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Bicycling
June 2005
AAAAAAAAAND ACTION!
The Bicycle Film Festival Shows Our Sport From All Angles
By Andrew Vontz
While “Welcome to the Jungle” thunders over the sound system at Mighty, a hip San Francisco dance club, more than 400 people pump their fists in the air and scream like Axl Rose. Couriers and courier wannabes clad in cutoff pants with Timbuk2 bags fill the folding chairs on the dance floor and sit alongside professional types in slacks and middle-aged guys with beards and specs. The crowd didn’t come to Mighty for a glam rock revival, though. “I’m here to see some bike movies,” says Rob Horning, a production designer and mountain biker from Los Angeles in Diesel jeans. The valet bike parking racks out front are filled to capacity while the crowd witnesses the first night of the Bicycle Film Festival, an exhibition of 29 narrative and documentary movies about bikes during the course of three nights ranging from “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” to a documentary about double-decker bike jousting.
Who are all these people? Why would anybody want to LOOK like a bike messenger? What’s a bike film festival anyway? And, uh, where do I have to go to get somebody to valet park my bike? The strange mix of people at the four-year-old festival might be perplexing if you think of the Tour De France, spandex shorts, and the Sunday group ride when you think of bicycling. But in SF, New York, Los Angeles, and other big cities around the country, fixed gear bikes and the courier look are hot. Just think of all the Timbuk2 bags you see non-pierced, non-courier types carrying in business class. The crowd includes everyone from Catherine Choo, 33, an attorney and bike commuter with Pantene perfect tresses, to Victor Vesey, a bike activist with wild hair past his shoulders, and strong b.o.—that’s bike odor. “If you have the excuse of a ride you’ll go and ride a bike because it’s within a certain context,” Vesey says. The festival has provided such an excuse and the valet bike parking makes the festival a bike friendly destination. The San Francisco Bike Coalition, a 4,500 member strong brigade of cycling activists, is responsible for the parking. It’s a service the Coalition provides at events around the city almost every weekend. Imagine that—people riding their bikes to get around the city. Wild, huh?
The festival is the brainchild of Brendt Barbur who created the festival four years ago in New York City during a ride that ended when he was doored into an oncoming bus. He sustained a separated shoulder, a spinal cord injury, blown out knees, two sprained ankles, and a broken jaw. While lying in a hospital bed he concluded that he was supposed to work as a bike advocate, not an actor, his pre-accident gig. “I think riding a bicycle should have more respect. There are health benefits, environmental benefits, social benefits. It’s community service.” So he created the Bicycle Film Festival.
If you think you’re not a part of the culture at the festival, you may be right. Or maybe you’re dead wrong. The last time a bike messenger showed up at your office with a FedEx, he probably smelled. But didn’t your chamois stink after your last epic? And didn’t you ever wonder what, really, that guy’s daily duty was like, how he rode, and where? Admit it, you’ve wonder if you could hack it as a bike messenger, just like you wonder if you could hack it, somehow, on Lance’s wheel. And because of that, trust me, you want to see what these 400 people are seeing right now, since the crowd is slackjawed at the riding they’re witnessing on a giant screen above Mighty’s stage. In Lucas Brunelle’s “Drag Race New York City” it’s the dead of winter and cross-dressed riders are riding faster than traffic as they scream through red lights, weave in and out of gnarly gridlock, and dodge packs of terrified pedestrians. They’re riding in a race a lot more dangerous than a stage of the Tour. It’s called an alleycat and the messengers are trying to be the quickest to complete a series of checkpoints scattered throughout the City. Up on the screen, a rider on a fixed-gear narrowly avoids a head-on with a bus. Down in the crowd, a woman in pigtails with a Kryptonite chain wrapped around her waist screams back, “Totally sick!”
Maybe being packed into a beer-soaked club watching fringe cycling movies isn’t your cup of tea. Fear not because I spent an entire weekend arm-warmers deep in the muck to bring back this report on what’s happening in the world of bike movies. The lunatic fringe isn’t for everyone—including some of the people at the festival. “I barely take recreational rides. People who do novelty experiences that happen to be on a bicycle, great, but I don’t find it very attractive,” says Chris Carlsson, a festival attendee who runs a print shop, commutes, and happens to be one of the founders of Critical Mass. Bike films might not be ready to conquer the world, but there were a number of films at the festival that could get just about anybody fired up to down a lo-carb muffin, pull on some spinning shorts and get on the road to burn some calories. Here’s the dirt on four of the best films I saw that are a sure fire way to stoke any cyclist.
