Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road. Healthy, free, the world before me. The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose - Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road
This feature documentary delves into the artistic, musical and literary resonances of the myth of the road – and especially of going off the beaten track - in American lore: Westward expansion, Dust Bowl treks, hobos, postwar suburbanization and the Beat critique of it, hitchhikers, the upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the latest generation of backpackers at home and abroad clutching their Lonely Planet and Rough Guides. Throughout the world the American road - from the frontier iconography of John Ford’s films through rent-a-car cross country jaunts – has inspired poetry, art, folk music, novelists and playwrights. In Hollywood the road film is a major genre.
Our thematic touchstone is the egalitarian ideal of the ‘open road’ first expressed by poet Walt Whitman. Whitman clearly inspired the wanderings of Woody Guthrie through the hard-traveling 1930s, the purposeful meanderings of Jack Kerouac through the affluent but edgy early post-war years, and the adventures and misadventures of much of the 1960s generation afterward. Whitman's open road, said D. H. Lawrence, was 'the bravest doctrine man ever proposed to himself.' American Road is a lively exploration of that doctrine in action. The road is a physical thing, but it also is a metaphor for personal and national transformation.
COLD
CHICAGO
PRODUCTIONS
Preview praise for American Road
"Highly recommended!"- Derek Malcolm, London Evening Standard, and President of the International Federation of Film Critics
"A wonderful work of art. I've seen a lot of documentaries on the American experience and, in particular, the beats, but I've never seen one that compares with American Road."- John Long, author of Drugs and the Beats
"American Road is an evocative and thoughtful and passionate and interesting piece of work. I enjoyed it thoroughly."- John Nichols, author and screenwriter of The Milagro Beanfield War
"Fascinating."- Gyula Gazdag, artistic director of the Sundance Directors Lab
