From naked bike rides to spectacles of motion: cycling and the rider-bicycle in experimental documentary film

ABSTRACT

Although the relationship between cycling and cinema has recently received some attention from researchers, there are no accounts on how it links to experimental documentary film and avant-doc storytelling. To fill this gap, I take a phenomenological stance on cycling to discuss the rider’s embodied experience of travel in a few short and stylistically distinct works, Chuck Hudina’s Bicycle (1975), Jon Behrens’ Girl and a Bicycle (1995), Vanessa Renwick’s The Yodeling Lesson (1998), Ken Paul Rosenthal’s I My Bike (2002), Tomonari Nishikawa’s Into the Mass (2007) and Tony Hill’s Bike (2013). Despite a different format and narrative focus, which questions the genderedness of cycling, explores it in a trance and dreamlike state or turns it into the sheer spectacle of motion, all films echo the recent phenomenological turn in film studies and present cycling as a multisensorial, kinesthetic practice, demonstrating how the rider-bicycle hybrid assemblage relates to both cycling mobilities and the riding environment. Compared to narrative and fiction film, experimental documentary film looks at the bicycle identity as a distinctive subject of inquiry and maps cycling not so much through its traditional connotations as through the actual lived experience, one that is not necessarily already pre-determined, mediated and ideological.

KEYWORDS:

• Experimental documentary film
• cycling mobilities
• bicycle identity
• corporeal turn

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Although the corporeal turn in the avant-garde film has been mostly associated with sexually explicit films (Elder 1997; Osterweil 2014), it can be also applied to the study of ‘non-body’ genres, including cycling films. Experimental film is often concerned with a multi-sensory embodied cinematic experience of the image that typically features overly layered and textured surface qualities and operates on the spectator’s sensorium through its frequent and explicit depiction of movement, bodies and corporeality. Similarly, in experimental cycling films, the viewer’s growing engagement in the mobilized virtual gaze is enhanced by means of: (i) a mode of spectatorship based on the perceptual simulation of cycling and constructed with editing, the voiceover, reflexive narration and subjective camera viewpoints; (ii) distortion of an episodic and linear travel narrative (Quiroga 2017, 230).

2 An excerpt from The Yodelling Lesson can be accessed on Vanessa Renwick’s website: http://www.odoka.org/the-yodeling-lesson. The film was also released on DVD under the title Nomads and No-Zones (Other Cinema Digital, 2004). Vanessa Renwick (b. 1961) is a Portland based artist and filmmaker. Since 1981, she has created over fifty works, including experimental documentary films, videos, sculptures, photographs and installations, which reflect on the relationship between place, landscape, environment, radical politics and the body.

3 Into the Mass can be accessed on Tomonari Nishikawa’s Vimeo website: https://vimeo.com/104335024. Tomonari Nishikawa (b. 1969) is a Japanese-American filmmaker and chair of Cinema Department at Binghamton University. Since 2003, he has completed ca. twenty experimental documentary films, which explore the process of art making and the idea of documenting different phenomena through the lens of the film medium and particular filmmaking techniques.

4 Bike can be accessed on Tony Hill’s Vimeo website: https://vimeo.com/68390728. Tony Hill (b. 1946) is an award winning British independent filmmaker and Associate Lecturer at the University of Plymouth. Since 1973, he has been working with moving image, photography, installations and sound and has made over twenty experimental short films at the intersection of sculpture and cinema.

5 Bicycle can be accessed on Chuck Hudina’s YouTube website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPqocD8MNsY. Chuck Hudina is a long-time Bay Area experimental and documentary filmmaker, photographer and visual artist. Since 1971, he has made around twenty award-winning films, which often explore the tension between fiction and documentary and mirror Hudina’s interest in the study of motion, art, place, landscape and photography.

6 I My Bike can be accessed through Canyon Cinema Foundation. Ken Paul Rosenthal is an award winning American independent filmmaker, educator and photographer based in the Bay Area. Since the mid-1990s, he has made several documentary films, which experiment with home movies, archival and found footage, animated text and hand-made image to explore the intersection of natural and urban landscape, art, performance, madness, mental health, trauma, healing and transformation.

7 I My Bike draws on the found footage from a renowned and undated early cinema’s actuality, A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire. The original print was shot by the Miles Brothers, possibly four days before the infamous 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which struck Northern California on early Wednesday morning, April 18. Known for preserving the city’s downtown right before it almost ceased to exist, this rare historical artifact has been reworked on screen several times, most notably in Ernie Gehr’s Eureka (1974). Both the original film and its reworkings capture the hustle and bustle of the then California’s most prosperous city, including automobiles, some of which were hired to drive past the camera several times, horse drawn carriages, buildings, stores and pedestrians, many wearing formal attire and bowler hats.

8 Girl and a Bicycle can be accessed on Jon Behrens’ Internet Archive website: https://archive.org/details/GirlandaBicycle. Jon Behrens is a Seattle based filmmaker, photographer and composer. Since the early 1980s, he has created over seventy works (along with original sound designs), including abstract, hand painted, optically printed, diary and city symphony films.

Additional information

Funding

This work is funded by the National Science Centre, Poland, under the project Lost highways, forgotten travels: The road movie in the post-war American avant-garde and experimental film through the lens of women and men filmmakers (grant number UMO-2018/31/D/HS2/01553). narodowe centrum nauki.

Notes on contributors

Kornelia Boczkowska

Kornelia Boczkowska, PhD is Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Culture at the AMU Faculty of English. She has received several research grants and is the author of two books and ca. forty other publications on independent, experimental and avant-doc film. Her most recent papers have appeared in Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, Mobilities, Short Film Studies and other peer-reviewed journals. She is currently the PI of the National Science Center post-doctoral grant (no. UMO-2018/31/D/HS2/01553). She also serves as Book Reviews Editor for the European Journal of American Studies and has guest edited the special issue of Papers on Language and Literature on experimental film and video. In 2022, she has received the scholarship from the Polish Minister of Education and Science for outstanding young researchers.