Travelogue

“Travelogue is a mythological road trip across America made entirely out of postcards. I started working on Travelogue five years ago, at the same time I started working on a doctoral thesis in film theory. I wanted to make a simple, little film that wouldn’t take a lot of time or energy away from the thesis. I decided to make a film using my small postcard collection. My favorite postcard subject was anything related to highway travel in America. I was particularly attracted to banal, everyday, highway scenes. Organizing my postcards, I discovered that cards of similar scenes could be organized like the successive frames of a film. Groups of similar postcards suggested a cinematic montage or movement. I started thinking about the windshield of a car being like the projection screen of a film, the highway like a reel of film which unspools in time, and each postcard like an individual frame of a film. I began to imagine a film about America made out of postcards, a road movie I could make without leaving town! The car trip in my film is a fantasy. It is partly autobiographical, places I have been, cards I have received, etc. And it is partly mythological, dealing with the popular imagination of places where one may have never been but which nevertheless make up part of our visual experience.” (Robert Arnold)