Road Movies

The promotional image for The Dressmaker (Jocelyn Moorhouse 2015) is a long-shot of the central character, Tilly, adorned in 1950s Dior-styled couture, standing poised to conquer rural Australia with her Singer sewing machine at her feet. This image of a strong willed, independent white female undertaking a journey in rural Australia recurred across Australian screens in various iterations in 2015. Spanning multiple genres, The Dressmaker (Jocelyn Moorhouse), Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller), Looking for Grace (Sue Brooks) and The Daughter (Simon Stone) – all released in 2015 – depict daughters who possess a strong sense of self and agency, as well as a desire to explore something other, between home and hinterland. The daughters embark on journeys through continually re-written landscapes that evoke family dramas, settler narratives and national traumas. This is the next generation of daughters, remapping the journeys of the daughters that have punctuated the Australian screen from its earliest period.

A detailed history and analysis of the film Hard Core Logo (1996) by Bruce McDonald, this book considers the film in relation to Canadian cinema and music, the road movie, and the study of masculinity. Part of the Canadian Cinema series from the University of Toronto Press.
http://www.amazon.com/Bruce-McDonalds-Hard-Canadian-Cinema/dp/1442612738

Se puede consultar a partir de la página 589, del tomo en PDF: http://www.cebusal.es/download/publicaciones/libro-cihalcep-web.pdf
Esta ponencia interpretará "El puente" (Bardem, 1977) desde la óptica literaria, explicitando la influencia del "Quijote"; además de detallar la huella de la estética felliniana; y reclamar su valía en la trayectoria del director.

The media is a very powerful medium. It does not only entertain us in every possible way, through the radio, the TV, newspaper, magazines, and the movies but can also influence the viewer immensely and has done so throughout many decades. The media can allow the viewer to dive into a new world and can teach about morals, behavior, and also gender roles. The television and movie industry have especially influenced audiences worldwide as to how to treat and look at females and males as well as their perceived position in our society.

The road movies have been a very male dominated genre. Starting with movies such as Easy Rider and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the genre embodied freedom, liberty, escape, and a journey to find oneself. Women were, at first, a side cast in this genre and were only present to show how strong the bond between the male protagonists was or to prove that the men were not homosexual. Thelma & Louise was the first road movie that put two female protagonists at the center of the movie. It is considered a gender revolutionary movie that paved the road for other non-mainstream movies.

In this paper I will analyze the gender roles of Thelma & Louise and to what extent if at all the characters are portraying authentic and realistic gender roles. I argue that Thelma & Louise is not a feminist and/or gender revolutionary movie and that it is in fact, just like any other male buddy road movie.

《五朵金花》（王家乙，1959）通常被作为少数民族题材的喜剧与音乐风光电影探讨，本文探究其如何将社会主义背景下的性别解放与民族平等主题编织进公路叙事。将《五朵金花》作为“公路电影”研究不仅可以挑战此类型的西方中心框架，也会赋予影片新的解读视角，如位于电影核心的“社会主义道路”的时间与空间隐喻。在此过程中，民间文化尤其是民歌及当时尚属新奇的彩色摄影呈现的乐观性暗示了其社会主义现实主义风格。除了影片叙事中的旅途及社会主义的象征性“旅途”，《五朵金花》本身跨越多个国家的旅途也使其在“冷战”时期“文化外交”方面扮演了重要角色。于是，社会主义现实主义与公路电影的跨国元素相遇与重叠，创造一种旅行世界的多层次流动。

This article identifies a particular subgenre of the road narrative, the transgender road narrative, analyzing the film _Transamerica_ and the novel Nevada as representative
examples. The first part draws on transgender studies scholarship, showing how these texts both depict a long history of trans (im)mobility and engage with the affective
geographies of gender transitioning, including the idea of the body as home. The second part draws on ecocriticism and environmental humanities scholarship, comparing how
Transamerica and Nevada depict landscapes and environments in relation to trans bodies. This article thus takes this subgenre as an opportunity to explore the intersection of transgender issues and environmental issues and subsequently to develop a new line of
inquiry that we might call “trans ecology.”

