001_016_Drive_intro__ 07/08/2012 11:13 Page 3

DRIVE
JOURNEYS THROUGH FILM,
CITIES AND LANDSCAPES

IAIN BORDEN

reaktion books

001_016_Drive_intro__ 07/08/2012 11:13 Page 4

For Claire

Published by
Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DX
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2012
Copyright Iain Borden 2012
The publishers gratefully acknowledge support for the publication of this book
by the Architecture Research Fund of the Bartlett School of Architecture, ucl
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound in/by
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Borden, Iain.
Drive : automobile journeys through film, cities and landscapes.
1. Automobile travel Social aspects. 2. Automobiles in motion pictures.
3. Travel in motion pictures. 4. Automobile travel in literature.
5. Automobile driving History.
I. Title
306.4'819-dc23
isbn: 978 1 78023 026 9

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CONTENTS

1
2
3
4

INTRODUCTION 7
CITIES 17
JOURNEYS 67
MOTOPIA 119
ALTERED STATES 167
CONCLUSION 227
REFERENCES 237
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 256
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 270
INDEX 273

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INTRODUCTION
It is no longer the cars forms and functions that call forth human
dreams but, rather, its handling, and before long, perhaps, we shall
be writing not a mythology of the automobile but a mythology
of driving.1
Roland Barthes

01
Kalifornia
(Dominic Sena,
1993).

The sheer quantitative presence of the automobile is astounding.

Some 1 billion cars were manufactured in the twentieth century, and
currently over 700 million are still operating, while some 1 billion
may be in use in 2030. Global car travel the number of journeys
and miles undertaken is estimated to triple between 1990 and
2050. And geographically, massive new economies and developing
countries notably China are now developing a new car culture.2
But as Roland Barthes prediction above suggests, to understand the history of the car and its role in our culture and cities
is not simply a question of the quantitative expansion of cars and
journeys. Driving is more than the car and the road, incorporating
also all manner of driving-related architectures, from petrol stations
to billboards, and, even more importantly, of people as drivers: the
thoughts we have, the actions we make, the images we consume
and imagine, the meanings we derive, the codes we observe and
the regulations we encounter. And driving is also the speeds we
move at, the spatial conditions we meet, the ways we look at and
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listen to the landscape, and the very emotions and attitudes we have
towards this pursuit. Furthermore, this immense assemblage is made
even more complex when we realize that there are differences of
people, cars, speeds, roads, landscapes, historical periods and countries
all of which creates yet more variation.3
With this context firmly in mind, Drive is an exploration of
cultural meanings, as visible and expressed through the real place
of the car: on the road, being driven and operating as a dynamic
machine. As one early motorist, A. B. Filson Young, whose Complete
Motorist provides many illuminating insights into driving and to
which I return many times in this study, stated, the true home of
the motor-car is not in garage or workshop, showroom or factory,
but on the open road. There it comes into its own, there it justifies
itself, there it fulfils its true and appointed destiny.4
In this age of urgent environmental concerns, it is also worth
noting that some might be somewhat aghast at a study of car-driving
cultures. Indeed, much of the most recent academic literature on car
driving has tended to focus on the negative qualities and connotations
of this practice, and to identify the various ways in which non-automotive living might be encouraged. For example, Against Automobility
and several other publications all make substantial contributions to
this necessary and important critique of automotive society.5 By
contrast, Drive, while certainly being aware of many of the negative
qualities of car driving alienation and placelessness, accidents and
death, traffic jams and environmental impact all make an appearance
nonetheless explores just why it is that so many people choose to
drive, seem to enjoy driving and even revel in doing so. In this
sense I am following Ruth Brandons salient remark in her excellent
8

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INTRODUCTION

social history of the car, Auto Mobile: How the Car Changed Life,
that we must recognize the intoxicating pleasures of automobility
because we are all addicts now.6 In this context, a consideration of
the cultural and experiential richness of driving seems a worthwhile
trajectory to follow. Indeed, underlying Drive is an implicit engagement with current debates about car-usage that is, it argues that
the role of the private car cannot be simply replaced by improved
forms of public transport without first understanding, and responding to, the various pleasures and experiences offered by automobile
driving. In other words, why do people often seem to prefer their
own car to the number 73 bus?
In this sense, this book is an exploration of the undeniable
delight which many people not all but many, not always but often
derive from driving. A primary concern here is the pleasures of
driving, with such qualities, whether they be perceived and/or real,
as liberation, fun, adventure, encounter, intimacy, visual stimulation,
self-understanding, contemplation, pure speed, risk and danger.
Such pleasures are not simple inventions of our most recent society.
Even by the early 1900s, Filson Young foresaw that the automobile
would not just be the rich mans toy, the idle mans excuses, the
brutish mans weapon but rather should be seen as good genius
that will make of poor mens wishes wings to carry them out of
themselves and their surroundings, out of darkness into sunlight
and the pure air.7 There is, therefore, a history to be told of how
such driving-related perceptions have been borne, and how they
have been carried through for over a century and into all corners of
the world. We need to understand how we have come to love driving
quite so much, while, conversely, it would be at our peril to simply
9

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dismiss out of hand all automobile pleasures as being pure delusion,

fantasy or selfishness.
Given how much many people undoubtedly enjoy driving,
the enormous number of cars and road miles covered over the last
century and more, and the vast literature available on cars, it is
remarkable how relatively little thought has been given to the
pleasures of driving. There is a plethora of studies of car design,
car production, advertising and marketing, racing, maintenance,
economics, highway and road design, traffic management and so
forth, but very little on the actual experience of driving itself. Of
those publications that do address the experience and pleasures
of driving in some way, of particular note are Morans On Roads,
Seilers Republic of Drivers and Vanderbilts Traffic, all of which
give valuable insights into driving experiences while framing these
within much larger studies of social, cultural, political and technological contexts. Similar clues to driving experiences are frequently
provided by the many social and other contextual histories of the
automobile.8 Two edited collections The Car and the City by Wachs
and Crawford, and Autopia by Wollen and Kerr similarly provide
clues within their wide-ranging collections of essays to various
aspects of automobile culture, as do a number of anthropology-,
psychology- and culture-oriented studies .9
We can also find other fragmentary indications of the joys of
automobility in accounts of particular roads, places and journeys.10
Of particular note here is Merrimans Driving Spaces, which
provides an exemplary and comprehensive account of the uks
m1 motorway in all of its economic, historical, geographic and
aesthetic aspects, while the wide-ranging essays contained in the
10

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INTRODUCTION

excellent Automobilities edited by Featherstone, Thrift and Urry

provide another exceptional overview of automobile driving through
intersections of critical and cultural theory, urban geography and
empirical data. Further indications of road visuality are provided
by a diverse spectrum of anthropologists, architects, urban planners,
philosophers, art theorists and critical commentators whose observations range from precise observations of driving to more speculative
interpretations and theorizations.11
None of these studies, however, provides an overview of driving
experiences in the last hundred years, and even when taken together
they assemble, as might be expected, a somewhat patchy history and
rather disparate methodological account of how people have engaged
with and enjoyed automobile driving. This is a notable deficiency in
our understanding of automobility, and instead we need here the kind
of exploration proposed by Nigel Thrift through the notion of nonrepresentational theory, that is an investigation of non-theorized,
everyday practices, where people encounter, imagine and reproduce
their lives in a non-academic manner.12 We therefore need, perhaps,
less highly detailed quantitative analysis and less complex theoretical
constructions, and rather more reflection on the kinds of emotions
invoked by Roland Barthes in his famous essay on the Citron ds,
describing how the car is an object of amorous attentions, that is
being touched, caressed and fondled.13 As Mimi Sheller has noted,
such feelings and emotions are instinctual, but also bodily and collective: that is, they are not just to be dismissed as the feelings of
one person but have real substance and historical worth.14 Or, as
Jean Baudrillard comments in relation to Los Angeles freeways, the
point is not to write the sociology or the psychology of the car, the
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point is to drive. That way you learn more about this society than all
academia could ever tell you.15
In order to undertake this kind of study, many writers and academics have commented on the need for interdisciplinary approaches,
including, in particular, Merriman and the various contributors to
Automobilities. So why then the particular interdisciplinary intersection of Drive, which here brings together concerns with driving
experiences, social space and cinema? The need for a consideration
of driving experience is already outlined above, and in terms of social
space, this book forms part of my general concern with how architectural, urban and other forms of space are constructed socially, and
how these are reproduced in different forms according to different
people, practices, histories, times and cultures.16 But why the additional
element here of a particular (if not wholly exclusive) reference to
cinema, movies and film?
There is of course the simple issue of the sheer extent of
the subject-matter, whereby a vast number of primary sources of
information, from personal diaries and government reports to
enthusiast car magazines and specialist websites, combines with
a wide geographical and historical range, as well as with a plethora
of representational materials such as novels, films, animations,
paintings, sculpture, music and poetry. My own bibliographic
database has over 100,000 references to automobile-related
materials in print-based form alone. A focus on film thus provides
one way of filtering this material down to a manageable size.
But the concentration on film is far from being purely prosaic.
First, cinema, more than any other representational form, provides
the most direct sense of what it actually feels like to drive, its visual
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INTRODUCTION

qualities giving a substantive (if not always entirely accurate or

complete) indication of how driving involves movement, bodies,
thoughts, feelings, spaces, sights and sounds. In this sense, cinema
helps articulate what it feels like to move and exist in urban space,
and records this experience in a semi-historical manner from the time
of a films production or setting. Second, as director Cecil B. De Mille
noted, the movie and automobile industries grew together because
they both reflected the love of motion and speed, the restless urge
toward improvement and expansion, the kinetic energy of a young,
vigorous nation.17 As such, movies help us understand the experiential thrill of modernity not only through aesthetic experiences of
space through effects of framing, signs, mobility and so forth but
in transcending the rational and disciplined qualities of driving and
moving into a realm of the comparatively irrational, into matters of
non-codified thought, instinct and everyday behaviours. In short,
film helps us understand that we often live dynamically and without
the necessity of constant presence of self-reflective or rationalized
thought. Third, movies do not stay on the cinema screen, but are
constantly reproduced in the minds of those who have seen them.
Driving in cinema is thus re-lived through the act of driving, and in
turn re-represented through yet later films and other cultural imaginations. Movies are not, therefore, a simple reflection of driving, but
instead an integral part of how we perceive, project, represent and
engage in this practice. Driving embodies cinema, just as cinema
visualizes driving. Fourth, nearly all movies contain some form of
driving, just as nearly all drivers watch movies and this ubiquitous
commonality further strengthens the way in which films turn viewers
into drivers, allowing them to move through spaces and cities while
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watching films, and, conversely, to recall filmic depictions while

themselves driving. As the architectural writer Juhani Pallasmaa notes,
experiential images of space and place are contained in practically all
films such that the most powerful cinematic architecture is normally
concealed in the representation of normal events, not in the specific
exposition of buildings and spaces of exceptional architectural merit.18
Thus in cinematic depictions, the normal event of driving comes to
be expressed most substantively and significantly. Cinema helps to
lift driving out from our collective subconscious and makes it more
apparent and meaningful; movies act as a kind of hidden text, recovering the implicit excitement, pleasures and themes which we all feel
when driving, but perhaps no longer consciously recognize. Fifth, as
Baudrillard has commented specifically in relation to America, the city
has seemingly stepped right out of the movies, and therefore, in order
to understand the city, we should not move inwards from the city to
the screen, but rather begin with the screen and move outwards to
the city.19 In other words, if we recognize that our subjectivities and
city spaces are not natural but constructed through diverse and dispersed cultures and technologies, then exploring cinematic depictions
of driving will help us to identify ways in which certain aspects of
driving culture and experiences have been expressed, encouraged
and heightened. Sixth, and last, a vast range of different driving
experiences are presented in movies, and so cinema helps debunk
any premise of there being a dominant unity or homogeneity of
driving; film shows driving as a mediated, provisional and differential
modern experience, a practice which varies according to road, speed,
car and landscape, as well as to specific life conditions, personalities
and narratives. Cinema shows driving as part of differential everyday
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INTRODUCTION

life, as something we all share but also undertake separately, which we

nearly all do, yet in disparate and divergent ways.
It is also worth noting here that several books and articles deal
with the road movie genre, from Gun Crazy and Vanishing Point to
Thelma & Louise and Kalifornia.20 However, even these road movie
publications tend to avoid much of the actual experience of driving
in terms of space, velocity and vision. They also, with a few notable
exceptions, have a tendency to focus on films of the 1960s and 70s.
Beyond these explorations of the road movie, considerations of
driving in film are few and far between, and are largely restricted
to occasional articles or chapters that make limited reference to this
subject. A few publications do concentrate on cars as objects and on
car chases notably Buckleys Cars in Films, the Internet Movie Cars
Database website at www.imcdb.org, and Crosses The Greatest Movie
Car Chases of All Time but these enthusiast endeavours, while often
highly informative in facts and data, are less concerned with wider
cultural or contextual considerations. By contrast, this book focuses
on the cultural and social qualities of automobilities in combination
with a direct consideration of the experiential nature of driving. It
also deals with far more than just the typical road movie fare of the
open country, desert or rural road, extending its scope to include city
streets, urban highways, freeways and motorways, as well as more
imaginary speeds and forms of driving. Furthermore, it covers a much
wider chronological range of films, extending from the earliest days
of film in the 1900s right through to the 2000s and consequently
in researching this material I have reviewed over 450 different films,
many if not all of which have found their way into the final text.
Another concern here, therefore, is that some aspects of driving
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experience have been around for decades or longer, and so can be

seen as integral or endemic parts of modernity; thus, in our frequent
contemporary concern to reduce or forego private automobile transport, we should recognize that these are qualities that are not likely
to quickly disappear, be given up or be forgotten.
Drive consists of four main chapters, each of which deals with a
particular intersection of speed, terrain and form of driving. Chapter
One, Cities, therefore looks at the practice of urban driving at speeds
of approximately 30 mph; key themes include those of democracy,
social mobility, gender, alienation, adventure and the visuality of
signs. In chapter Two, Journeys, the speed rises to around 55 mph,
and the landscape shifts to the countryside, rural settings and the
desert. Themes here cluster around the kinaesthetic qualities of vision
and movement, and around existentialist concerns with the self. In
chapter Three, Motopia, the focus is on the highly automobilecentred terrain of the freeway and motorway, where speeds of 70 mph
or more are commonly maintained. This discussion addresses qualities
of placelessness, new modernities, associations and temporality before
reflecting briefly on some of the most distinctive cinematic approaches
to representing driving. Chapter Four, Altered States, turns to actual
and virtual speeds of 100 mph or more, where drivers variously
encounter transcendental experiences, engage in transgressive acts,
participate in dramatic car chases and, perhaps inevitably, frequently
become involved in a crash, accident or other such sudden conclusion
to their journey. Throughout these chapters, films form the primary
(although not sole) focus of attention, while interpretations reflect on
the wider experiential and cultural qualities of the kinds of driving
these movies depict.
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1 CITIES
The single most powerful idea attached to urban driving is that
cars and driving are true harbingers of democracy, creating a world
where all men and women are equal, where they can go anywhere, do
anything, meet anyone. The road is the meeting place of democracy,
asserted engineer Pedro Juan Larraaga, a place where the RollsRoyce limousine, the Ford tourer, the cycle and the donkey cart
will learn to know and respect each other.1 Importantly it is not the
car itself but the car journey that fulfils the promise of the city as
a place of work and creativity, anonymity and sociability, structure
and adventure, history and progress, now liberated by the drivings
propensity for communication, discovery and speed. The wheels
move endlessly, always moving, always forward and always lengthening the American road, proclaimed a Ford advertisement 1951.
On that road the nation is steadily traveling beyond the troubles
of this century, constantly heading towards finer tomorrows.2

Getting On, Falling in Love

The association between urban car driving, freedom and democracy is
predicated on a sense of social mobility: automobiles let people get on in
life, furthering their economic, cultural and personal achievement. Thus
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while early American documentary films such as Automobile Parade

(1900) and Boarding School Girls (Edison, 1905) show automobiles
as the preserve of the privileged, within a decade class-conscious
films like The Girl and the Chauffeur (Yankee Film Company, 1911),
Putting the Bee in Herbert (Floyd France, 1917) and The Apple Tree
Girl (Alan Crosland, 1917) were depicting the car as a way for industrious working-class men to succeed, both economically and socially.3
Other early films such as The Elopement (Billy Bitzer, 1907) and A
Change of Heart (D. W. Griffith, 1909) similarly use the car to signify
social freedom, class mobility, domestic rebellion and changing
values.4 Less dramatically, but nonetheless in an overt class setting,
in The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) the status of
the nouveau Morgan family, whose wealth has been founded on car
manufacture, grows just as that of the old-moneyed and conservative
Ambersons declines. In very different economic circumstances,
The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940) shows how even destitute
Oklahoma sharecroppers the Joad family possess a car, and
indeed are wholly reliant on this 1926 Hudson Super Six on their
desperate journey along Route 66 to California and during their subsequent shuttling from one migrant camp to another. As challenging
as these times are, the family survives, and the film concludes in the
front of the Hudson with Ma Joad asserting to her husband that We
keepa comin, were the people that live. They cant wipe us out, they
cant lick us. Well go on forever, because were the people. A final
shot reveals a long line of similar vehicles, families and journeys
being undertaken, emphasizing that these experiences were repeated
across thousands of American lives, a condition which is also recorded
by photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee,
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CITIES

02
The final shot
from The Grapes
of Wrath
(John Ford, 1940).

Arthur Rothstein and John Vachon.5 Also set in the Depression

era is Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973), this time in Kansas.
Although the gritty portrait of the robust Joads is replaced by a
much more whimsical study of selfish tricksters Moses Pray and
young Addie Loggins, the essential theme remains of getting on
through driving and staying one step ahead of dire poverty and
ruin, this time with the aid of a 1936 Ford v8 De Luxe.
In post-war America, and in a sensitive exploration of
respectable affluence, Driving Miss Daisy (Bruce Beresford, 1989)
shows how Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy), an aged Jewish widow
living in Atlanta, is reliant for her daily routines on a car driven by
chauffeur Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman). At one point, Hoke
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leaves the state of Georgia for the very first time, crossing over into
Alabama while driving Daisy to a family event in Mobile. Contemporary racism in America is also explored here, as when Hoke is
stopped by Alabama highway patrolmen, who refer to Miss Daisy
as an old Jew woman and Hoke an old nigger. Above all, the car
interior becomes a space of class and ethnic negotiation, and although
Driving Miss Daisy romanticizes racially constructed relationships
of employment and servitude, it also displays considerable sensitivity
to complex questions of multiculturalism, especially when Hoke
gains Miss Daisys grudging respect and friendship. Eventually
Hoke as with many Southern state African Americans who used
cars to provide mobility and social status manages to purchase his
employers Hudson Commodore.6
As Driving Miss Daisy suggests, the association between
freedom and driving is particularly evident in prosperous everyday
circumstances. Even before the Second World War, many Californian
youngsters viewed a car as a social necessity, and from the 1950s
onwards cars became an increasingly common purchase for the
American urban as well as rural working classes.7 Consequently
in Nicholas Rays Rebel Without a Cause (1955), automobiles like a
1941 Chevrolet Special De Luxe, 1946 Ford Super De Luxe and 1949
Mercury Coupe provide transport for teenagers; even the 15-year-old
Plato has a 1940 Motor Glide motorized scooter. Similarly in George
Lucass nostalgic American Graffiti (1973), driving is the key for
teenage transition to adulthood, granting young men the freedom
to move across town, hook up with girls and generally fool around.
An English exploration of similar themes occurs in The Loneliness
of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962) when bored
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working-class Colin and Mike steal a Ford Consul Mk1 for a cheery
joyride, during which they pick up Gladys and Audrey with promises
of scooting up and down them hills and round them bends. The
seduction works, and Colin loses his virginity with Audrey. Similar
explorations of coming of age and youthful masculinity occur in more
recent American settings like Corvette Summer (Matthew Robbins,
1978), Boulevard Nights (Michael Pressman, 1979) and John Hughess
massively popular Ferris Buellers Day Off (1986), although in the
latter the teenage frivolity of high-school seniors Ferris, Sloane and
Cameron in a 1961 Ferrari gt California which initially stimulates
escapism, fantasy and teenage sexuality eventually culminates in
an emerging sense of responsibility after Cameron sends the car
careening out of his fathers glass-walled house into a ravine.
Many other 1960s films also returned to the kinds of class
sensibility articulated in The Magnificent Ambersons and The Grapes
of Wrath some twenty years earlier. For example, Blow-Up (1966),
Michelangelo Antonionis seminal study of media, aesthetics and
morality in mod London, is partly based on the life of the workingclass photographer David Bailey. As part of his glamorous life,
Thomas (David Hemmings) guides his Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud iii,
replete with radio-telephone messaging, while scouring places for a
shoot amid new housing, demolition sites, working-class streets and
industrial areas. A year later, Charlie Bubbles (Albert Finney, 1967)
also shows its eponymous character driving a Rolls-Royce Silver
Cloud iii as celebrated writer Charlie (Finney) returns to his native
Manchester. This time, however, the car marks not a way of connecting but being distanced from working-class streets. Beginning
his journey north in the golden limousine, Charlie and his young
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assistant Eliza (Liza Minnelli) are stared at by the occupants of a

small saloon with both fascination and resentment, while a petrol
station attendant is wordless and surly. When Eliza takes photographs as they drive around the desolate streets of Salford, unlike
similar scenes in Blow-Up which suggest creative engagement, this
one serves simply to underline the socio-economic NorthSouth
divide of 1960s Britain, which Bubbless driving of a Rolls still
further expresses.
As The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner suggests, another
principal promise of the car has been increasing opportunity for
sexual encounter. Although earlier horse-drawn buggies undoubtedly
provided occasions for romance, in the twentieth century the car
soon gave its users, and teenagers in particular, greater scope for
22

03
Thomas using the
radio-telephone
messaging service
in his Rolls-Royce.
Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni,
1966).

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passionate liaisons and other night-time fun.8 As John Steinbeck wrote

in Cannery Row, most of the babies of the period were conceived
in Model T Fords, while early films such as A Change of Heart and
Sunshine Sue (D. W. Griffith, 1910) portray the car as a device for
the sophisticated to seduce the innocent.9 But employing the car
for passionate purposes can also lead to more positive emotions
and heartfelt desires. One inventive take on 1950s teenage life is
Gary Rosss Pleasantville (1988), set like Rebel Without a Cause
and American Graffiti in the us of the 1950s. Finding himself transported into the ultra-conventional, black-and-white world of the
fictional television town Pleasantville, Bud takes Margaret for a
drive in a 1952 Buick Roadmaster. They and the other residents of
Pleasantville now have their senses gradually awakened by music,
fruits, rain and dawning sexuality, slowly moving from a local world
of innocent family routines and naive emotions into a more modern
and colourful realm of love, bodies, passions and new ideas what
Bud describes in court as the right to be silly, or sexy, or dangerous.
The association of driving with passion is particularly strong in
many films of the 1950s and 60s, and even appears in the dystopian
setting of Godards Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy
Caution (Alphaville: Une trange aventure de Lemmy Caution,
1965). Here, the controlling Alpha 60 computer has banned free
thought, love and emotion, and those few recidivists displaying such
individualist traits are summarily executed. Yet even in Alphaville
the promise of freedom can emerge, most dramatically at the movies
end when Natacha, riding in Cautions 1965 Ford Mustang as he
leaves the city, manages to utter je vous aime I love you. The
ultimate freedom of self-expression and emotion thus takes place
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in the liberatory space of the car and the highway. This should not
be taken to be a particularly unusually setting for the declaration
of love, for by 1967 around 40 per cent of marriage proposals in
the u.s. were taking place in automobiles.10 Sometimes love, with
the aid of a car, can be found in the most unlikely of places.

