39/81: Which Way to CA?

Kurt Kren, one of the most important avant-garde filmmakers to emerge since 1945, moved in 1978 to the States, where his financial situation rapidly went from bad to worse. Homeless for many years, scraping a living from occasional jobs, he came to know the seamy side of the great American dream. 39/81: Which Way to CA? is a genuine road-movie built around Kren’s cars and images of highways. His casual hand camera and dismal shades of grey counteract the usually opulent visual palette devoted to this genre; yet these images too are strangely familiar, more reminiscent of photography however, such as that of Robert Frank, perhaps (1).