"Vagabond" & Counter-Cinema Techniques
"Vagabond...deconstructs and reinvents the [road film] genre in terms of narrative structure, film style, and thematic tone" (Laderman 265).
Whereas American road films like Easy Rider promote the notion of wandering freedom, the European road film seems to assume a much darker tone, refusing to romanticize a protagonist's desire for rebellious travel. The 1985 French film Vagabond is a prime example, using elaborate camerawork (alongside ominous music and interesting symbolism) to de-mystify freedom into a false ideological construction. Tracking shots, in which a camera "follows" or continues moving without edit, come to represent the film's theme of aimless, isolated mobility. It begins with a slow gaze across a winterized crop field, taking in the landscape, before stopping to zoom in on main character Mona's froze corpse. This disturbing imagery is briefly followed by a beach scene in which the camera glides over sand and sea to link with the director's voice-over narration on how she believes Mona must have risen up from the water. Then, Vagabond's signature music kicks in and we've backtracked to just plain disturbing. Accompanied by "minor, almost atonal" keys, the next tracking shot travels slowly down the highway and catches up with our anti-heroine, hitchhiking and going nowhere fast. Within these first few (cold and distant) minutes, we learn of this waif's overall insignificance and how "life will continue after she dies." This is presumably why the camera always shifts to some object or setting instead of zeroing in on Mona and her various predicaments (even when she is raped in the woods, we found ourselves staring at branches in confused horror). Mostly, she wanders in and out of these tracking shots with no mind paid, as if to suggest that the landscape is more focused than she is; that there is an interconnectedness that will always go beyond her. One shot I found particularly engaging is where a man keeps up with the camera on a bicycle, while Mona falls out of the frame to fix her broken boot. However, Vagabond lets us know from the very beginning what exactly we have on our hands. Not only is Mona first seen dead in a ditch, but we have contrasting shots of policemen zipping her up in a body bag with the washing of wine off various village surfaces (we later learn where this comes from: the "bizarre pagan ritual" that involves vine-wound men dousing wandering strangers with wine dregs). There's a reason it looks like blood and is found between scenes of her body's disposal--because Mona is all-too-easily washed from society's memory.