Dmitri Kalashnikov’s The Road Movie – a found footage compilation assembled entirely from recent Russian dash cam recordings – is frequently concerned with the display of carnivalesque spectacle. Wild car crashes and road rage incidents intermingle in an often-surreal dance with windshield-views of police chases, animals darting into traffic, and strange weather conditions. An emphasis on spectacle privileges the hyper visible and the image captured on video with unbelievable timing and clarity. Despite this, I couldn’t help but find myself more so drawn to moments throughout the film that instead complicated such notions of vision. Rather than simply presenting carnage and calamity front-and-center (like an outlandish mash-up of America’s Funniest Home Videos, Ridiculousness, and Faces of Death), Kalashnikov’s documentary collage is often comprised of images that are quite difficult to discern or contextualize – the once legible suddenly rendered obscured or distorted by thick darkness, blinding light, precipitation, dirt, shattered glass, digital glitch, and the very limits of the dash cam itself.