Most movies pre-2000 focused on feminine stereotypes conceived within the confined ambit of societal constructs. It is only with the millennium that scriptwriters became bolder in their conception of femininity. Directors and women actors have begun experimenting with unconventional feminine roles which are definitively plausible. The portrayals of new-age peripatetic women like Deepika Padukone’s single and successful architect Piku Banerjee, living with her septuagenarian father or Paravathy’s urbane, sophisticated, English speaking, corporate executive, the widowed Jaya Shashidharan, prove that fixities have given way to flexibilities in portrayal and form. This chapter seeks to undertake a comprehensive study of the idea of femininity in cinematic rites of passage through an in-depth analysis of Shoojit Sircar’s Piku (2015) and Tanuja Chandra’s Qarib Qarib Singlle (2017), and show how itinerant women protagonists are negotiating identities by challenging alterity.

Abstract:
The paper begins with a survey of theoretical approaches to the literary genre
that lays the ground for examining the conceptual and thematic diversification of the road movie during the 1960s. An outline of the exemplary characteristics of the film genre in question and its critical assessment follows. In the focus of my analysis stand S. Kubrick’s adaptation of V. Nabokov’s  "Lolita", A. Penn’s  "Bonnie and Clyde", F. Coppola’s identity quest "The Rain People", and M. Antonioni’s controversial "Zabriskie Point". Instead of tales about re-integrating trips and ‘coming home’, they display dispersive narratives of journeys reaching the point of no return. Each one is a story of transgression and subversion of established values, loss of meaning, and fruitless effort to regain it. All of them are works of outstanding or emerging film auteurs, whose thematic and narrative challenges, as well as visual inventions, maintain the open and undetermined character of the 1960s road movies.
Keywords:
genre theory, historicity, film auteur, transgression, counterculture, identity, film noir

Despite its association with social criticism, the road movie genre frequently privi- leges a western, male subjectivity and presents unquestioningly his right to travel into the other’s space. The films of Tony Gatlif frequently depict westerners travelling into North Africa and eastern Europe; however, the romanticism inherent in this movement is undercut by the films’ insistent marking of these journeys as error. Deprived of the privileged relationship to space enjoyed by the classic road movie protagonist, Gatlif’s characters are instead enveloped by the spaces through which they journey in a manner that recasts the oppositions such as inside/outside and centre/periphery through which western spatial privilege is maintained. This article focuses in particular on Gatlif’s 2004 film Exils and its depiction of the exile’s return to his homeland.

The goal of this presentation is to show part of the results of the author’s Master’s dissertation conducted at the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation in 2020. This study builds on the work developed by Professor Michael Cronin in the books Translation Goes to the Movies (2009) and Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation (2000). This presentation aims at answering the following question: what are the visual and thematic choices in the representation of intralingual translation in Brazilian cinematic travel narratives? The primary materials are two Brazilian films: Central Station (Water Salles, 1998) and Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures (Marcelo Gomes, 2005). The multiple codes of film language are important devices in the representation of intralingual translations in film, as together with language itself, they create a different set of codes, in other words, a new expanded language. For this reason, the chosen method of analysis is an interpretation of Casetti & Di Chio’s (1998: 126) approach for analysing the filmic text, which are: isolation, identification and interpretation. It is concluded that the thematic choices in the representation of intralingual translation in Brazilian cinematic travel narratives revolve around: 1) the effects of intralingual translation in each of the travellers’ identities; 2) the roles of intralingual translation in the relationship forged between travellers and; 3) the roles of intralingual translation in the relationship forged between travellers and secondary characters. In order to showcase the three themes, the visual choices in both films mostly rely on editing and frame composition. Symmetry proved to be the most relevant visual aspect to both cinematic narratives. The findings of this study reinforce that translation studies, film studies, and the study of travel narratives can benefit from one another as fields of research.

