Buddies, Lovers, and Detours: America and its Road Movies

Is an open road also a democratic one? Zooming in on two films—Queen & Slim (2019) and Unpregnant (2020)—this article discusses American road movie genre from the perspective of 2021, and how contemporary film narratives intersect with race and gender. One movie often drives in another film’s lane, meaning the genre is self-referential. Unfolding in three parts, the article begins by introducing these two films and surveying how they contribute to the road movie genre. It then discusses cars and clothing as characters and concludes by considering surveillance and how these films, in tandem, take the temperature of contemporary American society.

Easy Rider and Thelma & Louise revisited, or on experimental film remakes of the road movie

Although remakes and road movies are particularly endemic to Hollywood cinema, experimental filmmakers have also embraced the road movie tradition and reproduced existing material for new audiences to retell, readdress and rearticulate the prior story, exploring the dialectics between repetition, differentiation and genre. Interestingly, however, while the remake, seen mostly as a genre phenomenon, has received some critical attention, remaking in the avant-garde film scene has been rarely explored by adaptation theory and practice. To somewhat fill in this gap, the article situates two recent avant-garde films, James Benning’s Easy Rider (2012) and Jessica Bardsley’s Goodbye Thelma (2019), within the framework of remake and adaptation studies and proposes that both works function as acknowledged and transformed remakes of the classic road movies, in which the outcome radically differs from the original story and crosses the temporal and spatial boundaries of the genre. In doing so, the projects fit in with the broader tradition of cinematic reworking and recycling as they continuously reference and exploit earlier films by creating their alternative versions as well as a strong sense of place and movement.

TEATRO POSDRAMÁTICO EN TIEMPOS DE CRISIS: TRES EJEMPLOS DE TEATRO DOCUMENTO Y TEATRO DE CREACIÓN

En el período que nos ocupa —desde 2010 hasta la actuali-dad— caracterizado como una época de crisis que todavía no ha aca-bado, debemos reflexionar sobre cómo se involucra el teatro en la crisis y actúa en paralelo, al emitir juicios, plantear preguntas y mantener un diálogo con la sociedad. El presente ensayo analiza tres creaciones tea-trales que presentan su trabajo en la escena griega y europea y que han obtenido un notable éxito. La elección del dúo de directores Azás -Tsini-coris, el grupo Station Athens de Marcopulu y el grupo Blitz, respondió a dos consideraciones: por un lado, su temática, que expone puntos co-munes como la emigración, la xenofobia, la violencia y la melancolía pro-vocada por la resistencia a un mundo cruel, y, por otro lado, sus textos, que proceden de la ficción y el documental, y que son fruto de la labor común de todo el grupo. La intertextualidad, la alegoría y el realismo del formato como documento, componen representaciones vertebradas, road movies sin desplazamiento, relatos tragicómicos de la violencia de los siglos XX y XXI, versiones de canciones con guiños bien reconocibles a la coyuntura de crisis actual. Actores amateurs y profesionales, inmi-grantes, ciudadanos de la calle, directores que cuentan con la tecnología como coprotagonista, transforman experiencias e ideas en un fecundo género metateatral.

THE ROAD MOVIE GENRE IN THE WEST MOVIES AND THE MUSLIM EAST CINEMATOGRAPHY

The article analyzes specific features of the Road Movie genre in a historical perspective on the example of the Western countries film production and Iran national cinematography. To that end the authors focus on genre and semantic variety of classical movies, a «proto-road-movie» and the Road Movies of nowadays. A comparative approach to the study of the genre formula provides for revealing the nuances in the stylistic techniques of directors and defining the national features of the semantic core of the Road Movie genre in both the Western movies (created in Europe and the USA) and in the films of the East (Iranian New Wave). While maintaining a number of aesthetic features that are similar in Western and Eastern Road Movies, one can nevertheless observe a significant difference in the way of representing the concept of the Path (the Road) by directors from the West and from Muslim countries. The article gives a detailed analysis of the Road concept in the context of Islamic cinema. Studying the symbolic of the Path and the Travel in Muslim tradition the authors refer to the norms of Sharia, Sufism and to the mode of the life traditions of the Middle Ages and our days. Special attention is paid to the movies of a well-known Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Working before and after the Islamic Revolution (1978–1979) he was the one of the founders of the New Iranian cinema.

Hojalateros en la carretera. Road Movies en el Siglo XXI

Entre las modificaciones y novedades que acompañan a la Revista Escribanía, nos complace presentar el primer dosier (esperamos muchos más), que recoge un conjunto de escritos sobre el road movie, conocido en habla hispana como cine de carretera o películas de carretera. La novedad estriba en que la sección Hojalateros utiliza, en calidad de monográfico, este particular género, de innegable origen en tierras norteamericanas, para que los respectivos trabajos tengan un hilo conductor común. Podríamos decir, la carretera y el viaje permiten un tránsito compartido.

Comedy, History, and Culture

How has comedy evolved around the globe from earliest times to today? Chapter 4 offers a chronology of comedy. Distinguishing among laughter, comedy, and humor, it finds evidence of humor in ancient texts and imagery, tracing the evolution of comic genres through classical Greek drama, Sanskrit poetry, early China, medieval Europe, and feudal Japan. The chronology continues with an account of popular festivals of laughter, comedic stage performances, and precursors of the comic novel, showing how they led to modern literary and cinematic forms as well as televised sitcoms and live standup. Motion pictures borrowed silent gags and witty wordplay from vaudeville, channeled the freewheeling energy of picaresque stories into episodic road movies, adapted the amatory impulses of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies to the screen, and turned the Carnivalesque spirit into scenes of cinematic mischief and mayhem.

Film Comedy in South America

From Brazil’s Hello, Hello, Carnival! to Argentina’s Wild Tales, films from south of the US border have both adapted and defied Hollywood conventions for performing memorable comedy. Along the way, they have explored the region’s varied landscape and inhabitants through comic road movies (The Voyage, Rolling Family), satirical experiments in social consciousness (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, Stadium Coup), scheme-and-swindler flicks (Nine Queens, A Cab for Three), ironic commentaries on aging (The Last Train, Whisky), and sexy spoofs (Captain Pantoja and the Special Services, Destiny Has No Favorites), adding their own brand to the global stock of movie comedy.