Men and Women Drivers

Most of the films noted above identify their drivers as men, and
indeed the connection between car ownership, driving and masculinity is one of the central themes of urban cinema. In particular,
opportunist male lotharios frequently use cars to meet or escape
female lovers. To cite but a few examples, in Jean Epsteins masterly
La Glace trois faces (1927), a wealthy businessman, rather than
face up to his three different dates, takes his sports car from an
ultra-modern garage and speeds to the fashionable beaches of
Deauville, while in the original Alfie (Lewis Gilbert, 1966), Alfie
relies on a 1957 Vauxhall Velox to conduct his affairs. Alternatively,
masculinity as self-confident autonomy is evident in Thunder Road
(Arthur Ripley, 1958), where war veteran Lucas Doolin (Robert
Mitchum) maintains a reputation for robust bravado by delivering
moonshine in modified Fords; as the theme song The Ballad of
Thunder Road describes, the mountain boy took roads that even
angels feared to tread.11 Alternatively, in White Lightning (Joseph
Sargent, 1973) Gator McKlusky (Burt Reynolds) announces his
release from prison by noisily steering a Ford Custom around smalltown Bogan County and then, in an astutely crafted scene shot from
24

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the drivers viewpoint, engaging in a menacing confrontation with

Sheriff J. C. Connors.
If male identity is frequently linked to car driving, then so
too is female identity, and sometimes to even greater extent. While
some motoring commentators have argued that technological and
physiological demands rendered early driving a predominantly
male preserve, in fact from the 1910s onwards car manufacturers
from Ford to Cadillac actively targeted female consumers through
advertisements in Good Housekeeping, Vogue and the Ladies Home
Journal. By the late 1920s manufacturers had realized that women
(and, by substitution, men) desired overtly stylish cars that could
supply some kind of psychological compensation for the rationalized, undignified and brutal nature of the modern workplace.12
Above all, however, it is not the consumption of automobiles
as objects but, as philosopher Loren E. Lomasky has argued,
the correlation of the actual act of driving with the capacity for
autonomy and self-direction that is most important here.13 As
Kate Dixon, a modern British mother and driver, asserted when
filmed by the bbc in the 1990s, I want to be an independent
person, I want to enjoy the driving I do, I want to enjoy myself.14
This kind of attitude affords women more relaxed family ties and
increased opportunities for work, leisure, romance and general
sociability.15 In film, this is first reflected in early movies such as
Man Rays 16-minute cinpome Emak-Bakia (1926), where Kiki
of Montparnasse expertly propels an elegant two-seater sports car
while wearing enigmatic goggles with masklike eyes for lenses.
This sense of driving where a strong and adventurous female style
is conjoined with determined separation from domesticity was
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repeated many times over the next 40 years, as with two films from
1955: To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock), where Francie propels
a Sunbeam Alpine around challenging Mediterranean roads, and
The Fast and the Furious (John Ireland and Edward Sampson) in
which Connie handles a speedy Jaguar xk120 in a purposefully
energetic manner. Id appreciate, Connie demands at one point
to an assailant, you returning my car and my freedom. During
the 1960s, a decade when Ford was actively selling the sports
pony car Mustang to independent young women, such depictions
became even more commonplace, ranging from the glamorous
Ethel, who drives an Aston Martin db3 drophead for a heist in
Two Way Stretch (Robert Day, 1960), to the blowsy and adulterous
Liz Gruffydd-Williams, who waywardly pilots an ostentatious
Oldsmobile convertible around the Welsh town of Aberdarcy in
Only Two Can Play (Sidney Gilliat, 1962). Even in the very epitome
of male bravado and sexual prowess 1960s Bond films starring

26

04
SPECTRE agent
Fiona Volpe takes
007 for a ride.
Thunderball
(Terence Young,
1965).

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Sean Connery woman still appear as skilful drivers. Hence in

Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton, 1964) Tilly Masterson steers her 1965
Ford Mustang with verve over alpine passes as she avenges the
death of her sister Jill, while in Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965)
spectre agent Fiona Volpe forces another Ford Mustang along
the palm-lined country roads of Nassau. As they screech to a halt
outside a hotel, Volpe clearly has the confidence to match even the
most daring of men. You look pale, Mr Bond, remarks the spy.
I hope I didnt frighten you.
In a less dramatic setting, the comedy Carry on Cabby (Gerald
Thomas, 1963) has a whole army of women asserting their driving
independence, this time through Peggy Hawkins (Hattie Jacques)
and her Glamcab operation, launched in retaliation to work-obsessed
husband Charlie (Sid James) and the anti-female employment
practices of his Speedee Taxis outfit. Although quite prepared to
use sexual innuendo as part of their service (each taxi flaunts a
roof-mounted heart-shaped sign atop an illuminated Im Free
signal), the Glamcab women are also more up-to-date than their
male rivals. The cars they use, Ford Cortina Mk1s, are contemporary
and American in style, while a similar modernity comes from their
efficiency of service, smart uniforms, no-tipping rule and slick
advertising all in stark contrast to the ageing Austin fx3s, grubby
rudeness and eccentric driving habits of the male Speedee Taxi
drivers. In a more serious context, Agns Vardas Clo from 5 to 7
(1962) details 90 minutes in the life of a singer, Clo (Corinne
Marchand), as she travels around Paris and contemplates cancer,
death, friendships, loneliness and the substance of modern life.
Taking a taxi across town, Clo remarks to the female cabbie that
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this is a tough job for a woman and asks if she isnt afraid at night;
the driver simply replies afraid of what? Clo, later called a spoiled
child for her endless cab rides, admires this taxi driver for her
courage and gutsy, street-smart attitude. Later, another of Clos
friends has just gained her licence and determinedly comes to grips
with an old open-topped Citron 11 bl. Thus while Clo, who cannot
drive, is full of fears about her health and future, these two other
women are making their way by car in the capital in an unashamedly
independent manner.
During the 1960s it was increasingly the image of the energetic,
independent female driver that came to the fore, someone like Claire
Chingford (Julie Christie) in The Fast Lady (Ken Annakin, 1962),
who is at once fashionably dressed and free-spirited, detailed in her
knowledge of cars (Red label Bentley. Late 27s. Three litre. Short
chassis speed model with long stroke four cylinder engine fitted with
single overhead camshaft) and exuberant in her driving of a 1962
Mini Cooper Mk1. This is not the pure invention of a film industry
promoting an idealized version of the modern girl about town: in
1968, for example, English television star Cathy McGowan was
actively promoted in photographs showing her smiling in the driving
seat of her new Mini, having just passed her driving test, ready to take
off around town. At a personal level, therefore, driving 1960s cars like
the original Mini helped people to cross class and gender divides and
to express their own liberation in the post-war metropolis.
Since the early 1990s, and particularly following the 1991
release of Ridley Scotts hugely successful Thelma & Louise (explored
in the next chapter), many films have reinvested the theme of
womens driving with new values. In Germany, for example, the
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media-savvy Bandits (Katja von Garnier, 1997) portrays four misfit

rock group prison-escapees as they move around the country, performing secret concerts and countering patriarchy while driving
their vw Dormobile against oncoming autobahn cars and turning
a traffic jam into an impromptu dance scene. In France, Vendredi
soir (Claire Denis, 2003) echoes some of the sentiments of Clo from
5 to 7. This time the central character, Laure (Valrie Lemercier), can
drive, which she does to travel across a gridlocked Paris. Negotiating
threatening evening streets in her Peugeot, Laure meets and spends
the night with a stranger, Jean, before abruptly leaving the following
morning. A kind of condensed urban road movie, Vendredi soir
sensitively shows Laure contemplating not just the dangers and
opportunities of the city but also an intersection in her life as she
moves from youthful frivolity to more serious responsibilities. In
all of this, the car interior is gloomy, confined and near invisible,
yet Laure and Jeans body language is minutely tracked, rendering
the car a time and space of intense yet tender communication. A
sense of everyday dreaming is also apparent, as when a Volvos rear
badge dances to music on Laures car radio. The kind of car journey
explored in Vendredi soir is thus part of the uncertainty and myriad
possibilities of city life a place of occasional anxiety, constraint,
conflict and fear, but also a place to be left alone, meet new people,
have unexpected things happen, maybe fall in love and yet not be
tied down.
More recently, and providing one of the most intensive movie
explorations of women and car driving, comes Quentin Tarantinos
slasher-exploitation Death Proof (2007). This film first shows three
friends in Austin Shanna, Arlene and radio dj Julia turning a 1996
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Honda Civic into a space of friendship where they joke, celebrate

and plan the evening ahead. Driving here is an accommodation of
girl-talk, of friends bantering and kicking back. In spirit, the second
part of Death Proof closely resembles Russ Meyers sexploitation
classic Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill! (1965) and its sports car-driving
ball-busting go-go dancers. In Tarantinos film, a new group of
women this time Abernathy, Kim and Zo in a white 1970 Dodge
Challenger (a reference to the cult Vanishing Point) survive a
car-borne attack from psychopathic killer Stuntman Mike (who
has previously sadistically murdered Shanna, Arlene and Julia with
his Chevrolet Nova) and then dispatch him in their own violent
assault waged by car and physical combat. I return to this film in
the final chapter, but suffice to note here that, as with actor Therons
stunt driving in the 2003 The Italian Job, in Death Proof the character
Zo is played by real-life stuntwoman Zo Bell, and much of the
movies extremely dangerous fast driving is performed by Bell

30

05
Abernathy, Kim
and Zo deal with
Stuntman Mike.
Death Proof
(Quentin
Tarantino, 2007).

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herself. Indeed, as Tarantino has explained, one aim was simply

to show real cars, real shit, at full fucking speed,16 that is, genuine
action in the manner of films like Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968) and
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011), largely devoid of cgi, speeded
up footage or other such trickery. As such, for all its tongue-incheek film genre knowingness, Death Proof displays female driving
as a full-on assertion of womens ability not just to command a car
skilfully at rapid velocities, or to be in control of their own lives, but
to enact dire and vengeful retribution against anyone foolish enough
to interfere with these freedoms.

Alienation and Negotiation

Not all films deal with car driving in an entirely celebratory manner.
As many of the movies above indicate, the freedoms offered by city
driving are not without complications and contradictions. Most
obviously of all, car ownership and driving is not available to everyone, a fact made particularly explicit in a movie like Borom Sarret,
the first film made by a black African and directed by the Senegalese
Ousmane Sembene in 1963. This 18-minute short discloses how the
political and social promises of the car and modernity are unequally
dispersed, for the cart man of the title does not have access to the new
houses, economy, automobiles or equality of nascent postcolonial
Senegal. Indeed, when he takes a besuited customer to the non-native
quarter of Dakar, his cart is confiscated by an over-officious policeman, who stands on the cart mans war medal and prevents him from
taking his fare. Two decades later, Down By Law (Jim Jarmusch, 1986)
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begins with a tracking shot from a slowly moving car showing the
graveyard, houses, shacks and impoverished people of New Orleans,
portraying the black and white city as listless and down-at-heel. The
unseen automobile here is only a voyeur of poverty never a means
of escape from it.
Those who can drive are not immune to the effects of driving,
and of course alienation of drivers and passengers through car driving
and ownership has been a constant theme of much exploration,
both sociological and cinematic, over the last century.17 In movies,
these range from the heartless and dysfunctional Alexander Joyce
in Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, Roberto Rossellini, 1953), to
the comedic portrayals of Play Time (Jacques Tati, 1967), where
city dwellers guide cars with robotic choreography and struggle
with parking meters, to the innumerable transport tribulations
of Planes, Trains and Automobiles (John Hughes, 1987). A decade
later, The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) implies that we are all
controlled by the mind-numbing schedules, systems and regulations
of the modern world. Unaware that his whole life is one giant media
construct, Truman is allowed to drive by the television programmes
controllers, but artificial routines, repetitive patterns and frequent
radio messages prevent him from ever leaving his local world. At
one point, sensing something is wrong with all this, Truman literally
drives around in circles before eventually being blocked by stagemanaged traffic.
It is, of course, not even necessary to drive to encounter
alienation through the car. Tobacco Road (John Ford, 1941), for
example, uses new automobiles as symbols of unnecessary commodity consumption, hostile modernity and personal narcissism.18
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Many European films of the late 1950s and 60s make similar
observations, notably at a drinks party in Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc
Godard, 1965), where husbands and wives eulogize about cars and
beauty products in staggeringly banal tones:
Husband #1: An Alfa Romeo has great acceleration,
powerful disk brakes, holds the road perfectly and is
an exceptional touring car. It is safe, fast, pleasant to
drive, responsive and stable.
Wife: It is easy to look fresh. Soap cleanses, cologne
refreshes and scent perfumes. And to avoid perspiration, I use Printil, and feel fresh for the rest of the
day. Printil is available as a stick deodorant, a roll-on
or a spray.
Husband #2: But the Oldsmobile Rocket 88 is even
better. Look at its rigorous design. Its powerful, sober
lines show that elegance and exceptional performance
can be combined.
Mon oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958) makes similar comments when M.
Arpel takes delivery of a ghastly apple-green, pink and lilac 1956
Chevrolet Bel Air, as does Les Tricheurs (Marcel Carn, 1958) when
carefree Mic rejects the Vespa scooters used by other Paris teenagers
for a 1955 Jaguar xk140, a wonderful piece of style and technology
that she has long coveted but which, she quickly discovers, cannot
compensate for her unfulfilled love for Bob. In another popular
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06
M. Arpel takes
delivery of a multicoloured Chevrolet
Bel Air. Mon oncle
(Jacques Tati, 1958).

French film of this period, La Belle Americaine (Jacques Dhry,

1961), a working-class couples chance acquisition of an enormously
ostentatious 1959 Oldsmobile brings them not success or status but
misfortune and envy. In the end, they regain their happiness by
transforming the American convertible into an ice cream van,
so serving their local community.19 In a similarly light-hearted
manner, Tatis Trafic (1971) uses a car show in Amsterdam to
mock the ridiculous features of new cars, manufacturers extravagant stands and the people who crowd around them. A slightly
different take on alienation by car ownership is provided by
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Ieri, oggi, domani, Vittorio de
Sica, 1963) when wealthy Anna of Milan drives herself and lover
Renzo around in her husbands Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud iii, while
having several near misses and minor bumps. Seemingly indifferent
to everyone around her, Anna remarks Ive been living an empty
life enclosed in an ivory tower, ignoring completely the rights of
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others, while simultaneously beeping vigorously to eject smaller

cars from her path. The gruff Bentley-driving Alexander in Journey
to Italy is equally divorced from others. What noisy people, he
snorts from his leather driving seat as a local blares past. Ive never
seen noise and boredom go so well together. In such portrayals,
drivers have become trapped as consumers and owners, seduced
by the appearance, specifications and marketing of cars for which
they have no significant use, knowledge or desire.
While these films tend to regard cars as objects, and driving
as a condition of ownership, the first movie to undertake a sustained
exploration of city driving as both dynamic performance and alienating practice arrived in 1976, in the form of Martin Scorseses
daunting Taxi Driver (1976). Robert de Niros interpretation of
former Marine and semi-fantasist Travis Bickle takes us on a
journey through New York and into the mind of a paranoid
psychotic. I go all over, Bickle declares, I take people to the
Bronx, Brooklyn, I take them to Harlem. I dont care. Dont make
no difference to me. In this way, the taxi is at first an instrument
of freedom for Bickle, and the opening slow-motion shots correspondingly peer through a rainy windscreen at beautiful city lights
and artfully blurred views, accompanied by the atmospheric jazzy
strains of Bernard Herrmanns Thank God for the Rain. On one
level, this is a highly aesthetic depiction of urban driving, suggesting
Bickles emergence from, or perhaps retreat into, a dreamlike state. As
he cruises around, streets waver like a three-dimensional oscilloscope,
light reflects off glass and bodywork, rain trickles down the overtaking
mirror, traffic lights pulse strong circles of colour, and lamp-posts
hover like guardian angels. Yet these same scenes also act as a
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pornographic frame (like the adult movie theatres he frequents),

forcing Bickle to encounter adulterers, suave politicians, abusive
customers, prostitutes, vandals, drug-takers and other city lowlife.
Theyre all animals anyway, Bickle declares. All the animals come
out at night: whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers,
junkies. Through such categorizations, Bickle largely sees rather than
engages with the city, and it is therefore this visual mode of experience which constructs his reading of the city as a set of characters
and vignettes, just like the temporary and disconnected encounters
he has with his customers. The problem, of course, is not so much
with anyone viewing the city in this way per se, but that this mode
of seeing and understanding becomes Bickles primary, indeed almost
only, mode of experiencing urban life.
As Iva Pekrkovs gritty novel Gimme the Money: The Big Apple
as Seen by a Czech Driver and other New York cabbies affirm, 1970s
and 80s Manhattan really was like this (it looked like Dantes Inferno,
it was hell), the relentless pulse of the city and the exhilaration of
driving making the drivers sleepless, lonely and necessarily thickskinned. Drive a taxi cab in New York for one year, one driver
declared, and learn what life is all about.20 Along with streets of
peculiar atmospheric beauty, Bickle thus encounters kids throwing
bottles at his taxi, drives through fire hydrants gushing water and
generally is thrown amidst the sick, venal world of prostitutes,
drunkards and drug-takers; not only does Bickle have to deal with
ill-behaved customers, but every night he must clean blood and semen
off the rear seats. This is the driving condition Bickle has to face: one
that is alternatively welcoming and hostile, seductive and repulsive,
striking and menacing, colourful and dark, mobile and claustrophobic.
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07
New York as
seductive and hostile beauty. Taxi
Driver (Martin
Scorsese, 1976).

At the start of the script for Taxi Driver, writer Paul

Schrader quotes Thomas Wolfe: The whole conviction of my
life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare
and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of
human existence.21 Bickle deals with this condition by inventing
a new character for himself, fantasizing that he is involved in
secret government work, while his inability to relate properly
even to his parents is revealed by his sending a solitary card to
cover a birthday, wedding anniversary and Fathers Day. He turns
inwards on himself, altering his haircut, physique and eating and
drug-taking habits, and procuring four handguns. Manhattan is
constantly exposed to Bickle during his taxi-driving, car-based
observations, and he is gradually desensitized to the city, which
is particularly apparent in the way he is able to relate to people.
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Bickle wants to like people, but cannot seem to find a way of

doing so; he takes the cultured Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) to a sex
film on a first date, and eventually becomes what Scorsese has
called an avenging angel: shooting a grocery store robber, trying
to assassinate a politician, befriending the teenage prostitute Iris
(Jodie Foster) and killing her pimp and clients. Despite this descent
into what seems to be a bloody death away from the realm of taxi
driving, the automobile reappears as Bickles saviour when in the
final scenes (much debated as representing either his actual future
life, or showing his dying dreams) the taxi becomes a space of
escape, with lights blurred in the drivers mirror, at once beautiful,
transient, unstable and uncertain. Bickles initial alienation his
inability to influence society, lack of appropriate beliefs, willingness to use illegitimate means, isolation from conventional norms
and inability to be genuinely satisfied22 is now replaced by a
sense of negotiation: that is, he has dealt with that alienation and,
ultimately, created some kind of peace, both within the city and
within himself.
A rather different conundrum faces another taxi driver, Max
(Jamie Foxx) in Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004), who is forced to
choose between driving hired assassin Vincent (Tom Cruise) across
Los Angeles, or being himself murdered. As the night unfolds, the
two characters roles begin to subtly shift: Vincent comes to Maxs
aid both when the radio controller charges Max for cab damages,
and when he supports Maxs exaggerated self-descriptions when
visiting his mother; and, in reverse, it is Max who enters a gangsterrun Mexican club and starts to assume Vincents persona. Above all,
the taxi interior is where Vincent forces Max to reflect on his life,
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08
Max confronts Los
Angeles, an assassin and himself.
Collateral (Michael
Mann, 2004).

and make him realize that his ambition to set up a cool high-end
Island Limo car service is still entirely unfulfilled. Aggravated by
this goading, Max finally takes charge, speeding up the taxi, driving
through red lights and deliberately crashing. The nights driving is
thus ultimately a testing ground for Max where he is shaken out
of his comfort zone and compelled finally to act in a decisive and
dramatic fashion.
Leaving such dramatic events behind, a more everyday kind
of conflict and self-negotiation is presented in Mike Leighs HappyGo-Lucky (2008). Scott (Eddie Marsan), a depressive, repressed
and intolerant driving instructor, is surprised to find himself both
encumbered with and attracted to the annoyingly upbeat Poppy
(Sally Hawkins), whose frivolous attitude to driving, inappropriate
footwear and constant innuendo-riddled chatter he mistakenly
interprets as signs of flirting. At first Scott seeks to dominate Poppy
in his role as instructor, berating her in a summary manner. You

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have no respect for order, Scott proclaims, You are arrogant, you
are disruptive. And you celebrate chaos. Yet as tensions escalate
and Scotts barely expressed feelings for Poppy go unrequited, it
is Poppy who, like Max in Collateral, takes the initiative, and in a
concluding meeting between the two it is Poppy who throws back
at Scott some of his favourite aphorisms regarding the responsibility
and dangers of car driving, and who ultimately decides who will
and will not drive. Rejecting Scotts style of aggressive, anger-fuelled
driving, at the movies end it is Poppy, for all her apparent childishness and flippancy, who is most in control of her own emotions,
behaviour and wider social responsibilities.