RED LIGHT GO
USA, 2002, Mini DV, 52 min.
Directors: Manny Kivowitz, Ben Barraud, Toby Barraud
“I’m a professional cyclist,” ponytailed New York courier Mike Dee says at the beginning of this hour-long documentary about the ins and outs of working as a messenger in NYC. This flick chronicles the camaraderie and culture that couriers create through riding, racing, and drinking. We learn that cars, cabbies, pedestrians, and people in offices almost universally treat messengers like crap, that they make almost nothing for what they do, and that respect is the ultimate commodity on the streets. Winning alleycat races is how they get respect and “Red Light Go” features footage of multiple races. “I’ve often compared a messenger and his track bike to a Jedi Knight and his sword because you have to be able to look in front of you and predict when f#@$d-up things will happen,” says Evil E, courier and race facilitator extraordinaire who plans a Halloween alleycat race—from his jail cell. The race footage gets redundant after a while and the camera work, editing, and narrative could all be tightened up, but Red Light Go will make you want to ride in the city.
HOOD TO COAST
USA, 2003, Video, 9 min.
Director: Rev Phil
Ever looked at your child’s 12”-wheeled bike and wondered what would happen if you tore off the training wheels and raced it down a mountain pass road? I haven’t either. But I can tell you that it’s one of the more funny things you’ll ever see someone do on a bike. The Zoo Bombers are a crew of Oregonian merry pranksters who assemble in the parking lot at the summit of Mount Hood to bomb the road to the bottom on an impressive arsenal of kiddie bikes. It’s most spectacular entertaining, and stupid adventures humankind has undertaken since people started hucking Niagara Falls in barrels. No one dies during the race, but I almost puked from the nauseatingly shaky handheld camera work. Hood to Coast looks like something you might have shot in fifteen minutes with your dad’s VHS camcorder in 1987, but like the Bomber’s bikes, there’s something magical, childlike, and intrinsically appealing about their adventure.
WARRIORS: THE BIKE RACE
USA 2004, Video, 17 min.
Directors: Josh Weinstein, Michael Green, Jesse Epstein
In August of 2002, 800 riders divided into 68 teams took to the mean streets of New York to complete the Warriors alleycat race, a ride from Manhattan at dusk to Coney Island at dawn the next day. But this wasn’t just any old alleycat. The huge turnout made it the biggest alleycat ever held in America and each team was decked out in outrageous themed costumes that ran the gamut from Mad Max wear to sci-fi gear to threads that imitated the look of gangs in the original film. Think Halloween meets Hollywood meets bike race and you’ve it. The racers were bikers from around the world. Teams had to complete outrageous tasks at each checkpoint from wrestling a giant man to the ground to competing in a trackstand competition to downing a quart of ice cream. This short video follows the race from start to finish intercut with clips from the feature film. The editing and videography are lo-fi but it looks like so much fun you won’t even notice.
TOUR OF LEGENDS
The Netherlands, 2003, 16-mm, 68 min.
Director: Erik van Empel
Did you know Gino Bartali’s victory in the 1948 Tour de France may have saved Italy from civil war? Did you know that Bartali liked to smoke cigarettes after each stage to relax? Neither did I but after Tour of Legends will make you fall in love with a Tour you never knew about. To capture the ’48 Tour and the hard men who contested it shortly after World War II van Empel interviews racers who rode it. They recount leaving behind jobs as coalminers and butchers to contest the Tour under the most brutal of conditions during an era when riders changed their own flats, carried their own food, and resorted to giving each other piggyback rides to get to the finish line. Beautifully shot on film, this brooding feature length piece concludes with a drive up the Galibier at night that fades into ghostly footage of the race up the same Col in the ’48 Tour. An instant classic and a must see for anyone who wants to touch the beating heart and history of the Tour.
Of course, the BFF is clearly more than the movies in it. It’s a chance to see all of the craziness happening around the bike world in one weekend in San Francisco. And to live it, too. What to do with all of that excitement? Go riding of course. On Saturday riders lined up for a chance to ride in an alleycat just like those seen in Red Light Go and Drag Race NYC. Like all good rides, this one finished with meat and beer in Golden Gate Park where dozens of bikes lay in the grass. For the Aeolian ride later that day, fifty people donned custom-made white windbreakers that inflated into bulbous shapes to ride through the city as a rolling art project. Like these rides, many of the featured movies might seem as far removed from your cycling life as Yoda frolicking in the Dagobah system. But before you turn your nose up at these almost invisible frequencies at the far end of the cycling spectrum, watch one of these flicks and see if you don’t walk away stoked. I dare you.
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