| Reference Type |
Sight and Sound
journal
|
| Title |
Crossing the Frontiers |
| Author(s) | Michael Atkinson |
| Volume |
4 |
| Issue |
1 |
| Page Number |
14 - 17 |
| Comments |
For anyone interested pursuing the Road Movie genre - either to make or simply write about one - Atkinson's article is an imperative read. Of the very few theorists who choose to touch upon the genre, Atkinson's argument is broad-ranging and in four short pages thoughtfully (wait, here comes a really bad pun) drives the concept of "what is a road movie?" further than any other theorist.
This view is shared by not only a humble student such as myself, but practically all fully fledged 'proper' theorists that have written about Road Movies since 1994 - when 'Crossing the Frontiers' was published - with Atkinson's article spanning most bibliographies.
A fantastically informative, thought-provoking and above all, entertaining read... it should be cast in GOOOO-LD (duco, that is)!!! |
| Synopsis |
Atkinson provides a concisive overview to the genre of the Road Movie, stating that cinematically, it is "...the Last Chance Gas Station on the movie map, reeking of desperation and hope and restless that seem to come over our collective culture every quarter of a century or so. If the signs are worth reading, we're cleaving into a new psychological gridlock in which questions of mass identity and national meaning become too big for traditional answers"(p 14).
Atkinson makes many provocative statements about the miens of the Road Movie institution, one of which is stating that it is an "ideogram of human desire and the last-ditch search for self"(p. 14)
Many theorists choose to concentrate on the similarities between Road Movies and 'Westerns', with the former being read as a modernised version of the frontier.
However, Atkinson surpasses (or 'crosses' as the title of his article suggests) this rather simplistic reading of the Road Film, by taking the qualities of the genre as being representative of a contemporary consciousness, particularly for youth "..raised on television and the open-ended, road-like format of the weekly serial"(p. 14).
Similarly, Atkinson claims that the Road Movie, more than encapsulating youth revolt, is representative of the cinema itself, with its linear vision of the world. |
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