King Corn and Fast Food Nation have mainstreamed an entertaining but critical view of the fast food industry. The theory of defamiliarization, the genre of environmental film, and environmental rhetoric (comic vs. melodramatic modes) structure the analysis. As a tongue-in-cheek investigation, King Corn parodies the pastoral genre, and is innovative in its use of visual narrative, and shifting points of view. As a melodrama Fast Food Nation draws on many genres and motifs, including “coming to America,” and monkey-wrenching. FFN expands the previously humorous satire of “eating crap” (pioneered by Super Size Me) to shed light on those who are “treated like shit” (workers and animals). Collectively the films critique the U.S. “bigger is better” mentality, and seem to fulfill Asturias’ prophetic words about the consequences of the lack of a land ethic.

"Prendre la route quand on est une femme : la représentation des femmes dans les road movies, de Thelma et Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991) à Mad Max : Fury Road (Georges Miller, 2015)". Communication lors de la journée d'étude des Masters sur le Genre, organisée par l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, le 14/03/2016.

This draft paper explores the prevalence of landscape narratives in art and cinema containing post-apocalyptic futures, bushranger mythology and vigilantism, with a focus on the type of masculinity reflected within these contexts. I will introduce the kind of masculinity that is attributed to Australian men as part of a national myth of character, and will examine various dystopic film narratives, such as Mad Max 2 (1981) and its recent counterpart The Rover (2014). In other words, I am drawn to narratives that feature a decline of civilisation, are set in an expansive Australian landscape, and often contain troubled male protagonists. I wish to demonstrate that this landscape, and its history of violence, hostility and suffering, feeds into post-colonial representations of reworked historical narratives and characters. Here, I link the American frontier to Australian representations of the fringe of white settlement via film theorist David Melbye's theory on landscape allegory. I also present creative works of my own that were produced in relation to these ideas, and use them to explore male characters not only as a facet of Australian cultural identity, but also in relation to wider concerns of masculinity and nature. I conclude with a discussion about Australian artists of my generation who are also tackling the issue of 'Aussie' masculinity.

This essay surveys the theme of the journey to Alaska as a quest in American cinema. The films Into the Wild (Sean Penn, 2007) and the documentary Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005) are my primary focus. However, the discussion ranges over a dozen films that are located in or on the way to Alaska, from Charlie Chaplin's Gold Rush (1925) to Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (2008). The Penn and Herzog films extend a tendency to imagine Alaska as an "othered" dimension. Their critique of the "Lower 48" lifestyle functions as a necessary cleansing that must precede more egalitarian concepts and practices of sustainable living.

Die Berlinale leistete in diesem Jahr eine verstärkte Annäherung zwischen Film und Kunst – mit Streifen wie The Future von der Performancekünstlerin Miranda July, Dirty Eyes des Konzeptkünstlers Lawrence Weiner oder The Host and the Cloud des Performance- und Videokünstlers Pierre Huyghe. Auch der spanische Aktionskünstler Santiago Sierra, Jahrgang 1966, ist in diesem Jahr mit seinem Erstling No, Global Tour beim „Forum Expanded" der Berlinale zu Gast.

Il contributo analizza la rappresentazione dello spazio americano, e del movimento attraverso lo spazio, in "Strada a doppia corsia" ("Two-Lane Blacktop", Monte Hellman, 1971), e considera quel film come un caso del tutto particolare di "road movie". In effetti, "Strada a doppia corsia" è un road movie impossibile, che evita sistematicamente ogni classica mitologia legata alla strada, all'automobilismo, al paesaggio statunitense. Road movie depotenziato, sottratto dello scenario mitico, del protagonista ideologico del film americano classico, cioè dello spazio, il film di Hellman mette alla prova la validità del mito del viaggio attraverso gli Stati Uniti facendolo scontrare con il mutismo di un paesaggio che in ogni occasione sembra indifferente.

