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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.

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""Crash "is an extraordinarily original intervention in contemporary 'technophilic' discourses (even critical ones) focused on speed and mobility. As it resonates through a variety of cinematic and literary texts, Karen Beckman views the 'car crash' vividly (and viscerally) as a startling visual image, narrative thematic, and critical metaphor for what drives our contradictory desires for 'automobility, ' inertia, feeling, and community on a collision course both productive and destructive. As she moves across theories and disciplines, Beckman's textual and cultural analyses come together in a work that is passionate, illuminating, and politically engaged. "Crash" is a major contribution to film and media studies, comparative literature, art history, and cultural studies and, indeed, is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship."--Vivian Sobchack, author of "Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture"

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CRASH

Duke University Press

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................................................................................................1INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................................................25CHAPTER ONE "Jerky Nearness": Spectatorship, Mobility, and Collision in Early Cinema.........................................................55CHAPTER TWO Car Wreckers and Home Lovers: The Automobile in Silent Slapstick.................................................................105CHAPTER THREE Doing Death Over: Industrial-Safety Films, Accidental-Motion Studies, and the Involuntary Crash Test Dummy.....................137CHAPTER FOUR Disaster Time, the Kennedy Assassination, and Andy Warhol's Since (1966/2002)...................................................161CHAPTER FIVE Film Falls Apart: Crash, Semen, and Pop.........................................................................................179CHAPTER SIX Crash Aesthetics: Amores perros and the Dream of Cinematic Mobility..............................................................205CHAPTER SEVEN The Afterlife of Weekend: Or, The University Found on a Scrapheap..............................................................235NOTES........................................................................................................................................275BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................................289

Chapter One

Spectatorship, Mobility, and Collision in Early Cinema

Today the most real, the mercantile gaze into the heart of things is the advertisement. It abolishes the space where contemplation moved and all but hits us between the eyes with things as a car, growing to gigantic proportions, careens at us out of a film screen. And just as the film does not present furniture and faades in completed forms for critical inspection, their insistent, jerky nearness alone being sensational, the genuine advertisement hurtles things at us with the tempo of a good film. Thereby "matter-of-factness" is finally dispatched, and in face of the huge images across the walls of houses, where toothpaste and cosmetics lie handy for giants, sentimentality is restored to health and liberated in American style, just as people whom nothing moves or touches any longer are taught to cry again by films.-WALTER BENJAMIN, "ONE-WAY STREET" (1928)

For Walter Benjamin, the cinematic car careening toward the audience "out of a film screen" becomes a privileged figure illustrating not only mass culture's destruction of contemplative space, but also its ushering in of an intensified physical experience of "jerky nearness," of virtual collisions with the material world that catalyze affective awakenings. As reflection becomes impossible in the face of these hurtling images, their sensational proximity and speed break through the defenses of those who had forgotten how to cry, allowing them to be moved and touched anew. Though the merits of this sentiment continue to be debated in discussions of the ideology of popular cinema, for Benjamin it is mass culture's ability to arouse this sense of "insistent, jerky nearness" to the material world shown within the film, rather than any fateful absorption into that world, that displaces critical distance and vanishes a "matter-of-fact" approach to the world. And it is in this notion of cinema as a world close-at-hand but stuttering, just beyond our grasp, that Benjamin locates the radical possibilities of film. Though the specter of capitalism's gargantuan face and the destructive threat of the oncoming motorcar caution against a nave and uncritical embrace of Benjamin's utopian vision of modern media, this passage nevertheless invites us to discover-through the figure of the cinematic car zooming straight at us-a mode of thinking about the world that grows out of, and has an affective openness to, the physical intensities of the virtual world of film. While the futurists celebrate the crash for its ecstatic potential and the regenerative orgasmic energy that arises in the wake of its destruction, Benjamin here suggests that feeling and the capacity to be moved emerge not through an actual collision, but through the sensation of nearness that the illusion of a vehicle about to collide with the apparatus of cinema is able to heighten. The paradigm of spectatorship as a virtual collision is not new to cinema; it can be found in descriptions of earlier projection technologies. Dionysius Lardner, for example, writing in 1859 of the common practice of gradually moving the magic lantern away from the screen in order to increase the size of the projected image, describes how "it sometimes appears as if the object would approach so as to come into actual collision with the spectator." Yet perhaps because cinema combined these sensations of sudden changes in distance and proximity, enabled by projection, with repeated images of actual technological collisions, the popular as well as the philosophical conceptualization of cinema is increasingly aligned with the experience of being run over by a car, as in this 1907 advertisement for Liebig's Real Meat Extract, a product which implicitly promised to fortify and restore its consumers after their daily encounters with the physical challenges of the modern world (figure 1).

Benjamin is not alone in linking cinema's utopian potential to its ability to elicit in spectators a kind of affective awakening in response to the speed and thrills represented on and experienced in film. Writing in 1926, only two years prior to Benjamin's publication of "One-Way Street," Virgina Woolf sees as the medium's promise in its ability to bring the true velocity of thought and emotion before our eyes in a way that writing never could. In the face of cinematic images, she suggests, the brain sees that "it is time to wake up." But for Woolf, too, the surprise, the affective and intellectual potential of cinema does not lie in any real threat that the objects on-screen will break through and hit us; and Woolf quite explicitly notes, "The horse will not knock us down. The King will not grasp our hands. The wave will not wet our feet." Rather, she envisions a yet-to-be-realized cinema that maintains a nearness that never resolves itself into the "present" of the audience, one made up of pictures that are "real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life." "Then," she claims, "as smoke pours from Vesuvius, we should be able to see thought in its wildness, in its beauty, in its oddity, pouring from men with their elbows on a table; from women with their little handbags slipping to the floor. We should see these emotions mingling together and affecting each other." Though Woolf thought cinema had yet to find its form, she saw intimations of its potential less in cinema itself than "in the chaos of the streets, perhaps, when some momentary assembly of color, sound, movement suggests that here is a scene waiting a new art to be transfixed."

For contemporary film theorists, the questions raised by Benjamin and Woolf regarding the role of critical distance and affective proximity; the relationships among thinking, seeing, and feeling; the intellectual possibilities of sensational and affective...