Doing Death Over: Industrial Safety Films, Accidental Motion Studies, and the Involuntary Crash Test Dummy

The aesthetics of auto-destruction so prevalent in silent slapstick both reflect the parallel standardization of the automobile and cinema, and explore the new urban, familial, visual, and affective structures these technological revolutions ushered in. Not until the 1960s does this frequent intersection of car accidents and visual culture recur, and, when the trope does return, it does so across a variety of media and genres: in the road movie and the art film (particularly those of Jean-Luc Godard); in the work of artists such as Ant Farm, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg; and in the mass media.2 By 1966, as the U.S. involvement in Vietnam continued to escalate, President Lyndon Johnson went so far as to designate highway safety as "the gravest problem before the Nation next to the war in Vietnam"; and, on August 29 of the same year, the front page of the New York Times declared, "Traffic accidents are now being seen not as isolated events, but as manifestations of an epidemic which--like other diseases--can be studied in public health terms."3 Yet, how do we move between the disaster images of the sixties that cut across the mass media, art, and film, and that are marked by their resonance with a culture of revolution, war, and public protest, and the auto-destruction that preceded these images in the slapstick comedies in the 1920s and 1930s? Does the generative relationship between film and the automobile accident disappear between the 1930s and the 1960s, or does it migrate to less visible spaces? Working to expand our understanding of the cinematic accident beyond the familiar high points in the visualization of the technological accident--the twenties and thirties (in slapstick), the risky sixties (think of Abraham Zapruder's film of the Kennedy assassination); Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile (1966); the media coverage of the Vietnam War; the release of auto-apocalyptic films like Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967); and the post-9/11 period--this essay explores how, where, and with what consequence accidents intersect with the media of film and photography between the 1930s and the 1960s, focusing in particular on the complex ways in which the films and the discourses surrounding them within this interstitial period engage and shape the concepts of risk, responsibility, and citizenship in relation to the technological accident. Neither embracing nor condemning speed per se, I go in search of a hybrid auto-cinematic space that includes scientific research, as well as industry-sponsored safety films, to explore how the private car becomes a figure though which to engage the complex question of individual and collective responsibility in the face of uncontrollable and sometimes antisocial drives, addiction, and sexual desire.