Adventure and Fun

Motion is a key to unravelling the city. When youre
moving, and the world is around you, your energy
gets matched. Youre enacting a kind urban dance
that no choreographer has scripted. Explore, team
up, match. This place seems to go beyond the usual
commercial libido. It responds and reacts.23
One of the most notable features of treatments of driving in films
from The Grapes of Wrath to Happy-Go-Lucky is that much of the
car-borne narrative takes place at comparatively slow speeds, cars
being used as a mobile platform for social encounters as much as
for the freedom of driving itself. However, if these kinds of filmic
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depictions of driving recall sociologist Georg Simmels contention

that the modern world allows us to be anonymous and uncaring, and
that in this kind of city we must negotiate our social relationships
in a guarded, managed and even slow manner,24 then, conversely,
we should also consider that high-speed city driving allows urban
dwellers to invoke experiences of adventure, exhilaration and even
lack of control. Other films, therefore, emphasize a sense of freedom
and openness to the city in a more dynamic way, exploring exhilaration in conjunction with social mobility, and, in particular, articulating
urban driving as an activity filled with adventure and fun. This lighthearted and exuberant approach to driving has been central to a
great number of films over the last century. To cite but a few of these,
as early as 1905 Georges Mlis The Paris-Monte Carlo Run in Two
Hours (Le Raid Paris Monte-Carlo en deux heures, 1905) depicts
King Leopold of Belgium playfully crashing into gateways, buildings
and stalls, while a year later the fantastical journey followed in The ?
Motorist (Walter Booth for R. W. Paul, 1906) imagines a car flying
into the sky and beyond the moon. Films like Man with a Movie
Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom, Dziga Vertov, 1929) later
used the car to give a dynamic sense of getting out into the city,
car-mounted cameras here being used to see and depict urban life,
while the car-borne shots in People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak and
Edgar G. Ulmer, 1929) also provide a strong sense of the city, this
time Berlin, being opened up to its young residents.
By the post-war years, this theme had developed much further.
As young lovers Bowie and Keechie flee the law in They Live By Night
(Nicholas Ray, 1948), it is constant automobile-borne movement
which secures their freedom from capture. Overhead airborne shots
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an innovative technique for the 1940s emphasize a sense of

speeding around the landscape, creating a symbolic wind propelling
them along. Although set in the Depression era, They Live By Night
is very much future-facing, showing that even in adversity young
people can still find adventure, fall in love and move forward.
In the somewhat different setting of 1950s England, Genevieve
(Henry Cornelius, 1953) shows Alan and Ambrose competing with
each other on the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run in their
Darracq 10/12 hp Type O and Spyker 14/18 hp in order to flee their
boring worlds of law and advertising. Over the next decade, similar
scenes of swerving, speeding and generally good-humoured harmless
tom-foolery abounded in London, from the chaotic car chases of
The Wrong Arm of the Law (Cliff Owen, 1963) and the Doctor in
the House series of films (Ralph Thomas, 195470) to the cheeky
driving of Charlie Hawkins in Carry on Cabby. In an unusually
thoughtful variant on this theme, Catch Us If You Can (John
Boorman, 1965) a promo for pop band The Dave Clark Five
undertakes a surprisingly serious exploration into personal freedom
and relationships amid stage-managed events, images and contracts,
deploying exuberant dynamic blurs, tilts and fast edits as Steve
(Dave Clark) and Dinah (Barbara Ferris) evade their commitments
in a white Jaguar E-Type, enjoying the rush of London roads, the
Kingsway tunnel, lights and buildings. Similarly in Paris, teenagers
Louis (Georges Poujouly) and Vronique (Yori Bertin) steal a
1952 Chevrolet Styleline DeLuxe as a mischievous lark in Lift to
the Scaffold (Ascenseur pour lchafaud, aka Elevator to the Gallows,
Louis Malle, 1957), with a Miles Davis jazz score adding to the sense
of free-form adventure. The Chevrolet has a stylish motorized roof,
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09
The city as playground. The Italian
Job (Peter Collinson,
1969).

which Vronique smilingly admires: Look, a push of a button and

its done! Thats the kind of life I want.
However, the movie which has undoubtedly done the most to
establish the notion of urban driving as a practice filled with adventure,
fun and joyful speed is the original version of The Italian Job (1969),
written by Troy Kennedy and directed by Peter Collinson. In this
humorous crime caper, a group of British criminals led by Charlie
Croker (Michael Caine) attempt to steal a truckload of gold bullion
from under the noses of the Turin police and Italian Mafia. To do
so, they jam the computerized traffic control system to bring the city
to a virtual standstill, ram an om Leoncino bullion truck and force it
into an inner courtyard, and then offload the gold into three Austin
Mini Cooper S MkIs (painted red, white and blue in the colours of the
British Union Jack). With Turin gridlocked and seemingly impassable,
the Minis make their escape through the interiors of the Palazzo
Carignano and down the steps of the Palazzo Madama, along the

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Galleria dellIndustria Subalpina and Galleria San Federico, and via

the various arcades, back alleys, courtyards and subway passages of
the city. They skip down the steps outside the Gran Madre di Dio
church, make high-level jumps between buildings, ride over the roof
of the 1961 Palavela (formerly Palazzo delle Mostre), race around the
famous rooftop track of the 1923 Fiat Lingotto factory, hide briefly in
a car park and finally flee the city across the weir of the River Po and
out via a sewer tunnel. In a deleted scene included in the dvd release,
the Minis and pursuing police Alfa Romeo Guilia TIs even come
together under the magnificent concrete vaulting of Pier Luigi
Nervis 1949 Exhibition Building, where they perform an improbable
choreographed dance to the strains of Strausss The Blue Danube.
At the end of the escapade, the gold-laden Minis disappear from
view when they are driven up into the back of a 1964 Bedford val
14 Harrington Legionnaire, using ramps trailed behind the coach as
it races along.25
The advanced stunt driving for the film was performed with
meticulous planning and precision by Rmy Julienne and his specialist quipe of drivers and mechanics. Nonetheless, it is not so much
the difficulty of the driving which makes The Italian Job so significant
or memorable as the character and personality of these antics. The
three childlike Minis bounce down steps, dart along gallerias, squeeze
through tunnels and cheekily play hide and seek with the chasing
police; the drivers grab food from pedestrians (I could eat a horse!),
shout good luck at newly married couples, and bicker goodnaturedly with each other: Try putting your foot down Tony
theyre really getting rather close. Here the streets of Turin become
a playground for driving, a scene of energy, pleasure and excitement,
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a place where adults transcend the constraints of the city (traffic

jams, regulations, signs, controls and procedures) and delight
instead in unfettered velocities and trajectories let loose within
unconventional and unusual locations. Indeed, if this seems like
an overtly optimistic reading of the joys of urban driving, one could
even go even further. In Matter and Memory (1896), the philosopher
Henri Bergson contends that space is not static or pre-existent, but
is born of motion, an unfolding and space of subjective perception
that is revealed by a persons immediate experience of their world.26
In this sense the urban space of Turin is not so much negotiated by
the three Minis as created through their wayward trajectories, tight
moves and hustling sprints; in this way, the city is rendered anew,
brought into its very existence by dynamic city driving.
Given the starring role of the Mini in the original film, when
the new The Italian Job (F. Gary Gray) was released in 2003, it was
not surprising that the contemporary bmw-era Mini should enjoy a
similarly prominent presence. In this version, written by Donna and
Wayne Powers, the action is set predominantly in America, where
Charlie Croker (Mark Wahlberg), Stella Bridger (Charlize Theron),
Handsome Rob (Jason Statham), Left Ear (Mos Def) and Lyle (Seth
Green) seek to avenge the death of Stellas father and steal back their
gold bullion from double-crossing Steve (Edward Norton). As Steve
transports the gold across Los Angeles in one of three International
4700 trucks, Lyle hacks into the citys computerized traffic system,
isolates the gold truck and gridlocks the surrounding traffic. The
team then blows up the road underneath the gold truck, dropping
it down into a Metro tunnel and stealing the bullion in a trio of new
Mini Coopers. As with the 1969 film, the red, white and blue cars
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avoid seemingly impassable streets by using a sequence of tunnels

and other short cuts, followed by some high-speed sequences
through Los Angeles. At the end, they transfer the Minis onto
another vehicle, a train at Union Station now replacing the earlier
films coach.
Unlike the more light-hearted tone of the 1969 movie, here the
action is more dramatic in nature, involving precise driving with lots
of tight turns and small jumps and a more spectacular and big-budget
feel. One of the most significant changes is to the gender of the
criminals, and in particular the prominence given to safe-cracker
Stella. In the 2003 film, Stella zips her red Mini (a pre-bmw Mini
Cooper Mk vii in homage to the 1969 original) through the streets
of Philadelphia, squeezing at startling speed into a tiny parking slot
between two enormous 4 x 4s. She later performs some equally
remarkable driving (this time in the modern bmw-era Minis) when
stealing back the gold bullion. A documentary included with the dvd
version also reveals that during an intensive four weeks of driver
training intended to allow them to perform as many stunts as possible,
actors Charlize Theron (Stella) and Jason Statham (Handsome Rob)
were intensely competitive with each other while undertaking
complicated manoeuvres like 180-degree reverse handbrake turns in
46

10
BMW-era Minis
make their escape
in Los Angeles. The
Italian Job (F. Gary
Gray, 2003).

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extremely tight confines. As this suggests, no cgi effects (despite their

ready availability) were used in the films driving action scenes, the
director being keen to preserve a strong sense of reality throughout
the movie.
Grays concern to maintain driving realism in what is essentially an improbable piece of Hollywood entertainment is highly significant, because at play in this meeting of the city, driving and film
is a deliberate conjoining of the real and the imaginary, the everyday
and the extraordinary, the conventional and the strange. For it is very
much in normal peoples quotidian lives that the city car operates,
offering us not only a means of daily transport but also an important
psychological and ideational sense of emancipation, pride, independence, autonomy and self-expression; the car allows us both
to negotiate the conflicts we feel in our lives, and, to some extent,
transcend them through newly constructed attitudes, aspirations,
beliefs and perceptions. This is why automobile advertisements
may focus on a range of different themes such as geographic escape,
social status, individual freedom, gender and power, but in doing so
nearly always go beyond matters of mundane function to incorporate
elements of symbolic desire or even magical qualities.27 Hence the
uk bmw-era Mini was first launched in July 2001 with a highly
sophisticated marketing campaign based on making the car seem as
fresh and sexy as possible, proclaiming that Its a Mini Adventure.
Giant billboards included full-size 3d cars racing up the side of
urban buildings (New Mini attempts to drive up side of building.
Succeeds. The End) while cinema advertisements parodied B-movies,
showing the Mini saving the Earth from Zombies and invading
Martians.28 Similarly inventive marketing took place in the rest of
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the world, an international Is It Love? campaign focusing on

emotionality, and running radio, television and print advertisements, mega-posters and special events across Asia, Europe, the
Middle East, South Africa and the us. Over a decade later, and
the new Mini is still being promoted as a sporty and adventurous
automobile through such techniques as being the designated car for
athletes during the London 2012 Olympics, as well as incorporating
a special iPhone App to allow drivers to connect directly to Facebook
and Twitter pages on the cars display screen, and automatically
varying iPod music to match the cars speed.
Jim McDowell, vice-president of Mini usa, calls purchasers
of the Mini and similar urban cars post-materialists, who buy an
automobile because they perceive it to be exactly right for their own
lives, and not because their neighbours have one. According to
McDowell, these are drivers who are design-orientated, who prefer
owning fewer and higher-quality objects and who have said I want
to try a different path; a car like the Mini helps them to redefine
themselves as a person.29 If they are to do so, of course, they cannot
be told directly what they should think or purchase by marketeers.
Hence the importance in the 2000s of films being increasingly used
in conjunction with the Internet as a way of marketing cars virally,
hoping that people will find and forward the films to their friends
and colleagues through emails and social networking media. bmw
were one of the first companies to succeed in this channel, particularly through the The Hire series of eight films produced in 20012.
For the Mini, in 2007 bmw commissioned the Hammer and Coop
series of six short films, created by Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners
and directed by Todd Philips. Here, Hammer is a spoof of 1970s and
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80s television cops, and Coop is an independent-minded, irreverent

and intelligent car which, in keeping with the spirit of the 1969 The
Italian Job, speaks in an English accent, is argumentative and sarcastic,
and performs numerous acts of precise urban driving such as spins,
high-speed cornering and through pipes.

Sensing
As we have seen, filmic depictions of urban driving include such
disparate notions as democracy and freedom, gender, alienation,
negotiation, adventure and fun, thus constructing myriad correlations of the city, automobiles and social concerns. But what are
some of the more visual, temporal and spatial aspects of these
kinds of construction? In particular, what sensory experiences are
involved in city driving, and how do films open these up?

Signs and Signals

From speeding to walking, each rate of movement

has generated a cinematic, constrained advertising
language of icons and flags that address that motion
and are probably invisible to others.30
One oft-cited aspect of urban driving is the reduction of city form
to signs, signals, billboards and lights. That is, car driving tends to
render the city as a matter of surface and the purely visual. Preeminent here is Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Stephen
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Izenours influential and partly film-based Learning From Las

Vegas (1972), which celebrates roadside architectures of decorative
symbolism, ordinary repetition and large-scale visibility. In this
urbanism, signification triumphs over space and highway signs
instantly communicate multifarious meanings.31 This perspective
resonates strongly with peoples everyday urban experiences, for in
the contemporary world of traffic management, where viewshed
design ensures landscapes are intelligible from moving cars, our city
experiences are indeed highly semiotic, based to no small extent on
a reading of signs and signals.32
Surprisingly, this aspect of urban driving is foregrounded
relatively infrequently in film. Exceptions include the neon light
sequences of Piccadilly (Ewald Andr Dupont, 1929) and other
1920s films such as Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter
Ruttmann, 1927) and Man with a Movie Camera, which take
similar delight in the signs and reflections of the newly electrified
metropolis. In the 1960s, movies like Catch Us If You Can used
road signs and signals to highlight the dynamism of London, while
one sequence in Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1969)
similarly invokes a Venturi-esque series of signs, billboards and
surfaces.33 Some of the Japanese high-speed driving films from the
1990s onwards take particular delight in this kind of visual condition.
For example, Freeway Speedway 6 (Nikkatsu Corporation, 1996)
turns the Japanese city into an assemblage of brake lights, headlights,
tunnel lights, cornering arrows, overhead signs and other visual
paraphernalia of night-time urban driving.
Other films, however, adopt a rather more critical attitude to
signs, such as the propagandist documentary The City (Ralph Steiner
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11
The Japanese city
as lights, signs and
signals. Freeway
Speedway 6
(Nikkatsu
Corporation,
1996).

12
Montage of signals
from the dystopian
city of Alphaville
(Jean-Luc Godard,
1965).

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and Willard van Dyke, 1939), where constant instructions regarding

no stopping and no turning indicate an intrusive, stressful and
congested metropolis. As The City recognizes, city authorities often
consider driving as a problem, and thus something to be controlled
and rendered safe. In an overtly anti-signal and anti-governmental
attitude, Godard first introduces the dystopian Alphaville as a city
of flashing street lights, arrows, signs and equations, denoting the
erasure of emotion and control of society by an unforgiving computer. In this kind of city, as French philosopher Henri Lefebvre
noted a few years before Godards film, signs are reduced to signals,
directly issuing their instructions. I am conditioned by signals,
wrote Lefebvre, perhaps recalling two years spent working as a
Paris taxi driver, I behave as they tell me to behave.34 Similar
connotations are felt by the cart man of Borom Sarret who reflects
on how traffic lights control him as if he were in a prison. More
prosaically, the kinds of sign-induced stress identified in The City
are greatly intensified in the traffic jam at the start of Falling Down
(Joel Schumacher, 1993), where William Foster (Michael Douglas)
contends not only with roadwork lights flashing across his windscreen but also bumper stickers and license plates advertising
everything from financial freedom and Christianity to downright
abuse: How Am I Driving? Dial 1-800-eat shit. From this perspective, when we drive, the signs we see and must obey are not only
a regulation of urban independence, but also a strong contributor to
a mounting sense of urban frustration, alienation and malevolence.35
And yet, despite the kinds of argument made by The City and
Lefebvre, stating that in a city of signals everything is trivial,36 signs
can also be much richer cultural entities, and indeed are capable of
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speaking in multifarious ways. For example, even a single car journey

in almost any city worldwide will provide not only signs for traffic
management and control, but everyday clues to such things as power,
servicing and communication networks, flora and fauna, corporations,
historical traces, religion, international road haulage and so forth.37
In film, these messages are often even more suggestive, providing
another layer of meaning. Hence in Saboteur (Alfred Hitchcock,
1942), billboards seem to speak to Barry Kane of the dangers he is
confronting, while neon ticker feeds in Breathless ( bout de souffle,
Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) announce that Michels arrest is imminent.
At the start of Sugarland Express (Steven Spielberg, 1974), a stack of
diverging highway numbers and directions indicates the uncertain
future awaiting the Poplins. More subtly, in Vendredi soir Paris
signs and lights provide the foil against which the slow-driving
Laure rethinks her life. In these kinds of scene, signs add to the
tapestry of the city, creating another layer of meaning among the
many other such modes of communication present in urban life.

Time and Rhythms

Notions of time are central to urban driving experiences. Even in

the early twentieth century, one of drivings great advantages was
the freedom it gave from authoritarian train timetables. If I visit,
wrote Rudyard Kipling of Edwardian motoring, I do so as a free
agent, making my own arrangements for coming or going.38
Some indication of this can be seen in depictions of early motoring,
notably in The Open Road (1925) where director Claude FrieseGreenes extended journeying around Britain is undertaken in a
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Vauxhall D-type. Notably, Friese-Greenes route from Lamorna

Cove in the furthest southwest, through Plymouth, Cardiff and
Glasgow en route to the north of Scotland, and then back south
to London would have been almost impossible via train, for only
a car could readily accommodate his complex itinerary.
If the car promises to let the driver travel exactly where and
when he or she wishes, of course in contemporary driving this does
not always hold true: parking regulations, congestion and complex
road systems mean the car is often no longer the most flexible
form of urban transport, as is made evident in films from The City
to Falling Down. But, for others, especially during non-rush hour
traffic, it can still produce a peculiarly individual temporal experience. In city driving, as we have already seen with the Mini, this
means a temporality of the ephemeral, darting and short-lived.
Driving here creates a sense of communication that is curt and
immediate, and which, again, is clearly evident in many films and
exemplified by Catch Us If You Can and The Italian Job.
At other times, however, city driving is an amalgamation of
different temporalities, from schedules and disruptions to free speeds
and immediate movements. A notable version of this combination
is provided by Robbery (1967), directed by Peter Yates who the
following year would produce Bullitts seminal car chase. Robbery
shows a group of London criminals planning and undertaking a
jewel heist from a Vanden Plas 4 litre, the robbery being carried
out with incredibly accurate timings and spatial choreography,
including intricate surveillance, tracking, radio communications
and a discreetly planted gassing device. After the heist, however,
the robbers are rumbled by the police, leading to one of the longest
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and most complex car chases ever undertaken in a British movie.

Throughout this later sequence, it is the police who now adopt a
highly measured and ordered operation, involving multiple cars,
detailed written notes, radios, motorbikes, call signs, street names
and directions. By contrast, the thieves resort to an increasingly
desperate, high speed and instinct-driven attempt to escape in a
silver Jaguar Mk2 in which they transgress various rules of the
road, nearly hit a group of children crossing the street and get their
windscreen smashed.
Unlike the fun-filled capers of The Italian Jobs Minis, all of
this is shot in an extremely realistic and factual manner. Hence the
streets are normal streets (not tunnels, weirs or arcades), the camera
often takes the drivers view, and there is little dialogue to detract
from what is essentially a neo-reportage piece of cinema, shot
without official permission around Londons Ladbroke Grove
and including at least one real-life near miss.39 Bereft of apparent
emotion or other expressive theatricalities, the sense of frenzy as
the robbers seek to escape is delivered instead by a sense of speed,
risk, potential danger and exhilaration as factual, empirical experience that is, as more like a high-speed game of chess against the
clock than the playground-like antics of The Italian Job. Indeed,
so matter-of-fact is the portrayal of these scenes that, despite their
undoubted drama, one could read them as depictions of everyday
driving, with all of its complex routes, manoeuvres, scrapes, timings,
anticipation and decision-making, but now with the intensity dial
turned up to max.
As Robbery therefore shows, driving adds another rhythm to
the time and space of cities, one more pattern to the symphony of
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melodies and beats created by urban life. In the early twentieth

century, this was a common artistic theme, readily evident in
Futurist paintings such as Giacomo Ballas Velocit dautomobile
+ Luci (Speeding Automobile + Lights, 1913), the films of Sergei
Eisenstein and Fernand Lgers Ballet mcanique (1924), with its
images of machines pistoning, rotating and gyrating. This is more
explicit in films such as Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and Man
with a Movie Camera, which montage car journeys and speeds
against other scenes from daily life, and which use the rhythm
editing of patterns, shapes and signs as well as of pedestrians, cars,
trams and trains to portray the intensely pulsating quality of the
city. Similar depictions occur in the first of the 1920s city symphony
films, Alberto Calvacantis oft-overlooked Rien que les heures (1926),
which shows everyday events for lower-class Parisians through a
series of multiple exposures, split screens, speeded-up action and
frozen images as well as more prosaic images. We can fix a point
in space to freeze a moment in time, proclaim intertitles, but space
and time both elude our grasp. A sense of rhythm is also to the
fore in Lszl Moholy-Nagys Dynamic of the Metropolis film sketch
(19212), and in Joris Ivenss Regen (1929), where the effects of rain
on road surfaces, windscreens, wheels and car reflections are set
within a delightful portrayal of downpours, splashes, patterns and
puddles. Rhythm here is cast not just as the speeds but the changing
light, textures and atmosphere of Amsterdam.
These avant-garde depictions of rhythms also appear in more
conventional narrative movies. For example, early film-makers
such as D. W. Griffith employed the fast speed of hurtling cars as
an integral part of their cross-cutting and intercutting techniques
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designed to increase narrative drama and tension,40 while more

subtle depictions of automobile and urban rhythms soon appear
in the 1920s, as in Piccadilly when layers of space and reflections
infiltrate shots of a blurred bus moving across a static background.
Even more sophisticated games are played with the famous opening
sequence to North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), where
Saul Basss kinetic credits shift along the diagonal gridlines of an
office building, dissolving to reveal reflected views of taxis and
other cars of midtown Manhattan. All of this works to signify the
constantly conflicting rhythms and changing conditions of modern
city life.

13
Rhythms and
visual delights
of Amsterdam
rain. Regen (Joris
Ivens, 1929).
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Not all rhythms are purely visual, as shown in Genevieve, where

the sound of Edwardian wheels negotiating cobbles and tramlines is
joined by judders, jolts, smells, beeps and burbling noises, while the
belligerent blind passenger in the Paris episode of Night on Earth
(Jim Jarmusch, 1991) recognizes from the sound of a tunnel that the
cabbie has not followed her requested route. Another Paris setting
provides a particularly modern formulation of rhythms in Breathless,
including thoughts and complex conversation. In one sequence,
Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Patricia (Jean Seberg) distractedly
drive past blurred buildings while their disjointed dialogue collapses
past, present and future, including a desire to caress, former marriage,
their riding in a stolen car, a policemans murder and a sense of fear
all while moving past some of the citys famous landmarks. Look,
says Michel midway through their disparate exchange, Isnt Concorde
gorgeous? Yes, agrees Patricia, Mysterious with all the lights.
Director Godard explores this multi-cadenced urban experience
again in Pierrot le fou, using the different coloured lights of nighttime Paris not to depict some kind of actuality but as a sensation
using the elements that compose it, as red stains, green, yellow
gleams passing by as they do in memory.41
A rather more cerebral depiction of rhythms is discernible in
Wim Wenderss Wings of Desire (1987), in which angels contemplations add temporal layers to the contemporary city they observe.
In one scene the angel Cassiel journeys alongside the owner of a
1934 Mercedes 290, while views of war-torn Berlin are set against
present streets. Germany has crumbled into as many small states
as there are individuals, the narrative declares, and these small
states are mobile. Here rhythms are created through memories
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14
The rhythms
of Londons
Limehouse Link
road tunnel. A13
(William Raban,
1994).

and history, gently overlaid by driving through contemporary

Berlin in a calmly measured manner. An equally thoughtful treatment of temporal rhythms appears in William Rabans a13 (1994),
where a day in the life of a major London highway is created through
different driving speeds, traffic control systems, major tunnel construction, and incidental activities and objects like roadside workers,
billboards, demolition works, street markets, artworks, financial
exchanges, trains and light conditions. Influenced by Man with a
Movie Camera, a13 uses superimposition, mattes and other withinthe-camera techniques and without recourse to post-production
manipulations. Another psychogeographic film, Robinson in Space
(Patrick Keiller, 1997), similarly conjoins times, ideas and places with
the ambient details of city traffic. A more mainstream depiction of
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the fluidity of time and space is the title sequence to Changing Lanes
(Roger Michell, 2002), where traffic pulses dramatically: slow at
intersections, speeded up down city streets, suddenly pulling up
behind cars, fast when changing lanes, medium-paced on elevated
freeways and so forth. All of this is shown at variable film speeds,
angles and viewpoints, and an accompanying drum and bass score
heightens a variable and discordant cadence in which the sense of
a pulsating city rhythm comes from velocities, views and music
rather than from montage or complex edits. Such filmic depictions
emphasize the disparate temporal rhythms of cities, where the slow
comes up against the fast, the speedy is interwoven with the plodding,
hurried and rapid movement is punctuated by tedious waiting and
stillness and, above all, the movement of cars adds its own distinct
rhythm and speed to the city. This is faster, more dynamic and
often more continuous than walking or cycling, at once creating
barriers to and modulations of these slower activities. The sum
total is indeed, as Ruttmann realized in the title of his Berlin film,
a symphony of speeds and times, all coming together to create the
complex, exhilarating and thought-provoking experience given to
us by modern cities.

