Department of Film Studies

Tue 18th November 2008 17:15 to 19:15

Centre for Film Studies Talk: Lars Kristensen: Bicycle Cinema: Bikes, Racing and Master Narratives

Moving images of bicycles and its riders are multiple: from the ‘first’ (Leaving the Lumière Factory, 1895), to modern classics like Bicycle Thieves (1948) and its post-communist remake Beijing Bicycle (2001). Moreover, many well-known directors have started their filmmaking careers with films that offer bicycles in pivotal roles, for example, Ridley Scott’s Boy and Bicycle (1965), Roman Polanski’s lost first film The Bicycle (1955), or Colin McKenzie in Forgotten Silver (Botes and Jackson, 1995). The topic of this talk will be cinema’s affinities with the bicycle; as the above-mentioned films illustrate, the bicycle and cinema share an intricate relationship.Scanning film theories for a framing set up, I will be ‘studying sideways’ revealing master narratives that make possible cross-genre and transnational generic readings of bicycle cinema. There will be an emphasis on the films that concentrate on the bike race and, in particular, the documentary films of Danish Jørgen Leth, The Stars and the Water Carriers (1974) and A Sunday in Hell (1976), and the autobiographical film, The Flying Scotsman (2006).