Traditions in World Cinema
Series eds. Linda Badley and R. Barton palmer
This new series introduces diverse and fascinating movements in world cinema. Each volume concentrates on a set of films from a different national, regional or, in some cases, cross-cultural cinema which constitute a particular tradition.
'Mapping French-language European road cinema through France, Switzerland and Belgium, its trajectories extending yet further afield in Europe and beyond, Gott's book is at once a perceptive exploration of a broad but coherent filmic corpus, an astute re-examination of the road movie, and a novel contribution to transnational European film studies.'
Laura Rascaroli, Professor of Film and Screen Media, University College Cork
Over the past two decades road cinema has become an increasingly popular form of expression for European directors. Focusing on a corpus of films from France, Belgium and Switzerland, including works by Ismaël Ferroukhi, Bouli Lanners, Aki Kaurismäki and Jacqueline Audry amongst many others, French-language Road Cinema contends that nowhere is the impulse to remap the spaces and identities of 'New Europe' more evident than in French-language cinema. Drawing on mobility studies, cultural geography and film theory, this innovative work sketches out the flexible yet distinctive parameters of contemporary French-language road cinema, and argues for an understanding of the 'road movie' not as a genre but as a thematic and formal template that crosses cinematic categories to bring together a wide array of films that narrate the movements of migrants, tourists and business executives.
Michael Gott is Assistant Professor of French and Niehoff Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati.
Cover image: Aaltra, 2004, Benoit Delepine © La Parti Productions/Moviestream/The Kobal Collection
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PPC ISBN: 978-0-7486-9867-7
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Michael Gott is Associate Professor of French and Film and Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati, where he teaches courses in European Studies, Film and Media Studies, and French-language culture and cinema. He is the author of French-language Road Cinema: Borders, Diasporas and 'New Europe' (EUP, 2016) and co-edited Cinéma-monde: Decentred Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French (EUP, 2018), Open Roads, Closed Borders: the Contemporary French-Language Road Movie (Intellect, 2013) and East, West and Centre: Reframing European Cinema Since 1989 (EUP, 2014).

Introduction; Chapter 1 - 'Mapping the Hybrid European Road: French Connections, European Traditions and American Influence?'; Chapter 2: Remapping the European Road; Chapter 3: Cowboys, Icebergs, Anarchists and Toreadors: The Paradoxes and Possibilities of the Francophone Belgian Road Cinema; Chapter 4: Travelling Beyond the National: Mobile Citizenship, Flexible Identities in French-language Return Road Movies; Chapter 5 -'The End of the Road?: Dark Routes and Urban Passageways'