Movies and the Car Culture
How have movies influenced the car culture and the auto industry? With my research, I hope to find out how these two seemingly different genres are interrelated and what kind of effect they’ve had on each other over the years. To answer this we first must look at the beginning of the last century. Cars and movie grew up together (Volti, 2007, p. 294-296), so naturally, there would be some overlaps between the two cultures. There have been car movies since the early 1900s, almost as early as there was film itself. At the beginning, the “movies” were actually documentaries about the car. These documentaries came mostly came out of America. They attempted to illustrate the vast number of automobiles available in the US. The French and the English, on the other hand, created what they called “trick films” like How it Feels to be Run Over (1900), How to Stop a Motor Car (1902-03), and The Delights of Automobiling (1903). These movies “represent formal extremes that would ultimately prove less appealing to a mass audience than narrative approaches combining and subordinating realistic and expressionistic elements to the demands of telling a story” (Smith, A Runaway Match: The Automobile in the American Film, 1900-1920). The purpose of the trick films were to actually just show off the possibilities of film while the documentaries, unfortunately, highlighted that cars were really just toys for the rich. These two examples of cars in film were essentially two different ways to “get the greatest number of potential customers to buy the vehicle they offered” (Smith, A Runaway Match: The Automobile in the American Film, 1900-1920). After a while, Hollywood and Detroit became partners of sorts.