America’s greatest cultural achievement is The Road Movie
MY LIST of FILMS and Donald Judd on rednecks in kaffiyehs
I watched Michael Haneke’s Happy End (2017) again the other day. He hasn’t made a film since it, although there was once talk of him possibly working with Michel Houellebecq some day, a collaboration that would presumably herald the end of Europe as we know it.
Haneke is apparently the quintessential ‘European’ filmmaker which makes him the European ‘auteur’ now. I can’t remember where I read that, but I’ve seen all the films, and he says as much himself. He is ‘the last modernist’ and in Europe we are all bourgeois now.
Fair enough but it’s summer holidays in Europe and I’m thinking of America. The far-off America of movies, and I would like to know what the American art critic Donald Judd thought of American road movies and whether or not he can help me define an apparently hitherto ‘elusive’ genre. [Scroll down to see my list of what I consider America’s greatest road films if you are not interested in digressions on art theory and gossip…and maybe circle back].
Judd, space, and gossip
Donald Judd was famous for saying that painting and sculpture were bad art and for being against what he called ‘the European look’. Really he was a philosopher who objected to art that implied philosophical order, and for him this was, with the exception of maybe Klee and Klein, largely what European art was about.
He especially hated Cézanne’s Apples and Pears, preferring Oldenburg’s Hamburgers but there is more to him than that and his famous 1964 essay “Specific Objects”—something of an ode in curt prose to three dimensions—is worth reading for his thoughts on space and materials. But basically, if you don’t know his name you just need to know that he was a big fan of Jackson Pollock who he called “the primary artist”.
So if Cézanne ruptured the art world Pollock ruptured what was left of it and in doing so he was the first American to “break with the European tradition of part-to-part composition”. Judd saw Pollock as a kind of positivist rather than an impressionist: the person who “created the large scale, wholeness, and simplicity that have become common to almost all good work.”
The only other thing I will note before I jump in and ask him about film is that while reading his art criticism I found an absolute gem on Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil, who are apparently still alive. In what sounds like something out of a Houellebecq novel, Philippa de Menil is now ‘Fariha al Jerrahi’ a ‘spiritual guide and current Sheikha of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order in New York City’. She is a long way from Texas. This was Judd writing on the couple in 1990:
In this century every new wave has thought itself newly made and absolutely right. The new wave in charge in the United States is struggling to gain this conviction, but manipulative capitalism as everyone’s tea is pretty weak, so the government needs an enemy. Friedrich’s friend, Franz Dahlem, told me at the time of Westkunst in Cologne that Friedrich’s mother had been a member of the National Socialist party in Berlin. Dahlem was then director of the exhibition space of the Dia Art Foundation in Cologne, which had been the Heiner Friedrich Gallery, run by Thordis Möller. Panza and Friedrich are going to feel superior, or try to feel superior, to the artists, no matter what. However, this attitude doesn’t require a high authoritarian background. Somehow it’s acquired straight from the cotton patch. Artists are at least liberal in some fashion, so that their art provides an opportunity to get even with liberalism and to dominate it and to prove the superiority of authoritarian upbringing. And at the same time liberally whitewash that upbringing. One of my jokes about Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil was that they were rednecks in kaffiyehs, since around 1980 they became Sufi Muslims, supposedly the most reactionary group in Turkey. Friedrich once tried to gain my sympathy, as if I knew nothing of left or right, by saying that after all they were trying to overthrow the Turkish Government. The kaffiyeh covers your neck so that it’s not possible to have a red neck, but being Sufi makes it possible to seem chic and jet-set and exotic, cool in New York City, while really being a redneck, that is, narrow and superior, self-righteous, simple and intolerant, racist, fascist, everything, ignorant and arrogant. If they were just plain redneck Christians, hating communism and “modern art” and all that stuff, it wouldn’t be cool for rich kids in New York City. Better to be exotic Sufis and satisfy and hide your red neck and be applauded for modern art while using and demeaning it. Just shift the cliché a little to satisfy your wealth and its illusions.
Sentimentality and a great deal about love and idealism is an extreme and a partner to the extreme of viciousness. Solzhenitsyn says this somewhere in The Gulag Archipelago. Gertrude Stein describes an example. After a fight about one of his puerile dirty tricks Heiner Friedrich would sign his letters peace and love. Caesar signed his letters to Vercingetorix Amor et Pax Romana. Because if the artist objects to what is being done to the work, the artist is disturbing the peace. Varus wrote Arminius that he deeply and truly enjoyed the shared experience.
Sound familiar? So Judd may have been something of a nihilist in a strictly philosophical sense but at least he wasn’t a pseudo like his friends. One does wonder how many of our modern day white wealthy kaffiyeh wearing denizens of NYC have friends like him? Perhaps we will find out when America goes to the polls.
