A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

–John Steinbeck

From the cave paintings of Altamira to the epics of Homer, journeys have been part of various visual art forms and literature. And although Road movies, as a genre, is considered to be Hollywood’s contribution to world cinema, it’s ancestry can be traced back to the early documentaries like Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) and Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon (1934).

Although it was Dennis Hoppers Easy Rider that defined the genre as we know it today. It usually has two beer-guzzling buddies riding a convertible zipping through the highways flanked by gorgeous landscapes, occasionally stopping at some sleepy town for an adventure or two. Or it can be a lonesome hobo travelling on a road to nowhere. It can be a spiritual journey, a bildungrosman, a crime-and-chase, an escapade, or even a treasure hunt. Such journeys are usually marked by signposts of epiphany.

Road movies essentially trace the outward as well as the inward journey of the protagonist, and the end of which he comes out transformed. The experiences during the trip often lead the protagonist on a path of self discovery providing him with a different perspective which helps him overcome his inner conflicts. Here are a few off-the-beaten-track road movies of the 21st century.

15. Paper Heart (Nick Jasenovec, 2009)

This is a quirky one. Her quest for finding the meaning of true love leads comedian Charlyne Yi on a journey across the country and she decides to capture her experiences on film with the help of her friend Nick Jasenovec (played by Jake Johnson on screen).

A sceptic herself, Yi interviews people from different age groups, sexual preferences and walks of life– the list includes old married couples, young lovers, science professors, bikers, school children and even Elvis impersonators– about their thoughts on the nature of love. The journey progresses as Yi’s interviewees open up about their own unique love stories with the more interesting ones being acted out through adorable wire puppets.

From being a hardcore documentary, the movie shifts gear when Yi decided to throw in a fictional love story—that between her and Michael Cera (of Juno fame). They meet at a party and there is an instant attraction. But Yi is still a sceptic. But the two slowly develop a relationship, under the watchful gaze of Yi’s camera crew, which is at times awkward and at times quirky.

The 5-week-long journey which stretched from Los Angeles to Paris, with the crew travelling in the same white van, occasionally stopping at shady cheap motels, yielded 300 hours of footage which was made into an 88-minute film, a mishmash of a documentary and a fiction, on the editing table.
The film won the Waldo Scott Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Festival.

14. Bombon: El Perro (Carlos Sorin, 2004)

In his films, Sorín usually casts non-professionals as themselves and this one is no exception. Here Juan Villegas, plays Juan Villegas—he is around fifty and has lost his job a few days back as a petrol attendant in a land where opportunities are scarce, more so for men his age.

After trying his luck at an employment agency, he decides to make ends meet by selling knives. Although these knives are products of his days of hard work and love, and are exquisitely crafted, no one wants to buy them. But Juan never loses his calm or turns bitter. He stoically endures and even embraces whatever life throws his way.

One day he receives an unexpected gift from a lady whose car he helps in fixing—a purebred Argentinian dogo named Bonbom. Although initially clueless about what to do with this huge white dog, he graciously accepts it as well. Later chance encounter with a part time dog breeder Walter, who recognizes Bonbom’s perfect pedigree on first glance, opens Juan to the prospect of putting the dog to some use.

They agree to enter him into competitions and split the profits. This not only provides Juan with an opportunity to earn a living but also gives him a purpose to work towards. However, first they need to embark on a road trip. While travelling through the vast empty stretches this underrated road movie shifts gear and from being a story of a lonely man’s struggle for existence, it becomes that of friendship between two travelling companions– a man and his dog, both unemployed, both deadpan. The warm-hearted modern-day fable that unfolds on the backdrop of stark windswept Patagonian landscape exudes an infectious optimism.

13. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2009)

Wendy (Michelle Williams) is driving from Indiana to Alaska in search of a job with just 500 dollars in her wallet. With her is her dog Lucy. Travelling on a shoestring budget, she has a spirit of a drifter and lives out of her car, even sleeping in it. Along the way she keeps jotting down the names of the towns she passes by and of course the amount of money she spends during each stopover.

So far so good, and the movie looks like another sweet road movie until Wendy’s old Honda Accord breaks down and she is stranded in a small town, almost penniless and friendless (yes, she manages to lose her dog as well). And this little big indie then traces how a minor setback and a few bad decisions can snowball into a major disaster.

Road movies lead their protagonists on a path of self-discovery by putting them through new adventures and relationships, and so does this one. Like Sean Penn in In to the Wild, she is Alsaka bound but her quest is not for spiritual enlightenment but that for economic independence. Even when she is finding it difficult to make both ends meet, she is not a destitute. She has just enough cash in her money belt to take her back to Indiana. But it is her dogged search for freedom that keeps her from returning home. It is a story of the poor middle class struggling to survive in a recession-hit modern-day America –a land where dreams are dying young.

In its direct and raw approach the film steers clear of the path usually followed by Hollywood road movies and gets precariously close to the dogme style of filmmaking. Also, in its portrayal of the bleak conditions of people living in the fringes of the society, one can discern a strand of Italian neo-realist films, especially those of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini.

12. About Schmidt (Alexander Payne, 2002)

Shot in Nebraska, the film opens with a montage of downtown Omaha and quickly shifts to the protagonist Warren Schmidt, an actuary, whom we catch on his last day in office at “Woodmen of the World Insurance Company. Like in his office, he slowly finds himself redundant in the scheme of things and his wife meets a tragic end, he packs his bags, hops on to his 35-foot Winnebago and embarks on a road trip revisiting places associated with his past. His ultimate destination- his estranged daughter’s house in Denver; motive-to attend (rather sabotage) her wedding to a guy he doesn’t approve of.

