They manage to shoot cars with this fetishistic lens that just makes you wanna jerk off.” They were also somewhat desirable for the stylish way they shot their vehicles or as Quentin Tarantino eloquently put it: “Nobody shoots a car the way the Aussies do. The romantic allure of leisurely losing yourself in a remote and exotic land has its consequences in the Australian Outback road movie where the terrain often turns hostile and a trip through scenic backcountry can turn into a fierce game of survival.Īppearing from the mid-‘70s onwards, Australian Outback road movies were noticeably set within or amongst remote disintegrating communities, usually featured anachronistic residents who posed a threat to masculine integrity and contained Grand Guignol horror moments often with a grainy cinéma vérité style aesthetic quality. While stars such as Mel Gibson, Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce and character actors Bruce Spence and John Jarratt have also shined provocatively on the open road. The typography of the outback terrain has also proved an ideal canvas for many Aussie auteurs to cut their creative teeth including directors Peter Weir, Richard Franklin, George Miller, Phillip Noyce and Stephan Elliott. The relationship between landscape and the characters that interact with them is very much at the heart of the Australian road movie where the Australian Gothic threatens to intrude at any moment and where there is little comfort in the activity of escape. With reoccurring themes of entrapment and stasis, (as appose to traditional themes of liberation through movement) Australian cinema has utilised the road movie as a means to express geographical concerns regarding isolation, suffocation and disillusionment with contemporary Australian life. “In the road movie, the travel undertaken by the protagonists serves as a metaphor for life itself, with freedom and social mobility being analogous to physical mobility.” says Jonathan Rayner in Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction.Īlthough a cultural product of America’s preoccupation with the mythology of freedom, escapist adventure and metaphoric redemption, the road movie is a subgenre culturally compatible enough to have been embraced interestingly by other countries around the globe to express their own concerns with ideology and national identity.
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