about a taxi driver trying to find about the Hollywood detective characterCharlie Chan, andAbraham Lim'sRoads and Bridges (2001), about an Asian-American prisoner who is sentenced to clean up garbage along a Midwestern highway.[21]
Australia's vast open spaces and concentrated population have made the road movie a key genre in that country, with films such asGeorge Miller's influentialMad Max film series, which were rooted in an Australian tradition for films with "dystopian andnoir themes with the destructive power of cars and the country’sharsh, sparsely populated land mass".[22] Australian road movies have been described as having a dystopian or gothic tone, as the road the characters travel on is often a "dead end", with the journey being more about "inward-looking" exploration than reaching the intended location.[23] In Australia, road movies have been called a "complex metaphor" which refers to the country's history, current situation, and to anxieties about the future.[23] TheMad Max series, including thefirst film and its sequelsMad Max 2,Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,Mad Max: Fury Road andFuriosa: A Mad Max Saga "have become canonical for their dystopic reinvention of the outback as a post-human wasteland where survival depends upon manic driving skills".[8]
Other Australian road movies includePeter Weir'sThe Cars That Ate Paris (1974), about a small town where the inhabitants cause road accidents to salvage the vehicles; the biker filmStone (1974) bySandy Harbutt, about a biker gang who witness a political cover-up murder; The (1981) thrillerRoadgames byRichard Franklin, about a truck driver who tracks down a serial killer in the Australian outback;Dead-end Drive-in (1986) byBrian Trenchard-Smith, about a dystopian future where drive-in theatres are turned into detention centres;Metal Skin (1994) by Geoffrey Wright about a street racer; andKiss or Kill (1997) byBill Bennett, a film noir-style road movie.[24]
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) has been called a "watershed gay road movie that addresses diversity in Australia".[8]Walkabout (1971),Backroads (1977), andRabbit-Proof Fence (2002) use a depiction of travelling through the Australian outback to address the issue of relations between white and Indigenous people.[8]
In 2005, Fiona Probyn described a subgenre of road movies about Indigenous Australians that she called "No Road" movies, in that they typically do not show a vehicle travelling on an asphalt road; instead, these films depict travel on a trail, often with Indigenous trackers being shown using their tracking abilities to discern hard-to-detect clues on the trail.[23] With the increasing depiction of racial minorities in Australian road movies, the "No Road" subgenre has also been associated with Asian-Australian films that depict travel using routes other than roads (e.g., the 2010 filmMother Fish, which depicts travel over water as it tells the story of theboat people refugees).[23] The iconography of car crashes in many Australian road movies (particularly the Mad Max series) has been called a symbol of white-Indigenous violence, a rupture point in the narrative which erases and forgets the history of this violence.[23]
Canada also has huge expanses of territory, which make the road movie also common in that country, where the genre is used to examine "themes of alienation and isolation in relation to an expansive, almost foreboding landscape of seemingly endless space", and explore how Canadian identity differs from the "less humble and self-conscious neighbours to the south", in United States.[25] Canadian road films includeDonald Shebib'sGoin' Down the Road (1970), threeBruce McDonald films (Roadkill (1989),Highway 61 (1991), andHard Core Logo (1996), a mockumentary about a punk rock band's road tour),Malcolm Ingram'sTail Lights Fade (1999) andGary Burns'The Suburbanators (1995).David Cronenberg'sCrash (1996) depicted drivers who get "perverse sexual arousal through the car crash experience", a subject matter which led toTed Turner lobbying against the film being shown in US theatres.[8]
