Walter Salles, the director of the upcoming film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, penned a nice essay on the history of the road movie which appears in today’s New York Times Magazine. In it, he traces its origins, first back to Homer’s Odyssey, then, at the prompting of Wim Wenders, further back to “our nomadic roots, in mankind’s primal need to leave an account of its passage on earth,” making the cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira the earliest trace of the narrative impulse.
I suppose that ultimately that would depend on whether the cave paintings function as documents of Cro-Magnon life as well as ritual tools. Salle himself draws an interesting parallel between road movies and documentary film: “The road movie is not the domain of large cranes or steady-cams. On the contrary, the camera needs to remain in unison with characters who are in continual motion — a motion that shouldn’t be controlled. The road movie tends, therefore, to be driven by a sense of immediacy that is not dissimilar from that of a documentary film.” This naturally dovetails with the reports of his On the Road being filmed with hand-held cameras (which in turn led me to draw parallels between Kerouac’s spontaneous prose and the mumblecore aesthetic in a previous post).
Salle must know what he's talking about, being the director of two very individual and critically well-received road movies, 1998’s Central Station and 2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries. “In doing different road movies, I also came to realize that a good screenplay grants you more freedom to improvise than a weak one. It’s like jazz: the better the melody, the easier it is to wander away from it, because it will also be easier to return to it later.” I like how Salles slips in another Kerouac trademark here, jazz as the essence of improvisation, only unlike Kerouac he emphasizes the importance of the core melody, or theme. Which parallels, interestingly enough what screenwriter champion David Kipen says (and which I reference in another recent post): a director without a strong screenplay may very find himself or herself on some very questionable back roads.
PHOTO CREDIT: Wim Wenders
