The Archi-Road Movie

Abstract

ABSTRACTEvery film is the opening or pathway of a world, of what Jean-Luc Nancy has called a “cineworld.” The road and the road movie are more than the figure or metaphor of such a pathway, they are the schema that drives it, or as Nancy writes in The Evidence of Film, a “schema of experience.” Cinema thus becomes a vehicle for the “routing” of the senses, each time singular and unique, and for the way they are attached to one or another of the points where their paths meet. This is what for the eye and the ear I will call, respectively, the cinematic “optoroute” and “otoroute,” whose effects I trace and describe in a number of films, including Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997), and Deathproof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007).