![]() ![]() Where his contemporary Werner Herzog dealt with the same issues by making arduous treks through remote and hostile terrain, Wenders revealed the strangeness of the everyday – the forlorn beauty of lay-bys, fast-food stands and the sort of downbeat poetry that usually passes us by. Wenders did none of the expected things, preferring the extended journey, which he followed up in subsequent German films, Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road and Wrong Movement, voyages of discovery through landscapes suffering cultural amnesia and a country refusing to face up to its past. Lured into Wenders’ early film The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty Kick by its title and not knowing what to expect, I was intrigued by the way it squandered its plot – goalkeeper loses game, hangs around, strangles cinema cashier and takes to the road – in favour of heightened lesser moments: a bright yellow cigarette machine at a bus station or listening to a familiar song on a crappy transistor with variable reception. If directing is about correct shot selection and knowing where to put the camera, then I wouldn’t change a frame of Voyage to Italy. Godard used the road to doodle (Pierrot le fou) but it wasn’t until seeing Rossellini and Wenders that I began to appreciate how making films might be possible. Another part of me appreciated the austere aesthetic of European directors Bresson, Straub and Huillet, who taught me to prefer watching people by themselves to dialogue scenes, and how aloneness, as much as loneliness, lies at the heart of cinema (and the road). But there was little that could be applied to trying to make films in England from watching Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. The road roadalltext.qxd 19/4/07 100 ROAD MOVIES 14:34 Page xi xi becomes a movie – becomes the memory of other movies, the physical space of the country reflected in its movie stars, who always knew how to move. After the cramped spaces of Europe, emotional and physical, America feels wide open and literal. Eight dollars of gas to cross three states, driving insane distances for the hell of it. Movement, space and light rather than words on a page. I summed up my feelings about the road in a film, Negative Space, a profile essay on the great American movie critic Manny Farber: America. Driving, like viewing film, is a suspended state and any drive – well, perhaps not those to the supermarket – has its own narrative: what is being driven away from (the past) and driven towards a simultaneous journey of flight and progression. I was never bored by an American road movie as long as it kept moving. England made me restless, which is why I liked US cinema with its recurring themes of migration, pioneering and journey. I saw no reason why contemporary England could not be a cinematic landscape or why you could not show it through the road. ![]() ![]() I saw nothing on the English screen that corresponded to a modern life that for me combined drift and boredom, jukeboxes, Alphaville, J. Driving with the radio on transcended the dreary reality of Britain, hinted at possibilities of a mythic landscape denied by the realism of the English cinema. Music and speed, combined with the ratio of the windscreen, made for an experience that was often more cinematic than the films I had to review for Time Out. I thought the portable radio cassette one of the great twentieth-century inventions and whoever thought to put a radio in a car was a genius. roadalltext.qxd 19/4/07 14:34 Page x Preface Back in the 1970s, I drove a lot and liked driving. Finally, I dedicate this book to Richard Beaumont, who is very fond of cars and of driving them. Chris Petit deserves my deepest appreciation for agreeing to write the preface. Sincere thanks also to: Geoff Andrew, Nicky Beaumont, City Screen (Deborah Allison, Clare Binns, Jo Blair, Daniel Graham, Tony Jones, Damian Spandley), Gareth Evans, Steve Jenkins, Michael Leake, Andy Leyshon, Verena von Stackelberg, Gavin Whitfield, Mark Williams, Felix Wood and Rudy Wood. My gratitude is also extended to Tom Cabot, Sophia Contento, Claire Milburn and Sarah Watt at BFI Publishing. Roadalltext.qxd 19/4/07 14:34 Page ix Acknowledgments I would first and foremost like to thank Rebecca Barden for commissioning 100 Road Movies and for not losing patience with me as various deadlines invariably came and went. ![]()
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