Sic transit: The Serial Killer Road Movie

This chapter considers the serial killer road movie through a comparison of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (USA, 1987) and Sightseers (UK, 2012). After outlining the importance of mobility in conceptualizing the serial killer, it establishes the historical specificity of the serial killer road movie as an anti-humanist inversion of the road movie belonging to late capitalist society. The chapter seeks to show how the combination of serial killer and road joins two modern mythologies, understood here within the different contexts of American independent cinema and British comedy. The chapter considers how mobility characterizes the killers in both films as radically other, yet expressive of something essential to the place from which they emerge. Considering respectively the importance of the post-industrial decay of Henry and the eccentricity of British manners in Sightseers, the chapter outlines the different meanings of the road in British as opposed to US culture, and the special narrational position of remove that cinematic mobility can produce.

Transnational Productions and Regional Funding: Border-crossing, European Locations and the Case of Contemporary Horror

This chapter investigates transnational co-productions, regional funding, film commissions and European locations in the new wave of European horror cinema of the new millennium. Since the international success of Hostel (2005) European locations have once again become appealing settings for Horror films, contributing to a new flourishing of the genre in Europe. In particular, we have witnessed a new development of the so-called 'road horror movie', a sub-genre traditionally characterized by border crossing, touristic activities and exotic locations. Film such as Frontier(s)(2006), Calvaire (The Ordeal, 2004), Manhunt (Rovdyr 2008), Ils (Them 2006) and The Pack (Le Meute, 2007) show traveling as a crucial theme. This chapter will engage, first of all, with the production features of these films, focusing on the involvement of regional film commissions and European co-production agreements, in order to investigate the local/global dimension of these productions, generally aimed at an international audience. Secondly, it will analyse the use of locations and how it mirrors European film policies as well as the idea of "Europe" and a “post-industrial” identity.

The Sense of an Ending: Music, Time and Romance in Before Sunrise

Right from the start, Before Sunrise presents us with the problem of its ending. The film narrates the on-the-road romance of Jesse and Celine, who meet on a train through central Europe, fall for each other, and decide to spend a day and night together in Vienna before continuing their respective journeys, never to see each other again. In a move that is typical of indie cinema, the two protagonists trade the idea of a ‘happily ever after’ with the possibility of experiencing a moment together. And yet, for this same reason, their time together is inseparable from the feeling of the approaching goodbye, which threatens their very ability to experience the moment. My chapter explores how Before Sunrise draws on music to find a solution to this conundrum. I show that, as we approach the temporal deadline of the title, Bach’s music is used to mobilise a set of complementary eschatological frameworks that are meant both to freeze and extend the time in Vienna. More broadly, I suggest that the film provides a model of cinema’s use of music to make sense of endings and of the time-bound nature of the cinematic experience.

Global Visions: Around-the-World Travel and Visual Culture in Early Modernity1

This chapter looks at the way in which the whole world has been imagined in visual and audiovisual media. In particular, it explores how the trope of global travel was exploited in nineteenth-century panoramas that had the ambition to encompass the entire world, such as the georama, the cosmorama and round-the-word moving panoramas. By looking at these earlier examples in mass visual culture, the chapter hopes to provide a useful framework to examine the way in which the whole world has reemerged in contemporary audiovisual culture.

Moving in Circles: Kinetic Elite and Kinetic Proletariat in ‘End of the World’ Films

This chapter considers two science fiction films, Elysium (2013) by Neill Blomkamp and Snowpiercer (2013) by Joon-ho Bong, which utilize the motif of journey and take us to the near future. What is specific about them is that the journeys take place on Earth or near the Earth. In the future they present there is no escape from our planet; the Earth appears to be a limit even for the privileged. They convey a sense of the end of history, when there is nothing new to discover or conquer and the conflict is around finding the best place within the existing economic and social structures. This investigation draws on the concepts of the ‘end times’, and ‘fast and slow lanes of social life’ and ‘kinetic elite’ to examine how mobility reproduces and exacerbates social inequalities caused by the hegemony of neoliberalism.

