ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 approaches The Motorcycle Diaries from the point of view of the road movie, a genre intimately related to the emergence of a counter-cultural youth in the 1950s and 1960s, as demonstrated by the genre’s emblematic film Easy Rider and Jack Kerouac’s seminal Beat novel On the Road . Salles’ specific take on the road movie as a genre of resistance is illustrated by the way in which he fuses the US model with references to a more politicised variant of the genre, as exemplified by Fernando Solanas’ The Voyage . Salles not only presents the road as a realm of freedom, as the US models do, but also refigures it as a space of social encounters. In the last part of the film, the image of the road transforms into the one of the river, which suggests that Guevara’s life will now naturally ‘flow’ from his travel experience.
