Jan 10: 'Drive' - Iain Borden (2013)

As the year progresses, I shall recommend film books that are of interest, and which are part of my personal collection. Some of these are also featured on the shelves of my GeoLibrary blog. I'm going to start with a fantastic read for all geographers.

'Drive' is a book that came out in 2013, and which I have a copy of. It was recommended via Twitter, as many of my recent book purchases have been. It was published by Reaktion Books. I have referred to it in a number of resources I've created since then.

It is written by Iain Borden and has the subtitle: Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes.

A good chunk of the book can be read on Google Books via this link.

There are good references in the introduction of the book to the theories of Roland Barthes on the cultural nature of cars and driving as a practice and how the car helps define cities, and impact on everyday life in many ways. Barthes' theories are linked with ideas of meaning. I shall no doubt return to Barthes in more detail in a future blog post, and his theories are part of the way that people interpret films.

The first chapter explores the role of the car in social mobility, and other chapters explore the way in which cities are defined by roads and transport as much as the buildings.

There are of course, references to many films which have cars as a motif, or as a setting for the action. The road movie is a popular genre, with a variety of classic films having been made with journeys, or the unscrolling tarmac being an important element of the mise-en-scène.

One of the classic scenes involving a car is 'Thelma and Louise' with its classic (no spoilers) ending and here the car denotes freedom and escape (although the reality is traffic jams and red lights for many of course).

The book also talks about the meaning of the car as being related to class in some cases, although it references the classic 'The Grapes of Wrath' where movement and in particular the migration of agricultural workers away from the 'Dust Bowl' towards the promised land of California is a key theme. The vehicle the Joad family travels in has particular significance and there are some key shots in the film referencing the fact that they are one of many families making that journey.

Route 66 is referenced here. 

'Highway 66 is the main migrant road. … 66 is the path of a people in flight. ... 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.'' The migrants are ''refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership.''

There is also an excellent chapter on the way that cars change cities. This is called 'Motopia'. This will form the basis for a section in my proposed unit.

This was the name of a plan for a proposed city built around the car, developed by Geoffrey Jellicoe.

There are echoes here of the transport systems in Fritz Lang's classic 'Metropolis', which will have its own blog post in due course.

This references the geographer Edward Relph's theories on place and placelessness, with the open road being a place of the imagination as well as reality. Henri Lefebvre said that the road was an abstract and flattened terrain and that drivers were focussing on the journey and the destination.

"you don't see nothing on the interstate except the interstate"

Taxi driver in 'Trains, Planes and Automobiles'