I've just driven 1,200 miles around the west coast of Ireland in my VW camper van. Though I didn't see a film for the whole fortnight, the trip felt cinematic. A windscreen is exactly the same shape as a movie screen, so driving is like one long travelling shot. Hollywood calls its blockbusters "rollercoaster rides" to suggest thrilling emotional peaks and troughs, but also, in part, because to sit in a rollercoaster car is to see an oncoming vista, like watching a crane shot.
But my trip was cinematic for more than visual reasons. As I had my bed in the back of the van, and had no fixed route, the structure of my holiday was open. On the Dingle peninsula, I saw a sign for an ancient oratory, so decided to head for it. In Galway, the sun came out, so I drove to a beach I'd glimpsed on the horizon. Those who have read anything about screenwriting will think such capriciousness unfilmic. Movies are all about structured stories, we're told. Screenwriters say the hardest bit is engineering the narrative: establishing personal, social and existential dilemmas in the system of characters and incidents in acts one and two that will afford complex and satisfying revelations in act three. A recent editorial in the film industry magazine Screen International agreed, and called for the reintroduction of the best story Oscar that was awarded between 1928 and 1956.
I don't disagree. The recent German film The Lives of Others moved me deeply because its plot built to tragic climaxes layered with irony and regret. But in the majority of films, narrative operates in a more rudimentary way. Its purpose is to provide new challenges for its characters. You can hear its whirr, the clunk and clang of its camshaft. One of Britain's best producers told me, some years ago, that the secret of a successful film is lots and lots of plot.
These films continue to have newness—lots of it—but the flow of incident, call it picaresque, further slows the movie's motor. Unlike, say, the films of Roman Polanski, which are usually set in one place and become tighter as they progress, there's an opening up to the fields and to the sky in the road movie genre (and its sister, the western) which, to my mind, gets close to the essence of cinema. Just like my holiday, such movies combine forward movement with freedom to choose and dissolution of self.
That the picaresque is essentially cinematic is widely misunderstood. I am co-producing a feature film based on Alan Warner's great novel The Man Who Walks, which is a manhunt full of digressions and set-pieces. When we submitted it to the UK Film Council for funding, one of its executives wrote back saying that it didn't have a strong enough narrative. I replied that strong narrative is exactly what road movies shouldn't have, mentioning some of the best and elaborating my point. He phoned me and we resolved the matter, but the point is clear. Yes, films—like novels and all sequential culture—need to introduce newness along their timeline, but that newness need not come from within the narrative in the classical sense, nor need it have significance further along that timeline. It can drift in, engage the protagonist, create its own world or micro-story, then sashay out again. Like life.
So why does most conventional wisdom about cinema not accept this? The great road movies mentioned above are American, and many film historians argue that the genre is innately so. Historians argue that America's immigrant populations, the novels of John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac, and the construction of the US's main freeway network from 1940 onwards are precursors to the road movie. But Germany's autobahns came before freeways and interstates, Homer and Cervantes rather predate Steinbeck and Kerouac, and the idea of the unsettled self going out into the world is as old as myth. It's no surprise, therefore, that some of the greatest road movies are from other countries: think of Federico Fellini's La Strada (Italy), Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También (Mexico), Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen (Mali), and Shinji Ayoyama's My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me? (Japan).
Perhaps our sense that films should be driven by plots derives from our over-awareness of American cinema at its brilliant best; the Hollywood model has become a nostrum. What road movies and westerns show is that structured stories in films are, in fact, no more than affectations; they may often be desirable, but they are hardly crucial.
