Road movie

The road movie has been called an elusive and ambiguous film genre. 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. 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). == Country or region of production ==

United States The road movie is mostly associated with the United States, as it focuses on "peculiarly American dreams, tensions and anxieties". 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. '' (1934) is about a rich woman who learns about regular Americans when she travels the highway system by car. In American road movies, the road is an "alternative space" where the characters, now set apart from conventional society, can experience transformation. For example, in It 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". The scenes in road movies tend to elicit longing for a mythic past. American road movies have tended to be a white genre, with Spike Lee's Get on the Bus (1996) being a notable exception, as its main characters are African-American men on a bus travelling to the Million Man March (the film depicts the historic role of buses in the American civil rights movement). Asian-American filmmakers have used the road movie to examine the role and treatment of Asian-Americans in the United States; examples include Wayne Wang's Chan Is Missing (1982), about a taxi driver trying to find about the Hollywood detective character Charlie Chan, and Abraham Lim's Roads and Bridges (2001), about an Asian-American prisoner who is sentenced to clean up garbage along a Midwestern highway. Australia Australia's vast open spaces and concentrated population have made the road movie a key genre in that country, with films such as George Miller's influential Mad Max film series, which were rooted in an Australian tradition for films with "dystopian and noir themes with the destructive power of cars and the country’s harsh, sparsely populated land mass". 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. 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. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) has been called a "watershed gay road movie that addresses diversity in Australia". Canadian road films include Donald Shebib's ''Goin' Down the Road (1970), three Bruce McDonald films (Roadkill (1989), Highway 61 (1991), and Hard Core Logo'' (1996), a mockumentary about a punk rock band's road tour), Malcolm Ingram's Tail Lights Fade (1999) and Gary Burns' The Suburbanators (1995). David Cronenberg's Crash (1996) depicted drivers who get "perverse sexual arousal through the car crash experience", a subject matter which led to Ted Turner lobbying against the film being shown in US theatres. The German filmmaker Wim Wenders explored the American themes of road movies through his European reference point in his Road Movie trilogy in the mid-1970s. They include Alice in the Cities (1974), The Wrong Move (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976). All three films were shot by cinematographer Robby Müller and mostly take place in West Germany. Kings of the Road includes stillness, which is unusual for road movies, and quietness (except for the rock soundtrack). Other road movies by Wenders include Paris, Texas and Until the End of the World. Wender's road movies "filter nomadic excursions through a pensive Germanic lens" and depict "somber drifters coming to terms with their internal scars". 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. 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's ''Inch'Allah Dimanche'' (2001), Ismaël Ferroukhi's La Fille de Keltoum (2001) and Tony Gatlif's Exils (2004). More broadly, European films are tending to use imagery of border-crossing and focusing on "marginal identities and economic migration", which can be seen in Lukas Moodysson's Lilja 4-ever (2002), Michael Winterbottom's In This World (2002) and Ulrich Seidl's Import/Export (2007). Airbag, along with Slam (2003), El mundo alrededor (2006) and Los managers, are examples of Spanish road films that, like US movies such as Road Trip, uses the "road movie genre as a narrative framework for...gross-out sex comedy". The director of Airbag, 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). 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 by Tony Scott and Oliver Stone. Spanish road movies about women include Hola, ¿estás sola?, Lisboa, Fugitivas, Retorno a Hansala, and Sin Dejar Huella address social issues about women, such as the "injustice and mistreatment" that women experience under "authoritarian patriarchal order." 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. 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". Other European road films include Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957), about an old professor travelling the roads of Sweden and picking up hitchhikers and Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965) about law-breaking lovers escaping on the road. Both of these films, as well as Roberto Rossellini's Voyage in Italy (1953) and Godard's Weekend (1967) have more "existential sensibility" or pauses for "philosophical digressions of a European bent", as compared with American road films. Other European road films include Chris Petit's Radio On (1979), a Wim Wenders-influenced film set on the M4 motorway; Aki Kaurismäki's Leningrad Cowboys Go America ( 1989), about a fictional Russian rock band which travels to the US; and Theo Angelopoulos' Landscape in the Mist, about a road trip from Greece to Germany. Latin America Road movies made in Latin America are similar in feel to European road films. The film received critical reception at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, which led to a series of genre-benders like Mani Ratnam's Thiruda Thiruda, and Varma's Daud, Anaganaga Oka Roju and Road. Subsequently 21st century bollywood movies witnessed a surge of motion-pictures such as Road, Movie, nominated for the Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix Award, the Tribeca Film Festival, and the Generation 14plus at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival in 2010. 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 was India's Official Entry for the Best Foreign Language Film for the 87th Academy Awards. It won special prize at Sofia International Film Festival. In Karwaan, the protagonist is forced to set out on a road trip from Bengaluru to Kochi after he loses his father in an accident, but the body delivered to him is of the mother of a woman in another state. Ryan Gilbey of The Guardian was broadly positive about Zoya Akhtar's Zindagi 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 various Spanish 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. 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 from Delhi to Kolkata. In Nagesh Kukunoor's children's film Dhanak a blind kid and his sister set off alone on a 300 km journey traversing testing Indian terrain from Jaislamer to Jodhpur, the film won the Crystal 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 the 65th Berlin International Film Festival Finding Fanny is based on a road trip set in Goa and follows the journey of five dysfunctional friends who set out on a road trip in search of Fanny. The Good Road is told in a hyperlink format, where several stories are intertwined, with the center of the action being a highway in the rural lands of Gujarat near a town in Kutch. Africa Several road movies have been produced in Africa, including Cocorico! Monsieur Poulet (1977, Niger); The Train of Salt and Sugar (2016, Mozambique); Hayat (2016, Morocco); Touki Bouki (1973, Senegal) and Borders (2017, Burkina Faso). == History ==

