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Cars and roads demarcate our lives. Cars enable our quests for speed, our love of the excitement of the journey, our search for the future, our yearning for a better life, our search for a home.
In the 19th century, driven by the ideology of manifest destiny, the great wagon trains headed across America, journeying westward, searching for something better, a new life; hope and opportunity lay just over the next hill, towards the orange sun sinking below the horizon. The journeys have been burned into cultural mythology, through literature such as Huckleberry Finn and The Grapes of Wrath, via the autobiographies of Boxcar Bertha and Jack Black, and in the blues and folk songs that detailed the wandering lives of the itinerant rural poor. With the mass production of the car, the possibility of getting on the road, of escaping poverty, of escaping the weight of inevitability, became realisable, the potentiality of re-invention and new life merely a road trip away. Put simply, America is a road trip.
The road movie was not a production genre; rather, it is a critical genre, retrospectively projected across numerous cinematic texts from radically different genres: horror, documentary, youthsploitation, film noir, and melodrama. In part, the road movie has roots in the western, the journey across the desert and the wilderness. In the road movie, the wilderness is the zone beyond recognisable signification, where possibilities emerge and the past vanishes to a pinpoint in the wing mirror. It is not coincidence that the vistas of the south-west that form the backdrop to the great westerns occur again in the road movie.
In film, there are narrative themes that wind their way through the genre: the young lovers on the run looking for a new life, the rootless searching for a home, the lost looking for meaning. In common with the mythology of the founding of America, and the western, the heroes of road movies are rugged individualists, loners, and even outlaws, but rarely real villains; instead, it is their circumstance that necessitates their status.
The genre emerged through its best-known film Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), which melded biker-exploitation flicks such as The Wild Angels (Roger Corman, 1966) with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady's existential criss-crossing of the USA. Easy Rider saw bikers searching for America, travelling from Los Angeles to New Orleans. Part quest for a future and part critical deconstruction of a country that had lost its way, where the freedom promised by the constitution had vanished, Easy Rider created the template, but the themes were already at play. Road movies became associated with youth, celebrating the iconography of rebellion, and frequently charging the soundtracks with rock and roll.
But the genre transmutes. As on the highway, there's always something just beyond the horizon. Even as youth and rebellion defined the genre, there were other movies that saw other meanings and possibilities in the road trip. While America seems the natural location of the genre, it has left its mark across many national cinemas: Australian, British, and German. The films selected for this programme celebrate the high-octane love-on-the-run outlaws, but also see other realisations and interpretations of the road movie, offering a broader insight into the genre's various manifestations.
Jack Sargeant
Jack Sargeant is the author of critically acclaimed study of underground film Deathtripping: The Cinema of Transgression, The Naked Lens: Beat Cinema, and Lost Highways: A History of the Road Movie, all published by Creation Books. He also contributes to journals such as Headpress, Panik and World Art. An underground pop-culture theorist and commentator, he lectures on, and arranges screenings and tours of, rare and unseen films.
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