The road movie is one of the most tried and true genres, a staple since the earliest days of cinema. This book looks at the road movie from a wider perspective than ever before, exploring the motif of travel not just in American films—where it has been most prominent—but via movies from other nations as well. Gathering contributions from around the world, the book shows how the road movie, altered and refracted in every new international iteration, offers a new way of thinking about the ever-shifting sense of place and space in the globalized world.
Through analyses of such films as Guantanamera (Cuba), Wrong Side of the Road (Australia), Five Golden Flowers (China), Africa United (South Africa), and Sightseers (England), The Global Road Movie enables us to think afresh about how today’s road movies fit into the history of the genre and what they can tell us about how people move about in the world today.
The road movie is one of the most tried and true genres, a staple since the earliest days of cinema. This book looks at the road movie from a wider perspective than ever before, exploring the motif of travel not just in American films—where it has been most prominent—but via movies from other nations as well. Gathering contributions from around the world, the book shows how the road movie, altered and refracted in every new international iteration, offers a new way of thinking about the ever-shifting sense of place and space in the globalized world.
Through analyses of such films as Guantanamera (Cuba), Wrong Side of the Road (Australia), Five Golden Flowers (China), Africa United (South Africa), and Sightseers (England), The Global Road Movie enables us to think afresh about how today’s road movies fit into the history of the genre and what they can tell us about how people move about in the world today.
The Global Road Movie: Alternative Journeys around the World
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The Global Road Movie: Alternative Journeys around the World
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Overview
The road movie is one of the most tried and true genres, a staple since the earliest days of cinema. This book looks at the road movie from a wider perspective than ever before, exploring the motif of travel not just in American films—where it has been most prominent—but via movies from other nations as well. Gathering contributions from around the world, the book shows how the road movie, altered and refracted in every new international iteration, offers a new way of thinking about the ever-shifting sense of place and space in the globalized world.
Through analyses of such films as Guantanamera (Cuba), Wrong Side of the Road (Australia), Five Golden Flowers (China), Africa United (South Africa), and Sightseers (England), The Global Road Movie enables us to think afresh about how today’s road movies fit into the history of the genre and what they can tell us about how people move about in the world today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783208784 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect Books |
| Publication date: | 04/09/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 260 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
José Duarte teaches cinema at the School of Arts and Humanities, Universidade de Lisboa.
Timothy Corrigan is professor of English and cinema studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker.
José Duarte teaches cinema at the School of Arts and Humanities, Universidade de Lisboa.
Timothy Corrigan is professor of English and cinema studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Learning to Drive: Midcentury Guidance Films and the Middle-of-the-Road Politics of the American Road Movie
Devin Orgeron
The late 1990s brought with them a still-lingering spike in the academic interest in the road movie, and a fair amount of that scholarship has focused on American contributions to this nebulous, mythically signifying cinematic phenomenon. There has been, in much of this work, some recognition of the literary roots of this semi-generic cinematic category (from Homer's The Odyssey to Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz). The road movie's specifically cinematic generic predecessors have also been explored (from early automotive trick films, to the American western, and Film Noir). Some of us have even attempted to establish a constellation of cinematic exchange between nations and major cinematic 'movements' that has itself moved along and within the generic confines of the imagined highways that connect us, one to the other, film-to-film, nation-to-nation. In this respect, the study that follows will feel like a detour – a pause in what seems to be a forward-moving critical momentum that has brought scholars and thinkers to a point of looking around and ahead, rather than backwards. The road movie as a cinematic category continues to be relevant, these studies suggest. And isn't it interesting to see the hold it and its myths have on other and especially emerging cinemas?
The answer, of course, is a resounding 'yes!' But we still have some looking back to do.
The American road movie's place in international film history and its international progeny exist not in isolation but in conversation with a widespread domestic need to domesticate the American driver, who had become a de facto stand-in for a broader understanding of 'American youth' in the years after the Second World War. Evidence of this need can be found in another sub-cinematic boom occurring before and during the 1960s–70s, as the first wave of American road movies was swelling: the American educational film.
