On the Road with Screen Culture (or hit the road, mate)

Jane Mills looks at the genre of the road movie, from both an Australian and an international perspective, and relates the tale of the AFI project SPIN 2001, which took the road movie to people in regional Australian towns, and spawned the online Road Movie Study Guide. 'I began by asking what people expected to see in a road movie. The answers invariably included a road, a journey, a moving vehicle with at least one person in it, and a wide, open landscape... For almost every element mentioned during the forums, it was possible to cite a road movie that confounds expectations.'