“Above all… don’t cut a single image.”

– Jean Renoir in a letter to Margot Benacerraf

A road movie becomes interesting when the traveller is a stranger. When he or she takes that first step, head still firmly planted at home, soul on its way out.

“Salt, pepper, sugar, ketchup and napkins, New York.”

Jørgen Leth is a Danish documentary maker who in the early 80s sent sixty-six postcards from America. These postcards form a #travelogue of bewilderment. The #landscape, #food, language, anything an American may take for granted framed in a moving still. The American, ever ready for stardom, poses and orates. The scenes become show, regardless if it's a New York cabbie or a man famously (falsely) credited for predicting fame, slowly eating a Whopper.

 

The resulting 66 scener fra Amerika is as much a time capsule as it is a portrait of forever.

Veronika Voss, once one of Ufa's greats and rumoured lover of Goebbels, has a chance meeting with #sports journalist Robert Krohn. Despite not recognising her at first glance, the faded star and her world turn out to be irresistible to him.

“What do you want from Voss? She's no good at soccer.”

– Grete

Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss [litt. The yearning of Veronika Voss] is #Fassbinder's tribute to both Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. (1950) and real-world actress Sybille Schmitz whose career, like Voss', suffered greatly due to her #morphine dependence after the Entnazifizierung.

“Say, mister. Will you stake a fellow American to a meal?”

– Dobbs

A chance encounter with a blonde drummer during the Holy Week in the village of Calanda leaves a deep impression on Julián (José Luis López Vázquez). When years later he reunites with his childhood friend Pablo, he finds that Pablo is married to bubbly cosmopolitan Elena (Geraldine Chaplin), the spitting image of the elusive drummer. Infatuated he tries to court her, but Elena sees nothing in the drab radiologist. Julián then turns his attention to his shy assistant Ana (also Chaplin) and grooms her into becoming the two unattainable women.

“Things last as long as they last.”

– Pablo

Saura's Peppermint Frappé takes #Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) – indeed the peppermint green of the drink is an homage – with a twist of #Buñuel and serves it over an anti-#Franco​ist tale of self-doubting machismo obsessing over The Other. Even Elena's car, American instead of a much more obvious European model, dismisses fascist Spain's perceived superiority. Indeed the Generalisimo drove a Cadillac.

Cheated out of their wages, broke Americans #Bogart and Holt are approached by a former prospector. There's #gold in the #SierraMadre mountains, he tells them.

“I know what gold does to men's souls.”

– Howard

Seemingly character driven, Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is an adventure moved by a relentless #landscape, the urge to drift, and #greed.

“Europe, a Stutz Bearcat, the best restaurants. You fellas really have a hard life, don't you?”

– Harold Horn, DA