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trip - 63 mins., single
channel digital video (2008)

trip is a road movie that moves across
continents, languages, spectacles, commerce, migration, and war. Traversing
more than seventy countries and twenty languages, the journey takes its
viewers to the physical borders of nations, the conceptual borders of nationalism
and tourism, and the borders of language, ethnicity, gender, and class.
In trip, these borders and the binaries they produce -- nationalism/transnationalism,
insider/outsider, motion/stasis, local/global -- are variously crossed,
sustained, or reinforced by financial, social, sexual, visual, or violent
exchanges.
Using YouTube as a repository of documentary footage of the recently and repeatedly seen and recorded, trip is made entirely from clips shot
from cars and other moving
vehicles. The clips are edited together to form a single journey across
the globe, with
locations linked together by the road, like sites linked
on the Internet. The presence
of the road and the car, homogenous conducts of modernization, industrialization,
and globalization, is so pervasive in the film that their periodic replacement
with rickshaws, tuk-tuks, or barely passable roads, becomes a pointed reminder
of modernity's uneven distribution across the world. Other obstacles along
the journey suggest sometimes fierce local resistance to the seeming forward
movement of modernizing globalization.
trip depicts a world in motion far beyond the movement of the car on the
road: identity, space, and geography are all in flux. What a viewer might expect to see
and hear in one location rarely matches expectations. Sound becomes a way
to mark, describe, blend with, or separate from the territories through
which the travelers pass. Throughout, we hear
the multiple soundtracks that people set to their lives, another means
by which local and global identities are articulated. The use of classical
road movie tropes -- driving into the sunset, singing in the car, getting
lost, getting pulled over, experiencing the world through the frame of
the car windows, and learning life's lessons along the way -- makes the
film's central challenge to this paradigm even more pronounced: rather
than telling the story of an individual or individuals on a single quest.
trip presents a constantly shifting array of subjectivities, among them
the tourist, the tour guide, the migrant, the soldier, the trucker, the
human rights worker, the expat, the guest worker, the activist, and the
missionary.
The use of the first-person perspective, together with the shifting points of
view, makes visible the unstable
position inside the car, that supposedly protected space that seems to
separate the viewer from the outside world. Yet this shell of protection,
which mimics the act of filmmaking itself, is a fragile one at best.
trip reflects the circulation of images, of people, of goods around the world, occasionally stalled by natural effects or by war, but ultimately, like the lines of trucks in the film driving across borders, relentless, plodding, and without an end.

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