Crash

“[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

“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

“In this inventive exploration of the car crash in the history of film, critical theory, and art practice, Karen Beckman invokes the crash as a way of working through questions of mobility and stasis, security and transgression, medium hybridity, and technology, spectatorship, and the body in new and exciting ways. Moving fluidly from the comic and reflexive moments of the car crash in early and silent cinema, to concerns with accident and trauma, especially in non-theatrical films from the 1930s to the 1960s, and then to more contemporary work, Beckman exhibits an impressive range of historical, artistic, and theoretical interests. She shows how the trope of the car crash weaves its way into the cultural life of the twentieth century in ways that parallel Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s pioneering work on the train accident in the nineteenth century.”—D. N. Rodowick, Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University

“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.”

“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.”

“[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.”

“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.”

“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.”