Much like in Kurosawa’s Ikiru, just after his retirement Schmidt in a bid to make himself useful and do something worthwhile, had started sponsoring a little orphan boy in Tanzania, named Ndugu. Along with the $22 cheque, he was also invited to send a letter to add a personal touch. With no one to talk to, he starts pouring his heart out to a 6-year-old kid whom he has never met, who probably can’t even read. Here Payne deftly uses these letters as a device to reveal Schmidt’s inner world— his angst, sorrow, disappointment, complaint.

As Schmidt continues with his journey of nostalgia and self discovery, his bond with this unknown little boy living in some remote Tanzanian village keeps getting stronger. And his affection for this boy is evident when he breaks down after receiving a crayon painting from Ndugu (which is also the first correspondence from the boy’s side).

It is at the same time a social satire and an ode to the resilient American Everyman. Like Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries it is also a story of an old man trying to come in terms with his own mortality (also like in Bergman’s film, there is extensive close-ups of clocks). Jack Nicholson (and his eyebrows) gives a restraint performance as Schmidt and bags another Oscar nomination. The first in his series of road movies, it predicts what was to become Payne’s signature style.

11. Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel Coen & Ethen Coen, 2000)

The prison break drama turns into a road movie opens with three men in striped clothes and chained together, obviously escaping after a jailbreak, making a failed attempt to jump onto a passing train. Later they take the next best option—a hand-powered rail car driven by a blind old man who turns out to be a fortune teller and among other things predicts that the trio “will find a fortune, but not the fortune they seek.”

The opening credits insist that story of the film is based on Homer’s Odyssey, one of the first ever stories that had all the ingredients of a road movie. Hence it comes as little surprise that the leader of the trio is named Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney).

However, this modern-day Odysseus, along with his fellow comrades Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nealson), is on a quest of a different kind—instead of Ithaca, he has a bounty of $1.2 million on his mind. But this journey is as eventful. They meet three seductive young women washing clothes in a brook and their sweet song has the same effect on them as that of the sirens’ on Ulysses and his men.

While Homer’s hero had to deal with the Cyclops, the trio encounters a giant one-eyed Bible salesman. And if these weren’t enough the Coen brothers also get a Penelope for their Ullysses—but in keeping with the modern times, they make Homer’s epitome of marital faithfulness a bit promiscuous. Instead of waiting for her husband, Penny (Holly Hunter) is quick to dismiss him as dead and move on to a different man. But this is hardly just a modern re-imagination of Homer’s epic.

It is a weird mash up of different seemingly unrelated things that seem to magically fit in together. From classic like Moby Dick, The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, radio comedy Amos and Andrew, the Paul Newman-starrer Cool Hand Luke, Texas governor Wilbert Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, blues singer Robert Johnson, to the infamous bank robber Baby Face Nelson and even the Ku Klux Klan the Coen Brothers takes everyone along as they lead their Ulysses through his epic rollercoaster journey through the depression-era South.

10. The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007)

After the death of their father, the estranged Whitman brothers, Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody), and Jack (Jason Schwartzman), along with their trail of matched and monogrammed luggage, embark on a ‘train’ journey that takes them across the length and breadth of India. The ‘spiritual’ trip is planned by Francis, the heavily-bandaged, control-freak big brother, who wants them to bond and become ‘brothers like we used to be.’

And what follows is a humorous and whimsy film. But under the comic surface runs a strain of melancholia and it is not difficult to discern certain emptiness within each of these apparently happy-go-lucky, quirky, Whitman brothers. Their father’s death has left a vacuum in their lives and their mother leaving them has made matters worse.

They have not been too lucky in love and friendship either. As they lug their suitcases and trunks, often dumping them onto car, buses, donkey carts and what not, the metaphor is of the emotional baggage that is weighing heavy on them. But Anderson neither indulges himself by slipping into too much of the back stories nor does he try to tie the loose ends.

Although Anderson acknowledged the influence of Jean Renoir’s 1951 film The River and there are copious references to Satyajit Ray, he lacks their humanism. Also, unlike their films, his doesn’t reflect the real India, but remains a Westerner’s version of it. The film takes you on a tour to the ‘exotic India (which is mostly confined to Rajasthan, the visually stunning desert state although not remotely in the route of Darjeeling!) replete with marigolds, vermilion-sprayed temples and really poor turbaned people.

Nonetheless, drenched in rich hues of yellow and orange, it is a meticulously-planned world where Anderson’s attention to details makes each frame of this romantic version of a train (and bus, when they are booted off it!) journey through a touristy India an interesting watch.

9. Nebraska (Alexander Payne, 2013)

This multiple Oscars and Golden Globes nominated film is melancholy road movie that meanders through the austere and cold landscape of recession-hit mid-west punctuated with shuttered shops, old signage of cheap motels and cafes and a few lonely gas stations.

The film begins with an old almost senile man doggedly staggering down a highway. He is Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), a resident of Billings, Montana, who believes he has won a won $1 million in a sweepstake and is on his way to the Lincoln, Nebraska. to claim is prize money. His health condition doesn’t allow him to drive a car, so he has set out on this journey of almost 1,500 km by foot.

However, he wouldn’t have to walk long before he is found and returned home, to the custody of his wife. But, Woody is not a man to give up and seeing his desperation his son David (Will Forte) eventually agrees to drive him to his El Dorado, knowing very well the futility of the task. What follows is a road trip from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska, via Wyoming and Mount Rushmore, South Dakota.

Although Woody’s quixotic quest was doomed from the beginning and there was disillusionment always lurching at the end of the road, Payne, deftly transforms the outward journey into an inward one and both the characters become well-rounded. Also, David manages to come a few inches closer (although still not at a huggable distance) to his cranky, ill-tempered, alcoholic father, whose past is also unravelled during a brief stopover.

Unlike conventional road movies, the mood here is sombre, which is often heightened by Bob Nelson’s sarcastic dialogues, and the colour palate monochrome. Payne’s DOP Phedon Papamichael shoots the vast stark landscape in widescreen black and white and the result is bleak as well as stunning.

