Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie

by David Laderman

Overview

From the visionary rebellion of Easy Rider to the reinvention of home in The Straight Story, the road movie has emerged as a significant film genre since the late 1960s, able to cut across a wide variety of film styles and contexts. Yet, within the variety, a certain generic core remains constant: the journey as cultural critique, as exploration beyond society and within oneself.

This book traces the generic evolution of the road movie with respect to its diverse presentations, emphasizing it as an "independent genre" that attempts to incorporate marginality and subversion on many levels. David Laderman begins by identifying the road movie's defining features and by establishing the literary, classical Hollywood, and 1950s highway culture antecedents that formatively influenced it. He then traces the historical and aesthetic evolution of the road movie decade by decade through detailed and lively discussions of key films. Laderman concludes with a look at the European road movie, from the late 1950s auteurs through Godard and Wenders, and at compelling feminist road movies of the 1980s and 1990s.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292747326
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	07/01/2002
Edition description:	1ST
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

David Laderman is Associate Professor of Film at the College of San Mateo, as well as a lecturer in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Paving the Way: Sources and Features of the Road Movie
• Chapter 2. Blazing the Trail: Visionary Rebellion and the Late-1960s Road Movie
• Chapter 3. Drifting on Empty: Existential Irony and the Early-1970s Road Movie
• Chapter 4. Blurring the Boundaries: The 1980s Postmodern Road Movie
• Chapter 5. Rebuilding the Engine: The 1990s Multicultural Road Movie
• Chapter 6. Traveling Other Highways: The European Road Movie
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

What People are Saying About This

Scott Simmon

This is a superbly conceived, thoughtfully organized, and well-written study of a subject--the 'road movie'--that has lacked anything close to a coherent, book-length overview. . . . It will make an ideal course text and should also have a wide appeal to non-academic readers.
— Scott Simmon, author of The Films of D. W. Griffith and King Vidor, American