These reviews are from 1989 and refer to the television series Road Dreams. As I’ve been showing the film in various guises from 1969 to the present (using the same diary source for all versions), I feel that the reviews are as relevant to the overall diary as they were to the series. Plus some interesting observations get made.

Elliott Bristow’s 14 years on the road in America began as a two week holiday in 1968. This is the first of six programmes, edited from 75 hours of Super 8 film, and it gives 30 minutes of pure delight. Bristow manages to convey the sensations you hoped to gain from watching those other late night documentaries which turned out to be merely pretentious, self-indulgent and self-consciously “poetic”. Here is both the immediacy of the experience and the quality of the nostalgia is has left behind, adding up to the private history of a society whose public face is familiar from newsreels and movies. The commentary supplies a rudimentary framework, leaving the images to speak for themselves. It is backed by music and the occasional readings from Kerouac and Thomas Wolfe. People, places, and the impulse to record them, remain unidentified, yet specific, tenderly observed memories.
Robin Buss
The Independent On Sunday

…..funny, surreal and thoroughly addictive
John Tague
TV Guide

This is the real-life America before the film directors get their hands on it. A brilliantly haphazard album
James Hughes-Onslow
Evening Standard

The laid-back, highly watchable travelogue of a man who went to the States for a fortnight’s holiday in 1968, and just kept right on driving through the Seventies
Jeremy Novick
The Independent

Elliott Bristow’s splendidly evocative Super 8 film tour of the United States: the Rhode Island summer shots awake memories of Jazz on a Summer’s Day
Geoffrey Phillips
Evening Standard

Elliott Bristow snaps the backyard, side road view of America that we tourists only dream of – the next best thing to being there
Jeffery Taylor
The Mail-on-Sunday

Quite unlike anything that’s been on TV before
TV Guide

Something about America makes people want to drive all over it. Perhaps it’s because gasoline and hamburgers are so cheap. Perhaps it’s to go in search of the perfect radio station.

It might have been unutterably pretentious, but Bristow wisely keeps facts and explanations to a minimum, so you find yourself constructing your own explanations about places and dates, or how Bristow met so many friendly girls. This could become a cult classic.
Adam Sweeting
The Guardian