This is a professional rugby player who became a stage mime, went on to win an Oscar, put his last penny in a film he truly believed in and then of course, went bankrupt. A director who was lauded more in foreign land than in his own country—at least when he was alive.

Although Andre Bazin has ranked him with Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin as one of the all time comic geniuses, and his contribution to French cinema is today regarded as no less than those of Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson and François Truffaut, his oeuvre consists of just six full length features along with a handful of shorts. This is Jacques Tati.

Tati made movies during what is known as Les Trente Glorieuses in French history, a thirty-year-long period after World War II that was marked by various technological developments and ushered in the modern France. And in almost all his films we see the protagonist fumbling to cope up with the rapidly modernising world. But he is neither overtly critical nor does he indulge in making any political statement. His is a half-amused glance of a keen observer of the self-obsessed society that is increasingly becoming a slave of technology.

He not only reinvented deadpan slapstick comedy but took it a notch higher with his meticulously choreographed visual gags, elaborate and detailed sets, often experimental and often sublime cinematography, brilliant use of camera angles and editing techniques. His early career as a mime in French music halls had a huge impact on his later works.

Although he made movies almost two decades into the sound era, his films are essentially slapstick comedy, reminiscent of that of Buster Keaton, with little dialogue of importance. This particular characteristic also conveys how superfluous the world with all its cacophony appears to Tati. However, Tati was brilliant in his use of sound effects which in many instances not only heightens the comic effect but becomes the central point of the gag.

His style was uniquely his own and it was a style he not only invented but perfected. According to film critic Dave Kehr, Tati “is one of the handfuls of film artists—the others would include Griffith, Eisenstein, Murnau, Bresson—who can be said to have transformed the medium at its most basic level, to have found a new way of seeing.”

His comedies were essentially episodic. There are elaborately designed set pieces sans a conventional plot or a pivotal character. And due to this very nature his films, many trace the birth of French New Wave cinema of Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson back to Tati.

As an actor, he is often named among the greatest comedians of the sound era but in spirit still he belonged to the silent-era and had a penchant for mime. While other director-actors like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Orson Welles, Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen, almost always reserved the pivotal role for themselves, Jacques Tati would let his ensemble cast, consisting mostly non-professional actors, take centre stage and often himself disappear from the action.

Like Chaplin’s Tramp, he created an on-screen alter-ego Monsieur Hulot. But unlike the Tramp, he never let him hog the limelight. Steering clear from the hyper-performance of Chaplin and Keaton, he made the tall and gangly trench-coat-clad pipe-smoking self-effacing Hulot a supporting character, a casual observer of the situation.

As Bazin points out “Hulot is not a comedian in the sense of being the source and focus of the humour; he is, rather, an attitude, a signpost, a perspective that reveals the humour in the world around him.” Tati in his own words described Hulot as “He is just a fellow in the road…a little head-in-air, thinking about other things.”

Tati first faced the camera for the 1932 short Oscar, Champion du Tennis (Oscar, Tennis Champion). Directed by Jack Forrester, the film never saw the light of the theatres. In 1934 he starred in another sports comedy, Charles Barrois’s On Demande Une Brute (Wanted: A Brawny Wrestler).

This was followed by Jacques Berr’s 1935 film Gai Dimanche (Lively Sunday). In this 40-minute short Tati along with his friend Enrico Sprocani aka Rhum starred as a pair of funny conmen who embark on a hilarious road trip. Talking about this film, David Bellos in his book Jacques Tati: His Life and Art says, “seems to have less to do with Tati’s métier as a mime, and more to do with the early development of the themes that he would later elaborate into films of real imaginative quality.”

Next we see Tati a year later in Rene Clement’s Soigne Ton Gauche (Watch your Left). The 13-minute sketch is another sports comedy which has a mimed boxing match as its centrepiece. In 1939 he joined the War and it was not until 1946 that he would return to films and would try his hands in direction for the very first time.

L’Ecole des facteurs (School for Postman) was a 15-minute short that centred on a village postman named Francoise. Played by Tati himself, this self deluded buffoon will later appear in his first full length feature, win hearts even in foreign shores, and pave the way for his classic creation the poker-faced bumbling Mr Hulot.

1. Jour de fete /The Big Day (1949)

In his very first feature Tati mixes satire with slapsticks as he focuses on the modern-day obsession with speed and efficiency. Francoise (played by Tati) and his bicycle make a comeback in this visual comedy that establishes Tati’s genius not only as a creator of sight gags but also as a pantomime.

If L’Ecole des facteurs was a dry run for his first feature, Jour de fete served as a prototype for all the later masterpieces of Tati. It is essentially plotless and showcases the basic characteristics of his films—the brilliant camera work, meticulous editing, sparse use of dialogues interspersed with hilarious sound effects.

In a time when Europe was struggling with post war depression and the films reflected that gloom, Tati’s film was like a breath of fresh air.

A year back, Vittorio di Sica had released his masterpiece, The Bicycle Thief. Considered one of the most important films of Italian Neorealism, it paints a devastating picture of the bleak conditions of the society through the story of a man in quest of his stolen bicycle which is the end all and be all of his very existence as it is the deciding factor between getting a job and unemployment.

Then comes Tati’s disaster prone postman on his rickety bicycle and makes a fool of himself as he tries to attain the ‘American Dream’. There are carnivals, merry-go-rounds, easy banter, celebrations, and beer-guzzling simpletons.

A travelling fair arrives in a small sleepy village of post-war France. And like everyone else, Francoise, the silly yet determined village postman, is fascinated by it. There, high on wine, he watches a newsreel about the jet-paced American postal system.

He becomes determined to take on the mighty Americans armed with the most advanced helicopters and motorbikes, on his wobbly old bicycle. He goes on to randomly introduce various methods which are all doomed to fail. The film reflects life in a small close-knit society and its values but also the fact America at that time was regarded as a nation of innovations, where every dream could be turned into reality.