Anticipation and Mapping

For drivers, one of the dominant psychological states among these

competing rhythms is that of anticipation: alertly reading the road
ahead in order to predict what might be about to occur. A first-rate
driver, declared pioneer motorist Filson Young, anticipates every
variation, foreseeing and avoiding difficulties of traffic rather than
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extricating himself from them.42 This is above all a mental process,

involving instantaneous calculation of innumerable possibilities, and
as such is embedded in nearly all filmic depictions of city driving,
from the deliberate coasting of Scottie in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock,
1958) as he tracks Madeleine around San Francisco, to the constant
awareness of New York traffic by Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, to the
frenetic computation made by the Mini drivers of The Italian Job as
they negotiate London and Los Angeles. Occasionally, anticipation
is even more explicit, as in Breathless when Michel instructs a Paris
taxi driver: Youre being overtaken by a scooter!, barks Michel.
Take the next left! Overtake that 2cv! Eyes on the road! More
recently, the Follow (Wong Kar-wai, 2001) episode of bmws The
Hire shows a driver (Clive Owen) recounting how to tail another
car through traffic as a matter of distance, patterns, anticipation
involving alertness, precision, percentages, blind spots and understanding that distance is subjective. Driving here is about a whole
range of anticipatory and instinctive spatial tactics, such as short
cuts, merging, overtaking, undertaking, accelerating, braking, cornering, reversing, rapidly parking and so on all of which enables
the driver be a truly metropolitan resident, someone who knows
both the city and how to thrive within it. As driving specialists have
described city driving, this practice not only requires considerable
perceptual and information skills, including fast reactions and
the ability to concentrate and to anticipate other road users moves,
but also deep socio-psychological qualities of independence as
well as resourcefulness, calm behaviour under stressful conditions,
cold-bloodedness. Above all, drivers must develop human nerves
to their fullest potential.43 More than a mere physiological skill,
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driving involves the mental resilience and emotional depth to

deal with all the city can throw up in terms of interweaving and
fluctuating movements. In cities, driving goes far beyond being a
mere skill: it is a registration of the drivers capacity to survive in
the modern world.
As this suggests, the fast pace of much urban life is matched
by the stop-start, ever alert and always impatient nature of urban
driving. City driving produces, therefore, an experience of visual
signs, but also of time, hearing, smelling, spatial judgment, danger,
impatience and frustration qualities which belie Lefebvre and
others who see driving as a sensationless, culture-free zone. Instead,
the very dynamic of urban driving creates cultural meanings or
states, such as the condition of constant anticipation. Indeed, the
situation is even more complicated in that urban driving sensibility
is certainly dulled and routine, but is also hyperactive, always aware
of the changing state of the surrounding city.44 Driving is, therefore,
an experience which represents the dual character of the city, being
anonymous, repetitive and flat while simultaneously personal,
rhythmical and variegated.
In another aspect of urban driving, knowing where to go
(or not go) has always been part of automobile culture, ever since
middle-class motoring pioneers put great effort into telling each
other the best routes and hotels, or the worst garages to avoid.45
As this suggests, mapping in driving at least until the rise of gps
devices has been primarily a cognitive activity, through which one
knows the city less as an abstract map and more as a local experience.
Hence in Vertigo, the seeming irrationality of Madeleines convoluted
routes boosts intrigue and mystery, reducing San Francisco to a
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stage-set of impenetrable facades and meaningless surfaces. A

similarly serious quality underlies Sherman and Marias journey
in Bonfire of the Vanities (Brian De Palma, 1990), when they take
a wrong expressway exit into the war zone of South Bronx. After
hitting a black youth in their Mercedes 560 sel, their lives rapidly
become a maelstrom of ethical, judicial, journalistic, personal and
political complications. A simple wrong turn, any one of us could
have done it, explains the voiceover, suddenly youre off the track
and moving relentlessly towards a destiny you could have never
imagined.
As all this suggests, mapping in driving is ultimately a matter
of maintaining control over the city. Nowhere is this more evident
than in heist and ambush situations, most explicitly in movies like
The Wrong Arm of the Law, Robbery and, of course, the two versions
of The Italian Job, in which the whole plot turns around the complications of conducting crime within complex city spaces. In Payroll
(Sidney Hayers, 1961), a wages robbery is constructed as a complex
mapping operation involving multifarious preparations, evasions,
chases and eventual capture. Conducted amid gritty and industrial
Newcastle upon Tyne, the action traverses central, wasteland and
backstreet settings, thus increasing the sense of a whole city being
mapped and controlled. A decade later, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry
(John Hough, 1974) showed new mapping technologies as the police
ensnare Larry, Deke and Mary in a large dragnet operation involving
roadblocks, watch towers, sweep-searches and helicopter surveillance.
The robbers counter with a radio scanner to eavesdrop and banter
with the police, while also relying heavily on detailed knowledge of
local territory. The 2003 Italian Job takes intricate mapping to even
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more of an extreme. Initially, the gang hope to steal their target

gold from a house interior, and so computer expert Lyle devises
complex driving pathways via internal hallways, passages and
steps. Later, he hacks the la traffic system to gridlock streets and,
by directing individual traffic lights, to manipulate a bullion truck
within the ensuing chaos. Here, mapping comprises highly precise
knowledge and control, and commands both large territories and
micro-movements in time and space. This is not without some
real-life parallel, for the Los Angeles Department of Transport
undertakes a similar operation each year for the Academy Awards
ceremony, precisely manipulating their computerized Automated
Traffic Surveillance and Control (atsac) system to ensure the
smooth cross-city running and timely arrival of 800 celebrity
limousines in Hollywood.46
Mapping through driving is not always, however, simply
about knowing where things are and how to get there. It is also
64

15
Lyle sends the
bullion truck into
a right-hand turn
during a Los
Angeles traffic jam
of his own making.
The Italian Job.

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CITIES

16
Gittes drives into
Chinatown.
Chinatown (Roman
Polanski, 1974).

a matter of making mobile sense of the city even when that city
resists conventional mapping. For example, the multiple car journeys
of Quentin Tarantinos Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994)
invoke a world of dislocated sensibilities and spaces in their depiction
of postmodern Los Angeles, which, as urban geographer Edward
Soja pointed out shortly before Reservoir Dogs, is the epitome of
a fractured city, being at once profoundly conflictual in its history,
limitless in its changing spatiality and appearing like an confusing
collage of signs.47 A similar process occurs in an earlier Los Angeles
movie, Roman Polanskis cinematic masterpiece Chinatown (1974).
Within a plot based in part on the land and water disputes of interwar California, the driving sequences in Chinatown disclose the
essentially unknowable and unmappable nature of the modern city.
In particular, a closing sequence shows detective Jake Gittes (Jack
Nicholson) driving into the Chinatown area of Los Angeles. While
we ride with the camera in the rear seat, city space is here both

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observed from inside of the car (where it is partially obscured

through reflections and movement) and accompanied by the tense
and silent intimacy of the car interior. The result is a highly complex
arrangement of views, searches and surfaces which renders Los
Angeles less as a coherent urban or architectural space and more as
a set of mysterious internalized and occasionally external spaces
interconnected in some kind of as yet indecipherable manner. City
driving here is at once mobile and static, revelatory and confusing,
internal and external, physical and immaterial. It renders the city at
once known and unknown, intelligible and irrational, certain and
fragmented. And so in this dense spatio-visual construction, the
experience of driving in cities attains what is perhaps one of its
most significant attributes: not just being a way of travelling around
or of discovering new places, but enabling the driver to confront
the complexities of the city with all that it has to offer, and to try
without ever quite succeeding to accommodate him- or herself
within that complexity. Chinatown therefore serves as a reminder
that our cities ultimately resist representation, comprehension and
ordered understanding, and that, in turn, driving in them makes
this even more apparent.48

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2JOURNEYS
In 1904, when the automobile was still the preserve of the wealthy,
early motorist Filson Young was already speculating about the cars
potential to enable the thousands who had otherwise been hopelessly
engulfed in cities to access the good life of the English country-side,
its spaces and silences, its winding roads and peaceful landscapes.1
Henry Ford agreed when five years later he foresaw that his motor
car for the great multitude would allow any man with a good salary
to enjoy with his family the blessings of hours of pleasure in Gods
great open spaces.2 Car manufacturer William Morris saw an
equivalent market among the British middle classes,3 while Adolf
Hitler believed that a peoples car would be of particular benefit to
the less well-off as it would enhance their Sundays and holidays,
giving them a great deal of future happiness.4
During the interwar years these automobile visions became a
common reality, either as a gentle Sunday drive in the countryside
or as a more extended tourist drive, taking the motorist to exciting
landscapes and distant sights. As Filson Young declared, the road
sets us free [and] allows us to follow our own choice as to how fast
and how far we shall go, permits us to tarry where and when we
will.5 The car thus enabled the traveller to visit places unreachable
by train, such as Raton Pass in America. Only by motor car can
you climb such heights, exclaimed Dallas Lore Sharp, and halt
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where you will and as long as you will.6 Unlike the train, which
seemed to many travellers to be overly mechanistic in the way it
passed places by, moving at a constant speed according to a predetermined route and timetable, the automobile provided a more
sociable way of travelling, hence restoring independence, intimacy
and personal time.7
Above all, early motoring journeys were complex affairs of
slowness, intimacy and unpredictability as well as of nature, landscapes, pre-industrial society and generally of encountering a world
which had recently become lost among the modern buildings and
bustling commerce of the metropolis. They were, undoubtedly,
also strewn with contradictions. For example, the 1920s American
practice of relaxed and simplistic motor camping increasingly
relied on luxurious campsites and hotels, technological gadgetry,
codified behaviour and even regimented timetables as motorists
sought to make miles between ever distant destinations.8 Guidebooks feverishly implored motorists to take time to see things,9
disclosing the disappearance of slow, gypsy-like travels and the
arrival instead of faster, view-at-a-glance tourism run according
to a strict itinerary and a checklist of sights.
Glimpses of all this are supplied by biographies and memoirs,
such as H. V. Mortons popular In Search of England and E. B.
Whites similarly influential account of American travels in Farewell
to Model T.10 But it is in film that the relatively innocent joys of
early motoring really come alive, most notably in a documentary,
Friese-Greenes The Open Road, made two years before Mortons
famous literary work, where an expansive journey by Vauxhall
D-type opens up Britain to both the driver and cinema audiences.
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17
Claude FrieseGreene passes
through an English
village. The Open
Road (1925).

An awful lot of Britain is on show here, from beautiful vistas, rural

hunts and agriculture to industrial manufacture, hydro-electric
power stations and coal mining, and from scenes of canals, roads
and trams to everyday routines such as craft activities, washing and
eating. So rich is the diversity on show that an intertitle asks why
travel abroad? And when Friese-Greene comes across some other
motorists taking a roadside picnic, another intertitle declares: here,
indeed, was manifested the full joy of the Open Road.
Suggestions of the camaraderie shared by early motorists
can also be seen in many other films. In The Grapes of Wrath, for
example, the extreme desperation of migrants en route to California
is mitigated by a campsite filled with shared food, personal tales and
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melancholy, defiant singing. A similar Depression-era scene occurs

in Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) when the injured fugitives
receive food and water at another itinerant motorcamp. Even in
the post-war setting of Genevieve it is clear that motoring was still
connected with an older, less urban England, including forgiving
policeman, helpful passers-by, traditional hostelries, local garages,
gentle roads and country lanes blocked by sheep. Other incidental
glimpses of driving as a carefree rural affair range from Les Vacances
de M. Hulot (Jacques Tati, 1953), where holidaying children get their
first sight of the seaside from a 1933 Renault Monaquatre 8cv, to
the nostalgic portrayal of mid-twentieth-century motoring in the
family animation Cars (John Lasseter and Joe Ranft, 2006). Here,
the motoring town of Radiator Springs is explicitly based on the
gentle driving conditions which ran along Route 66 in pre-interstate
America. Back then cars came across the country a whole different
way, explains Sally, the Porsche 911 lawyer. The road didnt cut
through the land like that interstate. It moved with the land, yknow,
it rose, it fell, it curved. Cars didnt drive on it to make good time,
they drove on it to have a great time.

Kinaesthetics
Sometimes, when Im driving across the moors at dusk on a summers
night, there are moments when Im going downhill and it feels like
falling into the landscape. I feel as if Im swooping down like a bird
of prey, the moors coming up to meet me.11 As this quotation
suggests, some countryside driving pleasures are less dependent
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on seeing new places or people, and instead are embedded within the
sensual pleasures of driving: what motoring journalist Steve Cropley
aptly describes as the rich satisfaction derived from the rhythm,
the absorption and the simple pleasure of motion.12 This condition
of sensory experiences produced in motion sometimes referred
to as kinaesthetics has been particularly explored in artistic and
literary debates, notably by Sara Danius.13 At first glance, this can
be a complex conceptualization, and it is therefore worth recapitulating its main features here under three categories the appearance
of objects, ways of seeing and the intensification of these effects
through speed while also indicating how these three kinaesthetic
conditions have been explored in film.

The Appearance of Objects

Driving can shock us out of our normal, unthinking and disconnected

relationship with our surroundings, and instead inculcate a purely
sensory encounter with the world around us. As a result, objects
appear differently, rendering the familiar strange and out-of-place.
In other words, trees, buildings, other vehicles and so on all look
different from the car from how they do from the roadside; as
Charles Bernard discovered during his first automobile drive in
Ilya Ehrenburgs Futurist-Expressionist novel The Life of the Automobile, everything flashed by as in the movie-theater.14 In particular,
objects can assume a purposeless beauty, being divorced from
their original function, and so appearing as items of non-contextual
contemplation. Filson Young described telegraph posts as no longer
performing a task of communication, but beginning to crowd
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together . . . flying in all directions over the ancient roofs of the

town and past the chimneys and weather-vanes like gathering
rumours or like flurried passengers.15
Objects also appear differently in other ways. For example,
a dominant driving effect is that the mobile becomes immobile,
for drivers, their own cars and other mobile vehicles appear to be
stationary. Conversely, the immobile: becomes mobile cars animate
landscapes so that stationary objects may appear to be moving. The
very mountains, wrote Filson Young, that in half a days walk do
not seem to change their places, move and wheel and curtsey round
you in a stately dance.16 This effect is further intensified through
the phenomenon psychologists term motion parallax, whereby
nearby objects, such as trees and telegraph poles, seem to be moving
more rapidly than those that are more distant, such as hills and
mountains.17 A great many writers have been struck by this kind
of visual experience, including the Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck, French writer Marcel Proust, Italian Futurist artist Filippo
Marinetti and French cultural theorist Paul Virilio. Maeterlincks
essay In an Automobile (1904) has driving speed increasing such
that the road grows frantic, springs forward, and throws itself
madly upon me, rushing under the car like a furious torrent,18
while, nearly a century later, Virilio remarks upon inanimate objects
that exhume themselves from the horizon and come bit by bit to
impregnate the sheen of the windshield, thus creating what he calls
speed pictures.19
In film, indications of these visual effects appear in documentaries like Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, where a mobile landscape
is contrasted with what appear to be stationary parts of a train, while
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18
The mobile and
the immobile.
Man with a Movie
Camera (Dziga
Vertov, 1929).

Man with a Movie Camera provides a strong sense of the mobile and
the immobile, particularly when a split screen has a static camera
shot of trams crossing (where the trams are clearly moving) contrasted against a car-mounted image of trams moving (where the
trams appear static in relation to the camera). From the 1950s
onwards, these kinaesthetic games are more commonplace, and
so in Journey to Italy, Wild Strawberries (Smultronstllet, Ingmar
Bergman, 1957), Les Tricheurs and Breathless we see blurred views
of passing trees, trains, telegraph poles and buildings; while in Duel
(1971), director Steven Spielberg engenders a great sense of speed
through long-lens shots of the cliff walls flashing by on the inside
of the demonic, chasing tanker.20 In a similar manner, John Frankenheimers Grand Prix (1966) emphasizes a tremendous sense of
high-velocity driving at Monza with trees, bridges, hedges and signs
all hurtling past the car-borne cameras. Franois Truffaut displayed
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a particularly sophisticated awareness of kinaesthetics in the title

sequence to The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups, 1959), which
intriguingly is an almost direct transposition of Prousts description
in Swanns Way (1913) of approaching the twin church steeple of
Martinville. The movement of the carriage and the windings of the
road seemed to keep them continually changing their position,
Proust writes. The steeples appeared so distant, and we ourselves
seemed to come so little nearer them, that I was astonished when, a
few minutes later, we drew up outside the church of Martinville.21
In The 400 Blows, Martinvilles church is now the Eiffel Tower, whose
lofty structure is first seen in the mid-distance from a car-mounted
camera, and then tracked as it continually disappears and reappears
from behind various buildings and trees. As the car circles, the tower
seemingly moves of its own accord while staying tantalizingly distant.
When the camera eventually gets near, the tower suddenly moves
faster, and the camera struggles to record the details of its iron

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19
The Eiffel Tower
depicted in
Proustian terms.
The 400 Blows
(Franois Truffaut,
1959).

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20
Montage of views
of the American
landscape from
Rain Man (Barry
Levinson, 1988).

structure; finally, the car departs down a straight boulevard, and

the Eiffel Tower becomes more static before gradually receding into
the distance.
In a more recent depiction of driving kinaesthetics, Rain Man
(Barry Levinson, 1988) contains a highly perceptive sequence in
which Charlie and his autistic brother Raymond experience a
melody of speed effects, including glimpses of rushing yellow lines,
road surfaces, trucks, bridge structures, fences, vegetation and open
fields, along with such other impressions as mid-distance views of
telegraph poles, wavering shadows, mirror reflections and mesmerizing single-point perspectives. In part this is a landscape being
seen from the eyes of a childlike man, but the sequence also allows
the audience itself to recover something of that initial newness of
experience encountered by earlier motorists when driving in the
countryside. These experiences can also be seen in many other road
movies, particularly when characters are revelling in a sense of
release from the city as they hit the open road. For example, in
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott,
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1994), To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (Beeban

Kidron, 1995) and Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004) we see wind,
shadows, rushing landscape, fresh air and sunshine all being enjoyed,
creating a sense not only of the kinaesthetics of driving but of life
being enjoyed afresh.

Ways of Seeing

As Rain Man, To Wong Foo and Sideways all suggest, another aspect
of kinaesthetics is that the way we see is changed by driving. By
releasing objects from their context, the process of seeing objects
is in turn freed from contextual knowledge; as a result, this seeing
process becomes a form of seeing in the first person. In short,
driving helps us to forget what we know, and to focus instead on
what we simply see. This process is particularly attractive to artists,
writers, film-makers and other creative producers, providing them
with appropriate metaphors or other reflections on modern life.
Unsurprisingly, this aspect of driving kinaesthetics is frequently
apparent in avowedly experimental films. For example, Man with
a Movie Camera introduced as a truly international absolute
language of cinema based on its total separation from the language
of theatre and literature is as much an analytical film about filmmaking as it is a portrayal of urban life, thus leading to the kinds
of split-screen depiction of mobile and immobile trams described
above. Less self-referentially, Emak-Bakia clearly shows how moving,
changing and vibrating vision fashioned from a moving automobile
can help explore Dada-Surrealist concerns with dreams, sexuality
and the Freudian subconscious. As Kiki de Montparnasse propels
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21
The journey
between external
and internal worlds.
Emak-Bakia (Man
Ray, 1926).

her car, angled views, movement blurs and juddering bumps infer
a strange and uncontrolled journey into her deeper, uninhibited
desires; driving here is a journey between the external world of
physical pleasures and the inner world of thoughts, longings and
yearnings. Similar depictions occur in Man Rays Les Mystres du
chteau du d (1929), where fast and jerky windscreen shots reveal
passing trains, telegraph poles, buildings, trees, village streets, slower
traffic, signs and hedges in a highly uncertain and transitory manner
all of which indicates a concern with the role of chance and the
fleeting nature of modern life. Equally experimental, albeit with
the different concerns of an industrial documentary director,
Geoffrey Joness Shell Spirit (1962) also exploits kinaesthetic
pleasures to reveal elusive meanings. This two-minute advertisement uses rhythm-edited and sun-drenched shots of road lines,
houses, boats, pigs, a woman, the sky, wheels, patterns, textures
and so forth, all set alongside South African Kwela pennywhistle
street music. The overriding impression is of freedom to be gained
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by driving out in the countryside and seeing new sights. Above all,
Shell Spirit is a celebration of the joyful sensation of movement and
a truly modern way of seeing.
Other forms of seeing are also implicated in the driving
experience, notably the way the windscreen acts as a frame, limiting
the landscape within a carefully prescribed boundary and hence
converting it into an object of visual pleasure; as film historian
Anne Friedberg summarily describes this condition, the visuality
of driving is the visuality of the windshield, operating as a framing
device.22 Through this frame, landscapes become fragmented into
a series of discrete objects, vistas and markings, but are then recombined by the particular driver, car and journey. Examples of this in
art are manifold, from academic painter Hubert von Herkomers
realization in 1905 that in his car one picture after another delights
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22
Montage of rhythm
edited shots from
Shell Spirit
(Geoffrey Jones,
1962).

067_117_Drive_ch2__ 07/08/2012 11:14 Page 79

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my artistic eye, to Henri Matisse, whose Le Parebrise, sur la route de

Villacoublay (1917) shows the view ahead framed into a triptych by
his cars central windshield and side glass, as well as Stuart Daviss
Windshield Mirror (1932), Edward Hoppers Jo in Wyoming (1946)
and some of David Hockneys Mercedes-based Polaroid collages.23
Sometimes artists look through the side windows, as in the photographs of Lee Friedlanders America By Car (19922009), Max
Forsythes Drive By Shooting (c. 2004) series, Ed Ruschas Every
Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), which depicts Los Angeles
building facades in a continuous car-like journey, and Robbert
Flicks similar video series L.A. Documents (1996).24 As these artworks suggest, such recombinations are near unique to driving. The
opening of the cockpit is not a simple window, writes Virilio, its a
stage where signs of the places traversed animate themselves in a play
of scenery changes composed of speed changes.25 Through driving,
therefore, the landscape appears in cinematic terms notably those
of framing, sequencing, editing, unusual juxtapositions, montage,
changing pace, unexplained events and unfamiliar sights, all of which
are induced by the speeding, kinematic nature of driving.
Instances of this process occur in almost every scene of automobile driving in film, and I return to this aspect of kinaesthetics at the
end of the following chapter. But to focus on just one movie here, a
notable demonstration is provided by the much-maligned The Brown
Bunny (Vincent Gallo, 2004), where motorcycle racer Bud Clay drives
across the u.s. while recalling his ex-lover, Daisy. Throughout, Clay
contemplates his life while viewing roads, traffic and landscape
through the unrelenting frame of his 1994 Dodge Rams dirty, flysplattered windscreen. The effect is at once terminally banal a
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never-ending stream of everyday roadside paraphernalia but also

occasionally profound, for we see Clay suffer and contemplate loss,
and eventually and controversially we come to understand his
tortured mind when witnessing the two notorious scenes in which
Clay (Gallo) and Daisy (Chlo Sevigny) have unsimulated sex and
in which Daisy is gang-raped while Clay stands by. In this sense, the
windscreen is cinematic in its portrayal both of America and of The
Brown Bunny as a film; it offers at once a banal representation of a
physically unyielding landscape, an effective insight into a challenging
mental state, and a metaphor for a hugely uncompromising movie.

