Documents Historiques : Road movies
- Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper, 1969.
- Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders, 1984.
- Thelma & Louise, Ridley Scot, 1991.
- The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Stephan Elliot, 1994.
- Little Miss Sunshine, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2006.
Some other road movies:
- On the road
- Into the wild
- Forest Gump
- The American dream of movement: Man/landscape
To Jean Baudrillard, main adjectives to describe the USA are: speed, space, cinema and technology.
The American dream has begun on the 17th century and then on the 19th century with the purchase of Louisiana, the annexation of the California in 1848 and Texas in 1845. Then in 1849 with the gold rush, gold diggers go further the west. Pioneers were set at the east of America move little by little and preserved the image of a young country.
Myth of America: pioneers: farming/gold digging
Myth of cowboys: mythological figure which is confronted to wilderness, on the edge of the civilisation.
The east was civilized, on the middle there were farms, the west was the frontiers, the unknown.
Western movies are the grand parent of road movies, it is a major genre in the American cinema. In its genre values are loyalty, honour and nostalgia. Western’s are set on the late 19th century. Western’s heyday was during the 1950’s-60’s. The old western had no social criticism, it was a serious western, cowboys were taming bad Indians. Old western has a conservative impact, manliness.
Themes of the western are: the national identity, violence (physical and metaphorical) and the individual. Masculinity is asserted, there are any women.
Mad max: male (old version) ≠ female (new version)
Real men are doing a journey, they come from a men land to go to the wilderness.
On the Road is book written by Kerouac in 1947 and a movie in the 1954. Men are the characters, it is a duo, it is a buddy road movie. There are two characters because of cars. Cars show the consumer society.
The Grapes of Wrath written by John Steinbeck in 1939 and released by John Ford in 1940.
Little miss sunshine: not a duo but a family. They are resisting against domesticity and social conventions; they resist against the norms of the society.
*Few western books and movies:
- Frontier, F.J Turner, 1892
- True Grit, Coen Brothers, 2010
- No country for old men, Coen brothers, 2010
- Social criticism
Character transgress the spatial and the moral laws (drugs, prostitution), They are socially and spatially apart. They are going out the frame, they don’t conform.
- Defamiliarization:
In Kerouac novel, characters are away of the civilisation, they are not conventional, there are against the consumer society and they are part of the next generation, the beat generation. Hippies movement have influenced road movies genre. Easy Rider is the flagship of hippies’ values, but the American society is too conservative. People are afraid of freedom, they are stuck in their mindset, they are too conservative, and people are stuck in the individualism. In the road movies, the shock between the society and the characters is violent. In Bonnie and Clyde (1966), there is a nasty shootout. Violence is real, characters are raped, killed or murdered.
The film is made with probs like a watch, the motorbikes.
There is a new form of narration: a story could have no beginning and no end. There are formal characters soundtracks, new movements of camera, new angles show landscapes as a character (travelling).
- The road as Bildungsroman
- Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, 1749
- Voltaire, Candide, 1759
- Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605-1615
- Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir, 1830
- Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale, 1869
Those books show not only a movement into the space but also a movement in character’s mind. They are taught by society and they teach us their own society.
Fleming, The Wizard of Oz, 1939: “east of somewhere”: Indians localization.
Dorothy: “There is no place like home”
This movie begins in white and black and when Dorothy meets people, it becomes a coloured movie. Indians were perpetually displaced from their habitations, and their habits.
Easy Rider: “A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it…anywhere!”
Characters are perpetually asking questions like:
- Who am I?
- what is the society?
- Do I agree with it?
Soundtracks
It is like a fourth dimension, it does not only affect our intellect, but it also affects our feeling. Now there are a very few numbers of films without soundtracks.
- Finally, what matters at the end?
The most important is not the arrival but the journey itself. Characters are stuck between 2 societies and 2 types of mind. The most important is not what we find but the quest on itself.
*Easy Rider*
- Director: Dennis Hopper.
- Best first feature film Cannes 1969
It is not an intellectual movie, but it was a huge success.
Dennis hopper is billy, and Peter Fonda is Wyatt (captain America). Both had written the Wild Angels in 1966. In the wild angel, Peter Fonda mystifies the life of Hells Angels.
