- A drive through representational cinema, a journey by car through the relation between representation, trauma and technology.
- Image: following the eponymous car moving through fields divided by electricity pylons. One of the only horizontal shots in the film, blue cut-out mountains in the background.
This shot could be a step toward producing the feeling of freedom, but stripped of the cinematic emotion-manipulation machinery (but is it? It's still an intentioned image on a screen within specific conventions). What is produced is simpler and more effective. Without music, it's closer to what this really feels like. A depiction of temporary, vagabond friendships made more recognisable by a formal reduction of elements.
'what this really feels like' - struggling to get away from a prosaic discussion of representation / identification within the conventions of cinema, leading back to an old idea of just an alternative narrative (realist?) cinema (which is dominant at present). also constantly returning to affect-related ideas in these notes - but why? what what really feels like? a memory of something, a memory of many journeys by car? it disappears the longer it is considered
This formal idea is also the way the characters in the narrative, theatre actors, approach the plays they read, reducing everything out but the text. It's also how the quiet character of the driver is played, the opposite of the mad, romantic American road-trip hero, somewhat subverting identification. The theatre rehearsal as a site of constant negotiation recalls films by Jacques Rivette.
- The quiet climactic scene rejects spectacle in favour of the absurd, two accidental killers confessing to one another, presented as a wide shot, making faces small. Then a cut to the odd world of objects, rain and wakes behind ferries. A big white hill of snow, a blank landscape, a limit, inescapable and necessary, necessarily inescapable. You can't get out of duration.
- Freedom Image: still can't help thinking of Hollywood, the open window of a Greyhound bus at the end of THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994). Always returning to an escape from narrative into the way and the journey. In DRIVE MY CAR that feeling (feeling? a desperate search for something called freedom - looking for this in moving images?) is subtler but extended out, for instance the long sequence of driving at night and smoking out of the sunroof.