Asian-Canadian filmmakers have made road films about the experience of Canadians of Asian origin, such asAnn Marie Fleming'sThe Magical Life of Long Tak Sam, which is about her search for her "Chinese grandfather, an itinerant magician and acrobat".[21] Other Asian-Canadian road movies look at their relatives experiences during the 1940s internment of Japanese Canadians by the Canadian government (e.g.,Lise Yasui'sFamily Gathering (1988),Rea Tajiri'sHistory and Memory (1991) andJanet Tanaka'sMemories from the Department of Amnesia (1991).[21]
European filmmakers of road movies appropriate the conventions established by American directors, while at the same time reformulating these approaches, by de-emphasizing the speed of the driver on the road, increasing the amount of introspection (often on themes such as national identity), and depicting the road trip as a search on the part of the characters.[26]
The German filmmakerWim Wenders explored the American themes of road movies through his European reference point in hisRoad Movie trilogy in the mid-1970s. They includeAlice in the Cities (1974),The Wrong Move (1975), andKings of the Road (1976).[27][28] All three films were shot by cinematographerRobby Müller and mostly take place inWest Germany.Kings of the Road includes stillness, which is unusual for road movies, and quietness (except for the rock soundtrack).[29] Other road movies by Wenders includeParis, Texas andUntil the End of the World.[30] Wender's road movies "filter nomadic excursions through a pensive Germanic lens" and depict "somber drifters coming to terms with their internal scars".[8]
France has a road movie tradition than stretches fromBertrand Blier'sLes Valseuses (1973) andAgnès Varda'sSans toit ni loi (about a homeless woman) to 1990s films such asMerci la vie (1991) andVirginie Despentes andCoralie Trinh Thi'sBaise-moi (a controversial film about two women revenging a rape), to 2000s films such asLaurent Cantet'sL'emploi du temps (2001) andCédric Kahn'sFeux rouges (2004).[31] While French road movies share the US road movie's focus on the theme of individual freedom, French movies also balance this value with equality and fraternity, according to the French Republican model of liberty-equality-fraternity.[32]
Neil Archer states that French and other Francophone (e.g., Belgium, Switzerland) road films focus on "displacement and identity", notably in regards to maghrebin immigrants and young people (e.g.,Yamina Benguigui'sInch'Allah Dimanche (2001),Ismaël Ferroukhi'sLa Fille de Keltoum (2001) andTony Gatlif'sExils (2004).[33] More broadly, European films are tending to use imagery of border-crossing and focusing on "marginal identities and economic migration", which can be seen inLukas Moodysson'sLilja 4-ever (2002), Michael Winterbottom'sIn This World (2002) andUlrich Seidl'sImport/Export (2007).[33] European road movies also examinepost-colonialism, "disclocation, memory and identity".[33]
Road movies from Spain have a strong American influence, with the films incorporating the road movie-comedy genre hybrid made popular in US films such asPeter Farrelly'sDumb and Dumber (1994). Spanish films includingLos años bárbaros,Carretera y manta,Trileros,Al final del Camino, andAirbag, which has been called the "most successful Spanish road movie of all time".[34]Airbag, along withSlam (2003),El mundo alrededor (2006) andLos managers, are examples of Spanish road films that, like US movies such asRoad Trip, uses the "road movie genre as a narrative framework for...gross-out sex comedy".[35] The director ofAirbag,Juanma Bajo Ulloa, states that he aimed to make fun of the road movie genre as established in North America, while still using the metamorphosis through road trip narrative that is popular in the genre (in this case, the main male character rejects his upper class girlfriend in favour of a prostitute he meets on the road).[36]Airbag also uses Spanish equivalents to the stock road movie setting and iconography, depicting "deserts, casinos and road clubs" and use the road movie action sequences (chases, car explosions, and crashes) that remind the viewer of similar work byTony Scott andOliver Stone.[36]