- 1960s-1970s counter culture
There was a social harmony after the WWII with the rock’n’roll: Elvis Presley, the consumer society (get a house, a fridge…). It was almost a consensus because there were dissident voices: the beat generation. The “leader” was Jack Kerouac with his novel On the road in 1957. He strongly criticized consumerism based on materialism and individualism. The first step of rebellion was the rock’n’roll created by African-American.
Theodore Roszak understood that changes and wrote The Making of a Counter Culture, Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition, 1968. He understood this social change when it was taking place, it is a foundation to the understanding of counterculture. It was a period of upheaval with new political and social protest (against consumer society and individualism) but also new practices like:
- Black panthers: fighting for African-American rights
- Chicano power: Brown powers
- Rebirth of feminism
- Demonstration against Vietnam war: at the beginning, a majority were in favour of war, but a lot of people died on the battlefield, it was a butchery and people had changed their minds.
- Rock’n’roll music
- Street theatre
- Pop art: Consumerism showed threw the art: Andy Warhol
- Experiment of drug such as LSD
But there are contradictions in that counterculture, it was new and opposed to the paternalist culture but was also eaten by the market, Roszak says that Bob Dylan for example made a lot of money thanks to the music industry even though he was against it.
- Is it really a revolution or a simple moment of hedonist recreation?
Counterculture was just a fraction of society. Roszak says it lasted 20years, starting with Brown vs Board of Education in 1954. The road film genre wasn’t even considered a genre, Easy Rider was the first one that was consciously made as a road movie. This movie celebrates counterculture with drugs, hippies, free love, alcohol, bikers.
- Tensions between counterculture and conservatism
Wyatt is a reference to Wyatt Earp, related to the gunfight of OK Corral in 1881. It was a period of violence with tensions on the border. It is the most famous gunfight of the western conquest, it becomes later a mythical scene in which good always defeats bad characters. The first movie about OK Corral was Gunfight at the OK Corral in 1957: “…fighting Indians and cowboys on every side…out in the wilderness.”. Wyatt is nicknamed Captain America, which emphasizes the link to America and the American dream.
Billy is a reference to Billy the Kid is the nickname of a famous outlaw of the Wild West who died in 1881, he is famous for having killed 21 persons.
When they go to the farmer’s house Wyatt admires this family because they look healthy and happy. The farmer tells him:
“I was headed out to California, and then… you know how it is”.
“You’ve got a nice place. It’s not every man that can live of the land, you know? Can do your own thing in your own time. You should be proud.” This refers to the Jeffersonian’s ideal.
It is a positive stasis whereas in road movies it is not, as they are often on the runaway etc. When Wyatt and Billy are arrested and put in jail because they mocked the parade they are outcasts. Jail becomes a metaphor for society. The only way for them to be free is to go to the no man’s land, between cities.
Another positive stasis is when they stop in the hippie community, who act like old time pioneers which show renewal can be conservative by going back to rural values. They run away from consumerist society, but it doesn’t seem to be successful, they don’t grow anything, this is where Dennis Hopper criticizes the movement. The young man that says the prayer in this community is a Christian figure, it represents the Last Supper with the 12 apostles. They thank the lord for giving them a place to make a stand, to show society they can live in another way. He also says Amen at the end of the prayer, referring to the colonial past. Wyatt admires them, but we doubt their success.
*Shooting and framing: a new genre, the road movie*
- Transitions: many transitions between landscapes
- tracking shots (backward/forward): many of them during the travel
- soundtrack: rock ‘n roll music. Steppenwolf, “Born to be wild”: transcendental (mythical) ≠ far west
- zooming: we see threw back Wyatt’s watch and the motorbike
- aesthetic tool: it is a story told, they were no conscious of the creation of a new movie genre
The way it is filmed is conservative, but it is the creation of a new genre: Not a film ON the counterculture, but a countercultural film.