The film also gains importance as it was arguably the first French film made in colour. Tati, always a risk taker, shot the film in Thomsoncolor—an experimental colour format which couldn’t be processed until 1994, when his daughter, Sophie Tatischeff, restored the prints. However, by then sections of the original colour prints were lost. But thankfully Tati had also shot simultaneously in black and white and the world didn’t have to wait till its restoration to enjoy this classic.

Although released France in 1949, it took a London premiere and a nod from the international press for the people back home to take Tati’s comedy seriously. The film went on to win an honour for the ‘best scenario’ at the Venice Film Festival, and bagged the ‘Grand Prix du Cinema Francais’ award in 1950.

Tati had stated that after the success of Jour De Fete at Cannes and Venice, he “ could have played it safe with Jour De Fete, recycled the character of the postman…the postman visits the Ministry, the postman joins the army and so on…it would have been easy,” but Tati was never the man who would play it safe. So, a brand new character, Mr Hulot, was born.

2. Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot/ Mr Hulot’s Holiday (1953)

He makes his maiden appearance in a rickety car (a ‘20s’ Amilcar), that looks more like a soap box on bicycle tyres, sputtering his way to Saint Marc sure mer, a small seaside getaway in Brittany. He kicks up a storm, quite literally, as soon as he enters Hotel de la Plage, a buzzing resort where he will stay for the rest of his vacation. And his very entry sets the mood of what is to follow.

Although often regarded as the forefather of Mr Bean, but unlike Rowan Atkinson’s character, Mr Hulot is not a crazy guy who is meant to be the butt of the joke. He is a genial and well meaning thorough gentleman who doesn’t mind going out of his way to help people.

It is just that he happens to be a disaster magnet. His very presence is enough to create some catastrophe of sorts. He simply bumbles by and the world order crumbles. And what makes this clumsy fellow more endearing is his nonchalance. Even amid mayhem and misadventures he never loses his happy gait, or his beloved pipe, and bows and doffs his hat to wish everyone—including the empty chairs, and the hotel radio when its announcer wishes good night — around like a perfect gentleman.

Even when nothing goes as planned, he is hardly surprised. It seems as if he is at home with chaos. It is this casual acceptance of things, and the non-judgemental approach that give Hulot his distinctive world view.

And what more, he manages to do all these deadpan! In fact, the entire ensemble cast goes through the hilarious situations with a straight face, and without speaking much (although the film won an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay). And this lack of dialogues is accentuated by the background Jazz score and a Tatisque manipulation of noises—deflating tyres, volleying tennis balls, slamming doors –trivial mundane sounds become important comic device in the hands of Tati.

However, it is not a film about Hulot. He is just one of the characters who land up in the beach resort. Tati packs each frame with various random activities of the vacationers, so much so, that it is almost impossible to understand all the goings-on in one watch—you have children walking by with ice creams that never melt, thanks to some magic ingredient; there is Henry, the husband who is out for a stroll with his wife but always keeps a safe distance from her (and initially comes across as a stalker as there is hardly any conversation between the two); Mr Meinard, the diligent proprietor of the resort who is ever welcoming and courteous to his guests but when it comes to Hulot and young children, he would like to keep them at bay; Mr.Smith, the stock broker who is forever on official calls checking share prices with London, three young men trying to impress a lady by dropping various American references, including Billy Holiday; and so on. The film showcases Tati’s brilliant power of observing people and their eccentricities. As Tati had himself said: “Film making is a pen, paper, and hours of watching people and the world around you.”

But the film is essentially plotless. We go through several incidents that happen but not in any particular order—you can add or subtract the gags or change the sequence without really changing much of the film.

And for this kind of an open-ended, non-directive narrative, Monsieur Hulot is often regarded as a precursor of modernist cinema and Dave Kehr goes as far as saying: “Without M. Hulot there would be no Godard, no Straub, no Duras — no modern cinema . . . Tati drove the first decisive wedge between cinema and classical narration”

A meticulous director, his attention to details is reflected in the perfectly choreographed scenes like when Hulot tries to paint a boat and the paint bucket lands on a wave, but it keeps coming back, riding on the very wave, every time Hulot needs to dip the brush in it. Such scenes are quintessential Tati—they are not madcap screwball comic situations that will make you burst in fits of laughter, but will leave a gentle smile on your face.

3. Mon Oncle/My Uncle (1958)

Five years after the holiday at Brittany, Mr Hulot returned to the silver screen—this time with a nephew to keep him company and in colour. And on this outing, he picked up not just the Special Jury Prize at Cannes but also an Oscar in the best foreign film category.

If Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday was about evoking the nostalgia of beach holidays and the simple pleasures of life—playing on the sand, eating ice creams, reading books, taking leisurely strolls; Mon Uncle is about the other side of the spectrum where man is slowly becoming a machine. In its spirit, it is very much like Chaplin’s Modern Times—a satire on modern man’s mechanical existence and over-reliance on technology.

Little Gerard, the son of Hulot’s sister Mrs Arpel, is bored of his high-society upbringing and looks for ways to spend time with his uncle, Hulot, who introduces him to the simple pleasures of life. However, Mr Arpel is concerned that Hulot might have a negative impact on his boy and to keep Hulot busy and away from Gerard, he finds him a job in his plastics factory. But soon it is evident that Hulot and the assembly line are not really meant for each other. And this leads to a hilarious string of events.

Tati pits the socially awkward Monsieur Hulot, an unemployed simpleton, against the Arpels, part of the high-society bourgeoisie whose very existence in dependent on various latest labour-saving automated devices—if Hulot symbolises the past, the Arpels are the future.

