Learning on ScreenDrive: Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes
But the concentration on film is far from being a purely prosaic act. Firstly, cinema, more than any other media, provides the most direct sense of what it actually feels like to drive, showing how driving involves movement, bodies, thoughts, feelings, spaces, sights and sounds. Cinema articulates what is feels like to drive in space, and also records this experience in a semi-historical manner.
Second, as director Cecil B. De Mille noted, the movie and automobile industries grew together because they both reflected a love kinetic energy, motion and speed. As such, movies help us understand the thrill of modernity, not only through aesthetic experiences of space through effects of framing, signs, mobility and so forth, but also 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 idiosyncratic everyday behaviours. In short, film shows how we often live dynamically and without constant codified thought.
Third, movies do not stay on the screen, but are constantly reproduced in the minds those who have seen them. Driving in cinema is re-lived through the act of driving, and of course in turn re-represented through yet later films. Movies are not, therefore, a simple reflection of driving, but are an integral part of how we perceive and engage in this practice. Driving embodies cinema, just as cinema visualizes driving.
Fourth, as Baudrillard also noted in America, the city has seemingly stepped right out of the movies, and therefore, in order to understand cities, we should not move inwards from city to screen, but the other way round, beginning with the screen and moving outwards to the city. In other words, recognizing that our experiences and city spaces are not natural but are constructed through diverse means, then exploring cinematic depictions of driving helps us to identify ways in which certain aspects of driving culture and experiences have been expressed, encouraged and heightened.
… film shows driving as hugely mediated and varied modern experience
Fifth, and last, a vast range of different driving experiences are presented in movies, and so cinema helps debunk any premise of there being any single kind of driving; film shows driving as hugely mediated and varied 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 the richness of everyday life, as something which we nearly all do, yet in disparate and divergent ways.
