ABSTRACT

Despite the recent upsurge of interest in automobility as a vital area of research, there are no accounts on how it links to the road movie and its derivatives in avant-garde and experimental filmmaking. To fill this gap, the article extends Archer’s use of film and genre studies in automobilities research to discuss how Highway (Hilary Harris, 1958), Dozer (Anna Geyer, 1999) and Driving Dinosaurs (Emma Piper-Burket, 2019), which span over sixty years of experimental filmmaking, revision the road movie’s automotive mobility through articulating a phenomenological and affective experience of highway driving. Echoing the new mobilities paradigm and recent phenomenological turn in film studies, the works illustrate how the cinematic representation of automobiles and the Interstate Highway System varies in tone from elegiac and celebratory to ironic and ambivalent, signaling the shift from the post-war frenzy of automobility to the modern system of mobilities after the car. While all films reproduce the ideology of American exceptionalism and reflect on the nation’s mid-20th century love affair with the car, each of them offers a different take on the practices of automobility, ranging from their high-modernist moment in the 1950s to the postmodern disillusionment in the regime and impossibility of automobility.

摘要

尽管最近人们对汽车作为一个重要的研究领域产生了浓厚的兴趣，但并没有说明它如何与公路电影及其在前卫和实验电影制作中的衍生品相关联。为了填补这一空白，本文扩展了 Archer 在汽车研究中使用电影和体裁研究，以讨论Highway (Hilary Harris, 1958)、Dozer (Anna Geyer, 1999) 和Driving Dinosaurs（Emma Piper-Burket，2019 年）跨越 60 多年的实验电影制作，通过阐明高速公路驾驶的现象学和情感体验来修正公路电影的汽车机动性。这些作品呼应了电影研究中的新机动性范式和最近的现象学转向，说明了汽车和州际公路系统的电影表现如何从哀悼和庆祝到讽刺和矛盾的色调变化，标志着战后汽车狂热的转变到汽车之后的现代移动系统。虽然所有电影都再现了美国例外主义的意识形态，并反映了美国 20 世纪中叶对汽车的热爱，但每部电影都对汽车实践提出了不同的看法，