{"id":808,"date":"2016-04-11T19:45:25","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T18:45:25","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=808"},"modified":"2022-08-01T11:49:13","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T10:49:13","slug":"bicycles-cinema-and-the-spectacle-of-mechanical-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/cemore\/bicycles-cinema-and-the-spectacle-of-mechanical-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"Bicycles, cinema and the spectacle of mechanical movement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bruce Bennett<\/a>, Senior Lecturer at LICA<\/a>, is doing research on a very convivial tandem: bicycles and cinema. He tells our readers why the bicycle was the perfect subject for the first film, in 1895.<\/h2>\n

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I am currently studying the history of cycling on screen<\/a>, and in the course of this research have come across many films featuring cycling and cyclists from around the world. These range from slapstick silent comedies<\/a> through dramatic feature films<\/a>, performance art<\/a> and sports documentaries<\/a> to public information films promoting tourism<\/a> and road safety<\/a>. Many of these films are interesting in their own right, but they also allow us to track the historical development of cycling cultures. Moreover, in placing the cyclist within the film frame, they invite us to understand cycling as a form of public performance, an act of signification that has a variety of complex meanings. In other words, analysing cycling on film<\/em> allows us to reflect upon and understand the significance of cycling in contemporary society with regard to social class, for example, gender and sexuality, conceptions of childhood, national and racialized identities, leisure or consumer culture. The bicycle is a vehicle for a wide range of meanings.<\/p>\n

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One of the striking aspects of this research is that cycling and cinema emerge at almost exactly the same time since the cycling boom of 1895, which followed the development of the modern \u2018safety\u2019 bicycle<\/a>, coincides with the first commercial film screenings. This is no accident; the safety bike and the film camera were products of developments in manufacturing technology, sharing a mechanism of chain-driven wheels, but they were also expressions of a modernist desire for greater mobility. Both technologies allowed people the new experience of travelling at speed, seeing the world from different perspectives, and of transcending their limited social horizons. In this sense, studying the history of the cinema in tandem with the history of the bicycle gives us a rich understanding of the history of mobility from the late 19th century onwards, and the pleasures and fantasies that structure it.<\/p>\n

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The safety bike and the film camera were products of developments in manufacturing technology, sharing a mechanism of chain-driven wheels, but they were also expressions of a modernist desire for greater mobility.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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For many cinema historians the screening held by Auguste and Louis Lumi\u00e8re in the Salon Indien of the Grand Caf\u00e9 in Paris on December 28th, 1895, marks the emergence of cinema as a new medium. Although this was not the first public film demonstration, it was these screenings, and the practicality of the \u2018Cin\u00e9matographe\u2019, the lightweight camera\/projector\/film developer they developed that \u2018helped make the cinema a commercially viable enterprise internationally\u2019 (Bordwell and Thompson: 9). The admission charge was a franc for a programme of ten single-shot films, each lasting less than 50 seconds, and \u2018within weeks the Lumi\u00e8res were offering twenty shows a day, with long lines of spectators waiting to get in\u2019 (Ibid.: 10). The cycling boom of 1895 thus coincides with the entry of this new medium into global culture, and this coincidence is marked emphatically by the first film in the programme.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n Part of the scenography used for the exhibition \u2018Lumi\u00e8re! Le cin\u00e9ma invent\u00e9\u2019, Paris, Grand Palais, 2015. Photo: Pascal Amoyel.\n

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The first screenings opened with the film, \u2018La Sortie de L\u2019Usine Lumi\u00e8re \u00e0 Lyon<\/a>\u2019, which shows employees leaving the Lumi\u00e8res\u2019 photographic factory, passing through the factory gates and heading off in different directions along the road outside the factory. There are three existing versions of the film, the first of which \u2013 the first film they shot \u2013 was filmed on 19th March 1895, and it is significant in a number of respects. Broadly, the subject of this film is bodies in motion, but more specifically we see scores of industrial labourers, the vast majority of them women, spilling out of the factory, presumably at the end of a shift. The film, which is itself an artefact of new industrial technology, presents us with a symbolic image of industrial modernity as a crowd of workers stream through the gates towards the camera. Tom Gunning has observed,<\/p>\n

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The twentieth century might be considered the century of the masses, introducing mass production, mass communication, mass culture. We could redescribe this transformation as the entrance of the working class (putatively the driving force of any age, but often eclipsed in the realm of official representation) onto a new stage of visibility (Gunning 2004: 50).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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The cinema is a crucial component of this \u2018stage\u2019, such that, by 1936, Walter Benjamin could write, \u2018any man today can lay claim to being filmed\u2019 (Benjamin 1968: 233). In this regard it is significant that the film shows us a photographic<\/em> factory, a crucial part of the communications infrastructure of the emergent mass culture. The other nine films include shots of a baby being fed, trick horse-riding, a practical joke, a street scene, and a couple of blacksmiths at work, but the factory-gate film that opened the original screening condenses the accelerating social changes brilliantly into a single moving image. It is a revolutionary film in several respects, but one detail that is rarely noted is that all three versions of the film feature cyclists. As well as pedestrians on foot, dogs, and two horse-drawn carts, there are several bicycles pushing through the crowd.<\/p>\n

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