Intensification Through Speed

If speed changes how objects appear to us, and how we view these
objects, then it also heightens our sense of these experiences. As
has been noted for train travel, increased velocity calls forth a
greater number of visual impressions for the sense of sight to deal
with, a condition which equates with sociologist Georg Simmels
realization that modern life intensifies urban perceptions.26 In
automobiles, where the driver has even greater exposure to speed
coming through the windscreen, this produces a correspondingly
greater intensification, and in particular exacerbates a sense of
strangeness, disconnection and velocity. In art we see this in early
Futurist paintings such as Giacomo Ballas Abstract Speed series
(191314) and Luigi Russolos Dynamism of a Car (191213),
while abstract films like Walter Ruttmanns Opus 1 (1922) and
Len Lyes A Colour Box (1935), Kaleidoscope (1936), Swinging the
Lambeth Walk (1939) and Particles in Space (196771) similarly
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23
Windscreen view
as representation
of landscape and
metaphor for film.
The Brown Bunny
(Vincent Gallo,
2004).

use conditions of motion and speed to intensify their effects. For

example, in Opus 1 abstract forms move against a black background,
creating raw rhythms and patterns in which shapes tumble, swerve,
sweep, swing, fall, point, grow, avoid, occlude, follow, chase, bulge,
drift, zigzag, wave, crest, swarm, oppose, stab and search and in all
of this speed heightens the effect on our eyes, creating a peculiarly
hypnotic effect of pure movement, velocity and motion. In La Glace
trois faces, a businessmans flight from his complex love life is
similarly centred on the mesmerizing velocity of his sports car:
flying through villages, scaring pedestrians, overtaking other cars,
flashing past trees and signs. Above all, speed defines both character
lonely, shallow, self-focused, cowardly and fate as he hurtles
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24
Abstracted movement intensifying
the anticipation of
a murderous act.
The Killers (Robert
Siodmak, 1946).

towards a final, lethal crash. Two decades later, Robert Siodmaks

classic film noir The Killers (1946), in a near abstract opening
sequence, almost directly translates the experimental depictions of
motion by film-makers like Ruttmann and Lye. A highly minimalist
windscreen view, shot along a fast-moving country road at night,
reveals only the road surface and lines as they are picked out by
headlights. Patterns of light and shade rush towards the camera,
the sheer speed at which they advance signifying the impending
arrival of the two hit men at their destination in Brentwood.
Furthermore, it is not just viewing which is altered in this
process, for the drivers body is also intensified by speed. Enthusiastic
drivers will often travel great distances to experience the unique
sensation of driving on particularly sinuous, steep or otherwise
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challenging routes; the Stelvio Pass (Italian Alps), Iroha-zaka (Japan),

Pacific Coast Highway (usa), Great Ocean Road (Australia), Pan
American Highway (Mexico section), Transfgran/dn7c
(Romania), Millau Viaduct (France), Hana Highway (Maui),
Lysebotn Road (Norway), San Bernardino Pass (Switzerland),
Guoliang Tunnel Road (China), unrestricted autobahns (Germany),
Cat and Fiddle/a537/a54 (uk) and the Jebel Hafeet Mountain
Road (uae), among many others, have all gained international
reputations for being among the worlds best driving roads.27
There is no sensation so enjoyable, insisted Lady Mary Jeune
in the 1900s, as driving in a fast motor. The endless variety of
scenery; the keen whistle of the wind in ones face; the perpetual
changing sunshine and shadow, create an indescribable feeling of
exhilaration of excitement.28 These words could easily have been
written for innumerable filmic depictions of driving as an enlivened
bodily experience, but is particularly noticeable in scenes like one
in Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, where Mary sticks her head out of
window, enjoying both the onward rush of air and, therefore, a
bodily manifestation
of being on the run. Driving here creates a physical expression of
a psychological condition. Indeed, in such conditions, a driver
can feel that their body is no longer their own: it was as though
I became the car, or the car became me, and which was which
didnt matter anymore.29 More poetically, in the 1907 fantasy
travelogue La 628-E8, Octave Mirbeau exhorts artists to devote
themselves to the automobile, and describes a driver whose life
is governed by speed. His brain is a racetrack, where thoughts,
images and feelings roar along at a hundred kilometers per hour,
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writes Mirbeau. Speed defines his life. He drives like the wind,
thinks like the wind, feels like the wind, makes love like the wind,
lives a whirlwind existence. Mirbeau also extends this description
in cinematic terms, noting how life rushes at the driver from all
directions, only to then flicker away like a film.30 Movie depictions
of such people abound, most recently in Ryan Goslings portrayal
of the anonymous avenger in Refns Drive. But it is in the appropriately named The Driver (Walter Hill, 1978) that we find the
figure of the driver-defined-by-driving in the most extreme form.
Without a name, The Driver is entirely circumscribed by his
ability to control an automobile: to hotwire cars, drive fast, evade
police, cause and avoid accidents, react to the visual conditions,
keep calm (even under gunfire), navigate streets and traffic at high
speed and even destroy a vehicle. Played by Ryan ONeal, The
Driver says less than 400 words in the whole movie, and thus
takes his whole raison dtre not from relationships with people
or surroundings but from the act of driving itself, and in all of its
possible variants.
In summary, the kinaesthetics of driving involves a substantial
re-orientation of the experience of time and space, in which sight,
senses, intellect, landscape, meaning, creativity and the human
body are all potentially reconfigured. As Filson Young wrote, such
driving flattens out the world, enlarges the horizon, loosens a little
the bonds of time [and] sets back a little the barriers of space, while
the driver simply lives more quickly.31 This is not an experience
restricted to the worlds best artists, race drivers or extreme thrillseekers. Rather, such experiences are available to us all; indeed,
they are often unavoidable whenever we drive or even passenger
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in a car. They may be experiences which we have seemingly grown

used to, and may not always have the shock of the new felt by the
drivers depicted in early films like Emak-Bakia or La Glace trois
faces, but they are nonetheless essential and commonplace parts of
modern driving.

Existential Self
Here we arrive at one of the most important aspects of automobile
experience: driving as an existential condition whereby the driver
seeks to confront, explore, express and produce the self through
encountering the world around them in other words where the
driver reassesses their sense of autonomy, freedom and self-reliance.
In particular, the road movie of the 1950s and 60s, which often
contains elements of social critique, later gave way, especially in
the 1980s, to road movies where driving across a real landscape is
used to indicate a psychological, emotional, philosophical or similar
personal transformation.32 Indeed, of all the ways in which driving
has been represented in film, it is the road movie that, along with
the car chase and the crash, has become particularly prevalent. It
is also the area of cinematic driving that has been most analysed by
critics and historians.33 In order to navigate this range of movies
and interpretations, I look here at three different themes: discovery,
reconfiguration and nihilism.

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is serene, self-enclosed and without disruption. It is sublime,

confronting a situation of terror and danger in such a way that
these things are not calculated or quantified but are pushed aside
in favour of a transcendent passage into a world of pure speed,
vision and concentration.

Transgression
In contrast to the highly individualistic experiences that invoke
the transcendental or sublime, another dimension to high-speed
driving is that of transgression, where the driver knowingly crosses
social boundaries, breaks rules, violates conventional mores and
challenges the established balance between right and wrong, and
between social responsibility and personal freedom. This, of course,
has been a common feature in film from the beginning, as made
clear in The ? Motorist where two speeding Edwardian motorists
outwit courtroom officials and the police.
Even more compelling than sensationalized drama and action
films are depictions of real-life transgression, and recent years have
seen the appearance of innumerable specialist dvds and video games.
Especially popular are the Japanese Megalopolis Expressway Trial
dvd series (Nikkatsu, 198896) portraying illegal racing on the
Shuto Expressway and other Tokyo roads, and now known globally
through street racing video games like Midnight Club (Rockstar,
20008). Other games incorporating transgressive street racing
include Grand Theft Auto (dma/Rockstar, 1997) and Need for
Speed (Electronic Arts, 1994). Within real-life street racing, dvd
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offerings include the Swedish Getaway in Stockholm (Duke, 2000)

and Ghost Rider series (Team Ghost Rider/Mller, 2002).17 YouTube
and other websites also offer thousands of examples of illegal driving
and racing, from high-velocity freeway drives to dangerous turns,
spins and other antisocial manoeuvres on public roads. Within
mainstream movies, films inspired by the street racing scene include
Hong Kong director Andrew Lau Wai-Keungs The Legend of Speed
(1999) and Initial D (2005); Malaysian Syamsul Yusofs Evolusi kl
Drift (2008) and Evolusi kl Drift 2 (2010); as well as the American
The Fast and the Furious series; Biker Boyz (Reggie Rock Bythewood,
2003); Redline (Andy Cheng, 2007); Street Racer (Teo Konuralp,
2008) and Fast Track: No Limits (Axel Sand, 2008).
The most notorious depiction of transgressive speed, however,
does not involve quite such outrageous velocities, manoeuvres or
denials of authority. Claude Lelouchs short vrit Ctait un rendezvous (1976) consists of little more than a solitary high-speed journey
through Paris streets, undertaken in the early hours, using a single
take via a camera mounted on the front of an unseen car. The journey
begins with an emergence from the dark tunnel of the Paris Priphrique at Porte Dauphine, then darting forward to the grand
1.4-mile Avenue Foch, rounding the Arc de Triomphe, hurtling
down the 2-mile straight Champs-lyses, dodging right across the
Place de la Concorde onto the Quai des Tuileries along the Seine,
before cornering hard left and accelerating through the imposing
arches of the Louvre and across rue de Rivoli. Onwards, the trajectory moves north along the arrow-straight Avenue de lOpra and
alongside the massive Paris Opra before continuing north along
rue de la Chausse-dAntin towards the Sainte Trinit church, then
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veering right along rue Jean-Baptiste Pigalle. By now, open boulevards

and wide squares have closed up, and buildings lean in alongside
narrow streets; at one point the car slowly straddles the pavement
to pass a refuse truck. Lurching round Place Pigalle, the car turns
left along the cobbled Boulevard de Clichy, again slowing around
another refuse truck, before passing the Moulin Rouge and turning
abruptly right into rue Caulaincourt. After a long gently curving
street, and now two-thirds through the journey, the car slows for
the much tighter streets of Montmartre and impatiently weaves
southeast up to an eventual resting point next to the Basilique de
Sacr Coeur and a spectacular view over Paris. The driver appears
as he runs in front of the camera to embrace his waiting girlfriend,
thus finally explaining both the reason for the journey and title of
the film.
Produced, as an intertitle explains, without film cranking or
other trickery, being reliant purely on the cars determined trajectory,
the 7 minutes 54 seconds of automobile movement in Ctait un
rendezvous is an unedited depiction of illegal driving, providing an
authentic sense of high-velocity passage through a distinctive city.
We do not ride with the driver, but instead, through the bumperlevel camera, gain an even more heightened experience that is at once
fascinating, compelling and hypnotic, the carless and driverless view
combining with the twilight streets to layer an air of fantasy upon
what is otherwise evidently a highly realistic journey. Significantly,
although at one point in its hyperactive slicing through Paris the
car may hit 125 mph, the average speeds are actually not that high,
probably being at most 76 mph even along Avenue Foch.18 Instead,
it is not absolute speed but the impression of speed which matters
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58
Approaching Sainte
Trinit. Ctait un
rendezvous (Claude
Lelouch, 1976).

most, for Ctait un rendezvous provides this sensation in abundance.

Tarmac, cobbles, grand buildings, local shops, arches, lights, signs,
other cars and pedestrians all fly by in an unendingly tumultuous
fashion. A revving engine, furious gear changes, squealing tyres
and echoes off Paris architecture add a similarly frenzied soundtrack, while the flashing headlights of oncoming cars provides yet
another layer of drama. Id never seen anything like it, described
documentary film-maker Richard Symons of his first viewing of
the film, nine minutes of adrenaline that simply leaves your jaw
on the floor.19
Yet beyond the dreamlike immersion in a world of startling
authenticity, there is another very different quality to Ctait un
rendezvous, for a sense of reprehensibility and immorality quickly
surfaces once we realize that the car is neither slowing nor stopping
for intersections, that all red traffic lights are being ignored and that,
whenever necessary, the driver moves to the wrong side of the road
or takes to the pavement to maintain maximum momentum. In
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addition, there are several near misses, including a woman who

walks in front of the car as it veers into rue Caulaincourt and, a
few seconds later, a white Mini that slowly crosses the same street.
Refuse lorries are avoided at the last moment, slower vehicles are
overtaken with alarming alacrity, and the car barely grips the road
when tyres shriek under hard cornering. Pigeons are sent into the
air, caught dramatically in the arc of the headlights while accelerating through Montmartre. As a result, Ctait un rendezvous is not
just exhilarating but also decidedly disconcerting, for the unavoidable sense of threatening danger means we can wholly condone
neither the drivers actions nor our own vicarious enjoyment of
what we see. The very authenticity of the footage underscores this
dilemma if Ctait un rendezvous were a fictional movie, we could
then relax in the secure knowledge that no one was being endangered,
but the combination of cinema-quality imagery with an attenuated
everyday realism makes viewing such scenes at once addictive and
disturbing. Even Lelouch seems to feel this way, and in a recent
interview he appears ashamed of his actions, regarding the film as
a selfish and immoral act.20
In this context it in unsurprising that, apart from viewing the
film itself, much of the interest around Ctait un rendezvous concerns
how it was made and received. Several rumours have persisted,
including Lelouch being arrested following the initial screening in
1976, that the filming used a Ferrari 275gtb with a camera mounted
gyroscopically on its front grille, and that a Formula 1 racer performed
the actual driving. In fact, the car was a Mercedes 450sel, the camera
loaded with film stock left over from Lelouchs Si ctait Refaire
(1976) was a wide-angled Eclair Cameflex on a conventional
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mount, the driver was Lelouch was himself, and a Ferrari (Lelouchs
own 275gtb) was indeed deployed but only for the soundtrack
added during post-production. Many of these clarifications are now
well known, diffusing the considerable aura around a film that for
many years was viewed only through private screenings and illicit
video copies. Nonetheless, the interlocked three-way reaction which
many have to the film admiration for the authentic speed and reality,
fascination through hypnotic immersal and reprehension at the risktaking and danger to others remains as strong as ever, and this is no
doubt why Ctait un rendezvous continues to maintain its reputation
as one of the most compelling of all driving films.
Moreover, many have recreated Ctait un rendezvous in their
own terms. For example, in the short The Fast and the Famous (Jeremy
Hart, 2009), American chat show host and car enthusiast Jay Leno is
inspired by Lelouchs film to take a Mercedes sls amg on an early
morning search for the hidden racetrack within Los Angeles. Other
projects inspired by Lelouchs film include the Getaway in Stockholm
series and The Run (John Bruno, 2003), a promotional dvd wherein
a Nissan 350z undertakes a six-minute dash through cobbled Prague
to rendezvous with a woman, as well as numerous television programmes, such as the uks Fifth Gear, which in 2007 retraced the
Paris run using a small Citron and front-mounted camera. Earlier
that year, rock band Snow Patrol used extensive footage from
Ctait un rendezvous for their video to Open Your Eyes, where
the otherworldly quality of Lelouchs trajectory comes to the fore.
Such depictions help to increase awareness of films like Ctait un
rendezvous car enthusiast Internet forums, for example, frequently
refer to it but in these later versions the outright transgression seen
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in the original is pushed back, and indeed many copyists explicitly

announce that, unlike Lelouchs film, all possible risks have been
removed, professional drivers employed and authorities informed.
Instead, therefore, it is still the original Ctait un rendezvous and
other vrit films like the Megalopolis Expressway Trial series
which best capture the complex character of transgressive driving,
providing an experience which is at once exhilarating, compelling
and disturbing.

Chase
Of all filmic depictions of driving, the car chase is undoubtedly
the most distinctive means of conveying drama and thrills. Indeed,
the reputations of The French Connection and Bullitt are today
dominated by their chase sequences, while other films, Ronin and
Gone in 60 Seconds for example, are constructed almost entirely
of chases (the latter includes a single car chase lasting 34 minutes,
the longest in movie history). And although some might see such
car chases as offering little more than surface drama, these scenes
are often deeper explorations of many different themes, subjects
and meanings.

Humour and Immersal

One prevalent genre of car chase is based on humour, as is particularly

evident in innumerable pre-war Keystone Kop movies and other Mack
Sennett productions, such as Lizzies of the Field (Del Lord, 1924), as
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well as in light-hearted post-war movies as diverse as Doctor in the

House, Smokey and the Bandit (Hal Needham, 1977), Convoy (Sam
Peckinpah, 1978) and Dukes of Hazzard (Jay Chandrasekhar, 2005).
Although the chases unique action is exploited here primarily to
generate laughter, it also generates implicit social critique upperclass pomposity, working-class self-protectionism, middle-class
priggishness, police bureaucracy, criminal immorality, environmentalist self-righteousness and politicians double-standards are
all frequently addressed. Hence in Convoy, Smokey and the Bandit
and the Dukes of Hazzard we see the police forces asinine stupidity
counterposed against the good outlaw driver, who uses a speeding
vehicle, cb radio and wit to invoke the wild rebel spirit of the
American South, refusing to yield to the dominance of the Union,
while simultaneously raising a bellyful of laughs.21
Of particular interest here are films that immerse the viewer
in the chase action. Movies as diverse as the live-action Dirty Mary
Crazy Larry, Death Proof and The Fast and the Furious series, as
well as animation-dependent films like Tron and Speed Racer, all
do this by creating a different world within which the viewer rides
along. Other movies go further, providing a heightened sense of the
viewer somehow participating in the high-speed events. This occurs,
for example in the high-speed action of Drive and in one of this films
most inspirational sources, the car chase in Bullitt (see below) where
Arriflex cameras allow the viewer to sit up front inside the speeding
cars. Similarly, the original Gone in 60 Seconds of 1974 provides an
equally visceral sense of vibrating, real-world authenticity. Such
thrills are not confined to more recent movies. For example, one
interwar film, The Crowd Roars (Howard Hawks, 1932), combines
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onboard and external views, jostling drivers, sliding cars, dirt-filled

air, heavy vibration and blurred vision to convey the dynamic and
reckless nature of early motor-racing. Two decades later, Checkpoint
(Ralph Thomas, 1955) also depicted high-speed action in a similarly
successful manner. Incorporating footage from the 1956 Mille
Miglia sports, run along Italian roads between Brescia and Rome,
the racing scenes here are also a kind of car chase, as industrial spy
and murderer ODonovan (Stanley Baxter) escapes in an Aston
Martin Lagonda. The charging and jostling field of red and green
racers is shown as a vibrant composition of saturated colours,
dynamic blurs and constant vibrations, and the juxtaposition of
onboard and tracking shots evokes an authentic sense of what it
was like to propel a sports car through 1950s Italy.

Character and Expertise

A notable feature of nearly all chase sequences is the way they

emphasize qualities of fortitude, self-reliance and resourceful
invention, as is evident from early films such as A Beast at Bay
(D. W. Griffith, 1912), The Fast and the Furious and The Great
Escape (John Sturges, 1963), and from White Lightning to The
Bourne Identity (Doug Liman, 2002).
A particularly recurrent theme in this equation between driving
style and character within car chases is the way police expertise is
portrayed. An early version occurs within the social realism of The
Blue Lamp, where the police are societys moral guardians, upholding
decency against haphazard instances of crime committed by a few
desperate youngsters. At the beginning of The Blue Lamp, after an
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announcement that the film is dedicated to the whole Police Service

of Britain, the imperious tones of a high court judge resonate out.
I have no doubt, the judge intones, that one of the best preventives
of crime is the regular uniformed police officer on the beat. Other
early scenes show local bobbies dealing considerately with cheeky
traders, cheery drunks, lost children and stray dogs. Given this
explicit ideological setting, it is unsurprising that, in one of the first
major car chases in British cinema, the police always have the upper
hand. While murderer Tom Riley (Dirk Bogarde) and accomplice
Spud (Patric Doonan) become increasingly demonic as they steer
their Buick coupe through west London, the authorities are calm and
collected. Using clear observations and studied radio communication
handwritten notes are even taken while in pursuit the police are
the epitome of responsible and systematic law enforcement. When
a group of uniformed schoolgirls foolishly walk out in front of a
chasing police car, despite having just recoiled from the speeding
Buick, the teacher screams theatrically while, in sharp contrast, the
police driver simply brakes hard to an undramatic halt. Variously
aided in their search by ragamuffin children and other members of
the public, and given words of support from the same street traders
whose life they occasionally make difficult, the police are even joined
in the final hunt for Riley by figures from the criminal underworld.
As a result, and unlike many other car chases, this episode in The
Blue Lamp is less an immersion in thrills, adrenaline or fear as a
comforting reminder that the audience can always rely on and
should always give support to the systematic and considerate
police. This is the car chase as a social reminder, psychological
reassurance and ideological instruction.
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The driving competence of The Blue Lamp is picked up by many

subsequent depictions of professional drivers, notably in the near
wordless The Driver (Ryan ONeal) in The Driver, the precision of
street racer Takashi (Brian Tee) in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo
Drift, and the expert manoeuvres of Jason Bourne (Matt Damon)
in The Bourne Identity (Doug Liman, 2002), Josselin Beaumont
(Jean-Paul Belmondo) in Le Professionel (Georges Lautner, 1981)
and the anonymous driver (Ryan Gosling) in Drive.
From the early 1970s onwards, however, the police have
not always been portrayed as adept and reliable professionals. In
particular The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971) provides
one of film historys wildest chases when narcotics detective Jimmy
Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) hurtles underneath a New York
train track after a drugs gunman. Driving a commandeered 1971
Pontiac LeMans, Doyle speeds through intersections, swerves
through oncoming traffic, hits a car and a truck and barely avoids
a terrified mother and baby. Thrilling and absorbing in its graphic
reality, the sequence dynamically demonstrates Doyles determined
190

60
A manic Popeye
Doyle. The French
Connection
(William Friedkin,
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yet irresponsible approach to his job. Nearly killing a woman, child

and numerous others evidently matters less to Doyle than getting
his man, and his maniacal state is further heightened by the way
he constantly blares the Pontiacs horn, by his linear trajectory
underneath the straight-line train track, and by the flickering highcontrast lighting penetrating down onto his face and windscreen.
At once likeable and bigoted, dedicated and overzealous, dependable
and alcoholic, Doyles behaviour in this chase sequence underlines
the qualities of a complex anti-hero, someone whose manic drive
creates all manner of chaos in his and other peoples lives.
Perhaps the most sophisticated use of an extended car chase
as a demonstration of complex character behaviour came three years
before The French Connection, in the combination of a dark Highland
Green 1968 Ford Mustang gt 390 cid Fastback, detective Frank
Bullitt (Steve McQueen) and the streets of San Francisco in Bullitt.
The setting is introduced right after the title sequence, when a
Sunshine Cab skims over the citys uniquely undulating topography,
while Bullitts adept driving talents are subtly introduced when he
parallel parks the Mustang with deft ease. Midway through the film,
the 11-minute car chase builds slowly, beginning when Bullitt notices
two hitmen parked up in a sinister black Dodge Charger r/t Magnum.
As the hitmen warily track the detective, the mood is tense but calm,
while a battle of wits gradually intensifies. The chase imagery, as with
Yatess earlier Robbery, is overtly matter of fact, showing real streets
replete with everyday vehicles, pedestrians, crossings and inclines.
Suddenly, however, in one of cinemas great moments, Bullitts
Mustang appears in the rearview mirror of the hitmens Charger,

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and the roles are now reversed. Lightweight Arriflex cameras allow
for a great variety of unusual shots including details of the drivers
faces and the clipping-in of a seatbelt all of which announce that
the real action is about to begin. As the hitmen suddenly turn left,
the distinctive bass and saxophones of Lalo Schifrins jazzy score
abruptly stop, and we are left with only the distinctive roar of the
Ford and Dodge as the chase takes off. As the cars surge around the
brows, descents, dips and corners of San Francisco, all of what we
now think of as the standard elements of the car chase make an
appearance: dramatic jumps, fast turns, fierce acceleration, near
misses, false turns, jolting bumps, squealing tyres and roaring
engines. The effect, as with all good car chases, is compelling and
thrilling, as we are sucked into a captivating dynamic.
Fast-moving automobile action as sound and vision is supplied
in abundance, but why have so many cited Bullitts as the greatest of
all movie car chases?22 The distinctive soundtrack, rumbling cars and
Billy Frakers inventive cinematography (including retina-detaching
vibrations and other visceral feeds from numerous car-mounted
cameras) are worth noting, but three other factors are particularly
important. First, the city itself provides much of the drama, with
San Franciscos hills creating not only a menacing terrain around
which Bullitt and the hitmen slowly stalk, and then a pulsating roller
coaster as they accelerate fiercely, but also dramatically vertiginous
views; at times, the Mustang and Charger seem to be launched into
the cityscape and bay below. The city too, then, is an active participant in the chase. Second, for all the undoubted thrills and skills on
display, this is a chase of psychology as much as of action, where
tension and determination as well as gasoline and v8s propel the
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61
Frank Bullitts
Ford Mustang
appears in the
rearview mirror.
Bullitt (Peter
Yates 1968).