The Arpel Villa (which predicts the magnificently crafted Tativille of Playtime and will go on to inspire the iconic house of The Powerpuff Girls) with its sleek, minimalist design and ultra-modern gadgets and gizmos, a fish-shaped fountain (that Mrs Arpel switches on only when there are important visitors, which do not include her brother Mr Hulot), a geometric garden, an ultra-modern kitchen that looks more like an operating room, is juxtaposed with the idyllic Parisian (and fast disappearing) neighbourhood where Hulot lives in a modest rooftop apartment.

As young Gerard feels suffocated by the mechanical existence and often runs to his uncle for some fresh air, travels between the two worlds, the contrast between the two and the people who inhabit them becomes even more acute. Tati accentuates this difference in the colour scheme as well—while the Arpel universe is painted in sterile white, silver and bland pastel shades; Hulot’s is a world in robust warm colours.

As his previous film, it is a visual comedy that relies much on sight gags and the physicality of My Hulot. But, though dialogues are sparse, music and sound effect serve as an important device to heighten the comic effect.

As Mr Hulot stumbles and fumbles his way through the film, which can be regarded as a descendent of the French Comedy of Manners, the audiences are made acutely conscious of the superficiality of the ultra-modern lifestyle of the nouveau-riche and the consumerism that is slowly engulfing the society.

Just like the cinema of Godard and Truffaut, it is a social commentary on postwar France—alibi Tati prefers to serve the bitter pill in a sweet capsule. And in this respect, he is indeed “an unlikely and aloof member of the French New Wave.”

Bela Tarr, who has had a huge influence on contemporary filmmakers like Gus Van Sant and Jim Jarmusch, is one director whose films are more read about than watched. And it is not without a reason. Imagine a seven-hour-long movie made up of just 150 shots! Yes, he is capable of that.

A proponent of the slow cinema movement, where his comrades include the likes of Theo Angelopoulos, Andrei Tarkovsky, Miklós Janscó, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Chantal Akerman, his films are often a difficult watch given their ponderously sluggish pace.

His camera often fixes its gaze on minor characters or seemingly insignificant details and frequently forgets to blink–lingering on a scene long after its contribution to the narrative is over. But then the purpose of such languid long shots is to make the audience look beyond the ‘purpose’. Because it is when you stop expecting the story to unfold and move forward, you actually start observing. It is in such prosaic, rudimentary details that the beauty of his shots truly reveals themselves.

His long takes are like Pieter Breugel’s paintings (who had a definite influence on the director) where everyone, each figure, even the smallest one in a crowd, has a distinct character. It is amid this mundaneness that he finds heroism and his characters, constituting mostly the marginalised, have-nots of the society, acquire their grace.

These signature long takes are also probably the most apt device to tell a story of everyday reality as these shots transport you to the scene of action (or inaction). It is as if you are sitting at one corner and watching a situation as and when (and if at all) it unfolds—you don’t have the option to select just the interesting bits. The audience goes through the same helplessness, ennui and the sufferings endured by the characters, and like their onscreen counterparts, come out feeling victorious.

Bela Tarr had once said in an interview: “I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another….All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that’s still genuine — time itself; the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds.” And these lines probably sum up the very spirit of his approach towards films. Unlike in conventional cinema that stylishly weaves the significant moments, his films offer an uncut version of life, which is often meaningless.

Apart from the laboriously slow pace, what allegedly makes his films inaccessible is the context, which is in most cases his country’s disillusionment and inability to come to cope with the newly-emerged complexities of the post-communist era. His films are about the decay of social structure and the decline of small, poor, rural communities of East Europe.

In order to truly understand his film, you need to understand the Hungarian situation, its socio-political realities. But he often leaves the context unexplained. There is hardly any mention of where these stories are set, or what the historical background is. And these very aspects are also what make his films universal. Structured in the vein of fables and morality plays, his films talk about the dismal human condition and the disintegration of the moral fabric in general.

Nature plays an important role in the dark dystopian world of his films. And he is often compared with Andrei Tarkovsky. Indeed, like the Russian director he uses ‘dead time’ and landscape to create a sense of duration and distance but what they convey is drastically different. If Tarkovsky lingers on an object to reveal its sublime beauty, Tarr does the same to reinforce its very ‘ordinariness’.

And in an interview Tarr himself explained this: “The main difference is Tarkovsky’s religious and we are not. But he always had hope; he believed in God. He’s much more innocent than us—than me. No, we have seen too many things to make his kind of film. I think his style is also different because several times I have had a feeling he is much softer, much nicer….Rain in his films purifies people. In mine, it just makes mud.”

Most of Tarr’s stories unfold against the stark backdrop of a harsh unforgiving landscapes lashed by forces of nature. However, there is no pathetic fallacy. Nature, in his films does not reflect the mental state of the characters; it is what they physically endure on a day-to-day basis. He creates the atmospheric surroundings that his characters inhabit and draws the audience into it in an attempt to make them a part of the experience.

1. Family Nest (1979)

“This is a true story. It didn’t happen to people in the film, but it could have.” With these lines Tarr begins his first feature film, Family Nest. It is a story of family falling apart under the communist regime in Hungary during the ’70S.

Focusing on the severe housing shortage, it shows how a young couple along with their daughter is forced to live with the husband’s parents and siblings in a cramped up one-room apartment in Budapest. So many people sharing such a small space creates a volatile situation in the house and there are endless conflicts which eventually lead to despair and an intense sense of suffocation.

The couple’s desperate struggle to get a small government apartment so that they can escape the claustrophobia and salvage their relationship, and the incessant streaming of intense political propaganda through the television all reflect the tyrannical regime that is blind to the plight of its people. Tarr touches upon pressing problems like population explosion, severe housing shortage under the new laws and Government red-tapism

This raw kitchen sink drama is shot in a cinema verite style. Shot in shoe-string budget with non-professional actors, hand-held cameras, environmental sound (juxtaposed by occasional use of jarring pop music), on location shooting, and rough editing, it hardly predicts the stylisations of Satantango or a Werckmeister Harmonies (although the ‘shabby bar’ makes its first appearance in this film).

