Road Tripping

As American as apple pie, the road movie is both a mirror and a mythmaker: a genre that feeds on and continually reconstructs the nation’s foundational stories of freedom. As a line of flight, the open road welcomes and accelerates the breakdown of identities and institutions; the drift defies the rigidity of fixed roles and inherited structures; possibility and transience overcomes stifling stability and predetermined destinates.

This series traces the genre’s high points in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the road became the defining terrain of New Hollywood, the counterculture it turned its camera to, and the existential disenchantment of a nation in flux. As an expressive vehicle for escape, new encounters, disillusionment, reckoning, and self-invention, the road also allowed these filmmakers to voyage through the landscapes of a pre-homogenized America. While presented primarily through a masculine lens, the series ends with a reclamation of mobility by female leads.