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January 2011, Week 3

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From:
Rebecca Cook <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 19 Jan 2011 17:09:08 -0000
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30 % off for all SCREEN-L subscribers!*

 

 Crash <http://is.gd/k4qFMW>

Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis

By Karen Beckman, University of Pennsylvania

 

"Karen Beckman's new book, Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis, is an inventive exploration of the startling figure of the car crash in the history of film, critical theory, and art practice. In this compelling book, 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 thirties to the sixties, and then to the more contemporary work of Warhol, Ballard, Iñárritu, Godard, and Davenport, Beckman exhibits an impressive range of historical, artistic, and theoretical interests, while showing convincingly 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. This is a path-breaking book of broad interest to readers in art history, film studies, and critical theory." - D. N. Rodowick, Professor of Visual & Environmental Studies, Harvard University

 

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 (particularly the still image of photography), and that these collisions between media offer useful ways to think about alterity. 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, 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 a variety of other media, technologies, and disciplines.

 

Duke University Press

 

September 2010 336pp £16.99 PB 9780822347262 - Now only £12.00 when you quote CSKB0110CR

 

 

Postage and Packing £3.50

(PLEASE QUOTE REF NUMBER: CSKB0110CR for discount)

To order a copy please contact Marston on +44(0)1235 465500 or email [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>

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http://is.gd/k4qFMW <http://is.gd/k4qFMW>

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Or to request a free inspection copy of this title please email [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> stating your university, any relevant courses/modules you teach and the intake for your course/module per year.

 

*Offer excludes the USA, South America and Australasia.

 


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