A second subtype of Spanish road movies is more influenced by the female road movies from the US, such asMartin Scorsese'sAlice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974),Jonathan Demme'sCrazy Mama (1975),Ridley Scott'sThelma & Louise (1991), andHerbert Ross'Boys on the Side (1995), in that they show a "less traditional" and more "visible, innovative, introspective, and realistic" type of woman onscreen.[37] Spanish road movies about women includeHola, ¿estás sola?,Lisboa,Fugitivas,Retorno a Hansala, andSin Dejar Huella address social issues about women, such as the "injustice and mistreatment" that women experience under "authoritarian patriarchal order."[38]Fugitivas depicts an American road movie genre convention: the "disintegration of the family and the community" and the "journey of transformation", as it depicts two fugitives on the run, whose distrust fades as the two women learn to trust each other from their adventures on the road.[39] The images in the film are blend of homage to US road movie conventions (gas stations, billboards) and "recognizable Spanish types", such as the "embittered drunkard".[40]
Other European road films includeIngmar Bergman'sWild Strawberries (1957), about an old professor travelling the roads of Sweden and picking up hitchhikers andJean-Luc Godard'sPierrot le fou (1965) about law-breaking lovers escaping on the road. Both of these films, as well asRoberto Rossellini'sVoyage in Italy (1953) and Godard'sWeekend (1967) have more "existential sensibility" or pauses for "philosophical digressions of a European bent", as compared with American road films.[8]Three Men and a Leg (1997) features several sketches from filmmakers and producers'Aldo, Giovanni & Giacomo's previous comedy productions overlaid with the rest of the movie's road-trip andromantic comedy atmosphere.[41] Other European road films includeChris Petit'sRadio On (1979), a Wim Wenders-influenced film set on the M4 motorway;Aki Kaurismäki'sLeningrad Cowboys Go America ( 1989), about a fictional Russian rock band which travels to the US; andTheo Angelopoulos'Landscape in the Mist, about a road trip from Greece to Germany.
Road movies made in Latin America are similar in feel to European road films.[8] Latin American road movies are usually about a cast of characters, rather than a couple or single person, and the films explore the differences between urban and rural regions and between north and south.[8]Luis Buñuel'sSubida al Cielo (Mexican Bus Ride, 1951), is about a poor rural person's trip into a big city to help his mother, who is dying. The road trip on this film is shown as a "carnivalesque pilgrimage" or "travelling circus", an approach also used inBye Bye Brazil (1979, Brazil),Guantanamera (1995, Cuba), andCentral do Brasil (Central Station, 1998, Brazil).[8] Some Latin American road movies are also set in the era of conquest, such asCabeza de Vaca (1991, Mexico). Movies about outlaws escaping from justice includeProfundo Carmesí (Deep Crimson, 1996, Mexico) andEl Camino (The Road, 2000, Argentina).[8]Y tu mamá también (And Your Mother Too, 2001, Mexico) is about two young male buddies who have sexual adventures on the road.[8]
Movies involving road movie genre while being rejected by mainstream media, gained huge popularity in Russianart cinema and surrounding post-Soviet cultures, slowly building their way into international film festivals. Well-known examples areMy Joy (2010),Bimmer (2003),Major (2013), andHow Vitka Chesnok Took Lyokha Shtyr to the Home for Invalids (2017). Some other movies incorporate a large portion of road movie style, for exampleMorphine (2008),Leviathan (2014),Cargo 200 (2007),Donbass (2018).
With themes ranging from crime, corruption and power to history, addiction and existence, road movies became an independent part of cinematic landscape. From the strong flow of existentialism, to theblack comedy style, the road movie experienced a new revival. Most precious are pieces fromSergei Loznitsa, in his early workMy Joy (2010) he used black noir style to tell the story of people falling together with destruction of governments after the fall of the Soviet Union. In his later workDonbass (2018), he takes an opposing style, turning to black comedy and satire to underline actual war tragedies in theRusso-Ukrainian War.
