Conclusion

The conclusion builds on Chapter 5’s discussion migrant travel by asking if migrant films and indeed European anxieties over the issue of migration might lead to the end of the road for ready mobility and by extension the road movie boom. It also considers the book within the context of recent development in the 2015 European refugee crisis and the closing of borders within the Schengen Zone.

The End of the Road? Dark Routes and Urban Passageways

Chapter 5 changes directions to consider the flip side of the European mobility boom. The chapter analyses three films whose protagonists are migrants from beyond the European Union: Hope (Boris Lojkine, 2014, France), Illégal (Olivier Masset-Depasse, 2010, Belgium/France/Luxembourg) and Marussia (Eva Pervolovici, 2012, France/Russia). It argues that these films – even when they narrate the lives of protagonists already in Europe – are filmed as road movies or continuations thereof. In earlier chapters it was argued that road cinema is defined first and foremost by an emphasis on ‘travelling shots’. This chapter considers how the generally panoramic vantage points of road cinema are represented in migrant road films, in which travellers are often granted solely or primarily limited viewpoints and sightlines.

Remapping the European Road

This chapter assessesfive contemporary films from three different nations that respond to the Europeanization of economies and identity formulations with a particular eye on how the passages through diverse landscapes are filmed: Le Grand Voyage, Rendez-vous à Kiruna (Anna Novion, 2012, France), St. Jacques… la Mecque (Colline Serreau, 2005, France), Torpedo (Matthieu Donck, 2012, Belgium/France) and La Vraie vie est ailleurs (Frédéric Choffat, 2006, Switzerland). The case studies are used to examine the primary motivations for being on the road in French-language Europe (and Europe in general) and the ways in which the various modes of transit involved are represented and how the techniques and practicalities affect the issue of representation. Each film under consideration seeks to outline the new ‘soft borders’ of Europe by crossing a variety of national, regional and social boundaries.

Introduction

The introduction discusses the political, cultural and cinematic contexts of contemporary European French-language road cinema. It also identifies defines ‘road cinema’ as used in this book and outlines and introduces the book’s three primary aims. The first is to assess the impulse to remap European space through the vantage point of French-language European cinemas. The second is to delineate the parameters of the European French-language road format and identify a number of its narrative, technical and formal particularities. The third objective is to expand the discursive parameters of ‘French’ cinema to encompass a wider realm of inter-related spaces of narrative, film production and reception that I label ‘French-language Europe’.

Travelling Beyond the National: Mobile Citizenship and Flexible Identities in French-Language Return Road Movies

This chapter examines what is likely the increasingly prevalent ‘return to origins’ movie. A close look at the corpus of French-language road cinema of the past twenty years reveals a genre that actively reformulates the limits of national and European identity by (often literally) redrawing the map. The popularity of ‘return’ voyages is reflective of a desire to remap French and other national identities within the parameters of an enlarged European Union, within which physical and administrative frontiers have fallen. Return films demonstrate that it is now conceivable to be French, Belgian or Swiss and retain, or rediscover, a connection to another identity, whether Polish, Czech, Armenian, Spanish, Italian, or Maghrebi. The chapter begins with a discussion of how mobile and layered outlooks on citizenship fit into conception of French republicanism and European identity frameworks before zooming in on case studies from France and Switzerland. Voyage en Arménie/Armenia (Robert Guédiguian, 2006, France), Ten’ja/Testament (Hassan Legzouli, 2004, France/Morocco) and Comme des voleurs (à l'est)/Stealth (Lionel Baier, 2005, Switzerland) furnish the examples.

Cowboys, Icebergs, Anarchists and Toreadors: The Paradoxes and Possibilities of the Francophone Belgian Road Cinema

This chapter attempts to answer the questions: ‘what, and where, is Belgian road cinema?’ Doing so involves considering the European-ness of Belgian film as well as its national specificity and connection to wider French-language cultural categories and industries. This chapter analyses five films: Eldorado (Bouli Lanners, 2008), L'iceberg (Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy, 2005), Quand la mer monte (Jeanne Moreau and Gilles Porte, 2004), Les folles aventures de Simon Konianski/Simon Konianski (Micha Wald, 2008) and Aaltra (Gustave de Kervern and Benoît Delépine, 2004, France/Belgium).Although these voyages generally engage with national culture – or cultures, in the case of Belgium – the limits of the nation-state no longer adequately contain the cultures and spaces explored in Belgian road cinema. Citizenship in contemporary Belgium is reframed as inherently linked to mobility, a stance that rejects fixed, monolithic identity formulations and the closed spaces associated with national identities and conceptions of Fortress Europe.

Mapping the Hybrid European Road: French Connections, European Traditions and American Influence?

This chapter set the stage for an exploration of contemporary French-language European road movies by tracing the interwoven lines of the tradition in its American and European iterations back to the 1960s, the period during which the template for contemporary road cinema crystalized. It argues that the contours of the road movie tradition are not strictly the product of a direct lineage from seminal American films from the late 1960s, such as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969, USA), but the result of complex transnational interactions within European cinemas and between European and American cultures. The films covered are Il Sorpasso (Dino Risi, 1962, Italy), Le corniaud/The Sucker (Gérard Oury, 1965, France/Italy) Les petits matins/Hitch-Hike (Jacqueline Audry, 1962, France), Im Lauf der Zeit/Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1977, West Germany), Leningrad Cowboys Go America (Aki Kaurismäki,1989, Finland/Sweden) and Lisbon Story (Wim Wenders, 1994, Germany/Portugal).