Lost in Transition? the European Road Movie, or A Genre "Adrift in the Cosmos"
2009; Salisbury University; Volume: 37; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)German History and Society
ResumoThis article, a development of the plenary paper of the same dde that I gave at the Literature/ Film Assoaation Conference in Towson in 2006, will focus upon one of the key trends in contemporary European film: the journey narrative, which will be considered in terms of the road movie. In other words, I shall take a well-known that is more commonly considered to articulate peculiarly American dreams, tensions, and anxieties (Cohan and Hark 2) in order to consider some of the ways in which European filmmakers use and abuse this for their own ends. In considering why it is that this form of narrative is so relevant to contemporary European cinema, my objective is to reassess both, the significance of the itself and the implications of the transformations that mark its journey from one side of the Adantic to the other. Journey Narratives and the Birth of a Genre Although the road movie is widely identified as a typical Hollywood genre, the concepts of journey and change, which lie at its heart, have always been fundamental to cinema. In Europe we might, for instance, trace the origins of the as far back as the Lumiere Brothers' famous Arrival of a Train in the Station at La Ciotat (1895), the first film to bring together the new and much feted medium of cinema with other, closely related, modernist notions of movement, speed, and travel. Similarly, it is possible to identify a corpus of subsequent films that might profitably be approached and analyzed in terms of the road movie: for example, L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934); Voyage to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954); The Road (Federico Fellini, 1954); Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957); The Easy Life (Dino Risi, 1962); several films by Jean-Luc Godard, including Contempt (1963), Pierrot le fou (1965), and Week-end (1967); and any films by Wim Wenders (such as Alice in the Cities [1974], Kings of the Road [1976]).1 In compiling a list such as this, it is particularly fascinating to observe the extent to which such films trace not merely individual narrative journeys, but also the temporal and historical journeys of cinema itself. Nevertheless, it is during the last two or so decades that the journey narrative has assumed a particular significance in European cinema that invites urgent investigation, and one of the key differences between these more recent films and at least some of the earlier examples I quoted is that, as well as articulating a dominant European experience, they also involve a self-conscious engagement with the American-defined genre. Given that itself has traditionally been perceived as an American phenomenon, it is understandable that it has largely been stuthed within that context, often in a misguided attempt to pinpoint differences between European art (or auteur) movies and their popular, more formulaic mainstream Hollywood equivalents. However, just as theory has at last moved away from the rigid definitions of the 1970s toward a more fluid understanding of its semiotic, syntactic, and historical multiplicities (Alunan; Gledhill; Grant; Moine; Codell), so too there is a growing awareness that generic identities should also be recognized within European film (Everett, Mapping Iceland, Between Here, Leaving Home; Tarr and Rollet; Lader man; Mazier ska and Rascaroli; Wood). As a genre, the road movie came of age in America in the late 1960s with films such as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), which, indeed, has been credited with having almost single-handedly created the [. . .] genre (Hill 72). However, various critics and filmmakers identify an Italian film, Dino Risi's The Easy Ufe, as the first modern road movie, and both Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda have acknowledged the debt owed by Easj Rider to this film. It is evident, therefore, that the narrative form which would eventually be known as the road movie was developing simultaneously in both continents, and that there was a considerable degree of cross fertilization between the two. …
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