Crash

Artists, writers, and filmmakers from Andy Warhol and J. G. Ballard to Alejandro Gonzaacute;lez Intilde;aacute;rritu and Ousmane Sembegrave;ne have repeatedly used representations of immobilized and crashed cars to wrestle with the conundrums of modernity. InCrashKaren Beckman argues that representations of the crash parallel the encounter of film with other media (particularly the still image of photography), and that these collisions between media offer useful ways to think about alterity. Examining the significance of automobile collisions in film genres including the "cinema of attractions," slapstick comedies, and industrial-safety movies, Beckman reveals how the car crash gives visual form to fantasies and anxieties regarding speed and stasis, risk and safety, immunity and contamination, and impermeability and penetration. Her reflections on the crash as the traumatic, uncertain moment of inertia that comes in the wake of speed and confidence challenge the tendency in cinema studies to privilege movement above filmrs"s other qualities. Ultimately, Beckman suggests, film studies is a hybrid field that cannot apprehend its object of study without acknowledging the ways that cinemars"s technology binds it to capitalismrs"s industrial systems and a variety of other media, technologies, and disciplines.

Karen Beckman is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Film Studies in the Department of the History of Art, and Director of the Program in Cinema Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania.