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rel: Film End Feel Logosphere - Semiosphere The Dialogic Imagination - M. M. Bakhtin
Abstract: The paper deals with the notion of film genre in general and the road movie, perhaps the most American and much contested genre in particular, employing Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope.
While the notion of genre has been ubiquitous in film studies, it remains vague and perhaps intentionally ambiguous.
After 1970s, the advent of mass tourism and the crisis of home, places an space as socially constituted categories were re-negotiated in the road movie.
The chronotope serves as a means of measuring how, in a particular age, genre, or text, real historical time and space as well as fictional time and space are articulated in relation to one another; Bakhtin’s term refers to the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed”
Audiences learn to superimpose and complete chronotopes over the plot as it unfolds.
Road movies, as the term makes clear, are movies in which protagonists are on the move. Generally speaking, such a movie is iconographically marked through things as a car, the tracking shot, wide and wild open spaces.
“…road with the function of a meeting place for characters who would otherwise perhaps never meet. As in the course of travelling the roadies’ personalities, stories and backgrounds are revealed, a change of personal development can also be triggered off by a fellow traveller—their fates are intertwined, if only for a short while.”
Bonding
As a general rule, bonding along the road (usually homosocial) is possibly one of the strongest effects of the chronotope of escape on the road. As the characters are on the run together, they share the same car, the same perception of time and space—in other words, they share the backward glances on the lookout for whatever they are escaping from.
Destination and Promised Land
Quite unsurprisingly, the quest for the “promised land” in the US-American cultural space is often embodied by traveling to California. “Where the sun is always shining.”
Dead End
Related to varying degrees to the chronotope of “stuck on the way”, the quest for the Promised Land, and of escape on the road, the chronotope of “Dead End City” revolves around questions such as what happens when the road doesn’t go on or when the Promised Land turns out to be just another dead end.
There is no longer any such thing as a single chronotope of the road (as originally described by Bakhtin), even less than there is a unified definition of “the road movie.” An all-inclusive definition usually provides no more than a list of superficial features instead of any new insight into or productive engagement with the road movie as a genre.