This dissertation explores my original term "the road in picture" and subsequently interrogates its cinematic representations in an attempt to situate the term within an existing visual hermeneutics. This term also seeks to redefine what began as "the road picture". An examination of Karl Grune's Die Strasse (1923) contextualizes "the road in picture" historically as originating with German "street films" and the Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity") of the 1920s, continuing through post-World War II Italian Neorealism and Federico Fellini's 1954 La Strada. The inclusion of Jonathan Demme's Beloved (1998) and Mathieu Kassovitz's Gothika (2003) further solidifies and validates "the road in picture" as a feasible critical designation in cinematic criticism. This dissertation proves that a close evaluation of criteria comprising "the road in picture" can be invaluable to discursive investigations of cinematic genders, class, and history-based fiction on film. Detailed mise-en-scène discussions are used in this dissertation to refine its boundaries and to determine how broadly and with what efficacy "the road in picture" can be applied to generically distinct works.

Interpretively, "the road in picture" describes those productions with female protagonists who (literally and figuratively) make circular journeys away from then back to the self. This dissertation argues that visual coding of physical structures reinforces the subject's developmental trajectory by over-determining narrative meaning with excess visual information. "Road in picture" films address the conceptual and theoretical primacy of "home" as the ambivalent site of trauma/comfort, terror/sanctuary. Next, "the road in picture" reveals the visual insistence of Judeo-Christian themes and practices which underpin the narratives. Lastly, "the road in picture" entails a protagonist's acute psychic or psychological transformation resulting from trauma resolution.

The dissertation relies on historical and formal methodologies to argue for "the road in picture" as a viable critical designation by establishing its socio-historical context at the intersection of three national cinemas and time periods. It also provides a template for further scholarship by thoroughly explicating thematic and cinematic threads drawn from psychoanalysis, the Gothic, and close adaptation.