Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis

(Duke University Press) Many artists, writers, and filmmakers have used automobiles to wrestle with the conundrums of modernity. In this book, 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. Ultimately, Beckman finds 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. Beckman is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Film Studies in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania.