Introduction

Summary

It is necessary to sail, it is not necessary to live. – Plutarch

This book is about journeys. Each of its chapters concerns films that feature some kind of travel, and as a collection they reveal the journey to be less an exotic departure than a persistent presence across cinema, as well as across cultural modernity. Spanning different regions and cultures, they probe the meaning of the journey in connection with notions of belonging, memory and history, in examples that range from pre-cinema to new media and through documentary, fiction and the spaces between. They investigate film's employment of the journey as a motif for something wider, whether as metaphor for self-discovery or encounter, emblem of artistic or social transformation, and evidence of autonomy and progress, or their lack.

A principal critical intervention of the volume is to put into relief the formal and contextual frameworks that relate to purposeful movement, and to how change is symbolised in spatial terms. Rather than claiming comprehensiveness with regard to such a large topic, the book proposes to use the journey as a kind of instrument, to the extent that it inspires both formal openness and narrative purpose, describes the processes through which film circulates and responds creatively to the socio-cultural influences that give our lives significance. Diverse amongst themselves, what each chapter develops are analyses that establish the cinematic journey as inherently multi-dimensional, constituted by representational, thematic, intellectual or contextual concerns but never manifest upon just one of these axes in isolation. In this regard, as well as in its geographical scope and its refusal of binaries between US and world cinema or between genre and art cinema, the collection contributes to an integrating and polycentric approach to film.

Before introducing the individual chapters and sections comprising the book, it may be worth making a brief sketch of the significance of the journey to the study of film. Film itself of course physically moves, rolling through the camera and then the projector that illuminates its chemical imprints on screen.