Indian screens saw a series of road movies with experimental filmmakerRam Gopal Varma's works such asKshana Kshanam.Rachel Dwyer, a reader inworld cinema at theUniversity of London-Department of South Asia, marked Varma's contribution into the new-agefilm noir.[42][43] The film received critical reception at theAnn Arbor Film Festival, which led to a series of genre-benders likeMani Ratnam'sThiruda Thiruda, and Varma'sDaud,Anaganaga Oka Roju andRoad.[44] Subsequently 21st centurybollywood movies witnessed a surge of motion-pictures such asRoad, Movie, nominated for theTokyo Sakura Grand Prix Award, theTribeca Film Festival,[45][46] and the Generation 14plus at the60th Berlin International Film Festival in 2010.[47][48]Liars Dice explores the story of a young mother from a remote village who, going in search of her missing husband, goes missing, the film examines the human cost of migration to cities and the exploitation of migrant workers. It wasIndia's Official Entry for theBest Foreign Language Film for the87th Academy Awards.[49][50] It won special prize atSofia International Film Festival.[51][52] InKarwaan, the protagonist is forced to set out on a road trip fromBengaluru toKochi after he loses his father in an accident, but the body delivered to him is of the mother of a woman in another state.[53]
Ryan Gilbey ofThe Guardian was broadly positive aboutZoya Akhtar'sZindagi Na Milegi Dobara; he wrote, "It's still playing to full houses, and you can see why. Slick it may be. But tourist board employees representing the variousSpanish cities flattered in the movie are not the only ones who will come out grinning", and that he found the movie "stubbornly un-macho" for a buddy film.[54]Piku tells the story of the short-tempered Piku Banerjee (Deepika Padukone), her grumpy, aging father Bhashkor (Amitabh Bachchan) and Rana Chaudhary (Irrfan Khan), who is stuck between the father-daughter duo, as they embark on a journey fromDelhi toKolkata.[55] InNagesh Kukunoor's children's filmDhanak a blind kid and his sister set off alone on a 300 km journey traversing testing Indian terrain fromJaislamer toJodhpur, the film won theCrystal Bear Grand Prix for Best Children's Film, and Special Mention for the Best Feature Film by The Children's Jury for Generation Kplus at the65th Berlin International Film Festival[56]Finding Fanny is based on a road trip set inGoa and follows the journey of five dysfunctional friends who set out on a road trip in search of Fanny.[57]The Good Road is told in ahyperlink format, where several stories are intertwined, with the center of the action being a highway in the rural lands ofGujarat near a town inKutch.[58]
Several road movies have been produced inAfrica, includingCocorico! Monsieur Poulet (1977,Niger);The Train of Salt and Sugar (2016,Mozambique);Hayat (2016,Morocco); Touki Bouki (1973, Senegal) andBorders (2017,Burkina Faso).[59][60]
The genre has its roots in spoken and written tales of epic journeys, such as theOdyssey[5] and theAeneid. The road film is a standard plot employed byscreenwriters. It is a type ofbildungsroman, a story in which the hero changes, grows or improves over the course of the story. It focuses more on the journey rather than the goal. David Laderman lists other literary influences on the road movie, such asDon Quixote (1615), which uses a description of a journey to create social satire;The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), a story about a journey down the Mississippi River that is full of social commentary;Heart of Darkness (1902), about a journey down a river in the Belgian Congo to search for a rogue colonial trader; andWomen in Love (1920), which describes "travel and mobility" while also providing social commentary about the woes of industrialization.[5] Laderman states thatWomen in Love particularly lays the groundwork for the future road films, as it showed a couple who rebelled against social norms by leaving their familiar location and going on an aimless, meandering journey.[5]
Steinbeck's novelThe Grapes of Wrath (1939) depicts a family that struggles to survive on the road during the Great Depression, a book that has been called "America's best-known proletarian road saga".[5] The movie version of the novel, made a year later, depicts the hungry, weary family's travel onRoute 66 using "montage sequences, reflected images of the road on windshields and mirrors", and shots taken from the driver's point of view to create a sense of movement and place.[61] Even though Henry Miller'sThe Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1947) is not a fictional work, it captures the mood of frustration, restlessness and aimlessness that became prevalent in the road movie.[5] In the book, which describe's Miller's cross-country journey across the United States, he criticizes the nation's descent into materialism.[5]
