Moving pictures, changing cultures: on the book fast cars, clean bodies

Abstract

[Excerpt] Postwar western societies became deeply enamoured with the seduction of the ever evolving and positivistic everyday life; they became entangled in a kind of belief — disguised as an act of conscience — on the new, optimistic zeitgeist. In Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, Kristin Ross addresses this phenomenon as the result of a shift of perception towards reality, created under the guise of modernization, an epitome standing for a change in industrial production and its objectives which came to introduce radically new consumption patterns and cultural habits. Although the book is speci!- cally based on the French postwar social, political, cultural and economic changes, it is, nonetheless, interesting to also acknowledge it as a study that inherently includes in its undertone the spectre of a Europe to come, along with the laying out of its cultural liaisons with America and its struggles with the processes of decolonization. The story Kristin Ross so eloquently conveys is a very speci!c and thorough account of the process of readjustment of postwar French historical identity, an identity reconstructed explicitly by overlapping both France’s modernization and decolonization processes. This leads to the acknowledgement and analysis of the classic opposition between interior and exterior, here seen through a kaleidoscopic lens of disciplines, facts and testimonies. [...]