16mm classroom films. If you were born before the rise of video in the 1980s, you experienced them. And, chances are, the images from these films most permanently etched into your mind are images, many of them quite gruesome, from driver safety films. In the pages that follow, I will examine an historical, thematic and chronological range of what we might broadly refer to as 'driver education films'. My hope is to demonstrate the degree to which the classic American road movie from the 1960s–70s was produced in conversation with these and related regulatory efforts. And that response, as we shall see, was often surprising in its concurrent regulatory impulses. This is to say that, for a period of time, the road movie was responding to the 16mm clampdown on the American driver, and the driver education film was, in its own manner, riffing on tropes that had become central to the American road movie. Acknowledging, as it does, the complexities of this imagined intersection between a socially engineered 'culture' and some imagined notion of 'counterculture', this work is uniquely equipped to demonstrate the ways in which the road's identification as a site of countercultural rebellion (in the US and abroad) has been, to some degree, misunderstood. Specifically, I am interested in examining the manner by which these films, designed for the classroom, attempt to control or otherwise defuse the notion of vehicular freedom and boundless mobility that would appear to be on offer in the 1960s-70s road movie.
Signal 30 (Richard Wayman/Highway Safety Foundation, 1959) and the Manufacturing of Fear
This is not a Hollywood production as can readily be seen. The quality is below their standards. However, most of these scenes were taken under adverse conditions, nothing has been staged. These are actual scenes taken immediately after the accidents occurred. Also unlike Hollywood our actors are paid nothing. Most of the actors in these movies are bad actors and received top billing only on a tombstone. They paid a terrific price to be in these movies, they paid with their lives.
(Signal 30, opening crawl)
Scholars, collectors and enthusiasts of educational films are interested in notions of genericity, and the fruits of their labour (screenings, shows, symposia and conferences, academic or popular articles and books) are often organized according to type. Perhaps because of their long and successful in-classroom runs (which means great numbers of these films were produced), and also because of their promise of sensational, often taboo images, sex hygiene and driving films turn up repeatedly (for sale on eBay, for viewing at specially arranged screenings across the country and within the pages of scholarly works dedicated to the phenomenon of the educational film). The mass-production of these films and their subsequent longevity speaks to widespread shifts in pedagogical practice after the Second World War: both the method and the material of what would become standard American education were undergoing profound re-evaluation, and 16mm film – the material itself as well as the pedagogical concept it embodied – was as experimental as its sometimes lurid, seemingly non-academic subject matter.
One result of all of this experimentation, among many, was the creation of what might best be referred to as 'micro-industries' in the educational media business. While major educational film manufacturers existed and thrived (Encyclopedia Britannica is a fine example on one end, or Coronet, on another end), the demand was high enough to support smaller, regional outfits whose reach, in retrospect, is astonishing. One such company (though its inception had less to do with the establishment of a company and more to do with what would appear to be a sincere desire to assist local law enforcement in their struggle to curtail highway deaths) was the 'official' sounding Highway Safety Foundation, a division of The Ohio Department of Highway Safety.
The outfit was the brainchild of Dick Wayman, who began by making still photographs of highway wrecks in and near Mansfield, Ohio, and his chief collaborator and fellow photographer, Phyllis Vaughn. Wayman and Vaughn, before making films, shared their photographs with local law enforcement, who would eventually lend their credentials (if not their financial support) to special lecture/slideshows at local gatherings, state fairs, etc. Wayman, Vaughn and a group of like-minded, roving camera operators and specialists, recognizing the impact and potential of these materials, soon transformed their travelling show into a small-scale film production operation. Taking full advantage of the extreme portability of 16mm equipment and banking (smartly) on what would appear to be an ever-escalating use of filmed materials in American classrooms, The Highway Safety Foundation is a model for what was possible in the Eisenhower-era business of classroom films.
Their first short film, Signal 30, is by no means the first highway safety film. In fact, the genre had been kicking around the educational circuit since the 1930s. But Signal 30 is revolutionary in its methodology as well as its near-ubiquity in the pre-1980s classroom. What made this film unique? What about it spurred dozens of followers (Highway Safety Foundation films and others) forward? What kept it in rotation in American high school classrooms for so long?
In short, the film's successes can be boiled down to one concept: the rhetorical use and careful deployment of violence. In fact, for a film produced by amateurs (amateurs, it should be noted, in all of the fields they were stepping into: law enforcement; moving image production; education), the film's psychological impact is extraordinary. Its power, I would argue, is in some ways a product of its apparent amateurism – its spontaneity; a point the film's opening crawl seems distinctly aware of, even as it pretends to apologize for sub-Hollywood production standards and 'bad acting'.