They were inspired by gangster movies which were countercultural in how they were made. It was a form of political rebellion. It was aesthetically a novelty: new elements like “fabric”: useless narration was added but it is still there. It is not useful because it allows the viewer to contemplate landscapes. There are links between the travelling: it is a major trap because it is conservatist but also it shows the values of landscapes of the country and the immensity of the it and therefore the country: nationalist echoes. The movement of the camera is countercultural: movement in space becomes an end on itself, landscapes are becoming a character. It is a movement threw characters and in themselves.
It is a rebirth of the landscape and for characters. Movements show that they are free like birds; even if they are acting childishly.
Characters are on contradiction with the society: they don’t work, they don’t have a family, they dealt drugs, they have no wives but have a lot of money. On the other hand, there are the American flags on the helmet and the gas tank. They also belong to the market place because they hide bills in their gas tank.
In their society, everybody has a car because highways were built for it.
“The irony here is that, while the bikers’ being on the road testifies to their apparent freedom, visualized further in their counter-culture appearance and behavior, they themselves represent an incoherent conjunction of modernity and tradition (after all, the American flag is emblazoned on Wyatt’s helmet and bike). More to the point, a plastic tube hidden inside the gas tank of Wyatt’s bike is the evidence of this pair’s own containment by the marketplace of US capital.”
*Is there a real liberation? *
To Dennis hopper it is a conventional buddy road movie because characters are looking for something higher and there are tensions between characters.
- Exploration of self: between idealism and selfish hedonism:
Women are the sexual desire (cf. prostitutes in the graveyard)
By contrast the Mexican wife has a traditional wife.
This movie is not a real critic of the patriarchal system, there is only one black in the movie. George Adson, the lawyer fights for equality. Characters are 2 whites males.
“I never wanted to be anyone else.” Billy answers a serious question. He meets several faces of America: New Orleans, Texas… Characters are in quest of identity, about themselves the country they are visiting and also a spiritual quest.
On the graveyard, one prostitute is called Mary as Jesus’ mother, it locks spirituality on the underside of America.
*Escape and quest*
- Characters escape responsibilities and normal life
- In quest of a place to live where they could live easily, without tensions between characters and people so they need a no man’s land to avoid conflicts.
“If God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”
Spiritual quest: there are conflicts between the hedonist and the spiritual quest: “why are we doing this?”
“You’re getting a little distant here man.” “I’m just getting my things together.”
Wyatt like this type of life but Billy does not at all.
- “We blew it, man”: social criticism and failure
At the bar, there is the police and they have to be careful.
“We want to be free. Free to ride our machines without being hassled by the Man” (machines mean alienation and man is the authority) The Wild Angels 1966.
We are stuck in a system. There is a wish for freedom. Billie and Wyatt reversed the western conquest, they go from West to East. The duo ends up in the south east, where The Birth of a Nation was shot and a place of memory, of dark past, a place of slavery and segregation. There is a historical questioning. Some critics say the social criticism of the movie didn’t go far enough, because segregation and slavery were not criticized enough. Conformity and fascism though are well criticized.
“What the hell is this? Troublemakers?” -> The two policemen have a violent image of the other, it is a clue as to what happens to them at the end by killing them at the end. They bring about desire from the girls because of their otherness. Everything that is exotic is exciting. They get hatred from the men because they are exotic. These are the two sister faces of the same way of looking at the other. Projections of hatred and desire. After that episode everything becomes darker. They do not have a happy end, which shows it is an independent movie, not a Hollywood movie. Easy Rider marks the birth of the American new wave inspired by the French new wave. The Director decides not the Producer
George gets clubbed by rednecks in the middle of the night. Conservative society is dangerous for people who are really free. They reach their goal, New Orleans but they take LSD and they are on a bad trip. As viewers it is a terrible moment. They blew it. It doesn’t have any meaning and what they saw of America is going to kill them. They have to be deleted/erased by society. There’s a tragic end. They are martyrs of conservative society. At the last scene we do not see corpses we only see the motorbikes. There is a pan out and high-angle shot. Inspite of the tragic ending Easy Rider carried a message of cultural subversion. Dennis Hopper supported the Republican party directing a countercultural movie but not being countercultural himself.
Until the end there is a paradox, why did Hopper do that movie?