This extract provided by Edinburgh University Press includes the full introduction, the table of contents, and a link to the book's page on the EUP website.

Abstract:
Over the past two decades road cinema has become an increasingly popular form of expression for European directors. Focusing on a corpus of films from France, Belgium and Switzerland, including works by Ismaël Ferroukhi, Bouli Lanners, Aki Kaurismäki and Jacqueline Audry amongst many others, French-language Road Cinema contends that nowhere is the impulse to remap the spaces and identities of ‘New Europe’ more evident than in French-language cinema. Drawing on mobility studies, cultural geography and film theory, this innovative work sketches out the flexible yet distinctive parameters of contemporary French-language road cinema, and argues for an understanding of the ‘road movie’ not as a genre but as a thematic and formal template that crosses cinematic categories to bring together a wide array of films that narrate the movements of migrants, tourists and business executives.

"Représentations de la wilderness dans les road movies féminins de l’Ouest américain : de la figure de la femme sauvage à la quête de la Terre Promise." Intervention pour la journée d'étude "Images et usages de la wilderness au Canada et aux États-Unis", organisée par l'Université Paul-Valéry-Montpellier III, le 12/10/2018.

A number of works have touched upon the issue of a road journey of ordinary people who “travel for travel’s sake” or take the road to redefine community or themselves. But what happens when two gay males are on the road? An American director/writer Gus Van Sant in his film My Own Private Idaho (1991) put the marginalized and homeless double-protagonists in trouble with themselves and made them “hit the road” for self-transformation. This work is an examination of Gus Van Sant’s queer film My Own Private Idaho and its main aim is to encounter the metaphorics of the road therapy. How does the road therapy work? Is My Own Private Idaho a “therapy” in a ‘masculinist’ genre?  Does “every path go to the thing”? Does the road have its ending?

Pour plusieurs créateurs, la route se présente comme une structure favorisant le rassemblement des images, que celles-ci soient fixes ou mouvantes, tangibles ou intérieures. L’essai Vers l’infini en défilement : prendre la route s’intéresse à la place qu’occupe la route au sein de pratiques artistiques alimentées par la déambulation et, plus largement, par l’idée du voyage. Se référant principalement au contexte routier nord-américain, elle s’articule par-delà les frontières disciplinaires, à partir d’un corpus partagé entre différents champs de création.

Des États-Unis à l'Argentine, de la Colombie à l'Iran, il n'est de cinématographie au monde qui ne fasse la part belle au voyage, que celui-ci représente un élément scénaristique ou la notion de franchissement des frontières géographiques, esthétiques ou éthiques (transgression). De la rue à la route, des rails à l'espace, des bikers aux fugitifs, des travellings aux pauses contemplatives, les façons de filmer le voyage sont multiples et ne cessent d'évoluer, comme autant de reflets du monde moderne, pris entre la facilité de communiquer et de se déplacer et le désir de fuir pour retrouver une nature rêvée. Conquête de l'Ouest ou de l'espace, quête de l'El Dorado ou sortie de route, voyage en solitaire ou portrait de groupes multilingues, la route au cinéma trace des croisements et des itinéraires communs entre Kubrick, Spielberg, Eastwood, Sorín ou Panahi. Les analyses réunies dans ce volume dépeignent les constantes et les variantes du road movie d'Hollywood à Téhéran, des années 1940 à nos jours.

