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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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On Saturday night, a big bunch of Toronto cyclists watched The Triplets of Belleville under the moon and stars in Trinity Bellwoods Park (a Bike Week screening by CBN). Because of the bikes-and-film connection, it was good to see Cinecycle's Martin Heath and bike courier/filmmaker extraordinaire John Porter in the audience. It was chilly, but most of us had blankets and beer. People sitting nearby made popcorn on a parafin stove.
My favourite image in the film is this strange machine, a sort of pedal operated mini-cinema projecting film of the road, with three cyclists staring into it, pedalling furiously and thereby powering the image that captivates them. At the climax of the film the whole contraption takes off and a car chase ensues, but the cyclists remain oblivious to anything but the film in front of their noses. This weird hybrid sailboat/bed/platform trundles along the city streets, glowing in the night. It's a very unusual yet oddly familiar image. There are certainly a lot of resonant connections between bicycles and film. I often think about this odd passage by Marshall MacLuhan from Understanding Media, the chapter titled, "Wheel, Bicycle and Airplane":
"...the movie camera rollsup the real world on a spool, to be unrolled and translated later onto the screen. [...] ...the airplane rolls up the highway into itself. The road disappears into the plane at take-off and the plane becomes a missile, a self-contained transportation system. At this point the wheel is reabsorbed into the form of a bird or fish that the plane becomes as it takes into the air. [...] Unlike wing or fin, the wheel is lineal and requires the road for its completion. [...] The bicycle lifted the wheel onto the plane of aerodynamic balance, and not too indirectly created the airplane."