This documentary-like realistic style of his early films has often been compared to that of John Cassavetes’s (an influence Tarr vehemently refuses). Tarr uses tight close-ups to heighten the claustrophobia and often pans to highlight seemingly arbitrary objects, but the choreographed camerawork that was to become his signature in later years, are conspicuously missing in this film.

Also, such a crowded film can hardly make room for the long stints of silence that populate his more mature films and here apart from dialogues, Tarr gives his characters monologues to vent out their feelings, giving an impression of how lonely they are in their individual struggle—maybe staying in such close proximity is alienating them from one another.

There is nothing ‘ambiguous’, ‘cosmic’ or ‘metaphysical’ in this blisteringly realistic drama. However, even at a young age of 22, the world Tarr and the Family inhabits is essentially bleak—where the society in general is rotting from inside, there is oppression, male-domination, hypocrisy, poverty, hopelessness, angst and a general decay in moral values. Although not a great work of art in itself Family Nest reflects the humble beginning of the great auteur.

In his next two films, The Outsider and The Prefab People, he continued more or less in the same vein—thematically as well as stylistically.

The Outsider, his first film in colour (the second and the last being Almanac of Fall) and centres around a bohemian alcoholic musician, who was once thrown out of the Conservatory, takes up various jobs but can’t sustain any because of his drinking problems. He is not any good when it come to relationships either—he insists of paying child support for a child that is probably not his and this effects his present relationship. The film shows the trails and turbulations of the working class and an individual’s futile attempt to fit in.

And in Prefab People, where Tarr first introduced professional actors, we see another young married couple’s slowly decomposing relationship under the economic pressures. The film moves back and forth as Tarr shows the couple stuck in a vicious cycle of complaints and indifference, reel after reel it is the same thing in a slightly different pretext. Arguably the best among his ‘socialist realist’ films, this kitchen sink drama reflects the strife, struggle, and stagnation of the working class in the Hungary of the late ‘70s.

2. Almanac of Fall (1984)

“Even if you kill me, I see no trace, this land is unknown, the devil is probably leading, going round and round in circles.”

With these lines of Alexander Pushkin begins Bela Tarr’s Almanac of Fall. The intense chamber drama oozing post Iron Curtain angst is set in a claustrophobic run-down apartment inhabited by five people: Hedi, the owner of the house, her son Janos, her nurse Anna, and two male boarders, Miklos (Anna’s boyfried) and Tibor (Janos’s former teacher).

The characters are almost clichés: an ill and volatile old woman, a jobless, drunkard son who lives off his mother’s wealth; a conniving young woman who has no qualms in sleeping around with the men (and she beds all three) to forward her own design; a scheming Lothario; and an ex teacher and once a man of good repute now reduced to a petty thief.

The story is a simple one: Hedi is the aged and wealthy matriarch and the other four are after her money and to get that they are vying for her allegiance. In the process the self-consumed characters eves-drop, conspire, manipulate, backstab at the slightest opportunity, falling into new lows each day. The characters share tumultuous relationships, from verbal abuses to violent physical assaults they go through everything, but no one even attempts to escape the situation or the hell house. And this reminds of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit.

Although not regarded as a major work in his oeuvre, the film is important in understanding the transition—from gritty realism of his earlier films to the extreme formalism of his late masterpieces.

But what makes this film significant in itself is its mise-en-scene. Tarr uses non-naturalistic lighting scheme and unconventional camera angles to tell this story of moral decay, treating each scene as an independent set piece.

Tarr’s voyeuristic camera goes everywhere—it peeps from behind wall, doors, window; it takes the characters from the top (a god’s eye view from the ceiling) and from under (wide-angle shot taken through a transparent floor, creating an eerie illusion of the characters floating mid-air.

The film (one of his two major colour features) uses an expressionistic colour palette. The shots are lit in blue greys and red oranges with the colour isolating the two characters from each other. By creating such compartments for the characters he stresses upon the fact that despite their physical proximity, one cannot really enter the other’s mental space. However, Tarr doesn’t colour-code his characters. The colours usually reflect their emotional state. In this respect the last sequence deserves a special mention.

Tibor is arrested for stealing Hedi’s bracelet and the remaining members celebrate that they are one competitor down. Shot under pristine white light, it probably symbolises that the rainbow colours of sin that this white contains within itself will soon hit another prism and show their true colours—eventually the cycle to conspiracy, debauchery, corruption, betrayal will continue. It will all go “round and round in circles”.

This is reinforced in the last shot. Once Tibor is taken away by the police, the remaining inhabitants prepare for Anna and Janos’s wedding. But in the final scene we see Miklos partnering Anna in a dance while Janos and Hedi stare at the camera blankly, hinting that the marriage was just a sham and the power-game within the house will continue as before. Tarr chooses the song for this final dance carefully–it is a version of Que Sera Sera, what will be, will be—symbolising the fact that amid this deception and decay, life will go on.

3. Damnation (1988)

“I don’t care about stories. I never did. Every story is the same. We have no new stories. We’re just repeating the same ones. I really don’t think, when you do a movie that you have to think about the story. The film isn’t the story. It’s mostly picture, sound, a lot of emotions. The stories are just covering something. With “Damnation,” for example, if you’re a Hollywood studio professional, you could tell this story in 20 minutes. It’s simple. Why did I take so long? Because I didn’t want to show you the story. I wanted to show this man’s life.”

Nothing explains his films better than these lines. Damnation is an age-old story of love and betrayal. Karrer, a recluse and an alcoholic, lives in a small half-abandoned mining town (we are never told about its exact geographical location) and every evening lands up in a shabby cheap bar called Titanik. He is in love with the bar singer, who is married.

One day the bar owners offers him a smuggling job which he passes on to the husband (Sebestyn) so that he can spend some quality time with the singer (who is never named). However her affection for him is as fickle as it is for her husband. Upon Sebestyn’s return, there is a confrontation between the two men. And at the end, a disillusioned Karrer turns in everyone to the police.