But I am less concerned with Judd’s distaste for meaning and his snarky remarks, although terribly funny, and more interested here in how he thinks about space.
Born in Missouri in 1928 he moved to New York early on but from the early 70s made annual trips to Baja, California, transfixed by the desert. In 1971 he rented a house in Marfa, Texas and began buying up land and buildings in and around Marfa and remaking them into a series of transformative projects that wove together art, architecture and landscape.
He decided to settle in the remote West Texas outpost in 1992, two years before his death stating simply: “I like the desert and the Southwest a great deal…And I wanted a place that would stay empty”. He eventually acquired over 32,000 acres of ranch land, now known collectively as Ayala de Chinat, and you can visit it by appointment through the Judd Foundation.
Judd apparently decided on Marfa by “look[ing] on a map for the least populated place still within America”, and before Judd Marfa’s only claim to fame was being where the 1956 Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean film Giant was shot. In recent years a number of other films have been shot or partly shot in Marfa, such as No Country for Old Men.
But what would Judd make of American Road Movies? What do I think?
Judd says nothing about film, or at least I found nothing on film when I flicked through his Complete Writings 1959–1975, but he does periodically comment on music.
In his last interview, a conversation with Regina Wyrwoll that was part of the making of her 1994 film Bauhaus, Texas (a made for German TV documentary on Judd’s work in Marfa) she asked him about music, noting that at his big parties and opening “very often there’s Joe Brady, the bagpipe major. Is this the music you like the most or would make personally?”
His answer is predictable enough. He likes Brady because the pìobaireachd has “ideas in it that I like. I’m not very interested in tunes and stories and beginnings and endings and conversations anyway, and in music, certainly. And the pipe music doesn’t have that.” He then goes on to talk about ‘sounds’ and working with Trisha Brown, but considers music “something of a failure in this century compared to visual art and architecture.”
Wyrwoll then asks if he finds Philip Glass interesting and the answer is revealing, although again predictable: “It’s too old-fashioned. Unlike visual art, most of that is just the dying end of the European tradition in music, and it’s been decades and decades now, so it’s very dying”.
While Judd would dismiss American Road Movies as ‘stories’ and ‘beginnings and endings’ (and I might note here that he didn’t care for Andy Warhol so Empire is probably even out) I think he would like what they seem to be as a genre: new, or original, or dare I say sui generis.
I also think that he would approve of the idea that in order for an American genre of film to establish itself as distinct and break free of European conventions it has to be not only set in America but it has to make primary use of America’s tabula rasa landscape.
We must note here that American Western films were not the first Western films. The first Western films were of course British and developed out of early fictional narrative film and the dramatisation of war, although they of course developed into their own distinctive genre in a way that the British films didn’t and couldn’t.
Some American Road Movies are Westerns too, like The Searchers or Shane, and I have no real definition of the genre, except to say that I think it exists and that it marked a departure from European traditions in a way that films that are ‘only’ ‘Westerns’ arguably did not and that not all road movies are Westerns.
I cannot think of a European Road Movie. Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend is a film about a traffic jam. Wild Strawberries is a meditation on human existence that rivals Celine’s novel Journey to the End of the Night. Fellini’s La Stranda? This has to be the closest European film to a ‘road movie’ but that is not even one of the ways I would describe it. It’s a Fellini. This may be part of my problem. For me it might be the case that film itself is European and auteurs in a league of their own.
The German Wim Wenders made one of my favourite American Road Movies Paris, Texas but he did so ‘pretending’ to be an American, or rather he travelled to America because, in his words, he wanted to “tell a story about America.” So Paris, Texas is one of the greatest American films like D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo is one of the greatest Australian novels.
Is an American Road Movie just an American movie in which the main narrative revolves around driving from A to B in the most American of things, a car? Or the other very American thing, a truck? Or a motorcycle? Godard was commenting on America, or capitalism, by ‘using’ cars, as were other Europeans, but all this tells us is that cars are an American symbol.
Wim Wenders’ so-called Road Movie Trilogy, very different from Paris, Texas, is not a European Road Film Trilogy, or a German Road Film Trilogy, it is Wim Wender’s Road Movie Trilogy like The Three Colours Trilogy is Kieślowski’s… and I am left again with a standalone, and again ‘an auteur’. I’m in Hungary. Does Béla Tarr make ‘road movies’? I don’t ‘believe’ in ‘Europe’? Another problem… or an answer?
