He sees in the windshield the images of all his fathers before him merging into his own face, and then into people who he supposes are his descendants.
The windshields frame images of landscapes he made at different times of a frozen Lake Michigan, the California desert and the Grand Tetons — far from the actual locations of the cars.
The heads-up speedometer image on the windshield changes to an infrared picture of the animal or pedestrian.
In images of active windshield wipers or lozenge-shaped rearview mirrors, Mr. Bordo creates blurred transparencies and fractured spaces.
In images of active windshield wipers or lozenge-shaped rearview mirrors, center lines break and red lights multiply for an effect that is deliciously and darkly comic, but also abstract and rather ham-handedly beautiful.
Abandoned near a bus stop, one S.U.V. still bore the signs of Dec. 2's celebration: heart-shaped green stickers peppered the hood, streamers in the national colors fluttered at the rear window, the windshield was plastered with an image of Dubai's ruler, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum.
These concepts are supported by the current technologic trends of the major display suppliers, with futuristic solutions as transparent or flexible displays spread on the dashboard and the windshield surface, with a large use of virtual images and special light effects involving the whole car interior.
Niskanen (who died of cancer in 1990) opens the film with images of the countryside shot through a windshield, presumably that of the car carrying the policemen to their deaths.
If you want to make unity out of the city's architecture, you must get in the car and zigzag around town, turning the windshield this way and that, as if it were a lens, piling image next to image like a David Hockney photomontage.
Black and white photographs -- the bottom of a truck, a lone orchid, a shattered windshield -- move from screen to screen, until each image seems to move off the stage.
