Crash

Artists, writers, and filmmakers from Andy Warhol and J. G. Ballard to Alejandro González Iñárritu and Ousmane Sembène have repeatedly used representations of immobilized and crashed cars to wrestle with the conundrums of modernity. In Crash, Karen Beckman argues that representations of the crash parallel the encounter of film with other media, and that these collisions between media offer useful ways to think about alterity, politics, and desire. 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 film’s other qualities. Ultimately, Beckman suggests that film studies is a hybrid field that cannot apprehend its object of study without acknowledging the ways that cinema’s technology binds it to capitalism’s industrial systems and other media, technologies, and disciplines.

“[A] fascinating study of the place of the car crash in cinema. . . . Although the book is written as a contribution to ongoing academic debates within film studies, the author’s observations and arguments should nonetheless be interesting to film lovers.” - Victor P. Corona, PopMatters, “Beckman does a thorough job depicting the history of the car crash throughout the years of cinema. Her passion for mobility and stasis is engaging through her timeline of the evolution of the automobile. Crash will appeal to those in film and media studies, as well as to lovers of cinema. By combining literature, film, history, and art, she provides not only a good read, but also room to think.” - Stephanie Koury, International Journal of Communication, “Beckman’s treatments are unfailingly interesting, and her arguments are provocative. . . . This important book will cause a stir in the field. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.” - W. A. Vincent, Choice, “Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis is exhaustively researched and argued with clarity. Blending cinema and media studies with a hard-edged critique of the capitalist machine, this book is both entertaining and enlightening.” - Simon Sellars, Media International Australia, “Crash represents a major intervention in the field of film and media studies, and provides a model of thoughtful, nuanced scholarship…[Beckman’s] persuasive and finely wrought argument challenges film and media scholars to develop new ways of thinking about the relationships among movement, stasis and mediated vision.” - Allan Cameron, Screen

Karen Redrobe (formerly 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. She is author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism and coeditor, with Jean Ma, of Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, both also published by Duke University Press.