ABSTRACT
The sheer physical effect of automobiles and driving on cities has been immense. By the 1920s and 1930s, film-makers were showing the arrival of automobile traffic as part of the developing modernity of the city. In many films, driving can be seen as a way of finding an appropriate setting within the world that allows the driver to disappear into the background of the urban environment, or to simply be comfortable within it. Alternatively, many films use urban car driving as a way of increasing the tension between the conditions seeing and being seen, between discovering and being discovered. Corky's refusal of an opening into the big-time world of Hollywood suggests that the interstitial world of driving is at once a place of reality and of escape, and it is this tension between the real and the imagined which pervades many cinematic portrayals of automobile driving.
