Stuart Croft's driver sits impassively on the road to nowhere© Stuart Croft
Road movies have long provided the perfect medium for explorations of the modern condition. The vehicular voyages of discovery often end with the hero either finding resolution – or oblivion – along a road strewn with life changing encounters.
Put this popular recipe into the hands of an artist and it all changes. In
Drive In, Stuart Croft’s art movie soon to be screened at Nottingham’s Wasp Room, the road movie becomes an endless journey without end or resolution.
Croft’s protagonists – the driver, a middle-aged man and his passenger, a 20-something American woman, encounter no characters, have no adventures beyond their car and meet no fateful ending. Instead they drive endlessly through the dark, rain-strewn streets of an unnamed city as she recounts a salacious joke about a man and woman washed up on a desert island.
She delivers her joke like a venomous diatribe and never gets to the punchline. He remains impassive. Much like the car journey, the tale goes round and round, her grubby words juxtaposed against the polished images of the city flashing by in the night.
Despite having the appearance of a clip from commercial feature film, Croft is said to be “infinitely denying cinematic assurances”. It may be a road well travelled, but his fusion of slickness, surrealism and claustrophobia will certainly deny visitors a conventional cinematic conclusion.
