Ken Paul Rosenthal

From Naked Bike Rides to Spectacles of Motion: Cycling and the rider-bicycle in experimental documentary film  (*excerpt)

by Dr. Kornelia Boczkowska

© November 2022

A dark side of cycling, which emerges as a multi-sensory as well as a memory- and thought-provoking urban experience pre-programmed with accidents, is explored in Ken Paul Rosenthal’s I My Bike, a short cinepoem and collage of image, text and sound. The film uses biking as a metaphor for mortality while exploring the relationship between the rider’s body and surrounding urban space. Through its reliance on the double image with an oval-shaped vignette being inserted into the central part of the frame at all times, the film occasionally contrasts the contemporary footage of biking down San Francisco’s Market Street with historical footage of the city’s pre-earthquake landscape, possibly depicting the streetcar’s ride down the same street. With the camera mounted on the front of a bicycle and trolley, which locates the vanishing point of the image at the center of the frame, I My Bike presents either a solitary or group ride through San Francisco’s streets, at times reminiscent of the Critical Mass events. Rosenthal’s emotionally powerful voiceover narration, which guides the viewer’s interpretation of the film, continuously traces the conflict between a child’s and an adult’s obsession with death, where cycling becomes a means to navigate through danger and negotiate one’s attitude to dying. Unlike a child, who often acts out scenes of killing, yet is unaware of the meaning of death, an adult is more conscious of their mortality, as implied by the artist’s disembodied, trance-like and therapeutic narration, which expresses his loss of innocence after moving to the city, referred to as ‘a buoy in a sea of concrete,’ his increasing confusion, fragmented state of being and finally, his longing for death so that he can ‘float through a sunlit portal’ and get recycled:

There is a movie in my mind:
I bike into on-coming traffic
Car door punctures my face
Pause. Rewind.
Car door punctures my face.

Interestingly, the double image both evokes a twofold consciousness typical for childhood and adulthood and superimposes vintage images of the turn of the twentieth century Market Street over the contemporary footage of modern-day bicyclists, merging past and present as well as urban architecture and the body:

My arteries are jammed with the intermittent pulse
of traffic lights, brake lights, and neon.
I see me in the blur of bus windows.
I see me hung from a telephone pole.
I see me in a puddle of shattered glass.
In my bathroom mirror I see:
Fallen bridgework
Ruptured pipelines
Oil spills and exhaust.

Both POVs and the voiceover narration move back and forth between childhood and present moments to dwell on the numerous possibilities of accidents and ultimately death, connecting the filmmaker’s own body to that of the living city. Set to the sounds of a stick in the wheels spokes, which gradually turn into the sounds of a working film projector and gamelan-like music, I My Bike brings attention to a phenomenological approach to the practices of cycling, seen as an affective and perceptual experience. As the rider’s flesh fuses physically and mentally with San Francisco’s urban landscape, traffic and the passing vehicles, Rosenthal’s work establishes the human-machine or, more specifically, the rider-bicycle hybrid assemblage, in which the bicycle becomes an extension of the rider’s body, creating the various forms of haptic travel experience and new subjectivities organized around the cycling body: ‘I glide past the flashing turn signal of a freshly abandoned car wreck. A battered lighthouse that has steered me away from the rocks.’ The image of Market Street, caught in a particular moment of time, elicits a tactile sense of place, expressed in an ongoing transition from past to present, where collective memory, history, personal reminiscences and the present-day narrative are physically inscribed into the landscape and bear the marking of the past. In I My Bike, the double image simultaneously enables one’s immersion in the past and places emphasis on the present moment, which is cinematically translated into numerous transitions between an irreversible past, irrevocably stuck in the present, and a harsh, painfully real and continually evolving present, embodied by the rider’s perpetual movement down Market Street.