Road Movies

1
Road Movies

• A couple on the run
• Arthur Penns Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

2
What are road movies?

• Introduction by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Mark
  in Road Movie Book
• The 1969 ad campain for Easy Rider exclaims, A
  man went looking for America and couldnt find it
  anywhere, and this much-remembered sentiment
  condenses what is typically taken for granted as
  the ideological project of a road movie,
  regardless of what travel narrative it
  specifically recounts. Cohan and Mark Quest /
  Search

3
What are road movies?

• Road movies are too cool to address seriously
  socio-political issues. Instead, they express
  the fury and suffering at the extremities of
  civilised life, and give their restless
  protagonists the false hope of a one-way ticket
  to nowhere road movies are cowled in lurking
  menace, spontaneous mayhem and dead-end fatalism,
  never more than few roadstops away from abject
  lawlessness and haphazard bloodletting road
  movies have always been songs of the doomed,
  warnings that once you enter the open hinterlands
  between cities, youre on your own. Micahel
  Atkinson
• Fatalism - their adventure ends up in tragedy

4
What are road movies?

• A road movie provide a ready space for
  exploration of the tensions and crises of the
  historical moment during which it is produced.
  Cohan and Mark
• The Great Depression, the 1960s, the early 1990s
• A Hollywood genre - films that catches American
  dreams, tensions, and anxieties, even when
  imported by the motion picture industries of
  other nations. Cohan and Mark

5
What are road movies?

• Periodization - a postwar phenomenon Timothy
  Corrigan
• Road Movie finds its genric coherence in the
  coalescence of four related features (1) the
  breakdown of the family unit (2) in the road
  movie events act upon the characters the
  historical world is always too much of a
  conrtext, and objects along the road are usually
  menacing and materially assertive

6
What are road movies?

• (3) The road protagonist readily identifies
  with the means of mechanized transportation, the
  automobile or motorcycle, which becomes the only
  promise of self in a culture of mechanical
  reproduction (4) A genre traditionally focus,
  almost exclusively, on men and the absence of
  women Timothy Corrigan

7
What are road movies?

• The genre is defined by its repeated positioning
  of conservative values and rebellious desires
  As a result, the road movie genre has repeatedly
  worked, first, to set in opposition two
  contrasting myths central to American ideology,
  that of individualism and that of populism, and
  second, to use the road to imagine the nations
  culture, that space between the western desert
  and the eastern seaboard, either as a utopian
  fantasy of homogeneity and national coherence, or
  as a dystopic nightmare of social difference and
  reactionary politics. David Laderman
• A road movie is a dialectic of values and desires

8
History of Road Movies

• Prototypes films in the 1930s
• The Grapes of Wrath You Only Live Once It
  Happned One Night (1934)
• Later road movies were influenced by Jack
  Keruacs On the Road (1957) Two buddies road
  travel
• Paradigm shift from heterosexual couples to
  buddies

9
Real Bonnie and Clyde

• During the Great Depression Bonnie Parker and
  Clyde Barrow went on their two-year spree of
  robbery and violence (1932-34). The general
  attitude in the country was anti-government and
  Bonnie and Clyde were Robin Hood like popular
  anti-heroes capturing the imagination of the
  nation.

10
Historic Reference

• Nostalgic representation of the Depression era
• Popular political and cultural fantasy
  anti-government and anti-establishment

11
Historical Reference

• The 1960s liberalism and counter-cultural
  movements in the USA gave filmmakers a
  perspective in re-interpreting history
• Response to the class and race oppression

12
Historical Reference

• Its very interesting that during a screening of
  Bonnie and Clyde one evening, five Negros present
  there completely identified with Bonnie and
  Clyde. They were delighted. They said This is
  the way thats the way to go, baby. Those cats
  were all right. They really understood, because
  in a certain sense the American Negro has the
  same kind of attitude of I have nothing more to
  lose that was true during the Depression for
  Bonnie and Clyde. It is true now of the American
  Negro. He is really at the point of revolution
  its rebellion, not riot. Arthur Penn

13
Critiques

• Penns film not faithful to historical facts
• Glamorization of the protagonists Warren Beatty
  and Faye Dunaway too good looking and sexy
• Stylish costumes worn by the protagonists
• Romanticizing criminals and criminal actions
• The conservative critiques reveal the truth about
  the film

14
Freedom

• Bonnie and Clyde free themselves from the prison
  house of labour, domesticity, and social
  immobility
• Film is fantasy of escape
• The sense of doom their escape never succeeds
• (Films tragic closure)

15
Road Movie Styles

• Certain classic road-movie shots
• View from the outside of a car a front window
  frame characters inside the car

16
Road Movie Styles

• Characters caught in camera from a side window of
  a car

17
Road Movie Styles

• Characters with a car