This course will allow us to study the changing shape of the road movie genre from Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to the French feminist revenge narrative, Baise-moi (Rape Me), (2000). In addition to considering the possibilities and limits of genre as a category of analysis, we will grapple with a number of questions that will persist throughout the course: What is the relationship between cinema and the automobile? Is the road trip a particularly American fantasy, and if so, what does it mean when non-U.S. filmmakers adopt the road-movie genre? Is the road movie a “masculine” genre? What role do urban and rural spaces play in the development of this genre? What happens to race/gender/sexuality/national identity in the road movie? What kinds of borders does this genre dream of crossing? Do the radical fantasies of characters within the road movie genre necessarily translate into films with radical politics?