Conclusion

Abstract

Films travel and transport the spectator to an elsewhere. Writing a book on travel in cinema is a process. I have presented some of the tropes that are at the core of the spectator’s experience, and used a specific segment in time. George Méliès plunges us onto the moon, the Lumière brothers expanded on the travel motif with trains and ‘live events’ commemorating coronations and banishment. There has been a frenzy of movement and displacements since the 1950s on screen. Festivals devoted to travel literature, which acknowledge filmmaking as well, exemplify this passion. One example is Etonnants voyageurs, organized in Saint-Malo (Brittany) since 1990 by Michel Le Bris, a proponent of world literature.¹