Road Dreams

[rayge]

Anyone else seen this? I was reminded of it by, of all things, a newsletter from British Sea Power, which linked to episode one as a public service for the self-isolating.
I saw it in the 80s (I think) and was transfixed and transported. Six episodes, 25 minutes long, of edits and montages of Super Eight film shot by a Brit called Elliot Bristow who got a gig driving around the USA in the late Sixties and early Seventies, linked by Bristow's narration, extremely apposite quotes from Kerouac and others, a wonderful eye for the poetic and a lovely elegiac tone. I like the music, too, but not everyone will.
Read about it here
Anyway, delighted to find that four of the six are on youtube.

Here's the first:



I find the last minute and a half or so, which is repeated at the end of every episode as a coda, very beautiful.

[Charlie O.]

I really enjoyed that, Ray, thanks for the turn-on! Even found the music reasonably reasonable.

[rayge]

I'm going to get to be a bore about this, I can tell. I just watched episode two -



and there are a couple of sequences in there that are so lovely I wept - not copiously, but the eyes were definitely not dry. It's not just that it's full of mythic America (the subject of my book, after all) and that Mr Bristow has an eye for an image that sees things similarly to me (a love of landscapes and interiors) as well as being one fuck of a great editor, but it's the times as well, my youth and young manhood, the joys and hopes therein. It's magic, really