Road Movies: From Muybridge and Melies to Lynch and Kiarostami by Devin Orgeron

Synopsis

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.

Biography

Devin Orgeron is Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the English Department at North Carolina State University. He has published widely on issues of cinematic authorship, realism, postmodernity, and mobility- subjects that intersect in Road Movies. He also collects, shows, and writes about home movies from the 1940s-1970s.