The Big Picture Magazine
“The world was like a faraway planet to which I could never return” – Holly, Badlands Terrence Malick’s directorial debut Badlands (1973) is in many respects a tale of escapism writ large over a collection of isolated interior and exterior landscapes. Our protagonists seek to construct their own mythologies and rewrite their own histories, with […]
She rips the sleeve off of a denim shirt and makes herself two bandanas to wear around her neck. She’s dressed in washed-up blue jeans, white cowboy boots and white tank top. She then sits next to an old man with a beat-up white cowboy hat on. She takes off all her jewellery, her earrings, […]
As I walk The Hemisphere Got my wish To up and disappear -“No Ceiling”, Eddie Vedder Into the Wild’s (2007) soundtrack integrates all of the contours, nuances, and mysteries of the wild and tamed places and becomes a living moodboard of the American landscape. We can hear the winds sweeping across the canyons of Arizona, […]
We follow the Rover through hostility and violence on his journey through the Outback.
The road movie is a narrative of migration. The characters within these films typically find themselves travelling or “migrating” somewhere new in search of a new home, a new family, or a new life of some kind. More recently, the rubric of the “queer road movie” has been introduced to define narratives which are guided […]
Nicola Balkind buckles up and heads off with the real life Griswold family on a road trip inspired by a cult comedy celebrating its 30th birthday. These days, the American Dream is typically understood to mean fame, fortune, and pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps. But the classic pursuit of prosperity and upward mobility is […]
Noyce collaborated on Backroads with Aboriginal activist Gary Foley, who, apart from his political actions such as the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra in 1972, had also worked in theatre. As a result, Backroads is the first feature in which Aboriginal characters in major roles are neither romanticized nor patronized. Foley and […]
A decade before Wim Wenders’ Palm d’Or winning Paris, Texas, came Alice In The Cities, a gentle road movie that introduced the key themes of alienation and angst that would later define Wenders’ oeuvre and firmly cement his reputation as an artistic force in the canon of new-wave German cinema. Jack Kerouak’s novel On The Road inspired the post […]
For most of La vie de Jésus Bruno Dumont has his audience riding pinion with a gang of bored young motorcyclists. They roam aimlessly around a widescreen rendered, rural northeastern France, waiting for their lives to happen, or for someone to merely notice they are there. However, a potentially racist act of violence towards the […]
