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Songs of the Bicycle
The Bicycle Film Festival Returns to Chicago
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
By Nathan Carley
The bicycle may be an obscure subject for a film festival, but after attending the Bicycle Film Festival in August, it’s clear there’s plenty to explore. In its seventh year, with a touring roster of 16 cities worldwide, the BFF is a celebration of the bicycle in all its forms, and of the urban bicycle community itself. In New York City, where the festival was born, satellite events include an art show, parade, trick contests, a race and, of course, parties.
Bringing the cycling community together to celebrate the beauty of their instrument requires wrangling a growing culture that is rapidly separating into several different directions. Talking with festival organizers from London and New York City about the essential groups a city needs for the festival to succeed, three distinct sets emerged: messengers and track-bike enthusiasts who makeup the hard-edged urban cycling scene, healthy and environmentally aware riders many of who pour in from the suburbs and hipsters who find that the youthful bicycle community appeals to their sense of taste. Naturally, the individual branches of the community don’t easily coalesce.
But this attempt commands attention. The Chicago festival drew several notables, including Gary Fisher, a legend in the cycling world who is largely credited with the invention of the mountain bike as it is known today. Fisher, who was honored at one of the screenings, is a rangy man who sports glasses and wears a soul patch. I approached him to get his thoughts on the growth of the bicycle community in this country and abroad. As he outlined the state of the world today, he liberally used the word “fuck” and his frustration was on full display. Fisher has kept himself involved with the design of bicycles at Trek and sees hope in the production of more utility, around-town bicycles. These practical cruisers equipped with racks and lights have long been popular in Europe for everyday transportation, but have not caught on in this country. He says that as people are “waking up” and “taking back the land” in America, the bicycling community will see mainstream growth.
The question is: How will the bicycling culture handle that growth, and how will it affect its personality? The fear is that it could polarize the different groups of riders. Fisher related a story about an old friend who was around at the beginning of mountain biking back in Marin County, California. The friend refuses to ride mountain bikes now because they sit in the garage of every home in America, regardless of the owner’s enthusiasm. The sentiment is typical of many riders. In urban areas 20 years ago the track or fixed-gear bicycle was popular only with messengers and racing cyclists. Now it is becoming a hip youth hobby in big cities, inciting the old guard who bemoan the loss of cycling’s purity.
The bicycle community might not be ready to embrace mainstream growth, but it will at least settle for mainstream acceptance. In the films screened at the Chicago festival, riders were called everything from “dorks” to “some form of indigenous centipede.” The festival’s founding director, Brendt Barbur, knows firsthand about the disrespect commonly dealt to urban riders: He started the festival as a direct response to the condemning faces that leaned over his body after he was run over by a bus in New York City eight years ago. They seemed to believe that as a cyclist on a Manhattan street he deserved to be run over. He recalls one businessman telling him to “get the fuck out of the street” as Barbur pulled his own broken body onto the sidewalk.
After recovering, Barbur approached avant-garde artist Jonas Mekas about starting a film festival that would celebrate the bicycle and give its community a stronger voice. Mekas helped found the Anthology Film Archives, which houses one of the largest collections of avant-garde and experimental film in the world. Barbur is quick to call this the festival’s true home even as it has outgrown the Archive’s walls.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the films that were most popular at the Chicago festival were ones that appealed to the outlaw nature of the cycling world. The best film screened was the independent feature Monkey Warfare from Canadian director Reginald Harkema. Its Freudian plot is drawn largely from political activism and the role played by bicycles. Annual contributors to the festival Lucas Brunelle and the Neistat brothers built their reputations on impressive, artistic videos from the fringes of the bicycle culture.
When Barbur was asked about his favorite films shown, he touched on one called A Sunday in Hell, a 1977 documentary from Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth with only a few prints in circulation. This film exemplifies the purest aspects of the festival; it follows the unconventional and filthy one-day race called Paris-Roubaix across the cattle-roads of northern France. Leth’s 20 cameras and his helicopter capture the beauty of the bicycle and the race brilliantly. Leth has since said he wanted to make a documentary about cycling because “it deserved to be sung about.” Likewise, it seems like the perfect answer to the question: Why have a film festival about bikes?
The Bicycle Film Festival is rolling into several cities this summer — click here for more information