Al Rees
The idea for the screening came from a seminar organised with the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre and the Vehicle Design department of the RCA, a few months before this major conference on the future of transport. Here, with John Bound, we explored some ways in which cinema and motor cars meet - and often clash! The selection of work shown at the Royal Geographical Society was a brief selection from a 'long list' discussed with staff and students at the initial half-day session.
The screening at the conference was first of all intended to open the debate with some film entertainment, as well as to imply some of the key themes for debate - notably, the fascination of vehicles, sometimes as fantasy objects, along with their changing social function.
Motor cars first appeared in film almost as soon as cinema was invented in the late 1890's. We took two comic (but telling) examples by the Brighton pioneer Cecil Hepworth, 'Explosion of a Motor Car' and 'How it Feels to be Run Over' (both 1900). Cars and disaster were linked from the start!. The second of these minute-long films is notable for its 'point-of-view' shot as the car heads towards the audience, and for its handwritten Music Hall tag line, which reads "Oh! Mother Will Be Pleased!"
The motor car as a source of jokes is taken up by 'The Magnificent Ambersons', where Orson Welles shows the family trying to start an early motor car in the snow while - in rhythmic counterpoint - they are overtaken by a horse and sleigh. A decade later, in 'Rhythm' by the experimental animator Len Lye, a more rapid montage shows a car being made in one minute flat. This 1957 ad, although Chrysler rejected it, heralds rapid-eye digital editing as well as a distinctly multicultural ethos (the workforce is shown as both black and white, male and female, and the film is cut to African drumming and blues riffs).
American car-power is taken up in two emblematic moments from 'Rebel Without a Cause' with James Dean (1955) and the 1978 'Driver' with Ryan O'Neill. In Nick Ray's classic and neurotically driven vision, two youths race their cars to the edge of the cliff in a game of dare. One of them literally goes too far. In Walter Hill's 'cool' thriller, the 'driver' of the title demonstrates his getaway skills in a car-park to his terrified clients. This sequence also demonstrates the continuing vigor of montage editing.
The French vision of American cars is less frenetic, even when Jean-Paul Belmondo is on the run (as in the opening of Godard's 1959 'Breathless') and when the car is the iconic Studebaker. His laid-back reflections on driving, girls and the world make an apt contrast too to Tati's parody of regular living in 'Mon Oncle' (1958), where symmetry is imposed on moving vehicles which all seem to advance in straight lines.
If Godard and especially Tati are able to make the ordinary world look like another planet, the aptly title ' Forbidden Planet' of 1956 introduces a new vision starring Robbie the Robot. Its space-buggy and auto-driver are innocent precursors of programmed vehicles in such contemporary sci-fi films as 'Total Recall' and 'Bladerunner', where violence and global breakdown are implied in the dehumanized city. Surveillance and revolt - the themes of a key ancestor-film such as 'Metropolis' of 1926 - are made visual in the vehicle, whether out-of-control or on a mission to kill.
While the urban documentaries of John Grierson's era (like 'Roadways' of 1937 or 'The City' of 1939, both directed by Alberto Cavalcanti) showed the same problems as we have today on overcrowded roads blocked by private vehicles, they had more optimistic conclusions. The urban sci-fi film of the mid-80's to the present is grimmer, even as it projects our own times and fears into an imagined future (an aspect of 'futuristic films' discussed by Christopher Frayling in a recent lecture on architecture and cinema at the RCA). But among the pollution-dust, the grime and the fallout, another vision emerges from the grand cinematic machines of Paul Verhoeven and Ridley Scott. This world is multicultural, exchanging many languages, ethnicities and identities. The vehicle is part of this nexus. No longer an isolated object in the centre of the frame, as in classic films of the earlier 20th century, the new vehicle is part of its environment, integrated with its speed and time, part of the graphic mix which comprises the modern cinema. Rarely seen as a whole object, the vehicle is no longer the fantasy machine of an earlier era but dispersed as a series of viewpoints inside the cabin, or outside in the whizzing space of the city-jungle. Vision, identity and speed have never been so closely linked as in the postmodern sci-fi cinema, where distinctions - such as mind/body in 'Total Recall', or human-robot in 'Bladerunner' - are questioned if not abolished.
Karl Ludvigsen
Thank you for that excellent presentation Al…The car has a sort of presence that we know and respect and we hesitate to change that, we are not sure about changing it, when we do change it perhaps we will transform something that for many of us is part of our lives and has been part of our lives for 3 or 4 or 5 generations. So, that’s not too easy to do, so it’s a mixed blessing the depth of character that the car has in our society. The other point that you made very vividly this evening that there is no better way to get across new concepts and ideas than the cinematic style and presentation and its telling us that if we have new ideas about urban transport and the car in the city and new concepts that we want to develop and present in a convincing way we are going to have to use these kinds of techniques - new cinematic techniques, virtual reality - we’ll have to show it and we can show it, that’s the remarkable thing with the techniques that are available and the sooner we can show new ideas that don’t exist yet we can show them in a very convincing way and I am reminded of some film that Renault did a few years ago showing some concept cars and they showed these concept cars in a very realistic urban environment in a very convincing way.
That’s the message that we need to take away this evening and following that, we’d like to leap well into the future with the help of Dr Sheila Ronis, I will very happily introduce her. Sheila is the President of the University Group which is a management consulting firm based in Michigan, she’s also an adjunct Professor at the University of Detroit, Mercy in Michigan. Sheila holds a doctorate in Organisational Behaviour from Ohio State University, at the University of Detroit she founded and directed the Institute for Business and Community Services and in order to assist the US automobile industry in becoming globally competitive. Previous experience that Sheila had includes Ameritec Publishing, AT & T, Michigan Belle, and for the US Energy and Research Administration a national energy programme. Among her clients are General Motors, Ford and the Department of Defence and it says here that Sheila has authored 48 papers on issues from national security to automotive futures and knowing Sheila that figure is already out of date.
© The authors and Royal College of Art, 2000
This is an unedited transcription of proceedings: a fully edited publication will be available later in the year.
Last Updated: 14 April 2000
Corrections and comments to: David Whittle