This is to suggest that, by 1959, nontheatrical viewers had established a set of expectations with regard to the polish and pedagogical style of educational fare. Tone of narrational voice, music, pacing and a degree of either gravitas (Encyclopedia Britannica), or campy playfulness and good humour (Coronet) were, perhaps, necessarily somewhat predictable. Some distance between Hollywood and the educational circuit was required. Hollywood films were seen as frivolous and removed, indeed, in every way possible from the supposed 'mission' of education. So, most educational filmmakers found and maintained a balance between pedagogical rigor and aesthetic polish. Signal 30, like the best feature films of the 1960s and 1970s, seems to have written its own rule-book, establishing its own mode of address and its own barometer for what the viewer (and those monitoring the appropriateness of what the viewer might or might not see) could tolerate.
The film opens on black leader and, abruptly, the soundtrack belies its subject: the distinct sound of tires screeching and metal crunching take us from a black screen to a poorly lit scene of automotive death. Dramatic music swells as the camera nervously paces around the bloody trauma, pausing briefly on a lifeless arm swinging from the door of a mangled blue sedan. This is followed by the opening crawl cited above, set against grainy, daylight footage of a not-too-busy two-lane highway. Those warnings about the film's 'deficiencies' are followed by an (appropriately enough) awkwardly acted scene of a highway patrol dispatcher taking a call for a double signal 30 (which necessitates the earnestly narrated definition that follows the main titles for the film). Our narrator explains that a 'signal 30' is police code for a highway fatality. And the frankness of the film's opening images, coupled with this information, alerts the viewer to (but hardly prepares him for) the carnage that is to follow. It is, however, our narrator's request of viewers that charges the scenes that follow to such an unprecedented degree. The narrator implores 'put yourselves and your family in these untouched, unstaged scenes. You or a loved one of yours can easily be a signal 30'.
After the double signal 30 that begins the film (a devastating scene involving an out of control cattle truck), a short segment establishes a pattern – a distinct rhetorical strategy – that the film will maintain through its entirety. The strategy focuses squarely on guided spectatorial identification: we are asked, at various moments, to identify with law enforcement (who must tend to these scenes) and the victims and their families (whose lives are altered or ended as a result). First, however, the viewer's faith in law enforcement must, itself, be enforced.
The viewer is treated to a 'behind-the-scenes' look at the training a highway patrolman must undergo, with special emphasis on the patrolman's supreme dedication. The idea itself is difficult to convey in a two-minute montage, so it will become a refrain throughout the film: the patrolman, like the rules he enforces, has the driver's well-being in mind and carries a significant portion of the burden of any driver's outright disregard. Routine safety checks, traffic laws, speed limits, etc. are not, the film is at pains to explain, there simply to infringe upon the freedom of our driving citizens. What becomes clear as the film continues is the degree to which its producers wish to suggest that all traffic incidents are, in fact, the result of driver error or inattention to the rules that are in place.
After this brief sidebar, the barrage of fatalities and (mercifully?) near fatalities kicks into full swing: two trucks disregard the speed limit, swerve to miss a fender bender and collide into one another, setting the scene ablaze (our narrator calmly describes as charred remains are pulled from the cabins); a careless driver narrowly escapes with his life and the life of his passenger, their rolled car, pierced by the crossbar of a mailbox, reminding them of how close it was; a deaf man in a pickup truck is ploughed over by a fast-moving train at a railroad crossing; a driver loses control and is thrown from his car and survives with serious injuries after 20 men lift the car from his suffering body; a 17-year-old boy in red convertible fails to yield the right of way and rams into a hardtop, is critically injured (the pair in the hardtop will die within hours); a young man after a stag party (drunk) is crushed between the driver's side door and the door post, though his car is barely damaged; a high school football star (the image the film begins with) wraps his car around a tree – our narrator asks that we identify with the men removing body; a husband ignores the speed limit, leaving his wife to survive the crash (horrifying live audio captures her terror at the scene).
