The paradoxes of cinematic movement: is the road movie a static genre?

Abstract

This article suggests a typology of the movements perceived by spectators in films. Filmic movement may be: duration-induced, profilmic, audible off-camera, composition-induced, editing-induced, narrative, or thematic. This typology is applied to the road movie, that is, a film genre defined as comprising those films which were considered as road movies by American critics or by their producers when they were first released. This makes it possible to show that the thematic and profilmic movement in road movies is frequently contradicted by an accumulation of formal elements which make the genre esthetically static and centripetal. Finally, editing-induced movement proves to be the key criterion in deciding whether a film is static or dynamic.

Keywords

• filmic movement
• stasis
• dynamism
• film genres
• road movie