vehicles onward. The dark professionalism of the mysteriously

wordless hitmen, flipping from deadly intent to resolute escape
when Bullitt emerges from behind, adds to the sense of this being
a battle of minds and tactics as well as of cars and power. Third, and
most importantly, Bullitts deadpan cool combining dispassionate
resolve with a no-bullshit attitude and expert skills underpins the
entire chase. Unruffled when he first spies his assailants, composed
when he turns the tables to slowly track them, and equally imperturbable when chasing the Charger out of San Francisco, Bullitt
epitomizes masculine determination, resolute focus and almost
nonchalant control. In contrast to the Popeye Doyles lunatic pursuit
in The French Connection, Frank Bullitt is equally relentless but
never steps beyond the limits of his own driving ability or mental
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capacity. When a motorbike is sent sliding by the hitmens Charger,

Bullitt not only spears off-road to avoid further danger but checks the
biker is okay before rejoining the chase. Even violence standard
fare in most chases is not a first option, and only after Bullitt
chases the mobsters onto the open roads is a gun used for the first
time, and even then it is not by Bullitt himself. Nonetheless, the
detective is still prepared to take extreme measures when necessary,
and the chase ends when he barges the hitmen at high speed, launching their Charger into a gas station where it explodes. As the two
hitmen are strewn unconscious and burning inside the upturned
wreckage, there is no display of emotion or drama from Bullitt,
who simply observes the gruesome double death in a plain and
perfunctory manner.
Bullitts character is, however, even more complex than this
might suggest. One danger of the car chase is that it may operate as
standalone drama, isolated from the narrative. With Bullitt, however,
the car chase, despite being a dramatic addition to Robert L. Pikes
original novel Mute Witness, is undoubtedly an integral part of the
movie. Unlike the relatively simplistic Popeye Doyle in The French
Connection, Frank Bullitt is ambiguous and difficult to understand,
and the chase sequence is hence an essential part of how his complex
character is revealed and developed. An informally dressed working
man who spends his time investigating the dirty world of crime,
someone who buys tv dinners and speaks infrequently, Bullitt is
nonetheless at ease in sophisticated social settings and with his exotic
girlfriend Cathy (Jacqueline Bisset). Unlike his nemesis, the besuited
politician Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn), who wishes to incarcerate members of the mob primarily to enhance his own career,
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Bullitt is concerned less with courtroom victories than with individual

people, fellow colleagues and, above all, discovering the truth behind
a murder. The silent, skilful and measured air with which Bullitt
propels his glamorous Mustang around San Francisco is then, ultimately, a demonstration of his difference to Chalmers in style and
attitude, being not slick, strategic or political but cool, active and
self-confident. The sequence allows the audience to side with Bullitt
and not Chalmers, the chases kinetic intensity giving visceral and
dynamic form to his ethical stance. Here, we find ourselves participating in a critique of politics and policing siding with Bullitts
world-view, involving action rather than words, intervention rather
than manipulation, personal style rather than formulaic codes, and
searching for immediate truth rather than distant victory.23
It is also worth noting one further aspect of the Bullitt car
chase, and that is its immediate and enduring reputation. While
the whole film was well received in 1968, the car chase particularly
caught the publics attention, and so was used extensively in posters
and other promotional material. The widely publicized fact that
McQueen did nearly all his own driving during the chase (although
it later emerged that stuntmen Loren Janes and Bud Edkins largely
stood in for McQueen,24 while the Dodge was driven by stuntman
Bill Hickman, who also played one of the hitmen) added to the
immediate impact, as did McQueens reputation as a committed
motorcycle and car enthusiast. Im not sure, considered McQueen,
whether Im an actor who races or a racer who acts.25 Yet more
publicity for the chase came when Frank P. Kellers editing won
an Oscar. Constantly held up as the very best chase sequence,
and minutely studied for all manner of details and inconsistencies
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(a Charger hubcap is repeatedly knocked off and then magically

reappears, while the same green vw Beetle is viewed on at least four
separate occasions), the sequence is particularly admired by car
enthusiasts, and today specialist websites such as The Bullitt and
the International Mustang Bullitt Owners Club provide inordinate
amounts of information concerning Bullitt rallies and other events,
how the sequence was made, its cars and how to create a replica.26
Bullitt memorabilia as innumerable models, slot cars, toys, clothing
and so forth is also widely available. In 1997, some seventeen years
after McQueens death, Ford, working with advertising agency Young
& Rubicam and director Paul Street, made a highly sophisticated
commercial for its new Puma sports coupe in which new filming
combines with cleverly manipulated footage from the original Bullitt
to show McQueen/Bullitt apparently driving the Puma around
San Francisco, while accompanied by the films distinctive original
music. In 2008 Ford also launched a new Bullitt version of its fifth
generation Mustang, complete with Highland Green paintwork,
Bullitt-logo fuel cap and other references to the 1968 car. As with
the Mini chase sequences in the two versions of The Italian Job,
the car chase in Bullitt has now passed firmly over into mass public
consciousness, where it is still being re-promoted and re-experienced
in innumerable ways.

Cities and Streets

An intriguing facet of the movie car chase is how it suggests a

different mapping of cities and their streets. Particularly interesting
here is White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1948), in which a police chase
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62
Norson heads
through an alien
New York. Side
Street (Anthony
Mann, 1950).

explicitly disorientates the viewer among the topography of Los

Angeles.27 Even more sophisticated is another film noir, Side Street
(Anthony Mann, 1950), where the police pursue guilt-ridden opportunist thief Joe Norson and his murderous assailant George Garsell
around New Yorks Wall Street district. Overhead shots disclose a
labyrinth of empty streets and side-alleys, while ground-level views
convey claustrophobia and impending capture. The overall effect
renders New York for Norson and Garsell a place of alien brutality,
a city truly knowable only by the police and their systematic technologies of coordinated radio and automobile response. While
Garsell is shot dead, the repentant Norson weak like some of us,
but foolish like most of us is recuperated by this system, and, as he
is wheeled away in an ambulance, a final voiceover announces that
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hes going to be all right. Three years earlier, The Naked City (Jules
Dassein, 1947), the first crime film to use extensive location shooting,
mapped New York through telephones and police networks,28 and
here Side Street, one of the very first films to include a modern setpiece car chase, extends the same logic to automotive technology
and mobility. Consequently, through its car chase Side Street represents the dangerous and unruly life that the modern city delivers
to its residents, while, by contrast, the polices control of that same
chase underlines their ability to maintain conditions of safety,
morality and behaviour. If the city for its everyday citizens is
unmappable and untamed, then for the authorities it is a place
to be understood and secured. We as audience thus come to know
the city through the same logic, as irrational and wild when encountered through immediate experience, but as coherent and protective
when comprehended through the eyes of the police, film and other
modern technologies.
By contrast, a very different city is presented in many other
car chases. In the exhilarating final chase within Ronin (John Frankenheimer, 1998) Paris loses the mesmeric otherworldliness evoked
by Ctait un rendezvous, becoming a forbidding and inescapable
labyrinth of narrow streets, dark tunnels and dense traffic, fabricated
from hard tarmac, concrete and metal, and wherein collisions and
explosions suddenly occur. At one stage Deidre, Seamus and Gregor
in their 1991 bmw 535i are chased by Sam and Vincent in a 1996
Peugeot 406 through the dimly lit Champerret Tunnel (eerily similar
to the Pont de lAlma underpass where Princess Diana died one year
earlier), drilling through oncoming traffic, and violently battering
and shooting their way into the daylight.
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Returning to New York, the 12-minute car chase in The SevenUps (Philip DAntoni, 1973) is a cinema classic, and shows renegade
policeman Buddy Manucci (Roy Scheider) in a 1973 Pontiac Ventura
Spring chasing two police-killers in a 1973 Pontiac Grand Ville around
Upper Manhattan and across the George Washington Bridge. The cars
surge over pavements, through red lights and across intersections,
weaving through traffic and hitting parked cars in a highly realistic
New York replete with crowded pavements, pressing buildings, blaring
horns, pot-holes and playing kids. The use of extensive low-down,
windscreen and tracking shots, as well as glassy reflections of city
architecture, at once increases frenzied motion and brings the grainy
urban fabric right into the action. The Seven-Ups thus depicts a very
different New York to Side Street, one that is no longer systematically
controlled by the police at a distance, and now a place of hands-on
entanglements, fast-moving events and gritty exploits. Above all, it is
a place where things go wrong as often as they go right. Indeed, at the
end of the chase, Manucci submarines his Pontiac under the rear of a
stationary truck. Improbably avoiding serious injury, his deeply silent
and shocked manner, blowing hard while walking away from the roofless wreckage, nevertheless shows that Manucci has taken on all New
York has to offer, and has very nearly paid the ultimate price. The city
here is multifarious and unforgiving, and not to be messed with lightly.

Crash
Manuccis near-fatal crash in The Seven-Ups is a reminder that car
chases, races and many other forms of cinematic driving often end
199

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CONCLUSION

75
A track day driver
in a Lotus Elise.

To conclude this exploration of filmic driving experiences, it is

worth noting one of the most enduring characteristics of the car
crash, namely the way it can lead to a rebirth of those involved.1
Of course, many people in both movies and real life do die in traffic
accidents, and the terminal and tragic nature of such occasions
should never be underestimated. But is also the case that for many
of the cinematic crashes noted in the previous chapter, as with most
real-life accidents, many if not all of the participants do survive,
and indeed, in film at least, often do so in a manner where they are
in some way reborn, re-energized or reconfigured. To cite but a
few disparate examples, for Delaney in Le Mans and Manucci in
The Seven-Ups, their horrific crashes lead to a renewed determination to continue and succeed with the jobs. For Robert in Kings of
the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit, Wim Wenders, 1976), the deliberate
driving of his vw into a river at the start of the film marks both the
end of his old life and the start of a new journey with Bruno. For
Maindrian Pace in the 1964 Gone in 60 Seconds, every single crash
seems to add further to his sense of independence and being alive,
and for Vaughan, James, Catherine and the other participants of
Crash it is sexual arousal as well as some kind of deeper philosophical positioning that are reinvigorated with every wreckage they
encounter. Alternatively, for Pelham in The Man Who Haunted
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DRIVE

Himself, Csar in Open Your Eyes and Kimberley in Final Destination

2, the car crash brings with it a curious combination of both death and
rebirth where, on the one hand, a certain kind of life is ended but, on
the other, a different life is cast anew in a strange yet vital manner.
When in Grand Prix the f1 driver Pete Aron is asked why he
races, he suggests that this is maybe to do something that brings
you so close to the possibility of death and survive it is to feel life
and living so much more intensely. This highlights an important
quality to both high speed and general driving practices: that such
experiences can also carry with them the opposite of speed and
exhilaration; that is to say, they are inevitably accompanied by,
as we have seen, crashes, accidents, damage, injury and even death.
Filson Young, for example, spoke of the startling, intoxicating,
appalling experience of speed, and how it amounted to a shocking death-challenging appearance.2 Yet it is exactly this kind of
challenging and potentially dangerous driving which many find
228

74
Delaney immediately after his tumultuous crash. Le
Mans.

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CONCLUSION

so compelling both in films and even in real life. A case in point

here is the burgeoning market today in track day driving at race
circuits around the world, where, under controlled circumstances,
drivers take their own cars onto the racetrack in order to drive
fast and unfettered by normal road conditions and regulations.
The Nurburgring Nordschleife facility in Germany, for example
originally constructed in the 1920s for vehicle testing and club
racing has now gained iconic status as being like no other track
on earth, where drivers encounter 13 unforgiving miles of undulating straights and 73 mountainous and tree-lined corners, a place
which creates a feeling youll never forget and an experience you
will want to repeat and which f1 champion Jackie Stewart once
described as the ultimate driver challenge.3 This seeming motoring
nirvana is, however, not exactly childs play; Stewart calls the Nordschleife The Green Hell, and between three and twelve fatalities
occur there every year. This fact is frequently underlined to drivers;
for example, at a recent track day at the Nordschleife, the preliminary
track-walk and briefing session included a detailed introduction
to some of the tracks most unforgiving corners and switchbacks,
including the daunting Schwedenkreuz-Aremberg section as a place
where you really can die.4 This was not, of course, an instruction
for those present to go off and crash fatally, but conversely that
they should, while driving at relatively high speed, try very hard
not to damage themselves or their vehicles. What such a statement
also implies, therefore, is that the ability to control and avoid such
accidents is part of the demanding pleasure of driving. This is one
of the reasons why driving is often seen as more satisfying than train
journeys, for it brings the driver to the edge of herself or himself.
229

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DRIVE

Like skiing, skateboarding, surfing or other kinds of highly mobile

sporting activity, in driving danger is neither denied nor celebrated,
but instead is acknowledged and confronted. Theres always the
chance it will all go wrong, explains Circuit Driver magazine, and
deep down thats probably a big part of the reason why we all do
track days driving at the limit only means something if that limit
is tangible, if it can bite.5
This does not mean, however, that such dangers are welcomed
in themselves. Rather, as Filson Young explains, high-speed driving
is the ability to meet all these risks smiling, and to turn them into
safety, thus concurring with the psychoanalyst Michael Balints contention that any real thrill is always a combination of fear, pleasure
and confident hope.6 The early racing driver Charles Jarrott, winner
of the Circuit des Ardennes race in 1902, acknowledged that the
spice of danger certainly added to the fascination of motorsport,
but even he had reservations. There is a certain amount of sport in
it, admitted Jarrott, but when in getting up in a race one has to take
the precaution beforehand of leaving everything in order for the
assistance of ones executors, the sporting spirit is rather dampened.
As a result of such concerns, and no doubt also remembering his
own experiences of a much publicized incident causing the death
of many spectators at the start of the 1903 ParisMadrid road-race,
Jarrott understandably preferred racing speeds to be kept to less lifethreatening levels, which in his view meant being below an average
of 60 mph.7 Or, as Circuit Driver noted over a century later, happily,
moments on trackdays are rarely converted into accidents.8
More generally, therefore, it is not the actuality of a terminal
ending of a fatal crash or serious accident, but instead the experience
230

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CONCLUSION

and the cyclical nature of speed and its attendant possibility of

a crash that prevail most strongly within driving culture. Early
motorists and poets were keenly aware of the close relationship
between dynamism and life on the one hand and potential death
and destruction on the other. G. Stewart Bowless The Song of the
Wheel (1903), for example, begins with these three lines: Fire in
the heart of me, moving and chattering / Youth in each part of me,
slender and strong / Death at the foot of me, rending and shattering.9
It is also worth recalling that, in the Futurist manifesto, the seminal
moment at which this most modern of avant-garde movements
began was a car crash experienced by Marinetti a year earlier. And
so after Marinettis car is recovered from a ditch they thought it
was dead, my beautiful shark, but a caress from me was enough to
revive it; and there it was, alive again, running on its powerful fins!
the Italian artist proclaims one of the central tenets of Futurism,
namely that we intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy
and fearlessness.10 The birth of Futurism thus begins both with a
car crash and with a positive life-enhancing rebirth, and this is what
the pleasure of driving is perhaps ultimately all about: the challenge
to the driver, and their renewal and reinvigoration, every time they
drive. Even early motoring in some of its supposedly most genteel
of guises could offer this kind of experience; Emily Post, for example,
writing about making up lost time easily in Nebraska, explains
how you forget that ordinarily you dislike whizzing along the
surface of the earth, and for just this once even though you think
of it more in terror than in joy you are approaching the raceway
of America, and you, too, are going to race.11 A century later, and
the philosopher Marinoff describes such high-speed driving in even
231

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DRIVE

more effusive terms. The mind is calm, unruffled, yet utterly ecstatic.
You experience a thrill, a joy, a rush of delight of being alive . . . This
is nirvana my friends. Some attain it by sitting; others by chanting;
folks such as me (and maybe you) by taking the road more swiftly
travelled.12 It is exactly through this kind of vital experience through
the driving of an automobile that the human subject emerges as
someone who has encountered one of the most distinctive and
ubiquitous conditions of the modern world, who indeed has not
only survived but thrived within it, and who has become, as a result,
a different kind of person.
Returning now to some of the comments made in the introduction to Drive regarding contemporary concerns around private,
public and mass transportation, then if we are indeed to deal with the
problems of congestion, pollution, energy consumption, health and
safety that car use undoubtedly contributes towards, then we must,
in doing so, also seriously consider that the undoubted pleasures of
driving play no small part in why people will not simply abandon
their cars even if fully affordable, efficient, ubiquitous and useful
forms of public transport were suddenly to become readily and
universally available. In short, without addressing the cultural
reasons as to why people like to drive, a purely quantitative,
economic, managerialist or scientific approach to transportation
will always fall short of its desired aims. Indeed, the oft-stated
functionalist approach to reducing the amount of private car driving
namely that journeys by car should only be made when absolutely
essential could be simply reversed. That is, car driving should
never be essential, never be necessary; rather, driving should only be
undertaken as a form of pleasure and hence the kinds of cultural
232

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76
Edwardian
motorists flee their
pursuers in The ?
Motorist (Walter
Booth for R. W.
Paul, 1906).

and mobile experiences explored in this book could be even more

enjoyably pursued.
Alternatively, one of the essential challenges of addressing any
overuse of automobiles is therefore that of creating, as Melvin M.
Webber has argued, more auto-like transportations: other forms of
mobility which replicate the advantages both perceived and actual
of driving cars.13 In his own analysis Webber focuses largely on
issues of functional mobility in terms of access, parking, geography,
population distribution and so forth, but to these we might now add
the multitudinous, rich and diverse pleasures of the act of driving,
which this book has sought to explicate from the experiences of
the fantastically speeding Edwardians of The ? Motorist in the 1900s
right through to those of the irrepressibly upbeat Poppy of HappyGo-Lucky in the 2000s and which the millions of drivers around
the world will today not wish to readily forego.
Nor is this a matter of superficial or indulgent experiences. As
philosopher Loren E. Lomasky has argued, automobility complements
233

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DRIVE

our sense of autonomy, and so both corresponds with and encourages

the kind of positive, self-directing impulse that is so valued in our
contemporary society. Furthermore, as Lomasky also argues, driving
additionally complements other core cultural values, including those
of freedom of association, pursuit of knowledge, economic advancement, privacy, and even the expression of religious commitments
and affectional preference.14 In this way, as shown so clearly and
diversely in the many films and other cultural manifestations referred
to in this book, car driving and particularly the cultural, political,
social and experiential benefits we gain from directly engaging in it
is an integral part of our modern society, and therefore is something
to be preserved, celebrated and even encouraged.

77
Poppy learns to
drive in Happy-GoLucky (Mike Leigh,
2008).
234

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235

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REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION
1 Roland Barthes, Mythologie de
lautomobile: La Voiture, projection
de lego, Oeuvres compltes [1963]
(Paris, 2002), pp. 23442, and quoted
in Jean Baudrillard, The System of
Objects (London, 2005), pp. 256 n7.
2 John Urry, The System of
Automobility (2002), at
www.its.leeds.ac.uk; and Ruth
Brandon, Auto Mobile: How the Car
Changed Life (London, 2002), p. 385.
3 Mimi Sheller and John Urry, The
City and the Car, International
Journal of Urban and Regional
Research, xxiv/4 (2000), pp. 73757;
Mike Featherstone, Nigel Thrift and
John Urry, eds, Automobilities
(London, 2005); and Steffen Bhm,
Campbell Jones, Chris Land and
Mat Paterson, Introduction:
Impossibilities of
Automobility, Sociological Review,
liv/1 (2006), pp. 116.
4 A. B. Filson Young, The Complete
Motorist: Being an Account of the
Evolution and Construction of the
Modern Motor-car, Etc. (London,
revd 5th edn, 1905), p. 274.
5 Steffen Bhm, Campbell Jones, Chris
237

Land and Mat Paterson, eds, Against

Automobility (Oxford, 2006); Jim
Conley and Arlene Tigar McLaren,
eds, Car Troubles: Critical Studies of
Automobility (Abingdon, 2009);
Kingsley Dennis and John Urry, After
the Car (Oxford, 2009); and Brian
Ladd, Autophobia: Love and Hate in
the Automotive Era (Chicago, il,
2008).
6 Brandon, Auto Mobile, p. 386.
7 Young, Complete Motorist,
p. xxiv.
8 See, for example, Warren James
Belasco, Americans on the Road:
from Autocamp to Motel, 19101945
(Cambridge, 1979); Shane Birney,
A Nation on Wheels: Australia and
the Motor Car (Sydney, 1986); James
J. Flink, America Adopts the
Automobile, 18951910 (Cambridge,
1970); James J. Flink, The Automobile
Age (Cambridge, 1988); David
Gartman, Auto Opium: A Social
History of American Automobile
Design (London, 1994); David
Jeremiah, Representations of British
Motoring (Manchester, 2007); Jane
Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation: How the
Automobile Took over America, and
How We Can Take It Back (New

236_280_Drive_End__ 07/08/2012 11:19 Page 238

DRIVE

York, 1997); Peter J. Ling, America

and the Automobile: Technology,
Reform and Social Change
(Manchester, 1989); John McCrystal,
100 Years of Motoring in New Zealand
(Auckland, 2003); Sean OConnell,
The Car and British Society: Class,
Gender and Motoring, 18961939
(Manchester, 1998); Sean OConnell,
The Social and Cultural Impact of the
Car in Interwar Britain (Warwick,
1995); William Plowden, The Motor
Car and Politics, 18961970 (London,
1971); and Peter Thorold, The
Motoring Age: The Automobile and
Britain, 18961939 (London, 2003).
9 See, for example, Richard Benson et
al., The Secret Life of Cars, and What
They Reveal About Us (London,
2007); Cynthia Golomb Dettelbach,
In the Drivers Seat: The Automobile
in American Literature and Popular
Culture (Westport, ct, 1976); David
D. Lewis and Laurence Goldstein,
eds, Automobile and American
Culture (Ann Arbor, mi, 1983); Peter
Marsh and Peter Collett, Driving
Passion: The Psychology of the Car
(London, 1986); Daniel Miller, ed.,
Car Cultures (Oxford, 2001); and
Gerald Silk, ed., Automobile and
Culture (Los Angeles, ca, 1984).
10 See, for example, Reyner Banham,
Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four
Ecologies (Harmondsworth, 1973);
David Brodsly, L.A. Freeway: An
Appreciative Essay (Berkeley, ca,
1981); Tim English, Overlanding: The
238

Ultimate Road Trip (London, 2004);

Phil Llewellin, The Road to Muckle
Flugga: Great Drives in Five
Continents (Sparkford, 2004); Peter
Schindler, On the Road: Driving
Adventures, Pleasures and Discoveries
(Hong Kong, 2005); and Alistair
Weaver, A Drive on the Wild Side:
Twenty Extreme Driving Adventures
from Around the World (Dorchester,
2007).
11 See, for example, Donald Appleyard,
Kevin Lynch and John R. Myer, The
View from the Road (Cambridge,
1964); Marc Aug, Non-places:
Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity (London, 1995); Jean
Baudrillard, America [1968] (London,
1988); Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of
Perception: Attention, Spectacle and
Modern Culture (Cambridge, 2000);
Sara Danius, The Senses of
Modernism: Technology, Perception,
and Aesthetics (Ithaca, ny, 2002);
Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook:
Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism
(Durham, nc, 2009); Jeffrey T.
Schnapp, Crash (Speed as Engine
of Individuation), Modernism/
Modernity, vi/1 (1999), pp. 149;
Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Three Pieces of
Asphalt, Grey Room, i/11 (2003), pp.
521; Alison Smithson, AS in DS: An
Eye on the Road (Delft, 1983); Robert
Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and
Steven Izenour, Learning from Las
Vegas (Cambridge, 1972); and Paul
Virilio, Negative Horizon: An Essay in

236_280_Drive_End__ 07/08/2012 11:19 Page 239

REFERENCES

Dromoscopy (London, 2005).