Exposés sur Easy rider
America is a land of opportunity with the American. Characters are practicing freedom as pioneers and settlers into wilderness.
- hippy community
There is a spirit of rebellion with the frontier of wilderness/ out of society. Those rebels are outcast. They adopt a wield behaviour: authenticity close to nature.
- Freedom threw drugs
Zooms emphasize drugs. There are a lot of brief cut, flash-forwards, flashback during the bad trip of LSD. They undergo drugs and it is shown by a noisy soundtrack.
Freedom and drugs: at the beginning there is a motif in which characters are doing a drug deal that make them rich. It is a metaphor of freedom based on drugs.
- Do they take drugs for being free or because they are free?
It is a quest of freedom not for drugs, drug is a part of the quest of freedom!
- freedom of time
characters lost the track on time as if time were running out. In the graveyard there is a religious painting which is depicting the last hour. Thomas Grey Elegy. Death is inevitable, there are many clues of their death. Salvation is a state to be forbidden in society. They had a last chance to survive but they did throw consciousness.
But did they reach freedom?
Hippy scene: counterculture and rejections, movement against conservatism and consumerism.
Liberty is important, it is linked with self-sufficiency. Characters are far from cities and have an access of intellectual freedom with a theatre, music (guitar), there is also a freedom of cloths, there is no dress code.
Billy’s definition of liberty: don’t feel comfortable, his liberty ends when he is rejected by the group. He wants as soon as possible to leave the place.
Wyatt’s definition is a voyage with a friend.
Women’s place in their society: 2 women
- Mexican traditional woman living as a housewife. Billy like her and she is seen as sexual object
- The second one is interested by Wyatt
One rejected billy but both are excited.
Contrasts between Billy and Wyatt
This movie is a building roman because they learn a lot about themselves. They want to live the American life style. For Wyatt there is a personal embellishment, he is free with the money earned. Billy is materialist, he doesn’t like life group and he is socially bound. Billy is not spiritual whereas Wyatt wants to stay in the community.
They are free, they act like children. They are not afraid of others’ behaviour.
Liberty & identity: night and nature: – farmers wife’s family
- (bigger) hippie community: younger than the farmers but they are not equal
- Old church: opposite of prostitute (one is called Mary)
There’s a satirical vision of women.
They have a goal, to go to Mardi-Gras. There are a lot of cuts that create an impression of oppression. He had a revelation, he has high vision shots: they are doomed. These cut show city as a negative place, theu are attacked by the people of the city.
Soundtrack of rebellion bring by Steppenwolf with born to be wild and the pusher.
On the lyrics, there is no suicide, it is calm, and, in the movie, it is calm and then violence is followed by death.
Buddie road movie: they get kicked by highways.
There’s a decline on relationship: they make fun of family, farmers are owning things, lands… Wyatt (captain America) is anchored in the American ideology and also anchored in reality.
They never achieved to get out towns, because Billy is materialist. Before cemetery scene, billy is satisfied, they took spiritual ecstasy. Wyatt is not satisfied of the voyage “we blow it man” but billy thinks they are doing a voyage to get money.
They have a religious faith: the ideology of freedom
Paris Texas
- Wim Wenders, 1984.
- Best film award in Cannes 1984
- Harry Dean Stanton (died Sept 2017), Natassja Kinski
Motel Chronicles 1981 (Sam Shepard):
“He stands still by the smashed suitcase peering down into all his one-time belongings. Crushed soap bars saved from motel showers. Flattened cans of string beans. A mangled map of Utah. Hot tar and blacktop ground into the pure white towel he was saving for his first along bath in a month. Nothing moves from one end of the highway to the other. Not even a twig flutter. Not even the Meadowlark feather stuck to a nail in the fence post. He pushes the toe of his boot across the burned black rubber skid mark. Follows the crazy swerve of tires with his eyes. Sour smell of rubber. Sweet smell of sand sweltering. Now a lizard moves. Makes a fragile fishlike wake with his tail. Disappears. Swallowed in a sea of sand.”
