Motifs
The sea and the voyage
The call of the open sea, the crossing, the shipwreck.
To set out on water is to accept losing control: the sea puts characters at a distance from their society and forces them to become someone else. Homer sends a king towards the island where his house awaits him, Melville puts a narrator aboard a whaler commanded by an obsessed captain, Conrad places an officer before a fault committed at sea, Verne goes beneath the surface. The motif continues in cinema in journeys up rivers and along empty roads, in Herzog, Kurosawa and Wenders.
works 10
- EpicThe OdysseyὈδύσσειαHomer · -700A Greek epic of the Archaic period, composed to be sung, about a king's long return to his island after the Trojan War.Literature
- NovelRobinson CrusoeDaniel Defoe · 1719A man alone on an island learns to make, from nothing, everything he used to consume without a thought.Literature
- NovelMoby-DickHerman Melville · 1851American whalers then set out on voyages of several years to fetch sperm oil from the other side of the world; these pages give the detail of it and use it for something else.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelTwenty Thousand Leagues Under the SeasVingt mille lieues sous les mersJules Verne · 1870Three men held captive on a submarine discover the ocean depths alongside a captain without a homeland.Literature
- NovelLord JimJoseph Conrad · 1900A rusted bulkhead, eight hundred sleepers on deck, and not enough boats for everyone.Literature
- NovelThe Old Man and the SeaErnest Hemingway · 1952The narrative rests entirely on the struggle of a lone man against a beast he admires and calls his brother.Literature
- CinemaLa StradaFederico Fellini · 1954A poor young girl takes to the road with the man to whom her mother has given her up.Cinema
- CinemaMoby DickJohn Huston · 1956The story follows a captain who drags an entire crew into his hunt for a single beast.Cinema
- CinemaAguirre, the Wrath of GodAguirre, der Zorn GottesWerner Herzog · 1972A sixteenth-century Spanish expedition, lost on an Amazonian river, where an officer refuses to turn back.Cinema
- CinemaParis, TexasWim Wenders · 1984The roads of the American Southwest, where a man who has come back from nowhere tries to find his family again.Cinema