12 Nigel Thrift, Non-representational
Theory, The Dictionary of Human
Geography, ed. R. J. Johnston, Derek
Gregory, Geraldine Pratt and Michael
Watts (Oxford, 2000).
13 Roland Barthes, The New Citron,
Mythologies [1957] (London, 1973),
pp. 957.
14 Mimi Sheller, Automotive Emotions:
Feeling the Car, Theory, Culture and
Society, xxi/45 (2004), pp. 22142.
15 Baudrillard, America, p. 54.
16 See, for example, Iain Borden,
Skateboarding, Space and the City:
Architecture and the Body (Oxford,
2001); Iain Borden, Jane Rendell and
Joe Kerr with Alicia Pivaro, eds, The
Unknown City: Contesting
Architecture and Social Space
(Cambridge, 2001); and Iain Borden,
Machines of Possibility (2004), at
www.issuu.com.
17 Quoted in Kenneth Hey, Cars and
Films in American Culture,
19291959, in Automobile and
American Culture, ed. David D. Lewis
and Laurence Goldstein (Ann Arbor,
mi, 1983), p. 193.
18 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Architecture of
Image: Existential Space in Cinema
(Helsinki, 2007), p. 7.
19 Baudrillard, America, p. 56.
20 See, for example, Steven Cohan and
Ina Rae Hark, eds, The Road Movie
Book (London, 1997); Tom Conley,
Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis,
2007); Giampiero Frasca, Road
239

Movie: Immaginario, Genesi, Struttura

E Forma Del Cinema Americano on
the Road (Turin, 2001); David
Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring
the Road Movie (Austin, 2002); Ewa
Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli,
Crossing New Europe: Postmodern
Travel and the European Road Movie
(London, 2006); Devin Orgeron,
Road Movies: From Muybridge and
Mlis to Lynch and Kiarostami
(London, 2008); Jack Sargeant and
Stephanie Watson, eds, Lost
Highways: An Illustrated History of
Road Movies (London, 1999); and
Jason Wood, 100 Road Movies
(London, 2007).
1 CITIES
1 Pedro Juan Larraaga, Successful
Asphalt Paving: A Description of
Up-to-date Methods, Recipes and
Theories, with Examples and
Practical Hints, for Road Authorities,
Contractors, and Advanced Students
(London, 1926). Quoted in Jeffrey
T. Schnapp, Three Pieces of Asphalt,
Grey Room, v/11 (2003), p. 12.
2 Quoted in Ruth Brandon, Auto
Mobile: How the Car Changed Life
(London, 2002), p. 304.
3 Julian Smith, A Runaway Match:
The Automobile in the American
Film, 19001920, Automobile and
American Culture, ed. David D. Lewis
and Laurence Goldstein (Ann Arbor,
mi, 1983), pp. 1847; and David

236_280_Drive_End__ 07/08/2012 11:19 Page 240

DRIVE

4
5

7
8

10

11

240

Gartman, Auto Opium: A Social

History of American Automobile
Design (London, 1994), pp. 36 and 54.
Devin Orgeron, Road Movies: From
Muybridge and Mlis to Lynch and
Kiarostami (London, 2008), pp 3943.
Gerald Silk, Reality and Beyond the
Real, Automobile and Culture, ed.
Gerald Silk (Los Angeles, ca, and
New York, 1984), pp. 11013.
Blaine A. Brownell, A Symbol of
Modernity: Attitudes toward the
Automobile in Southern Cities in the
1920s, American Quarterly, xxiv/1
(1972), pp. 346; and Eliza Russi
Lowen McGraw, Driving Miss Daisy:
Southern Jewishness on the Big
Screen, Southern Cultures, vii/2
(2001), pp. 4159.
James J. Flink, The Automobile Age
(Cambridge, 1988), pp. 159 and 359.
Michael L. Berger, The Cars Impact
on the American Family, The Car and
the City: The Automobile, the Built
Environment and Daily Life, ed.
Martin Wachs and Margaret Crawford
(Ann Arbor, mi, 1992), p. 66.
Gregory Votolato, Transport Design:
A Travel History (London, 2007),
p. 97; and Orgeron, Road Movies,
pp. 423.
Clay McShane, The Automobile:
A Chronology of its Antecedents,
Development and Impact (London,
1997), p. 127.
The Ballad of Thunder Road,
co-written by Robert Mitchum and
Joao Gilberto.

12 Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel:

Women and the Coming of the Motor
Age (Toronto, 1991), pp. 11133;
Gartman, Auto Opium, p. 98; Flink,
The Automobile Age, pp. 1624; and
Roger Miller, Selling Mrs Consumer:
Advertising and the Creation of
Suburban Social Relations,
19101930, Antipode, xxiii/3 (1991),
pp. 2824.
13 Cited in Cotten Seiler, Republic of
Drivers: A Cultural History of
Automobility in America (Chicago, il,
2008), p. 42.
14 Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry, episode 5
of From A to B Tales of Modern
Motoring (bbc, 1994).
15 Charles L. Sanford, Womans Place
in American Car Culture, in
Automobile and American Culture,
ed. Lewis and Goldstein, p. 139; and
Berger, The Cars Impact on the
American Family, pp. 6872.
16 Quentin Tarantino, interviewed in the
documentary Stunts on Wheels: The
Legendary Drivers of Death Proof ,
contained in the 2-disc dvd special
edition of Death Proof (2007).
17 For example, Steffen Bhm, Campbell
Jones, Chris Land and Matthew
Paterson, eds, Against Automobility
(Oxford, 2006); Jason Henderson,
Secessionist Automobility: Racism,
Anti-urbanism, and the Politics of
Automobility in Atlanta, Georgia,
International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research, xxx/2 (2006),
pp. 293307; and Brian Ladd,

236_280_Drive_End__ 07/08/2012 11:19 Page 241

REFERENCES

18

19

20

21
22
23
24

25

241

Autophobia: Love and Hate in the

Automotive Era (Chicago, il, 2008).
Kenneth Hey, Cars and Films in
American Culture, 19291959,
Automobile and American Culture,
ed. Lewis and Goldstein, pp. 1957.
Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies:
Decolonization and the Reordering of
French Culture (Cambridge, 1995),
pp. 5054.
Documentary Taxi Driver Stories,
contained in the 2-disc dvd special
edition of Taxi Driver (2007); and Iva
Pekrkov, Gimme the Money: The
Big Apple as Seen by a Czech Driver
(London, 2000).
Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver (London,
2000), p. xxiii.
Raymond Williams, Alienation,
Keywords (London, 1988), p. 36.
Nigel Coates, Guide to Ecstacity
(London, 2003), pp. 12930.
Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and
Mental Life [1903], in Cities and
Society: The Revised Reader in Urban
Sociology, ed. P. K. Hatt and A. J.
Reiss (New York, 1951), pp. 63546.
For the Mini and The Italian Job
(1969) see Christy Campbell, Mini:
An Intimate Biography (London,
2009); Matthew Field, The Making of
the Italian Job (London, 2001); Peter
Filby, Amazing Mini (Yeovil, 1981);
Simon Garfield, Mini: The True and
Secret History of the Making of a
Motor Car (London, 2009); Rob
Golding, Mini: Thirty-five Years
On (London, revd edn, 1994); Brian

26

27

28
29
30
31
32
33

Laban, The Mini: Forty Years of Fun

(London, 1999); Jon Pressnell, Mini:
The Definitive History (Sparkford,
2009); Graham Robson, Mini:
A Celebration of Britains Best-loved
Small Car (Sparkford, 2006); L.J.K.
Setright, Mini: The Design of an Icon
(London, 1999);
www.miniworld.co.uk, www.paulsmithmini.co.uk;
www.roblightbody.com; and
www.theitalianjob.com. See also the
documentary Get A Bloomin Move
On contained in the 2003 dvd
release of the 1969 version of The
Italian Job.
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
[1896] (New York, 1988); and Enda
Duffy, The Speed Handbook: Velocity,
Pleasure, Modernism (Durham, nc,
2009), pp. 1689.
Jim Conley, Automobile
Advertisements: The Magical and the
Mundane, in Car Troubles: Critical
Studies of Automobility, ed. Jim
Conley and Arlene Tigar McLaren
(Abingdon, 2009), pp. 3757.
Garfield, Mini, pp. 20525.
Ibid., pp. 2457.
Coates, Guide to Ecstacity, p. 215.
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown
and Steven Izenour, Learning from
Las Vegas (Cambridge, 1972).
Nigel Thrift, Driving in the City,
Theory, Culture and Society, xxi/45
(2004), p. 45.
Steven Jacobs, From Flneur to
Chauffeur: Driving through

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34

35
36
37

38

39
40
41

42
43

242

Cinematic Cities, in Imagining the

City, vol. i: The Art of Urban Living,
ed. Christian Emden, Catherine Keen
and David Midgley (Oxford, 2006),
pp. 2245.
Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to
Modernity: Twelve Preludes,
September 1959May 1961 (London,
1995), p. 95.
Seiler, Republic of Drivers, pp. 6066.
Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity,
p. 119
Tim Edensor, Automobility and
National Identity: Representation,
Geography and Driving Practice,
Theory, Culture and Society, xxi/45
(2004), pp. 10810.
Rudyard Kipling, letter to Filson
Young, in A. B. Filson Young, The
Complete Motorist: Being an Account
of the Evolution and Construction of
the Modern Motor-car, Etc. (London,
revd 5th edn, 1905), p. 250.
Jesse Crosse, The Greatest Movie Car
Chases of All Time (St Paul, 2006),
p. 16.
Jacobs, Flneur to Chauffeur, p. 219.
Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Luc Godard
par Jean-Luc Godard (Paris, 1968),
p. 383, quoted in Ross, Fast Cars,
Clean Bodies, p. 40.
Young, Complete Motorist, pp. 1712.
Kurt Mser, The Dark Side of
Automobilism, 190030: Violence,
War and the Motor Car, The Journal
of Transport History, xxiv/2 (2003),
pp. 2446; David Sharpley, Driver
Behaviour and the Wider Social

44

45

46
47

48

Context, Driver Behaviour and

Training, ed. Lisa Dorn (Aldershot,
2003), pp. 3817; and Tom
Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the
Way We Do (and What It Says About
Us) (London, 2008).
Nigel Taylor, The Aesthetic
Experience of Traffic in the Modern
City, Urban Studies, xl/8 (2003),
p. 1622.
Warren James Belasco, Americans on
the Road: from Autocamp to Motel,
19101945 (Cambridge, 1979),
pp. 1939.
Vanderbilt, Traffic, pp. 10810.
Edward W. Soja, Postmodern
Geographies: The Reassertion of Space
in Critical Social Theory (London,
1989), pp. 222 and 2446.
For an extended discussion of driving
in Chinatown, see Iain Borden,
Chinatown, Automobile Driving and
the Unknowable City, in Urban
Constellations, ed. Matthew Gandy
(Berlin, 2011), pp. 1869.
2 JOURNEYS

1 A. B. Filson Young, The Complete

Motorist: Being an Account of the
Evolution and Construction of the
Modern Motor-car, Etc. (London,
revd 5th edn, 1905), pp. 1423.
2 Ruth Brandon, Auto Mobile: How the
Car Changed Life (London, 2002),
pp. 7980.
3 Brandon, Auto Mobile, pp. 2238.
4 Cesare Santoro, Hitler Germany as

236_280_Drive_End__ 07/08/2012 11:19 Page 243

REFERENCES

5
6

8
9
10

11

12
13

243

Seen by a Foreigner (Berlin, 1938)

and R. J. Overy, Cars, Roads, and
Economic Recovery in Germany,
19328, The Economic History
Review, xxviii/3 (August 1975),
pp. 4756, cited in Brandon,
Auto Mobile, p. 203.
Young, Complete Motorist, p. 276.
Dallas Lore Sharp, The Better Country
(Boston, 1928), p. 130, quoted in
Belasco, Americans on the Road,
p. 24.
Belasco, Americans on the Road,
pp. 1939; and Gabrielle Barnett,
Drive-by Viewing: Visual
Consciousness and Forest
Preservation in the Automobile
Age, Technology and Culture, xlv/1
(2004), p. 42.
Belasco, Americans on the Road,
esp. p. 86.
Quoted in Belasco, Americans on the
Road, p. 87.
Henry Vollam Morton, In Search of
England [1927] (Harmondsworth,
1960); and E. B. White, Farewell to
Model T [1936] (New York, 2003).
Female driver, 36, Penzance, quoted
in Richard Benson et al., The Secret
Life of Cars, and What They Reveal
About Us (London, 2007), p. 6.
Steve Cropley, A Week in Cars,
Autocar, cclxviii/2 (13 April 2011),
p. 17.
Sara Danius, The Aesthetics of
the Windshield: Proust and the
Modernist Rhetoric of Speed,
Modernism/Modernity, viii/1 (2001),

14
15
16
17

18
19

20

21

pp. 99126; and Sara Danius, The

Senses of Modernism: Technology,
Perception, and Aesthetics (Ithaca,
ny, and London, 2002).
Ilya Ehrenburg, The Life of the
Automobile [1929] (London, 1999),
pp. 45.
Young, Complete Motorist, p. 291.
Ibid., p. 281.
Mark Nawrot, Depth from Motion
Parallax Scales With Eye Movement
Gain, Journal of Vision, iii/11
(December 2003), pp. 84151; and
Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We
Drive the Way We Do (and What
It Says About Us) (London, 2008),
pp. 912.
Quoted in Danius, Aesthetics of the
Windshield, p. 109.
Paul Virilio, Dromoscopy, or the
Ecstasy of Enormities, Wide Angle,
xx/3 (1998), pp. 1112, pp. 6572;
and Paul Virilio, Negative Horizon:
An Essay in Dromoscopy (London,
2005).
Steven Spielberg interviewed in the
documentary A Conversation with
Steven Spielberg on the Making of
Duel contained in the dvd special
edition of Duel (2005).
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of
Things Past, vol. i: Swanns Way
(www.gutenberg.org, 2009).
Originally published as Du ct de
chez Swann (1913). These lines of
Swanns Way are based on a section
from Marcel Proust, Impressions de
Route en Automobile, Le Figaro (19

236_280_Drive_End__ 07/08/2012 11:19 Page 244

DRIVE

22

23

24

25
26

244

November 1907). See Alessia

Ricciardi, Cinema Regained: Godard
between Proust and Benjamin,
Modernism/Modernity, viii/4 (2001),
pp. 64551; and Danius, Aesthetics
of the Windshield, pp. 99126
Anne Friedberg, Urban Mobility and
Cinematic Visuality: The Screens of
Los Angeles Endless Cinema or
Private Telematics, Journal of Visual
Culture, i/2 (2002), p. 184.
Gerald Silk, Proliferation and
Assimilation, in Automobile and
Culture, ed. Gerald Silk (Los Angeles,
ca, and New York, 1984), p. 75;
Gregory Votolato, Transport Design:
A Travel History (London, 2007),
pp. 789; and interviews with David
Hockney from the Evening Standard
(8 July 1983) and The Face
(September 1983), reproduced at
http://shapersofthe80s.com.
Max Forsythe, Drive by Shooting
(London, 2004); Lee Friedlander,
America by Car (San Francisco, ca,
2010); Edward Ruscha, Every Building
on the Sunset Strip (Los Angeles, ca,
1966); and Robbert Flick, M. J. Dear,
David L. Ulin and Tim B. Wride,
Trajectories (Los Angeles, ca, 2004).
Virilio, Dromoscopy, p. 13.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway
Journey: The Industrialization and
Perception of Time and Space in the
19th Century (Leamington Spa, new
edn, 1986), p. 57; Georg Simmel, The
Metropolis and Mental Life [1903],
in Cities and Society: The Revised

27

28
29
30

Reader in Urban Sociology, ed. P. K.

Hatt and A. J. Reiss (New York, 1951),
pp. 63546.
For example, Henry Catchpole, Is
this the Greatest Road in the World?,
Evo, 144 (June 2010), pp. 96105;
Andy Markowitz, Ceaucescus Folly,
The Guardian, Travel section (23
April 2005); Peter Schindler, On the
Road: Driving Adventures, Pleasures
and Discoveries (Hong Kong, 2005);
Alistair Weaver, The Worlds Best
Road, Autocar (24 January, 2006), pp.
649; Alistair Weaver, A Drive on the
Wild Side: Twenty Extreme Driving
Adventures from around the World
(Dorchester, 2007); Greg Fountain,
ed., Epic Drives (Peterborough, 2009);
and www.theworldsbestdrivingroads.com.
Lady Mary Jeune, letter to Filson
Young (20 June 1904), in Young,
Complete Motorist, p. 236.
Quoted in Chris Mosey, Car Wars:
Battles on the Road to Nowhere
(London, 2000), p. 186.
Son cerveau est une piste sans fin o
penses, images, sensations ronflent
et roulent, raison de cent kilomtres
lheure. Cent kilomtres, cest ltalon
de son activit. Il passe en trombe,
pense en trombe, sent en trombe,
aime en trombe, vit en trombe. La
vie de partout se prcipite, se bouscule,
anime dun mouvement fou, dun
mouvement de charge de cavalerie,
et disparat cinmatographiquement.
Octave Mirbeau, La 628e8 (Paris,

236_280_Drive_End__ 07/08/2012 11:19 Page 245

REFERENCES

1907), p. 55. See also Danius,

Aesthetics of the Windshield,
pp. 11011.
31 Young, Complete Motorist, p. 275.
32 Michael Atkinson, Crossing the
Frontiers, Sight and Sound, iv/1
(1994), pp. 1417; Steven Cohan and
Ina Rae Hark, Introduction, in The
Road Movie Book, ed. Steven Cohan
and Ina Rae Hark (London, 1997),
p. 1; David Laderman, The Road
Movie Rediscovers Mexico: Alex
Coxs Highway Patrolman, Cinema
Journal, xxxix/2 (2000), pp. 789;
Cotten Seiler, Republic of Drivers:
A Cultural History of Automobility in
America (Chicago, il, 2008), pp. 423.
33 For example, Cohan and Hark, eds,
The Road Movie Book; Tom Conley,
Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis,
2007); Ron Eyerman and Orvar
Lofgren, Romancing the Road: Road
Movies and Images of Mobility,
Theory, Culture and Society, xxii/1
(1995), pp. 5379; Giampiero Frasca,
Road Movie: Immaginario, Genesi,
Struttura e Forma del Cinema
Americano on the Road (Turin, 2001);
David Laderman, Driving Visions:
Exploring the Road Movie (Austin,
2002); Ewa Mazierska and Laura
Rascaroli, Crossing New Europe:
Postmodern Travel and the European
Road Movie (London, 2006); Devin
Orgeron, Road Movies: From
Muybridge and Mlis to Lynch and
Kiarostami (London, 2008); Jack
Sargeant and Stephanie Watson, eds,
245

34

35

36
37

38
39
40
41
42

Lost Highways: An Illustrated History

of Road Movies (London, 1999); and
Jason Wood, 100 Road Movies
(London, 2007).
For example, Fleda Brown, Driving
with Dvorak: Essays on Memory and
Identity (Lincoln, 2009); Tim English,
Overlanding: The Ultimate Road Trip
(London, 2004); Tony Hiss, In Motion:
The Experience of Travel (London,
2011); Phil Llewellin, The Road to
Muckle Flugga: Great Drives in Five
Continents (Sparkford, 2004); Ewan
McGregor and Charlie Boorman, Long
Way Round: Chasing Shadows across
the World (London, 2004); W. Scott
Olsen, At Speed: Travelling the Long
Road between Two Points (Lincoln,
ne, 2006); and Schindler, On the Road.
For the original short story, see
Richard Matheson, Duel: Terror
Stories by Richard Matheson (New
York, 2003).
Spielberg in A Conversation with
Steven Spielberg.
Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema
Without Walls: Movies and Culture
after Vietnam (London, 1991), p. 145,
cited in Cohan and Hark,
Introduction, p. 2.
Matheson, Duel, p. 37.
Laderman, Driving Visions, pp.
12831.
Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls,
p. 143, cited in Cohan and Hark,
Introduction, pp. 23.
Laderman, Driving Visions, pp. 1334.
Ibid., pp. 1424.

236_280_Drive_End__ 07/08/2012 11:19 Page 246

DRIVE

43 Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls,

pp. 1435, cited in Cohan and Hark,
Introduction, p. 2.
44 Tim Cresswell, Mobility as Resistance: A Geographical Reading of
Kerouacs On the Road, Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers,
xviii/2 (1993), pp. 24962.
45 Carlo Di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi,
eds, The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema (New
York, 1996); and Juhani Pallasmaa,
The Architecture of Image: Existential
Space in Cinema (Helsinki, 2007),
p. 120.
46 Ian Leong, Mike Sell and Kelly
Thomas, Mad Love, Mobile Homes,
and Dysfunctional Dicks: On the
Road with Bonnie and Clyde, The
Road Movie Book, ed. Cohan and
Hark, pp. 7089; and Corey
Creekmur, On the Run and On the
Road, ibid., p. 92.
47 Jack Sargeant, Killer Couples: From
Nebraska to Route 666, Lost
Highways, ed. Sargeant and Watson,
p. 159.
48 Callie Khouri, quoted in Maria
Sturken, Thelma & Louise (London,
2000), p. 73.
49 Adam Webb, No Beginning. No End.
No Speed Limit: Two-lane Blacktop,
Lost Highways, ed. Sargeant and
Watson, p. 828.
50 Young, Complete Motorist, p. 40.
51 Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls,
pp. 1456, cited in Cohan and Hark,
Introduction, p. 2.
246

52 Jack Sargeant, Vanishing Point: Speed

Kills, in Lost Highways, ed. Sargeant
and Watson, pp. 937; and John Beck,
Resistance Becomes Ballistic:
Vanishing Point and the End of the
Road, Cultural Politics, iii/1 (2007),
pp. 3550.
53 Sargeant, Vanishing Point, p. 96.
54 Richard C. Sarafian, audio commentary to the us dvd edition of
Vanishing Point (2004).
3 MOTOPIA
1 Geoffrey Jellicoe, Motopia: A Study in
the Evolution of Urban Landscape
(London, 1961).
2 For example, Antonio Amado,
Voiture Minimum: Le Corbusier and
the Automobile (Cambridge, 2011);
Jonathan Bell, ed., Carchitecture:
When the Car and the City Collide
(Basel, 2001); Robert Fishman, Urban
Utopias in the Twentieth Century:
Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd
Wright, and Le Corbusier (Cambridge,
1982); Murray Fraser, The City, the
Car and the Dwelling, in Architecture
and the Special Relationship: The
American Influence on Post-war
British Architecture (Abingdon, 2007);
Moshe Safdie and Wendy Kohn, The
City after the Automobile: An
Architects Vision (London, 1997); and
Elizabeth A. T. Smith, The Drive-in
Culture and Traffic Systems and the
Visions of City Planners, in
Automobile and Culture, ed. Gerald

236_280_Drive_End__ 07/08/2012 11:19 Page 247

REFERENCES

4
5
6

7
8

247

Silk (Los Angeles, ca, and New York,

1984), pp. 2003 and 2949.
Norman Bel Geddes, Magic
Motorways (New York, 1940); Helen
J. Burgess, Futurama, Autogeddon:
Imagining the Superhighway from
Bel Geddes to Ballard, Rhizomes, 8
(Spring 2004), at www.rhizomes.net;
Expositions Publications, Official
Guide Book (New York, 1939); David
Gelernter, The Lost World of the Fair
(New York, 1995); General Motors,
Highways and Horizons: The General
Motors Exhibit Building (Detroit, mi,
1939); Edward Dimendberg, The
Will to Motorization: Cinema,
Highways, and Modernity, October,
73 (Summer 1995), pp. 90137; and
Cliff Ellis, Lewis Mumford and
Norman Bel Geddes: The Highway,
the City and the Future, Planning
Perspectives, xx/1 (2005), pp. 5168.
Ruth Brandon, Auto Mobile: How the
Car Changed Life (London, 2002),
pp. 28990.
Roland Barthes, The New Citron,
Mythologies [1957] (London, 1973),
pp. 957.
Dimendberg, The Will to
Motorization, p. 126; and Paul Mason
Fotsch, The Building of a
Superhighway Future at the New York
Worlds Fair, Cultural Critique, xlviii
(2001), pp. 6597.
Brandon, Auto Mobile, pp. 2012.
Grant Geyer, The Freeway in
Southern California, American
Speech, lxxvi/2 (2001), p. 222; and

Brandon, Auto Mobile, pp. 3423.

