Crash Cinema: Representation in Film is a collection of essays that emerged from Crash Cinema an annual symposium that is an integral part of the Bradford Film Festival at the National Media Museum (UK). The symposium was created by academics and curators who share the common aim of promoting the importance of film both as an academic study and for critical public appreciation. Films can be enjoyed as entertainment, they can educate and inform and they can excite and disturb. Films are powerful pieces of culture. The films that we now ‘consume’ do more than simply amuse or horrify. Cinema not only thrills us but also communicates to us about ourselves and in the twentieth and twenty-first century moving images have become the dominant form of this communication. Bombarded by images, we inhabit a media intensive world in which every aspect of life is pervaded by visual signs. In these circumstances it becomes increasingly significant to engage with the politics of representation. Through this vital process we can acknowledge that all cultural forms, whether in high art or the mass media, are in the broadest sense political. We can also appreciate that it is a complex agenda of interests that shapes specific ideological meanings. Fulsomely equipped, we can apply this essential tool to the exciting task of decoding the political, social and cultural meanings articulated through the making, promotion and consumption of film. This book aims to offer an arena for the analysis of these representations. Representations cannot depict the ‘truth’ and the essays in this book do not claim to search for the ‘truth’. We ask whose ‘truth’ is being represented, how is it represented and why is it represented like that? We also ask how do representations tell us something about the culture within which they are created. Yet the essays in this volume are not ‘stuck’ in the representational concerns of the past and try instead to uncover the power of cinema to shock and surprise whether that be through visceral impact, subversive content, experiments with identity or the exploration of the taboo. Representation, as defined by the eleven essays in this book, is a fluid and dynamic approach to the study of film. The study of film, to which this book contributes some unique case studies, is as popular as ever and has withstood growing challenge from the new media such as CG Animations, the internet and computer, console and online gaming. This is because the pleasure of film is still the most humanistic and because the sophistication of the representations offered by cinematic expression remain ever more complex and pleasurable to decipher. This book can therefore be read by any student, academic, writer or filmmaker hooked on these delights.

Analyzes six films as allegories of capitalism’s precarious state in the early twenty-first century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the contradictions of capitalism became more apparent than at any other time since the 1920s, numerous films gave allegorical form to the crises of contemporary capitalism. Some films were overtly political in nature, while others refracted the vicissitudes of capital in stories that were not, on the surface, explicitly political. Rumble and Crash examines six particularly rich and thought-provoking films in this vein. These films, Milo Sweedler argues, give narrative and audiovisual form to the increasingly pervasive sense that the economic system we have known and accepted as inevitable and ubiquitous is in fact riddled with self-destructive flaws. Analyzing four movies from before the global financial crisis of 2008 and two that allegorize the financial meltdown itself, Sweedler explores how cinema responded to one of the defining crises of our time. Films examined include Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana(2005), Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener (2005), Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006), Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine (2013). “Milo Sweedler has produced what are surely the most original, provocative, and downright dazzling readings of a handful of socially significant and potent films released during the tumultuous years from 2005 to 2013. This is a fine book.” — David Desser, former editor, Cinema Journal

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.

Between 1996-97 an almost unprecedented campaign was mounted in the British press against on one film: David Cronenberg's Crash. What motivated this campaign? What can it tell us about British film culture? What impact did the campaign have on general audiences? This book, which draws on a year-long investigation supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, offers a series of important and challenging findings and is a major contribution to our understanding of censorship campaigns, how audiences respond to films, and the strategies employed in engaging with such texts.

A screenplay adaption of J.G. Ballard's novel of sex on the motorways, in which humans realign their minds, bodies and sexuality to dominant technology.

David Cronenberg's Crash (1996) brought down a storm of controversy and opprobrium when it was first screened in London. And yet it's a cool, controlled, formal film, unsensational, more analytic than titillating, a brilliant exposé of modern pathologies. It has almost none of the violence and explicit sexual content of the J.G. Ballard novel from which it is adapted. What is the relationship between Ballard himself and the character 'James Ballard' in Crash? In this book, which includes an exclusive and revealing interview with Ballard, Sinclair explores the uncanny temporal loop which connects film and novel. If Cronenberg's 'adapted' Crash, he also absorbed it, ingested it, made it into something new. But, on the other hand, the novel controls the film, or uses the film to disguise its truly subversive intent. And, for Sinclair, there are more startling permutations still. To what extent, for example, is Crash a premonition of some of the more remarkable media events of recent times?

Artists, writers, and filmmakers 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.