Road Movies: Journeys Rather Than Destinations

Kings of the Road, Dir. Wim Wenders

The enduring appeal of the road movie should come as no surprise. The films are centred on the contradictory possibilities offered by the open road. This can be a metaphor for freedom and adventure. Or a descent into danger and despair.

The genre defines post-war American culture. Offering a platform to literally (and figuratively) look through the windscreen towards a hopefully bright future. Or cast a backwards glance in the rearview mirror, trying to escape from a troubled past.

Road movies come in many forms. And they have evolved over the years. But they’re unified by the theme of a physical journey, made by car or motorbike, which becomes a platform for the search for meaning and truth. And a rebellion against a conservative social order. Or a vehicle for the exploration of alienation, anxiety and loneliness.  

Whatever the focus, the empty but panoramic vistas of the American West are often used to reflect the internal struggles of the main characters. And the films are based on the foundation myths of the American frontier, the rapid expansion in car ownership and the increasing mobility of American society.

It Happened One Night, often considered to be the first road movie, was released in 1934. This was really a romantic comedy. But the genre took on a more interesting, and explicitly film noir character, in the 1940s with the release of films such as Detour, They Live by Night and Gun Crazy.

It’s often thought of as a peculiarly American genre. And it really came into its own in the 1960s with the growth of the counter-culture reflected in films like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider. These movies reinvented the spirit of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road for a younger, socially liberated audience.

In fact, asked to name a famous road movie many people would plump for Easy Rider. Dennis Hopper's anti-establishment classic, featuring sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, is emblematic of the genre.  

Existentialism, Friendship and Americana  

But European filmmakers – including cinema greats like Henri-George Clouzot and Jean-Luc Godard – have also embraced the genre and, as you would expect, given it a very different twist. One of the most intriguing contributions is Wim Wenders’ Kings of the Road, released in 1976.

Wenders emerged from the New German Cinema movement of the 1960s/1970s, which was a reaction to the artistic stagnation of German cinema. He was steeped in American culture, brought up on American Forces radio, comic books and the Hollywood films that flooded Germany after the war. But he was also schooled in the classic film tradition of directors such as Truffaut and Ozu. And has an ambivalence towards American culture and politics that permeates his films.   

Kings of the Road is a lengthy meditation on identity and post-war German angst. It’s a nomadic journey through Germany, reflecting on the death of the old provincial cinemas as the industry adopted a more commercial, hard-nosed attitude to distribution.   

The story centres on Bruno (Rüdiger Vogler), aka “King of the Road”, a travelling film projector repairman, as he visits small-town dilapidated cinemas along the border between West and East Germany. He develops a friendship with a depressed psychologist Robert (Hanns Zischler), aka “Kamikaze”, when Robert drives his old VW into a river in a half-hearted suicide attempt.

This encounter is the beginning of their shared journey through a strange German no man’s land. The two men bond over a shared alienation, which reflects a country scarred by artificial division and the economic disruption generated by the Cold War. Everything seems to be in decline. And, pressured by distributors, cinema owners are either showing porn or shutting down. The barriers between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, and between American and European culture, are reflected in the barriers that exist between ordinary people.  

Kings of the Road was captured in poetic black-and-white compositions by cinematographer Robby Müller, a long-term collaborator.  Intriguingly, Wenders and Müller chose an explicitly American aesthetic for the film’s ‘look’, using the social documentary photographer Walker Evan’s images of America during the Great Depression as their reference point.

“The Yankees have colonized our subconscious.”

In a nod to the road movie celebration of journeys rather than destinations, there was no script for the movie. Apart from the initial scene when the two protagonists first meet each other, everything else was improvised by the actors along a route mapped out by Wenders. With a running time of 2h 56m, it’s a long film. And there are long periods without any dialogue. But this space allows the relationship between the characters to unfold, against the backdrop of landscapes that somehow reflect the narrative.

The apparent absence of drama also provides an opportunity for the protagonists to reflect on their relationship with history as Bruno tells Robert, “For the first time I have the feeling that I’ve passed through a certain time and that this time is my story.”

Wenders once said: "If you travel a lot, if you like roaming about in order to lose yourself, you can end up in the strangest places." The old van, stuffed with film equipment, meandering along the border, was a metaphor for the state of cinema at the time. It was also a vehicle to explore how people attempt to come to terms with the often difficult reality of their lives.