While the near-dizzying array of tragedies is far from over, our filmmakers pause, here, to echo what are surely the audiences' sentiments. Our narrator changes gears: 'We're cruel, cold and harsh, you say? You shouldn't be made to see and hear this. How could we give a better lesson on carelessness?' (Signal 30, 1959). What might, at first glance, be considered an act of mercy (a pause in the bloodbath) is more critically a barely veiled attempt on the part of the filmmakers to indicate that every fatality on offer in this film, every injury, is the result of at least one driver's disregard for the rules (here, 'carelessness'). The rapid-fire narration of the film, its unending need to force the viewer to bear witness, is intended to cause the viewer to not question the logic of this assertion – to not question the possibility that there might be other factors in play or that the reasons behind the scenes 'witnessed' might, in fact, be other than what our narrator is suggesting. Viewers are, in other words, meant to accept the images as transparent, indexical representations of the actual highway mishaps being narrated.
The barrage continues: a flipped car results, miraculously, in no injuries; a pipe truck driver is crushed and impaled by his load; a triple signal 30 is the result of a driver's unwillingness to stay to the right; a failure to yield right-of-way results in an especially grim scene, made all the more unsettling for what the film has us believe to be live audio recordings of the still-living victims (four are dead).
In a manner that will come to be key to our understanding of the 1960s–70s American road movie and its relationship to this as well as the vast majority of driver safety films that would follow, Signal 30 concludes (prior to a brief denouement imploring viewers to heed the film's warning: 'whether we show you or your loved ones in the ugly sprawl of death is largely up to you') within the domestic space – within the home of the bereaved wife of a deceased, careless (she claims he often drove too fast) driver. The scene switches to a patrol car pulling into the driveway of a small, suburban home as our narrator asks: 'what is the impact on a family whose husband and father met death? Let's watch and listen'.
We switch to a two-shot of the patrolman and the bereaved seated next to one another, the woman's sparsely decorated living room oddly framed to accentuate the literal corner she finds herself in. The patrolman begins awkwardly: 'today I would like to get some sort of a message from you to pass on to the motoring public'. The wife goes on to explain that her husband 'was a lineman for the Ohio Edison Company. He worked with high voltage. He had a very dangerous job'. The information takes a second to take hold. He was not killed on the job (where rules and regulations are a given), but on his time. The officer continues by asking 'how has this accident affected your life – and your family's ...?' Her answer drives home the film's purpose, its domestic intentions. She says 'well, it means I will have to go to work very shortly to provide for the children's education, all their needs ... whereas they would have had a father to help with that'.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Introduction: From American Roads to Global Highways
Timothy Corrigan and José Duarte
Section 1: The Americas
Chapter 1: Learning to Drive: Midcentury Guidance Films and the Middle-of-the-Road Politics of the American Road Movie by Devin Orgeron
Chapter 2: The Colombian Road Movie: Uses and Abuses of a Film Genre by Jamie Correa
Chapter 3: Notes on a Journey from Guantánamo to Havana: Guantanamera Revisited as Winds of Change Hit US-Cuba Relations by Hermínia Sol
Section 2: Africa
Chapter 4: Departing from Anti-Colonialism, Arriving at Afropolitanism: Africa United as an African Road Movie by James M. Hodapp
Chapter 5: The Road and Transatlantic Currents in the Cinema of Licínio Azevedo by Sara Brandellero
Section 3: Asia and Australia
Chapter 6: The Palestinian Road(block) Movie: Interrupted Journeys in Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention by Drew Paul
Chapter 7: Song of the Big Road: Negotiating Scale in the Road Films of Twenty-First-Century India by Lars Erik Larson
Chapter 8: Provincializing the Road Movie: Realism, Epic and Mobility in Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik by Moira Weigal
Chapter 9: Navigating Gender, Ethnicity and Space: Five Golden Flowers as a Socialist Road Movie by Ling Zhang
Chapter 10: Genre at a Crossroads: The Korean Road Movie by Joseph Pomp
Chapter 11: Wrong Side of the Road: Crossing Cultures, Traversing Forms and the Blackfella Road Movie by Keith Beattie
Section 4: Europe
Chapter 12: Et in Arcadia Ego: Precarious Romaniticism and the English Road Movie by Neil Archer
Chapter 13: Bumps on the ‘Road to Europe’: Remaking the Road Movies and Re-mapping the Nation in Post-2004 Central Europe by Micheal Gott and Kris Van Heuckelom
Chapter 14: The Road Movie in Portuguese Cinema by Filipa Rosário
Notes on Editors
Notes on Contributors