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Da Casa Amarela 

Monday, April 4, 2001

Road to Nowhere - Sem Destino 

original title: Road to Nowheredirector: Monte Hellman

If cinema is the territory of ghosts, or dreamed of lives lost, the "myth" that can be created fromthe career of Monte Hellman may be, if anything, the destruction of a dead art of cinema (or 

rather an art of parallel life that escapes the eyes less sensitive to that formed in the constructionindustry). Monte Hellman is part of the generation of free American cinema of the 60s and 70s,

early anchored by a working relationship with Roger Corman, a name central to independent

film and the start of the careers of Scorsese, Coppola, Bogdanovich, Demme, among others.Hellman would make some of the most unique films of that time such as Ride in the Whirlwind(1965), The Shooting (1968) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1972; film that will appear next Saturday

at Cinema Nimas in Lisbon) . Hellman's films, misunderstood by his industry, were kept out of movie theaters and sent directly to video tape, and their slow recovery and his discovery by later 

generations have influenced, discreetly, a good many of the names most charismatic in Americanindependent film (Jim Jarmusch comes to mind).

Behold, more than twenty years after his last feature film, efforts gather around Hellman to

launch his latest film - Road to Nowhere ± a work passed for a prize at the last Venice FilmFestival by the forgettable and inconsequential Somewhere (Hellman would receive a prize for 

the whole of his career). However, Hellman is not hidden, nor does he try to create an image of aforgotten independent, or resume a paused brand (in terms of time and style) that gave us his best

films. Instead, Hellman, in a gesture that reveals the size of a unique and inimitable author,deconstructs a linear narrative to present us an idea about the limits and boundaries between

reality and fiction, thinking that surely will not have ceased to feed us after the long years of absence and oblivion into which his films unfairly dropped.

So, for what could be an influence of Lynchian mazes and adoration of his figures and ghosts,

Hellman admits another influence for the engine of his movie, a crime story "  serie noire" or " film noir ", the ideas of each of its actors and scholars (the evil that lies at the heart and essence

of the life of this little masterpiece): Vertigo (1958) Hitchcock. We have, therefore, a man

obsessed with a reproduction of a death and an actress (the wonderful and incredibly filmedShannyn Sossamon) who finds himself worshipping something misunderstood and untouchable,except for the larger dimensions of an art such as cinema, its movement and imagination.

Hellman also outlines, in a gesture rare and entirely laudable, many of the difficulties in

  producing the film, integrating them into the narrative and showing even the miraculoustechnical props and cameras (Hellman shooting with a Canon 5D camera, making it a character 

in his own movie - like everything else that is revealed here, as the Hitchcockian participation of 

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the viewer). But above all, is the failure of a life of oblivion and death that is used for the production of this work, aware that its success can no longer be dissociated from it. An in-depth

work, free and clear proof of how Hellman¶s extraordinary faith in his way of seeing and livingcinema, Road to Nowhere eventually becomes one of the most original and essential evidences

of a mature creation and a youthful worship. The combination of these feelings is only reserved

to the major authors, Hellman is certainly among them.

Road to Nowhere debut this Thursday, April 7.

Posted by Francisco Valente at 14:41