The plot is minimal, dialogue is sparse, and pace is glacial with long takes and the camera moving in extreme low motion. The film is a trailer to what Tarr achieves in his later masterpieces, Satantango and Werckmeister Harmonies. It marks a transition (subject wise and stylistically) from his earlier realist dramas filmed mostly using hand-held cameras to what was to become his trademark—the black and white treatment, extremely long shots, languid camera movement.

The most poignant scene is the last one where Karrer is down on his fours confronting a street dog in the middle of a dirt pile while it continues to pour. Tarr ends the shot with Karrer, having forced the dog to retreat with his animalistic behaviour, walks away. The dolly shot shows rain falling on the muddy landscape as Karrer crosses the frame, Tarr continues shooting the mud and slush before fixing his gaze back on the dirt pile. The effect it has on the audience is of despair as it dawns that there is no way to escape this ruthless world—there is no respite from the muck life produces.

The films of Theo Angelopoulos—the most renowned Greek filmmaker to date—are slow, meditative, and melancholic. The films often run exceptionally long—up to almost four hours—with extended shots that can last up to ten minutes without a single cut. As tedious as these initial descriptions seem, why should one watch his films?

Once (and if) anyone gets used to his style, he or she becomes addicted to his films. Each frame of an Angelopoulos film is like a huge canvas of hauntingly beautiful, lucid painting in watercolour. His films are set on the bleak, cold, misty and often rain-lashed backdrop of North Greece, and the narratives unfold in a deliciously languid pace through slow, sweeping (and often 360 degree) pans, tracking shots, and long takes.

Like Gabriel Garcia Márquez does in his 1967 novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Angelopoulos weaves in different time frames and places them into one narrative. The filmmaker also shifts gear between the past and the present and between two places, using one single long shot, which liberates his films from the shackle of “here and now.”
A master of Brechtian detachment elements, Angelopoulos’s fondness for certain filmic techniques, such as the God’s eye view shots, stylized and choreographed scenes, and preference of long shots over close-ups makes him an auteur’s auteur.

However, it is not just Angelopoulos who makes his films so distinct. Much of the credit is shared among his frequent collaborators, Yorgos Arvanitis, his cameraman and a master of those really long takes; Eleni Karaindrou, who composes the hauntingly elegiac background score; and, of course, screenwriter Tonino Guerra.

Angelopoulos’s films deal with many issues, such as: borders between countries and immigration; the societal deconstruction of and adverse effect on Greek villages post World War II and Civil War; and political instability in the Balkan region. The director’s films also explore the dismal living condition of ordinary people under both Right-wing and Stalinist regimes, and the country’s inability to incorporate its past into the present. The filmmaker’s stories are often about journeys of men who find themselves strangers in their own country.

Thus, history, landscape, myth, contemporary, and past political events serve as the backdrop of his stories and at times even become the central character. Like in the films of Luchino Visconti, Carlos Saura, Andrzej Wajda the history of the nation plays an important role in Angelopoulos’s films. He often puts miniscule human figures on the backdrop of a vast landscapes suggesting man’s helplessness while confronting the great forces of nature and also his insignificance in the greater scheme of things.

Also, much like in the works of Michelangelo Antonioni, the landscape becomes a character in Angelopoulos’s films, which often reflect the mood of the scene or adding a symbolic angle—at times the landscape even faces the camera alone.

The ten Angelopoulos films are entered in no particular order. When one is watching, he or she must not that these films are not meant for a hurried viewing. For optimum results, VIEWERS MUST WATCH ON A BIG SCREEN.

1. Reconstruction (1970)

Based on a real incident and developed as a homage to Kurasoawa’s Rashomon, Angelopoulos’s first full-length feature is a straightforward story of a crime of passion (that parallels Agamemnon’s murder by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus) and is set in a Greek village. After many years of being away, a man returns to his house and is murdered by his wife (Eleni) and her lover (Christos).

Both the accused are caught and they eventually confess. However, the actual act is never shown. What the viewers see are reconstructions or versions of the crime—by Eleni, Christos, and several journalists—as part of a social documentary, not to mention a reconstruction of the real events by the director himself to script the film.

The film ends where it began—it cuts back to the man crossing the fields, walking towards his home. More than reconstruction, Angelopoulos deconstructs the murder in this film-within-a-film. Although it is a story of crime, the film is not a film noir, as suggested by many, but a social commentary that reflects his “weltanschauung” (or philosophy of life).

Shot in high-contrast black and white, the film shows the change in the value system with the breakdown of economy, and villages once throbbing with life being reduced to a necropolis of broken dreams. In Angelopoulos’s own words, Reconstruction is “an elegy for a land rotting away, abandoned by its inhabitants.”

Although it is a quintessential Angelopoulos film at heart, and opens with a single long shot of a bleak, rain-smudged landscape that was to become his trademark, stylistically the film doesn’t quite predict the path he was to follow. The film includes, however, almost everything his later films do not: a sharp documentary tone, interspersing voiceovers, constant timeframe shifts, ambiguous flashbacks, and the overall structure of uncertainty. These antitheses brands Reconstruction an important film.

2. The Travelling Players (1975)

Arguably his best work, the film dwells upon the theme of displacement and migration. The film follows an acting troupe repeatedly trying to stage a play, Golpho the Shepherdess. Each time, however, it is interrupted by some historic event or the other. Set between 1939 and 1952, the film takes us through the pro-monarchy Metaxas dictatorship (1936–1941), the German occupation of Athens during World War II (1941–1944), and the Greek Civil War (1944–1949)—one of the most turbulent times in Greek history.
However, this Angelopulos masterpiece is not for everyone. Greece’s official entry into the Oscars, the four-hour-long film comprises of mere 80 shots. Moreover, if one is not used to his style, this austerity of shots might seem overstretched, self-indulgent, and pretentious. Nevertheless, it is these painstakingly crafted set pieces that lend this film its unique charm.

