Road Movies: From Muybridge and Melies to Lynch and Kiarostami

Road Movies engages with two foundational twentieth century technologies: cinematic and automotive.  It is a book about road movies, a genre burdened by its own seductiveness. It is also, however, a book about images of human mobility more generally and the social function those images have served.  From Eadweard Muybridge’s pre-cinematic experiments through contemporary films by David Lynch and Abbas Kiarostami, road movies are part of a larger imagistic tradition focused on the social costs of modernity and the consequences of a culture moving, often quite rapidly, away from the stabilizing structures of community and communication.