The Road Movie: ‘an elusive genre’ and my list
According to Wikipedia no one knows how to define ‘Road Movie’ as a genre and I have jumped straight to the American Road Movie. This is simply because I think the others are either not very good (Australian) or not terribly interesting (Indian). That is, not very good or not very interesting on the whole. There should be individual stand-outs. Some would argue Mad Max but I do not care for it. I also think Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris is a hack job. I am not selling my country here but Wake In Fright is the only Australian film that comes to mind as truly great in this vague context but that is not a ‘road movie’ in the way that Mad Max or others arguably, very arguably, are. It was also not made by an Australian, although it is based on the Kenneth Cook book. But I digress…
I am interested in American Road Movies because I think there are enough of them to constitute a genre and I think that they are very good films. So why haven’t the film scholars figured this out? This is what Wikipedia says about genre and ‘road movies’:
The road movie has been called an elusive and ambiguous film genre.[7] Timothy Corrigan states that road movies are a "knowingly impure" genre as they have "overdetermined and built-in genre-blending tendencies".[12] Devin Orgeron states that road movies, despite their literal focus on car trips, are "about the [history of] the cinema, about the culture of the image", with road movies created with a mixture of Classical Hollywood film genres.[12] The road movie genre developed from a "constellation of “solid” modernity, combining locomotion and media-motion" to get "away from the sedentarising forces of modernity and produc[e] contingency".[13]
Road movies are blended with other genres to create a number of subgenres, including: road horror (e.g., Near Dark from 1987); road comedies (e.g., Flirting with Disaster from 1996); road racing films (e.g., Death Race 2000 from 1975) and rock concert tour films (e.g., Almost Famous from 2000).[8] Film noir road movies include Detour (1945), Desperate, The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947) and The Hitch-Hiker (1953), all of which "establish fear and suspense around hitchhiking", and the outlaw-themed film noirs They Live by Night (1948) and Gun Crazy.[8] Film noir-influenced road films continued in the neo noir era, with The Hitcher (1986), Delusion (1991), Red Rock West (1992), and Joy Ride (2001).[8]
Even though road movies are a significant and popular genre, it is an "overlooked strain of film history".[5] Major genre studies often do not examine road movies, and there has been little analysis of what qualifies as a road movie.[14]
So I will have to figure it out, working backwards. Presumably my list will showcase a particular type of America? Or a particular type of filmmaking? Here goes:
Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker. A 1953 “American independent film noir thriller”. No, this is arguably the first American Road Movie, although the 1956 The Searchers could also take this position but it is tough because The Searchers is possibly America’s greatest film, it is definitely one of them.
Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider. A 1969 “American independent road drama film”. Accurate.
Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces. This is apparently just a “1970 American drama film”. Nope, ‘the road’ is definitive in this film, and another Jack Nicholson classic.
Steven Spielberg’s Duel. A 1971 “American road action-thriller television film”. Accurate.
Monte Hellman’s 1971 Two-Lane Blacktop. Correctly listed as a “road movie”.
Terrence Malick’s Badlands. Apparently this is a 1973 “neo-noir, period crime drama film”. This is too messy. It’s an American Road Movie.
Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas. This is a 1984 “neo-Western drama road film”. Accurate.
Richard Linklater’s It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books. Correctly listed as a “1988 American Road Movie”.
Mike Figgis’s Leaving Las Vegas. This is again apparently just a 1995 “American drama film'“. Nope, Road Movie.
These are just some of my favourites and the ones that first came to my mind in some sort of order. Other films that fit the genre but are not necessarily considered ‘road films’ are: Ridley Scott’s 1991 Thelma and Louise, Terry Gilliam’s 1988 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Oliver Stone’s 1994 Natural Born Killers, Gus Van Sant’s 1991 My Own Private Idaho, Roger Corman’s 1966 Wild Angels and the better 1967 The Trip, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. This is apparently a 2007 “American action slasher film”. (This is half accurate. Tarantino discusses why it doesn’t fit a genre) and I could go on and on and I think I would find myself somewhere near where the scholars cited by Wikipedia ended up. You start to think about the Cohen Brother’s 2000 O’ Brother Where Art Thou? and then Stuart Rosenberg’s 1967 Cool Hand Luke and you’re somewhere else. Somewhere good, but somewhere else.
What I do know is that the ones that I listed (and there are more) have a car or a road trip as their defining feature and they are all American and they are all superb. You do not get this in European cinema, nothing close.
When I was searching for an image for the most obscure film I chose, Richard Linklater’s first film It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books I came across this short note by Monte Hellman who writes that Linklater mailed him his film with a letter and that he “answered with enthusiastic encouragement”. I had no idea of this. Perhaps I have stumbled on some sort of thread, after all. Hellman signs off, self-consciously, and seemingly aware of the generic dilemma, with:
“Monte Hellman, a protégé of legendary producer/director Roger Corman, is best known for a pair of Jack Nicholson Westerns, as well as the cult film favorites Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter, and China 9 Liberty 37.”
Anon,
LS
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Thanks for the post Every time I read through it (about 3 times now) I find some new snippet of information to me that’s the work of a great writer/ author.American movies have always been loved and admired throughout the world their diversity comes from the enormous multicultural population which have migrated there from many parts of the globe Thanks again LS