Western films such asJohn Ford'sStagecoach (1939) have been called "proto-road movies."[62] In the film, an unusual group of travellers, including a banker, prostitute, escaped prisoner and a military officer's wife, move through the dangerous desert trails.[63] Even though the travellers are so unlike each other, the mutual danger they must face in travelling throughGeronimo's Apache territory requires them to work together to create a "utopia of...community".[61] The difference between older stories about wandering characters and the road movie is technological: with road movies, the hero travels by car, motorcycle, bus or train, making road movies a representation of modernity's advantages and social ills.[15] The on-the-road plot was used at the birth of American cinema but blossomed in the years afterWorld War II, reflecting a boom in automobile production and the growth of youth culture. Early road movies have been criticized by someprogressives for their "casual misogyny", "fear of otherness", and for not examining issues such as power, privilege, and gender[62] and for mostly showing white people.[64]
_-_10.png)
The road movie of the pre-WW II era was changed by the publication ofJack Kerouac'sOn the Road in 1957, as it sketched out the future for the road movie and provided its "master narrative" of exploration, questing, and journeying. The book includes many descriptions of driving in cars. It also depicted the character Sal Paradise, a middle class college student who goes on the road to seek material for his writing career, a bounded journey with a clear start and finish which differs from the open ended wandering of previous films, with characters making chance encounters with other drivers who influence where one travels or ends up.[65] To contrast the intellectual Sal character, Kerouac has the juvenile delinquent Dean, a wild, fast-driving character who represents the idea that the road provides liberation.[66]
By depicting a movie character who was marginalized and who could not be incorporated into mainstream American culture, Kerouac opened the way for road movies to depict a more diverse range of characters, rather than just heterosexual couples (e.g.,It Happened One Night), groups on the move (e.g.,The Grapes of Wrath), notably the pair of male buddies.[67]On the Road and another novel published in the same era,Vladimir Nabokov's novelLolita (1955), have been called "two monumental road novels that rip back and forth across American with a subversive erotic charge."[8]
In the 1950s, there were "wholesome" road comedies such asBob Hope andBing Crosby'sRoad to Bali (1952),Vincente Minnelli'sThe Long, Long Trailer (1954) and theDean Martin andJerry Lewis filmHollywood or Bust (1956).[8] There were not many 1950s road films, but "postwar youth culture" was depicted inThe Wild One (1953) andRebel Without a Cause (1955).[8]
Timothy Corrigan states that post-WW II, the genre of road films became more codified, with features solidifying such as the use of characters experiencing "amnesia, hallucinations and theatrical crisis".[5] David Laderman states that road movies have a modernist aesthetic approach, as they focus on "rebellion, social criticism, and liberating thrills", which shows "disillusionment" with mainstream political and aesthetic norms.[5] Awareness of the "road picture" as a separate genre came only in the 1960s withBonnie and Clyde[citation needed] andEasy Rider.[68] Road movies were an important genre in the late 1960s and 1970s era of theNew Hollywood, with films such asTerrence Malick'sBadlands andRichard Sarafian'sVanishing Point (1971) showing an influence fromBonnie and Clyde.[69]
There may have been influences from French cinema in the creation ofBonnie and Clyde;David Newman andRobert Benton have stated that they were influenced byJean-Luc Godard'sA bout de souffle (1960) andFrançois Truffaut'sTirez sur la pianiste (1960).[70] More generally, Devin Orgeron states that American road movies were based on post-WW II European cinema's own take on the American road film approach, showing a mutual influence between US and European filmmakers in this genre.[70]
The addition of violence to the sexual tension of road movies in the late 1960s and in subsequent decades can be seen as a way to create more excitement and "frisson".[6] From the 1930s to 1960s, merely showing a man and woman on a road trip was exciting for audience, as all the motel stays and closeness had implied, yet deferred, consummation of the sexual attraction between the characters (sex could not be depicted due to theMotion Picture Production Code).[6] WithBonnie and Clyde (1967) andNatural Born Killers (1994), the heterosexual couple are united by their involvement in murder; as well, with jail hanging over their heads, there can be no return to domestic life at the end of the film.[71]