9 Wilbur Smith, Future Highways and
Urban Growth (New Haven, ct,
1961), p. 3; u.s. Department of
Transportation, Federal Highway
Administration, Interstate faq, at
www.fhwa.dot.gov; James J. Flink,
The Automobile Age (Cambridge,
1988), pp. 36873; James Howard
Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere:
The Rise and Decline of Americas
Man-made Landscape (New York,
1993), p. 107; Cotten Seiler, Republic
of Drivers: A Cultural History of
Automobility in America (Chicago, il,
2008), pp. 69104; and Cliff Ellis,
Interstate Highways, Regional
Planning and the Reshaping of
Metropolitan America, Planning
Practice and Research, xvi/34 (2001),
pp. 24769.
10 Seiler, Republic of Drivers, p. 91.
11 Peter Merriman, Driving Spaces: A
Cultural-historical Geography of
Englands m1 Motorway (Oxford,
2007), pp. 10340; and cbrd
(Chriss British Road Directory),
at www.cbrd.co.uk.
12 Taiwan Area National Expressway
Engineering Bureau, at
www.taneeb.gov.tw.
13 Thomas J. Campanella, The
Civilising Road: American Influence
on the Development of Highways and
Motoring in China, 19001949,
Journal of Transport History, xxvi/1
(2005), p. 79.
14 Dimendberg, Will to Motorization,

236_280_Drive_End__ 07/08/2012 11:19 Page 248

DRIVE

15
16
17

18

19

248

pp. 9093; and Thomas Zeller,

Driving Germany: The Landscape of
the German Autobahn, 19301970
(Oxford, 2007).
Brian Ladd, Autophobia: Love and
Hate in the Automotive Era (Chicago,
il, 2008), pp. 1539.
Dimendberg, Will to Motorization,
p. 90.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of
Space (Oxford, 1991), p. 313; Marc
Aug, Non-places: Introduction to an
Anthropology of Supermodernity
(London, 1995); Jean Baudrillard,
America [1968] (London, 1988);
and Edward C. Relph, Place and
Placelessness (London, 1976), p. 90.
Guy Debord, Theses on Traffic,
Situationist International Anthology,
ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, ca, 1981),
p. 56.
Tim Edensor, Defamiliarizing the
Mundane Roadscape, Space and
Culture, vi/2 (2003), pp. 15168;
David Inglis, Auto Couture: Thinking
the Car in Post-war France, Theory,
Culture and Society, xxi/45 (2004),
pp. 20419; and Peter Merriman,
Driving Places: Marc Aug, Nonplaces, and the Geographies of
Englands m1 Motorway, Theory,
Culture and Society, xxi/45 (2004),
pp. 14567; Richard Sennett, The Fall
of Public Man: On the Social
Psychology of Capitalism (New York,
1974), p. 14; and Richard Sennett,
Flesh and Stone: The Body and the
City in Western Civilization (London,

1994), p. 18.
20 Dimendberg, Will to Motorization,
pp. 12737.
21 Martin Pawley, Where the Big Sheds
Are, in The Strange Death of
Architectural Criticism: Martin
Pawley, Collected Writings, ed. David
Jenkins (London, 2007), p. 226,
quoted in Joe Moran, On Roads:
A Hidden History (London, 2009),
p. 149.
22 Iain Borden, Playtime: Tativille and
Paris, in The Hieroglyphics of Space:
Reading and Experiencing the Modern
Metropolis, ed. Neil Leach (London,
2002), pp. 21733.
23 David Matless, Landscape and
Englishness (London, 1998), p. 64;
and Moran, On Roads, p. 130.
24 Iain Sinclair, London Orbital: A Walk
around the m25 (London, 2002).
25 Anon, A Car Talk With Julian Opie,
Carls Cars, 12 (Summer 2005),
pp. 98101.
26 R. J. Gibbens and Y. Saacti, Road
Traffic Analysis Using midas Data:
Journey Time Prediction (Cambridge,
University of Cambridge Computer
Laboratory Technical Report 676,
December 2006), p. 17.
27 Seiler, Republic of Drivers, p. 126.
28 Brandon, Auto Mobile, p. 353.
29 Moran, On Roads, p. 22.
30 Ibid., p. 101; and The Secret Life of
the Motorway: Falling In Love, The
Honeymoon Period and The End of
the Affair, three-part bbc television
documentary (produced and directed

236_280_Drive_End__ 07/08/2012 11:19 Page 249

REFERENCES

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

249

by Emma Hindley, first screened

bbc4 21, 22 and 23 August 2007).
Suzanne Greaves, Motorway Nights
with the Stars, The Times (14 August
1985), p. 8, quoted in Merriman,
Driving Spaces, p. 181; and The
Secret Life of the Motorway: The
Honeymoon Period.
Tony Brooks, The Hazards of m1,
The Observer (8 November 1959),
p. 5, quoted in Merriman, Driving
Spaces, pp. 1712.
Patrick Mennem, I Drive on Britains
Space-age Highway, Daily Mirror
(30 October 1959), quoted in Moran,
On Roads, p. 27.
Gordon Wilkins, Londons Threering Motorway, Illustrated London
News (1972), p. 31, cited in Sue
Robertson, Visions of Urban
Mobility: The Westway, London,
England, Cultural Geographies, 14
(2007), pp. 7980.
Franoise Sagan, With Fondest
Regards (New York, 1985), p. 65,
quoted in Kristin Ross, Fast Cars,
Clean Bodies: Decolonization and
the Reordering of French Culture
(Cambridge, 1995), p. 21.
Par Blomkvist, Transferring Tech
nology-shaping Ideology: American
Traffic Engineering and Commercial
Interests in the Establishment of a
Swedish Car Society, 19451965,
Comparative Technology Transfer and
Society, ii/3 (2004), pp. 273302.
For example, John Foster, John
Buchans Hesperides: Landscape

38

39

40

41

42

Rhetoric and the Aesthetics of Bodily

Experience on the South African
Highveld, 19011903, Ecumene, v/3
(1998), pp. 32347; and Wolfgang
Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey:
The Industrialization and Perception
of Time and Space in the 19th Century
(Leamington Spa, new edition, 1986).
Dimendberg, Will to Motorization,
pp. 10710 and 11516. See also
William H. Rollins, Whose
Landscape? Technology, Fascism and
Environmentalism on the National
Socialist Autobahn, Annals of the
Association of American Geographers,
lxxxv/3 (1995), pp. 494520.
Merriman, Driving Spaces, pp. 60102;
and Peter Merriman, Mirror, Signal,
Manoeuvre: Assembling and
Governing the Motorway Driver in
Late 1950s Britain, Sociological
Review, liv/1 (2006), pp. 7592.
Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch
and John R. Myer, The View from the
Road (Cambridge, 1964), esp. pp. 37
and 39; and Eduardo Alcntara De
Vasconcellos, The Use of Streets: A
Reassessment and Tribute to Donald
Appleyard, Journal of Urban Design,
ix/1 (2004), pp. 322.
For example, Louis Ward Kemp,
Aesthetes and Engineers: The
Occupational Ideology of Highway
Design, Technology and Culture,
xvii/4 (1986), pp. 75997.
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown
and Steven Izenour, Learning from
Las Vegas (Cambridge, 1972).

236_280_Drive_End__ 07/08/2012 11:19 Page 250

DRIVE

43 Reyner Banham, Los Angeles:

The Architecture of Four Ecologies
(Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 35
and 8890.
44 Lawrence Halprin, Freeways (New
York, 1966), p. 5, quoted in David
Brodsly, L.A. Freeway: An
Appreciative Essay (Berkeley, ca,
1981), p. 50.
45 Rowan Moore, Lets Celebrate the
Westway, Evening Standard (Tuesday,
11 July 2000), p. 28.
46 Halprin, Freeways, p. 16, quoted in
Brodsly, L.A. Freeway, p. 50; Vivien
Arnold, The Image of the Freeway,
Journal of Architectural Education,
xxx/1 (1976), pp. 2830.
47 Banham, Los Angeles, pp. 23 and
2134.
48 Tony Smith, Talking with Tony Smith:
Conversations with Samuel Wagstaff,
Jr, in Theories and Documents of
Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of
Artists Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles
and Peter Selz (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, ca, 1996), pp. 1278, cited
in Merriman, Driving Spaces, p. 15.
49 Alison Smithson, AS in DS: An Eye on
the Road (Delft, 1983), pp. 914 and
14045; and Merriman Driving
Spaces, pp. 1516.
50 Merriman, Driving Spaces, pp. 1415;
Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, p. 55;
Mitchell Schwarzer, Zoomscape:
Architecture in Motion and Media
(New York, 2004), p. 99; Paul Virilio,
Dromoscopy, or the Ecstasy of
Enormities, Wide Angle, xx/3 (1998),
250

51
52
53

54

55
56
57
58

pp. 1122; and Paul Virilio, Negative

Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy
(London, 2005).
Virilio, Dromoscopy, pp. 1213.
Home Office, Roadcraft: The Police
Drivers Manual (London, 1960),
p. 75.
Quoted in Jason Wood, Radio On
and the British Cinematic Landscape,
essay in the accompanying booklet
to the bfi dvd version of Radio On
(2008), p. 1. See also Radio On, at
www.lightsinthedusk.blogspot.com.
Edensor, Defamiliarizing the
Mundane Roadscape, pp. 15168;
Greg Noble and Rebecca Baldwin,
Sly Chicks and Troublemakers: Car
Stickers, Nonsense and the Allure of
Strangeness, Social Semiotics, xi/1
(2001), pp. 7589; and Hagar
Salamon, Political Bumper Stickers
in Contemporary Israel: Folklore as
an Emotional Battleground, Journal
of American Folklore, cxiv/453
(2001), pp. 277308.
Jellicoe, Motopia, p. 18; and Moran,
On Roads, pp. 1424.
Suzanne Greaves, interviewed in
The Secret Life of the Motorway:
The Honeymoon Period.
Quoted ibid.
Quoted in Christophe Studeny,
LInvention de la vitesse. France, xviiiexxe Sicle (Paris, 1995), p. 192, and
cited in Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Crash
(Speed as Engine of Individuation),
Modernism/Modernity, vi/1 (1999),
pp. 1921.

236_280_Drive_End__ 07/08/2012 11:19 Page 251

REFERENCES

59 A. B. Filson Young, The Complete

Motorist: Being an Account of the
Evolution and Construction of the
Modern Motor-car, Etc. (London, revd
5th edn, 1905), pp. 2738.
60 Mike Jackson, The m4 Sights Guide:
Find Out About Everything You Can
See from Your Vehicle on the Motorway (Worcester, 2005), pp. 58 and 74.
61 Roy Phippen, m25 Travelling
Clockwise (London, 2004); Roger
Green, Destination Nowhere: A South
Mimms Motorway Service Station
Diary (Twickenham, 2004); and
Margaret Baker, Discovering m1
(Tring, 1968).
62 Quoted in Gerald Silk, Cultural
Reconstruction, Explosion, and
Reflection, in Automobile and
Culture, ed. Silk, p. 139.
63 Virilio, Dromoscopy, p. 17.
64 Eric Laurier, Doing Office Work on
the Motorway, Theory, Culture and
Society, xxi/45 (2004), pp. 26177;
and Richard Benson et al., Work,
Rest and Play, The Secret Life of Cars,
and What They Reveal About Us
(London, 2007), pp. 4256.
65 Brodsly, L.A. Freeway, p. 41.
66 Baudrillard, America, p. 9.
67 Male driver, 35, South London and
Female Driver, 34, Hull, quoted in
Benson et al., The Secret Life of Cars,
pp. 6 and 22.
68 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of
Perception: Attention, Spectacle and
Modern Culture (Cambridge, 2000),
p. 78.
251

69 Susan Robertson, Visions of

Mobility: The Sensational Spaces of
Westway, ma Cultural Geography
dissertation, Royal Holloway (2003),
p. 34; and Edensor, Defamiliarizing
the Mundane Roadscape, pp. 16061.
70 Sam Delaney, Garage Anthems, The
Guardian, The Guide supplement
(13 August 2005), pp. 45.
71 Julia Loktev, Static Motion, or the
Confessions of a Compulsive Radio
Driver, Semiotexte, vi/1 (1993), quoted in Michael Bull, Soundscapes of
the Car: A Critical Study of
Automobile Habitation, Car Cultures,
ed. Daniel Miller (Oxford, 2001), p.
185; Michael Bull, Automobility and
the Power of Sound, Theory, Culture
and Society, xxi/45 (2004), pp.
24359; and Greil Marcus, Back Seat,
2wice, v/2 (2001), pp. 357.
72 Chris Petit, Dancing Alone on the
Cline, essay in the accompanying
booklet to the bfi dvd version of
Radio On (2008), pp. 45.
73 Fred Camper, untitled introductory
essay accompanying the Criterion
dvd By Brakhage: An Anthology
(2003), n.p.
74 Smith, Talking with Tony Smith,
p. 128, cited in Merriman, Driving
Spaces, p. 15.
4 ALTERED STATES
1 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, quoted
in Lawrence S. Rainey, Selections
from the Unpublished Diaries of F. T.

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4
5
6

252

Marinetti, Modernism/Modernity, i/3

(1994), p. 21.
Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Crash (Speed as
Engine of Individuation),
Modernism/Modernity, vi/1 (1999),
p. 8; and Alexander H. (Sandy)
McCreery, Turnpike Roads and the
Spatial Culture of London:
17561830, PhD thesis, ucl Bartlett
School of Architecture (2004).
David Vivian, No Limits, Evo
(November 2009), p. 31; and John
Tomlinson, The Culture of Speed: The
Coming of Immediacy (London,
2009), pp. 9 and 4471.
Schnapp, Crash, pp. 9 and 34.
John Beck and Paul Crosthwaite,
Velocities of Power: An Introduction,
Cultural Politics, iii/1 (2007), p. 25.
Julian Smith, A Runaway Match: The
Automobile in the American Film,
19001920, in Automobile and
American Culture, ed. David D. Lewis
and Laurence Goldstein (Ann Arbor,
mi, 1983), pp. 1812.
Quoted in Cotten Seiler, Republic of
Drivers: A Cultural History of
Automobility in America (Chicago, il,
2008), p. 44.
Ruth E. Iskin, Father Time, Speed
and the Temporality of Posters
around 1900, KronoScope, iii/1
(2003), pp. 33 and 3842.
Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook:
Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism
(Durham, nc, 2009), pp. 17780;
and Gerald Silk, Invention and
Celebration, in Automobile and

10
11
12

13
14
15

16

17

Culture, ed. Gerald Silk (Los Angeles,

ca, and New York, 1984), pp. 512.
Gerald Silk, Cultural Reconstruction,
Explosion, and Reflection, Automobile and Culture, ed. Silk, p. 129.
Michael Atkinson, Blue Velvet
(London, 1997).
Susan Luckman, Road Movies,
National Myths and the Threat of the
Road: The Shifting Transformative
Space of the Road in Australian Film,
The International Journal of the
Humanities, viii/1 (2010), pp.
11325.
Lou Marinoff, Persistence Pays,
Times Higher Education Supplement,
1941 (1 April 2010), p. 47.
Peter Marsh and Peter Collett,
Driving Passion: The Psychology of the
Car (London, 1986), p. 183.
Alistair Weaver, 200mph in
Germany, A Drive on the Wild Side:
Twenty Extreme Driving Adventures
from Around the World, 2007), p. 113;
and Jean Baudrillard, Le Systme des
objects (Paris, 1968), p. 68, quoted in
Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies:
Decolonization and the Reordering of
French Culture (Cambridge, 1995),
p. 21.
Ayrton Senna, interviewed in Gerald
Donaldson, Grand Prix People:
Revelations from Inside the Formula 1
Circus (1990), quoted in Clyde Brolin,
Overdrive: Formula 1 in the Zone
(London, 2010), pp. 23.
At www.getawayinstockholm.com
and www.ghostridermovie.net.

236_280_Drive_End__ 07/08/2012 11:19 Page 253

CITIES

18 Glenn Elert et al., Speed of a Car:

Ctait un Rendezvous, at www.
hypertextbook.com; and analysis
by Sumner Brown, cited in Jesse
Crosse, The Greatest Movie Car
Chases of All Time (St Paul, 2006),
pp. 467.
19 At www.rendezvousdvd.com.
20 At www.claude-lelouch.ifrance.com;
La Vrit sur le court mtrage, enfin
dvoile, at www.axe-net.be; Making
of Rendezvous, documentary with
Claude Lelouch, at www.youtube.com;
Elert et al., Speed of a Car; and
Crosse, Greatest Movie Car Chases,
pp. 467.
21 Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson,
Looking for Maps: Notes on the
Road Movie as Genre, in Lost
Highways: An Illustrated History of
Road Movies, ed. Jack Sargeant and
Stephanie Watson (London, 1999),
p. 8.
22 For example, Crosse, The Greatest
Movie Car Chases, esp. pp. 1724.
23 For example, Todd Berliner, The
Genre Film as Booby Trap, Cinema
Journal, xl/3 (Spring 2001), pp.
2546; Thomas Leitch, Crime Films
(Cambridge, 2004), pp. 23140; and
Nick Roddick, Bullitt Proof , Sight
and Sound, xx/11 (2010), p. 17.
24 Marc Myers, Chasing the Ghosts of
Bullitt, Wall Street Journal (26 January
2011), p. d7.
25 Quoted on the back cover of William
F. Nolan, Steve McQueen: Star on
Wheels (New York, 1972) and
253

www.stevemcqueen.com.
26 At www.ponysite.de; and
www.imboc.com.
27 Steven Jacobs, From Flneur to
Chauffeur: Driving through
Cinematic Cities, in Imagining the
City, vol. i: The Art of Urban Living,
ed. Christian Emden, Catherine Keen
and David Midgley (Oxford: Peter
Lang, 2006), p. 218.
28 M. Christine Boyer, Twice-told
Stories: The Double Erasure of
Times Square, The Unknown City:
Contesting Architecture and Social
Space, ed. Iain Borden, Jane Rendell
and Joe Kerr with Alicia Pivaro
(Cambridge, 2001), pp. 3053.
29 Brian Ladd, Autophobia: Love and
Hate in the Automotive Era (Chicago,
il, 2008), p. 73.
30 George R. Chatburn, Highways and
Highway Transportation (New York,
1923), p. 204, cited in T. C. Barker,
The International History of Motor
Transport, Journal of Contemporary
History, xxix/1 (1985), p. 15.
31 World Health Organization (who),
Global Status Report on Road Safety
(Geneva, 2009), pp. viiix and 13;
and Mark Dery, Always Crashing in
the Same Car: A Head-on Collision
with the Technosphere, Against
Automobility, ed. Steffen Bhm,
Campbell Jones, Chris Land and
Matthew Paterson (Oxford, 2006), p.
228.
32 Duffy, Speed Handbook, pp. 2245.
33 Schnapp, Crash, pp. 345.

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DRIVE

34 Denise Halicki, introduction to the

remastered dvd edition of Gone in 60
Seconds (2005).
35 Parveen Adams, Death Drive, in The
Modern Fantastic: The Films of David
Cronenberg, ed. Michael Grant
(Westport, 2000), pp. 11112.
36 Dery, Always Crashing in the Same
Car, pp. 22339; and Iain Sinclair,
Crash (London, 2008); and Terry
Harpold, Dry Leatherette:
Cronenbergs Crash, Postmodern
Culture, vii/3 (1997), np.
37 Rebel Without a Cause: Defiant
Innocents, documentary contained in
the 2-disc dvd special edition of
Rebel Without a Cause (2005).
38 Jeremy Millar and Michiel Schwarz,
eds, Speed: Visions of an Accelerated
Age (London, 1998); Steven Jay
Schnieder, Death as Art/The Car
Crash as Statement: The Myth of
Jackson Pollock, in Car Crash
Culture, ed. Mikita Brottman
(London, 2002), pp. 27881; Gregory
Votolato, Transport Design: A Travel
History (London, 2007), p. 82; Peter
Wollen, Automobiles and Art, in
Autopia: Cars and Culture, ed. Peter
Wollen and Joe Kerr (London, 2002),
pp. 335; Gerald Silk, The Image of
the Automobile in American Art, in
Automobile and American Culture, ed.
Lewis and Goldstein, pp. 20621; and
Silk, Automobile and Culture; and
Ken Russell, Death Drive by Dean
Rogers, The Times (2 October 2009)
and at www.timesonline.co.uk.
254

39 Quoted in Brolin, Overdrive, p. 126.

40 Andre40, Ford f3l and David Piper,
at www.gt40s.com, The Auto
Collection forum.
CONCLUSION
1 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Crash (Speed as
Engine of Individuation),
Modernism/Modernity, vi/1 (1999),
pp. 1921.
2 A. B. Filson Young, The Complete
Motorist: Being an Account of the
Evolution and Construction of the
Modern Motor-car, Etc. (London, revd
5th edn, 1905), p. 282.
3 Richard Meaden, Classic Motorsport
Routes (Basingstoke, 2007), pp.
1429; Chris Nixon, Kings of the
Nurburgring. Der Nurburg: A History,
19251983 (Isleworth, 2005); and
Ultimate Nurburgring Guide, Evo, 82
(August 2005), pp. 10724.
4 Ron Simons, briefing session at rsr
Nurburg track day, Nurburgring
Nordschleife (Wednesday, 29
November 2010).
5 Mike Breslin, Cover Story, Circuit
Driver, 94 (May 2007), p. 30.
6 Young, Complete Motorist, p. 284; and
Michael Balint, Thrills and Regression
(New York, 1959), cited in Peter
Wollen, The Crowd Roars: Suspense
and Cinema, ed. Jeremy Millar and
Michiel Schwarz, Speed: Visions of an
Accelerated Age (London, 1998), p. 77.
7 Charles Jarrott, letter to Filson Young
(April 1904), in Young, Complete

236_280_Drive_End__ 07/08/2012 11:19 Page 255

CITIES

8
9
10

11

12
13

14

255

Motorist, pp. 2445; and Charles

Jarrott, Ten Years of Motors and Motor
Racing [1906] (London, 1956), p. 171,
cited in Joe Moran, On Roads: A
Hidden History (London, 2009),
p. 169.
Mike Breslin, Cover Story, Circuit
Driver, 94 (May 2007), p. 30.
Quoted in Young, Complete Motorist,
p. 274. See also G. Stewart Bowles, A
Stretch Off the Land (London, 1903).
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The
Founding and Manifesto of Futurism
(1909), in Marinetti: Selected
Writings, ed. R. W. Flint, (New York,
1972), pp. 3944. See also Jeffrey T.
Schnapp, Crash (Speed as Engine of
Individuation),
Modernism/Modernity, vi/1 (1999),
pp. 149.
Emily Post, By Motor to the Golden
Gate (New York, 1916), quoted in
Warren James Belasco, Americans on
the Road: From Autocamp to Motel,
19101945 (Cambridge, 1979), p. 88.
Lou Marinoff, Persistence Pays,
Times Higher Education Supplement,
1941 (1 April 2010), p. 47.
Melvin M. Webber, The Joys of
Automobility, in The Car and the
City: The Automobile, the Built
Environment and Daily Life, ed.
Martin Wachs and Margaret
Crawford (Ann Arbor, mi, 1992),
pp. 27484.
Loren E. Lomasky, Autonomy and
Automobility, The Independent
Review, ii/1 (1997), pp. 528. See also

Sudhir Chella Rajan, Automobility

and the Liberal Disposition,
Sociological Review, liv/1 (2006),
pp. 11329.