Big-Screen Bikes

Eighty-two-year-old international avant-garde film legend Jonas Mekas has kicked off most every Bicycle Film Festival with a story and a sharp bugle blast. Four years ago, his anecdote went like this: "I was riding my bike back home in Lithuania, and I was pushed into a ditch by a horse-drawn carriage, but I got back up and got back on my bike. I love riding my bike!"

With 55 features and shorts from around the world, the festival, housed at Mekas' Anthology Film Archives since 2001, casts a net to every corner of the cycling world. While festival organizers worked to cull existing bike-oriented films the first year, word has spread such that 350 submissions arrived in 2005, some made specifically for the festival, which will soon expand to London, L.A. and Tokyo. Highlights of the program include an elegantly shot feature on the muddy sport of cyclocrossing (Pure Sweet Hell, USA, 2005), the minute-long Flash-animated Dead People Ride Bikes, Too (USA, 2005), a 29-minute rumination by Mekas and Virginie Marchand, and Jorgen Leth's rarely screened A Sunday in Hell (Denmark, 1973). Others cover the difficulties of riding a bike in the Bible Belt; BMXers in Long Beach, Brazil, Russia, and beyond; polo and karaoke via bicycle; the now-legendary 2002 NYC Warriors bike race; and a hefty dose of messenger-culture braggadocio.

While the festival will premiere several documentaries about last summer's RNC protests, don't assume a particular brand of politics. "We're celebrating a lifestyle of bicycles. I think it's infectious," says Brendt Barbur, who founded the festival in 2001 after being hit by a bus while riding his bike.

His efforts aren't entirely anodyne. One film is clearly an 18-minute Puma ad (Messenger, USA, 2005), and Puma sponsored another that ran in this year's Tribeca Film Festival and last year's BFF. Barbur defends Puma's sponsorship and his inclusion of the films: "I think a lot of messengers view themselves as urban athletes, and Puma is supporting them. They're thrilled to have a sponsor." It's bicycle advocacy more along the lines of viral marketing than civil disobedience. And there's no denying that the experience of pedaling on two wheels is a thrill, exhilarating and sweet. Clare Hill's four-minute We Are the Traffic (UK, 2004) is a visual poem, neat prose floating over luminous Super 8 footage of London bike lanes, crosswalks and pavement. It notes, "We get there faster than the taxis/ buses, tubes and trains/ a little breathless but pleased."

-Kate Crane