The Road Movie by Neil Archer

Author:Neil Archer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004020, Performing Arts/Film & Video/Guides & Reviews
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 2.2 Travel as political: Ernesto and Alberto at Machu Picchu in The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

As a concluding thought, it is to the credit of The Motorcycle Diaries if, in watching the film, we forget we are also watching a period drama, about events happening fifty years previously. This would largely be down to the sense of spontaneity and immediacy created through the filming style, and especially the moments of improvisation at work in the film’s making. The interesting point though is that these moments of apparently spontaneous contact and interaction – and we are led to believe that much of the film’s interaction took place between the actors and people they simply came across while filming – come not from the 1950s but the 2000s. Salles’ film consequently collapses past and present in order to make Ernesto and Alberto’s trip feel as vital today as it would have been half a century before. It was perhaps inevitable that on the back of this film, then, Salles would be asked to direct the much-anticipated adaptation of another 1950s travel narrative: Kerouac’s On the Road, the film which finally came to light in 2012. The results of this venture – as we will see later – proved very different, in ways that shed light on the contemporary relevance of Kerouac’s novel, as well as on the particular character, and above all the political nature, of the road movies considered in this chapter.

Note

1 Walter Salles would eventually direct a starry version of Kerouac’s On the Road (2012); Cuarón had already directed a Hollywood adaptation of Great Expectations (1999), and would go on to write and direct Children of Men (2006) and Gravity (2013).

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