The film boasts some of the best examples of long shots and mise-en-scene—two devices the director profusely experimented with all through his career. One such scene is when the players move into the past by taking a long walk down a street, and it is done in one single shot. In another scene, the camera tracks a group of men leaving a New Year’s party.

The seven-minute shot captures their transformation from merrymaking right-wing supporters to true-blue fascists, which merges with gathering crowd celebrating the victory of Alexandros Papagos. The time travel in this single shot is from 1946 to 1952!

There are no protagonists here and hardly any close-ups, as men are seen as part of groups and these groups become part of the landscape. This characterization emphasizes the fact that men, as individuals, are part of a larger design; they are part of their surroundings, their history.

The film also has some brilliant use of monologues which are part of the play, but at the same time they are commentaries on the contemporary socio-political situation of the country. In a masterstroke, the director contemporizes Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy and parallels between the ancient myth of the family of Agamemnon and the recent Greek political history.

Trilogy of Silence

3. Voyage to Cythera (1984)

Alexander, a middle-aged filmmaker (Giulio Brogi) is on a shooting break when he stumbles upon an old man, Spyros (Manos Katrakis). Spyros just returned to Greece from a 32-year-long political and is greatly disillusioned by the Greece’s state of affairs.

The country to which he returned is hardly the one in which he grew up; Spyros is virtually a stranger to this new Greece, as well as his family. He gropes to make peace with reality and at the end sets sail again, probably in a last bid to find his Cythera—a mythical island of dreams. In the parting shot, the camera pulls back slowly as his raft almost merges with the horizon.

In the first installment of the Science Trilogy, Angelopoulos modernizes Homer’s Odyssey. In Voyage to Cythera, Alexander resembles Telemachus. In Homer’s epic, Telemachus chronicles the tale of his father Ulysses. The return of Spyros to his homeland aptly parallels the aging Ulysses, who returns to Ithaca after a decade-long Trojan War (only to set sail again). For both Spyros and Ulysses, the homecoming was not the end but a beginning of a new journey.

It is never truly revealed whether Alexander—who was abandoned by his father—thinks Spyros to be his father, or this old man is just a story for his next film. It is known, however, that Spyros is character who also happens to be the name of Angelopoulos’s father, and the Spyros character represents almost all of the father figures in Angelopoulos’s films.

Angelopoulos, once again, uses the film-within-a-film structure to interweave a personal tale of disillusionment and alienation with socio-political commentary of the Civil War-ravaged Greece. It discusses a rapidly changing country, crumbling of old social structures, and the deconstruction of the villages in the name of development.

In the film, Spyros is a representative of the country’s Communist past—a past Greece cannot incorporate into its present. The film’s desperate bid to shake away its past finds a human voice when a villager shouts: “Spyros, you’re dead. A ghost. You don’t exist.”

Though content is similar, Voyage to Cythera drifts away from the sweeping scale of the filmmaker’s preceding triptych of films—Days of 36, The Travelling Players and The Hunters–which are long contemplative studies in modern Greek history. Voyage to Cythera—which won the FIPRESCI Prize and the best screenplay award at 1984 Cannes Film Festival—includes a smaller canvas and a more intimate approach than the director’s aforementioned films.

4. The Beekeeper (1986)

This was Angelopoulos’s first collaboration with Marcello Mastroianni, and the legendary actor gives a soulful performance as Spyros—the stoic middle-aged schoolmaster turned beekeeper. After the marriage of his daughter, Spyros leaves (with his beehive) on a pollen trail that leads him to his birthplace. On his way, he meets a feisty, young hitchhiker (Nadia Mourouzi). After initially despising her, Spyros becomes attracted to this beautiful girl (who is almost half his age!).

The film represents the fluctuating relationship between of two polar opposites. Spyros is a worn-out school teacher, and the girl is a blithe-spirit adolescent. The old one looks backward, as he tries to keep up with his family business of beekeeping. The girl, on the other hand, looks for quick gratification of her desires. The two characters, nevertheless, serve as the centrepiece of this self-discovery story.

Angelopoulos, however, is more introspective in this film than the other installments of his Science Trilogy. The concepts of history, myth, socio-political issues, and the autobiographical tone—which all encompass the fabric on which he usually weaves his stories—barely exist in The Beekeeper. It is story of Spyros’s personal journey, the ultimate resignation to fate, and the tumultuous struggle between old and new ideas.

5. Landscape in the Mist (1988)

The last film of Angelopoulos Trilogy of Silence is also his most sublime one. Landscape in the Mist is a coming of age story of a brother-sister duo—the 11-year-old Voula and the 5-year-old Alexander. The two young siblings leave the security of their home to embark on a dangerous journey through the “landscape in the mist” in search of their father.

It is a pursuit for the unattainable, as early on the audience realizes that this “father” doesn’t really exist. The children’s innocence is shattered as they face the cold and merciless world. They survive, however, and the film ends with the two, at night, crossing a river border and finding what may be their “Elysium.” The dazzling image of hope—perhaps Angelopoulos’s best shot at optimism—conveys the duo reaching the opposite side. Here, the mist rises from the landscape, and an outline of a single large tree emerges on the horizon.

For the first time, the depressing muted browns, blues, and greys give way to robust bright green. The children run up and embrace it. Is this the end of their journey? Have they found the tree of life? Does it symbolize a father figure? The director leaves it up to the viewer’s interpretation.

What makes the film different from the other coming-of-age stories is the fact that it—much like author John Bunyan’s 1678 novel, The Pilgrim’s Progress—is a quest for spiritual enlightenment. It is also a road movie, albeit a metaphysical one shrouded in allegory. Some even interpret it as Greece’s emergence from the dark years under the regime of the military junta.