Amsterdam Stories USA · Excerto «East» · 6′32″

Russell Banks a sillonné les États-Unis. La route, il connaît bien. À nos yeux, il joue un peu le rôle du grand frère. Un mythe vivant.

Russell Banks has criss-crossed the United States. He knows the road well. To us, he plays something of the role of the big brother. A living myth.

Il a connu le Jack Kerouac de la fin, solitaire, mélancolique et alcoolique. Banks avait écrit un premier scénario de On the Road. Nous y sommes.

He knew the late Jack Kerouac, solitary, melancholic and alcoholic. Banks had written a first screenplay of On the Road. Here we are.

Russell Banks: Americans have been on the road since we first arrived off the shores of New England, Virginia, and Florida, moving inland and across. When you arrive in America, there is this sense of, "If I move, I will be able to change my life, and therefore I will be able to change my character, my personality, perhaps not just my fate and my future, but my fortune, but who I am, my identity as well." It's a deep part of our sense of ourselves, and it's mythical, but it drives us, I think. It has always driven us.

In 1958, I was 18 years old and hit the road really literally, and hitchhiked from New England, where I was living, where my family was living, south with the intention of joining Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra Mountains in Cuba, and helping him and Che Guevara and the other heroes of the revolution overthrow the hated dictator Batista.

I knew no Spanish, and I had no clear idea of how to get from Florida to Cuba, but I was determined in the way only a romantic 18-year-old boy can be, that I would be welcomed there and that they would find me useful in the revolution. Unfortunately, I got to Miami in January, and in early February, Castro and his merry men marched into Havana, and they no longer needed this skinny kid from New England who couldn't speak Spanish to help them overthrow the dictator. So there I was in Miami in the winter of '58, '59.

Within a few years, I realized I was bending my life to this activity of writing, and my economics, my relationships with other people, my domestic arrangements, everything. My time was being shaped and organized and structured around this activity. And I think so I almost became a writer without knowing that's what I was doing. And then about the age of 23, I realized I must be a writer. This is what I do whenever I can.

Ces paysages se ressemblent, trop […]. Tout se ressemble. Il n'y a pas de bistro. Il n'y a même pas d'Amérique. Il n'y a que du visible.

These landscapes look alike, too […]. Everything looks alike. There is no bistro. There isn't even any America. There is only the visible.

We live very much in a much more homogenized nation than existed in my youth, even 50 or 40 years ago, or even 25 years ago. And it's increasingly homogenized, I think, too, as we go along. Maybe that too is a way of sustaining and feeding that fantasy, that myth of change being possible by movement. Because it is so homogenized, we perhaps still feel that, "Well, maybe if I go really far, I can find my true self. Maybe I can't find it here, but maybe I can find it in the wilds of Alaska."

I understand your project. I understand its impulse and I hope its use as well. The images of America which are sent abroad, and also images which most Americans consume themselves on TV and through films and to some degree in popular literature as well, basically represent a kind of life that's not lived in reality in America.

And most Americans don't see the connection between what's going on, because there isn't really a connection between what's going on in Washington or what they see on TV or what most films portray and what most people are living. I think it's important to try to find images that will reveal the nature of those lives and the shape of their desires and needs and fears.

A project like this is one I can understand. The kind of arbitrary framework for it, following Amsterdam around the United States, is intriguing. But obviously what it is serving you is an opening, is a door to walk through into rooms that are relatively shadowed and dark to you. And as you walk through that door, then you can then figure out where you are and what you're doing there.