With Carretera and Manta (Let’s roll!) curator Chiara Marañón wanted to bring together a series of films that address these and other issues from different points of escape;
Whether the road movie is a genre or not is something that really shouldn't worry us in the slightest. Labelling such films, within a tradition whose origin is, to say the least, quite malleable, only serves to underline the slippery nature of the genre, of films that seem to have more in common than a literal link with the road. We are talking about films driven by the notion of escape, that articulate such flight by constantly delving into unfamiliar domains, films that venture beyond their own supposed parameters and are in turn pierced by the unpredictable and the extraordinary.
There is something magical and liberating about the idea of “the wealth of potentiality” inherent to movement. In movement nothing is concrete, everything mutates and seems to be in the air; the materialization of reality only comes about when we come to a halt. That is why road movies, films that exist in a state of transit, not permanence, are a particular case of communion between the construction of the story and the nature of the medium; cinema, in essence a phenomenon of perpetual transformation constantly on display, being, as it is, the reflection of that movement, which is the base of that which can be registered filmically, in those emblematic 24 frames per second.
And if normality is suspended to make way for the extraordinary, and since the extraordinary can, by definition, never be rendered normal, are road movies studies in the finite?
The answer may lie in the particularity of these films, taking any given transition, pseudo-temporality or pseudo-space as a nucleus; i.e., lapses between concrete time and space, thereby allowing the route reconnoitred to take precedence over destination and origin. Hence, when neither past nor future matter, what remains is present - pure, elusive, and infinite.
With Carretera and Manta (Let’s roll!) I wanted to bring together a series of films that address these and other issues from different points of escape; films which, with all the trappings of road movies, complement and even contradict each other. In all of them, the road is a central element, as well as, at the same time, a starting point or perfect alibi for the orchestration of a narrative vision, to tread upon other genres and savour the exorcistic thrill of telling stories.
Chiara Marañón