's 1939 Western Stagecoach has been called a proto-road movie. The genre has its roots in spoken and written tales of epic journeys, such as the Odyssey Even though Henry Miller's The 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. 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. Even though the travellers are so unlike each other, the mutual danger they must face in travelling through Geronimo's Apache territory requires them to work together to create a "utopia of...community". '' (1940) is about an entire family on the road. The road movie of the pre-WW II era was changed by the publication of Jack Kerouac's On 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. 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. 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. On the Road and another novel published in the same era, Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita (1955), have been called "two monumental road novels that rip back and forth across American with a subversive erotic charge." Road movies were an important genre in the late 1960s and 1970s era of the New Hollywood, with films such as Terrence Malick's Badlands and Richard Sarafian's Vanishing Point (1971) showing an influence from Bonnie and Clyde. There may have been influences from French cinema in the creation of Bonnie and Clyde; David Newman and Robert Benton have stated that they were influenced by Jean-Luc Godard's A bout de souffle (1960) and François Truffaut's Tirez sur la pianiste (1960). 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. There have been three historical eras of the "outlaw-rebel" road movie: the post-WW II film noir era (e.g., Detour), the late 1960s era which was rocked by the Vietnam War (Easy Rider and Bonnie 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 and Natural Born Killers). In the 1970s, there were low-budget outlaw films depicting chases, such as ''Eddie Macon's Run''. 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 which Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945), a film noir about a musician travelling from New York City to Hollywood who sees a nation absorbed by greed, or Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, which showed how American society was transformed by the social and cultural trends of the late 1960s. In the 2000s, a new crop of road movies was produced, including Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny (2003), Alexander Payne's Sideways (2004), Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers (2005) and Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy (2006) and scholars are taking more interest in examining the genre. 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". The BFI's top 10 include Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (2016), which used "mostly non-professional actors"; Alfonso Cuarón's Y 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 and Jay Duplass' The Puffy Chair (2005), the "first mumblecore road movie"; Broken Flowers (2005); Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris' Little Miss Sunshine (2006), about a family's trip in a VW camper van; Old Joy (2006); Alexander Payne's Nebraska (2013), which depicts a father and son on a road trip; Steven Knight's Locke (2013), about a construction executive taking stressful calls on a road trip; and Jafar Panahi's Taxi Tehran (2015), about a cab driver ferrying strange passengers around the city. 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". 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. == Movies of this genre ==

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. == See also ==