This collection seeks to position the journey as a persistent presence across cinema, and fundamental to its position within modernity. It addresses the innovative appeal of journey narratives from pre-cinema to new media and through documentary, fiction, and the spaces between. Its examples traverse different regions and cultures, including a sub-section dedicated to Eastern Europe, to illuminate questions of belonging, diaspora, displacement, identity and memory. It considers how the journey is a formal element determining art cinema and popular genres such as sci-fi, romance and horror alike, with a special focus on rethinking the road movie. Through this variety, the collection investigates the journey as a motif for self-discovery and encounter, an emblem of artistic and social transformation, a cause of dynamism or stasis and as evidence of autonomy and progress (or their lack). The essays in it thus document epochal changes from urbanisation, migration and war to tourism and shopping, and all aim to address the diversity of cinematic journeys through developing methodological frameworks appropriate to an understanding of the journey as simultaneously a political question, contextual element and a formal property.