Fort du succès critique et commercial de Drugstore Cowboy (1989) et My Own Private Idaho (1991), Gus Van Sant s'attelle à l'adaptation de Even Cowgirls Get The Blues (1993), roman tardif de la beat Generation, mouvement littéraire et artistique dans lequel il puise nombre de ses sources d'inspiration. Cette oeuvre semble s'inscrire dans la continuité formelle et thématique de ses deux opus précédents, flirtant avec les ailleurs de la route et de la drogue, les figures de la jeunesse marginale, l'homosexualité et les questions de genre, la culture underground et le communautarisme, sur toile de fond de paysage naturel américain. Le roman éponyme de Tom Robbins 1 (1976), raconte l'histoire de Sissy Hankshaw, née avec des pouces hypertrophiés d'une trentaine de centimètres qui feront d'elle la meilleure auto-stoppeuse au monde. Son destin extraordinaire la confrontera à des personnages singuliers, Indiens natifs, transsexuels, cowgirls lesbiennes et féministes ou encore vieux sage asiatique aux origines incertaines. Bref, tout un microcosme psychédélique, fidèle aux topoï du roman beat. À la lumière de certains de ces motifs, il apparaît que l'adaptation filmique du roman ne se limite pas à une reprise en règle de tous les lieux communs du genre, mais qu'une hypothèse de lecture plus ambiguë, plus nuancée, se dessine. En actualisant dans son film les stéréotypes de la culture beat, Gus Van Sant cherche à les déplacer, à les ébranler, pour en révéler les failles et les limites. Une démarche qui dévoile le jeu conscient et sophistiqué du réalisateur avec les modalités du road-movie mais aussi du western, et se propose de mettre au jour la prise de distance de Gus Van Sant avec la notion de genre. Modèles de l'emprunt Le personnage de Sissy, emblématique figure du stopper, s'inscrit dans la droite lignée des personnages nomades de la beat, épopée libertaire qui célèbre « non plus le voyage lettré vers une destination guidée par l'idéologie du XIX ème siècle, mais le voyage pour lui-même, tel qu'en lui-même, n'ayant d'autre finalité que l'avancée vers des terres toujours plus lointaines » 2. Après un prologue centré sur l'enfance de l'héroïne, le récit élude paradoxalement le voyage de cette dernière à travers les États-Unis et s'ouvre sur son arrivée à New York au terme de onze années d'errance. Le style de Tom Robbins épouse la liberté de ton emblématique des écrivains beat, qui s'affranchissent des conventions linéaires du

The article examines how Death Proof (Tarantino, 2007) subverts both gender and genre by mixing several genres (the slasher, the car movie, the buddy movie) generally considered to be male, either at the diegetic level (e.g. the main characters) or at the level of reception (i.e. the target audience). The film's play on gender and genre, which is clearly based on the idea that film genres are gendered, is, then, enabled by the very discursivity of these norms. The article also shows how Tarantino took into account feminist film theory, namely Carol Clover and Laura Mulvey, when making Death Proof, suggesting that film genre, for Tarantino, is not so much a matter of corpus as of discourses, including both texts and context, production and reception; the film's visual effects underline, for instance, what Rick Altman calls the “pragmatic” dimension of film genre. The author comes to the conclusion that Death Proof could be considered a hybrid, a horror-car-buddy movie “for gi...

Ouvert à tou·te·s (masterant·e·s, doctorant·e·s, chercheur·e·s de toutes disciplines), ce séminaire entend fédérer un ensemble de travaux se proposant d’étudier les films ou les cinémas dits « de genre », tout en réfléchissant aux différents sens de ce qualificatif polysémique et à la variété de ses usages sociaux.
Le séminaire bénéficie du soutien du Labex ICCA et s’inscrit dans les activités de l’IRCAV. Il se déroulera une fois par mois (10 novembre, 8 décembre, 12 janvier, 16 février, 9 mars et 13 avril) le vendredi de 15h à 17h à la Maison de la Recherche de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Sa séance inaugurale du vendredi 10 novembre 2017 accueillera Laurent Jullier (« Le mélodrame, genre ou mode narratif ? ») et Yohann Chanoir (« Les films sur le Moyen Age : un cinéma qui défie la loi du genre ? »).