Season Three of Rowhouse Film Festival is called "On The Road." Starting with a quintessential road movie, Easy Rider, we'll explore the genre of the road film as a manifesto for freedom & wandering, and as the anti-establishment American dream.
We all go on roadtrips and inevitably they have marked meaningful moments in our lives. So what is it about the open road and us driving down them that is so compelling for us (and filmmakers) to try to capture?
Very loosely, this is what we're trying to explore here this season by examining 12 films about being "On The Road." We've built and organized our series around a few obvious themes, general sub-categories (perhaps meaningless) that they all can fit into: the buddy flick, romance on the road, the lone rider on a quest, and the family who strike on the road for new beginnings.
But what we find when we look a little further into what is now become a genre in American film making -- "the road movie" -- are the inseperable iconography of the car and the horizon which surrounds it. Most strikingly we see in cars an individualist mode of transportation, a modern interpretation of a rugged cowboy's horse. And the expanse of open road articulates a similar manifest destiny to modernize and to make the unknown known.
And yet, mining the cinematic history of these mobile obsessions, we might find that the films themselves repeatedly focus on the consequences of a culture moving away from the stabilizing structures of community and communication. There is often desperation and turmoil which send our travellers adrift in a desire to find significance and perhaps stability in the contemporary world.
We all go on roadtrips and inevitably they have marked meaningful moments in our lives. So what is it about the open road and us driving down them that is so compelling for us (and filmmakers) to try to capture?
Very loosely, this is what we're trying to explore here this season by examining 12 films about being "On The Road." We've built and organized our series around a few obvious themes, general sub-categories (perhaps meaningless) that they all can fit into: the buddy flick, romance on the road, the lone rider on a quest, and the family who strike on the road for new beginnings.
But what we find when we look a little further into what is now become a genre in American film making -- "the road movie" -- are the inseperable iconography of the car and the horizon which surrounds it. Most strikingly we see in cars an individualist mode of transportation, a modern interpretation of a rugged cowboy's horse. And the expanse of open road articulates a similar manifest destiny to modernize and to make the unknown known.
And yet, mining the cinematic history of these mobile obsessions, we might find that the films themselves repeatedly focus on the consequences of a culture moving away from the stabilizing structures of community and communication. There is often desperation and turmoil which send our travellers adrift in a desire to find significance and perhaps stability in the contemporary world.
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