Chronotopic Ghosts and Quiet Men: José Luis Guerín’s Innisfree

In 1988 José Luis Guerín took a film crew from Spain to the western coast of Ireland, in search of the filming locations of John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952). The resultant film, Innisfree (1990), blends documentary with fiction, and the present with the past, to seemingly uncover the physical, cultural and spectral remnants of the Hollywood production in this small rural locality. Innisfree is both the product of a journey (the Spanish filmmaker’s fannish field trip) and the representation of several journeys and returns. This essay examines Guerín’s depiction of the ghostly persistence of The Quiet Man in the landscape, by using Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope to identify the lasting significance of real and imagined time-spaces in the cinematic landscape. Just as immigrant Irishman Sean Thornton (John Wayne) returns to his spiritual homeland from Pittsburgh, USA to reclaim his family land, Ford himself returns to the land of his parents’ birth. In Innisfree Thornton’s, Ford’s and Guerín’s imagined Irelands all mingle and intertwine in a confusing crossroads of time, fiction, memory and landscape.

Diasporic Dreams and Shattered Desires: Displacement, Identity and Tradition in Heaven on Earth

In Cartographies of Diaspora Avtar Brah writes that “at the heart of the notion of diaspora is the image of a journey” (1996:182). Indeed, the image of the journey is a dominant feature of filmic renditions of the diasporic experience, be it the one offered by Indian popular cinema or by South Asian diasporic filmmakers. This chapter analyses the representation of the diasporic experience offered by Deepa Mehta’s film Heaven on Earth (2008) as a text which engages with issues of displacement, home and belonging by focusing on the situation of a working-class family in the diasporic space of Canada. The analysis focuses in particular on the intersection of issues of displacement and identity with questions of gender and class, and on the use of tradition as a simultaneously constraining and liberating force.

Brief Encounters: The Railway Station on Film

This chapter examines the cinematic representation of the railway station, examining the different ways in which the space and iconography of the station have been used in film to represent cultural integration, transformation and/or friction. The station is both physical space and symbol or metaphor for cultural encounter of all kinds: encounter engendered by travel and tourism, conflict and displacement, memory and identity. One of the very earliest moving pictures, the Lumière brothers’ Arrivée d’un train à la gare de La Ciotat (France, 1896), puts a station at its heart reminding us of the shared origins of both cinema and the modern station in the nineteenth century and presaging the countless filmic representations of the station which would ensue. Via close analysis of David Lean’s seminal ‘station’ film, Brief Encounter (1945) the chapter examines the reasons for this cinematic fascination with the railway station and examines this film’s particular representations of journeys, encounters and identities.

Women on the Road: Representing Female Mobility in Contemporary Hungarian–Romanian Co-productions

Despite their stylistic differences, contemporary Hungarian and Romanian films show a striking similarity in representing aborted, delayed, interrupted journeys, often culminating in situations of entrapment. The three analysed films - Iszka's Journey (Csaba Bollók, 2007), Katalin Varga (Peter Strickland, 2009) and Bibliothèque Pascal (Szabolcs Hajdu, 2010) - represent the incomplete, fragmented journeys of female protagonists of different ages, thus constituting a coherent, representative narrative of a quest for a home, endangered by (male) trahison and physical or psychological aggression. All three films are Hungarian-Romanian co-productions, an aspect which opens the topic of mobility out to new figurative, meta-narrative interpretations of the fims’ heterotopia, of the limits and limitations of intercultural exchange. Following an overview of central heterotopias the chapter performs a typology of these female travellers, with the aim to deconstruct (Western) cultural stereotypes related to (Eastern) female mobility.

Hesitant Journeys: Fugitive and Migrant Narratives in the New Romanian Cinema

This chapter argues that instead of uncovering a certain social world as real, the films of new Romanian cinema depict the mobile, hesitant ways in which social institutions produce a reality in post-socialist society. In order to illustrate the historical-interpretive advantages of the concept of hesitation, this chapter focuses on the fugitive- and migrant narratives of new Romanian cinema in which the characters physically move back and forth between various institutions such as the prison, the state foster home, the hospital, various educational institutions, the police and immigration authorities.