Open Roads, Closed Borders

The Contemporary French-language Road Movie

Edited by Michael Gott, Thibaut Schilt

Publication date:

15 May 2013

Publisher

Intellect Books

Dimensions:

229x178mm
7x9"

ISBN-13: 9781841506623

This is the first collection of essays about French-language road movies, a particularly rich yet critically neglected cinematic category. These films, the contributors argue, offer important perspectives on contemporary French ideas about national identity, France’s former colonies, Europe, and the rest of the world. Taken together, the essays illustrate how travel and road motifs have enabled directors of various national origins and backgrounds to reimagine space and move beyond simple oppositions such as Islam and secularism, local and global, home and away, France and Africa, and East and West.

Introduction – Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt

Chapter 1: On the Eve of the Journey: Tangier, Tbilisi, Calais – Laura Rascaroli

Chapter 2: The Constant Tourist: Passing Intimacy and Touristic Nomadism in Drôle de Félix – Florian Grandena

Chapter 3: Brittany, No Exit: Travelling in Circles in Manuel Poirier’s Western – Thibaut Schilt

Chapter 4: Troubling Return: Femininity and Algeria in La Fille de Keltoum – Darren Waldron

Chapter 5: Going Nowhere Fast: On the Road in Contemporary Algeria in Tariq Teguia’s Rome plutôt que vous – Joseph McGonagle

Chapter 6: Times on the Road: Identity and Lived Temporality in Benoît Jacquot’s À tout de suite and L’Intouchable – Glen W. Norton

Chapter 7: Tourism and Travelling in Jean-Luc Godard’s Allemagne 90 neuf zéro and Éloge de l’amour – Ewa Mazierska

Chapter 8: Under Eastern Eyes: Displacement, Placelessness and the Exilic Optic in Emmanuel Finkiel’s Nulle part terre promise – Michael Gott

Chapter 9: Nowhere to Run, Somewhere to Hide: Laurent Cantet’s L’Emploi du temps – Martin O’Shaughnessy

Chapter 10: Traffic in Souls: The Perils and Promises of Mobility in La Promesse – David Laderman

Chapter 11: Mobility and Exile in Claire Denis’s 35 rhums – Michelle Royer and Miriam Thompson

Chapter 12: Gatlif’s Manifesto: Cinema is Travel – Sylvie Blum-Reid

'Open Roads, Closed Borders opens the reader’s eyes to a vast world of ideas by viewing them through the pinhole perspective of the contemporary French-language road movie'