It is a road movie of landscape and for characters
Ry Cooder=> soundtrack: slow bluesy guitar
Paris Texas belongs to Wenders’ road movie trilogy with Alice in the city (1974), The Wrong Move (1975) and the king of the road (1976)
- A postmodern film
Road movies have changed, the genre became more disenchanted. It was more focused on the existential loss of the characters than social criticism. It was a critical version of the first road movie because characters were always stuck in society. Characters move without having the will power: driftage= drifter.
There is also a political frustration because conservatism and market returned in force in the 1980’s. It was a much more internalized conflict, it is more psychological than political.
Terrence Malick, Badlands, 1973:
“The strangest moment in Paris, Texas has Travis pass by a man on a bridge, shouting shibboleths at the interstate traffic below, like the war veterans we have all seen in urban USA: ‘There will be no safety zone’, rhymes his portent of doom, and Travis quickly passes by, perhaps not to be ‘infected’ by whatever demon has possessed this brother.”
There are like 2 soldiers lost on the American continent; there are drifters.
- “It is a navigation to nowhere.”
- “I don’t know where I turned off, it didn’t have a name…but I can find our way out again.”
Travis has not really a goal at the beginning, but then he has to bring back Jane in order to reconstruct a family.
During the 1980’s there were no road movies on the screen. Bronco Billy (1980) is a normal Hollywood movie, it was the return of action hero such as Rocky in 1976 (academy award for best feature film), Star Wars from 1977 to 1983, Rambo in 1982.
The rebirth of road movies is the consequence of independent movies.
- Description of the landscape: idealization of the landscape in Easy rider
- Modernism: creator take rules and break it: they criticize society with social criticism
- Postmodernism: the truth is everywhere and there is no hero.
Postmodernism changed the standard of road movies; no one is good or bad.
Rain man,1988: both are afraid of the plane, it is closed to “art et essai” (art-house) movies. Characters are doing a road trip and making fun of it. The subversion of modernism is ironical.
2- Inverted Bildungsroman
Travis is a man who lost his memory and his education. It is an inverted bildungsroman. He becomes again a human when he looks for Jane. He finds who he is, he had erased his memory to forget violent events. So, it is a movement in space, in time, and in relationships. It is a social death, he ran away for 4 years, he passed the borders. It goes from a social death to a resurrection. His goal is to find Jane. The first word he said was “Paris”. this place is the genesis, the state of the birth. Travis is roaming, he looks for that place.
“I remember, now”
In this scene, there is a still (arrêt sur image), he finds his memories, things what constitutes his identity. In this scene, he is the driver, he is in control of his life, he is empowering, it gives power and he becomes a man. At the beginning, Hunter is ashamed because he doesn’t want to walk home. Travis is searching his origins, he is looking for Hunter’s mother. There is a parallel between Travis’ origins and the origins of earth (discussion with Hunter). Hunter has not seen her mother for his half-life. Hunter also roams to find Jane. Thanks to Hunter, Travis has a goal in the middle of the movie: search Jane. He wants to fix his past mistakes/ violence. At the very beginning, with Walker, he is the passenger and with Hunter, he is the driver. He bought an old car for his existential quest.
The child as a help for the reconstruction.
They become more and more active with child game. The car chase is a race, it is a parody of Hollywood action movies. There is a quote from Star Wars.
“Dad, if a guy put a baby down, traveled at the speed of light for an hour. If he traveled at the speed of light, he would…he would come back in an hour, he would be an hour older. But the little baby would be a very old man.”
“Oh yeah? Well, how long will it take him to get to Houston?”
“Uh…if…if they were to travel…I’d say about three seconds.”
Hunter is teaching his father. It is intertwined with childishness and tragic drama. They are creating their own mythology.
Colour codes:
Red colour: red cloths, a red phone to communicate with Travis. Travis remembered his parents, Travis’ father had a “disease: jealousy, Travis also suffers of it.
Black colour: mourning (deuil) and shadows. Memories had come back but Jane and Travis can’t come back. It’s over, it was the last conversation.
Green colour: it is the colour for hope. It means reconstruction. Jane is wearing usual cloths, he has no longer prostitute cloths.
Even if they are separated by glass, Travis belongs to a lineage. He broke the spell.