There have been three historical eras of the "outlaw-rebel" road movie: the post-WW IIfilm noir era (e.g.,Detour), the late 1960s era which was rocked by the Vietnam War (Easy Rider andBonnie and Clyde), and the post-Reagan era of the 1990s, when the "masculinist heroics of the Gulf War gave way to closer scrutiny" (My Own Private Idaho,Thelma & Louise andNatural Born Killers).[72] In the 1970s, there were low-budget outlaw films depicting chases, such asEddie Macon's Run.[30] In the 1980s, there were rural Southern road movies such asSmokey and the Bandit and theCannonball Run chase films of 1981 and 1984.[30] The outlaw couple movie was reinvented in the 1990s with a postmodernist take in films such asWild at Heart,Kalifornia andTrue Romance.[73]
While the first road movies described the discovery of new territories or pushing the boundaries of a nation, which was a core message of early Western films in the United States, road movies were later used to show how national identities were changing, such as whichEdgar G. Ulmer’sDetour (1945), a film noir about a musician travelling from New York City to Hollywood who sees a nation absorbed by greed, orDennis Hopper’sEasy Rider, which showed how American society was transformed by the social and cultural trends of the late 1960s.[1] The New Hollywood era films made use of the new film technologies in the road movie genre, such as "fast film stock" and lightweight cameras, as well as incorporating filmmaking approaches from European cinema, such as "elliptical narrative structure and self-reflexive devices, elusive development of alienated characters; bold traveling shots and montage sequences.[5]
Road movies have been called a post-WW II genre, as they track key post-war cultural trends, such as the breakup of the traditional family structure, in which male roles were destabilized; there is focus on menacing events which impact the characters who are on the move; there is an association between the character and the mode of transportation being used (e.g., a car or motorcycle), with the car symbolizing the self in the modern culture; and there is usually a focus on men, with women typically being excluded, creating a "male escapist fantasy linking masculinity to technology".[14] Despite these examples of the post-WW II aspects of road movies, Cohan and Hark argue that road movies go back to the 1930s.[74]
In the 2000s, a new crop of road movies was produced, includingVincent Gallo'sBrown Bunny (2003),Alexander Payne'sSideways (2004),Jim Jarmusch'sBroken Flowers (2005) andKelly Reichardt'sOld Joy (2006) and scholars are taking more interest in examining the genre.[75] The British Film Institute highlights ten post-2000 road films that show that "[t]here’s still plenty of gas left in the road movie genre".[76] The BFI's top 10 includeAndrea Arnold’sAmerican Honey (2016), which used "mostly non-professional actors";Alfonso Cuarón'sY tu mamá también (2001), about Mexican teens on the road; The Brown Bunny (2003), which garnered publicity for its "infamous fellatio scene";Walter Salles'The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), about Che Guevera's epic motorcycle trip;Mark Duplass andJay Duplass'The Puffy Chair (2005), the "firstmumblecore road movie";Broken Flowers (2005);Jonathan Dayton andValerie Faris'Little Miss Sunshine (2006), about a family's trip in a VW camper van;Old Joy (2006);Alexander Payne'sNebraska (2013), which depicts a father and son on a road trip;Steven Knight'sLocke (2013), about a construction executive taking stressful calls on a road trip; andJafar Panahi'sTaxi Tehran (2015), about a cab driver ferrying strange passengers around the city.[76]Timothy Corrigan has called the postmodern road movie a "borderless refuse bin" of "mise en abyme" reflection, reflecting a modern audience that is not able to think of a "naturalized history".[5] Atkinson calls contemporary road movies an "ideogram of human desire and a last-ditch search for self" designed for an audience that was raised watching TV, particularly open-ended serial programs.[5]
 | This sectionneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources in this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Road movie" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(April 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Note, that the Country column is the country of origin and/or financing, and does not necessarily represent the country or countries depicted in each film.
Australia's sheer size and relatively concentrated population means much of its cinema has either taken the form of road movies or contains aspects of the road film genre.
