Undertaking this research on the history of bicycles and cinema has involved looking differently at films. As well as noting those scenes in films and TV programmes where characters are riding bikes, trikes and all sorts of related mobility aids, I’ve found myself continually noticing the fleeting presence of bicycles in the background of street shots or dumped in the corners and hallways of characters’ houses. The bright green American-made mountain bike hanging on the wall of Jerry’s New York apartment in the sitcom Seinfeld is a particularly visible example. Although we never see him cycling, nevertheless the bike is a prop that conveys information about the character – his concern with his health, his slavish attention to urban fashions, and his impulsiveness; like most exercise equipment anybody ever buys that sits unused in a garage or cupboard, it is a mute reminder of failed ambitions to remodel his life.

So, analyzing the significance of bicycles in film involves a different way of looking at filmic space. Scanning the film image for the presence of a bike means paying particular attention to the mise-en-scène of the film – the sets and locations – and what quickly becomes clear is that the cinema is full of bicycles, although they are often far less loaded with meaning than Jerry’s bike. A bicycle is sometimes just a stubbornly distracting flash of colour, shape or movement in the film frame – an element of the visual texture of the image.

 

Inevitably, watching Kathryn Bigelow’s new film Detroit (2017) earlier this week – in preparation for a new course I’m teaching on women directors this autumn – it was a bicycle that caught my eye. In the film’s account of the outbreak of the riots in July 1967, it is the theft of a bicycle that triggers the disorder. The film opens with a police raid on an unlicensed bar; as the occupants are arrested and loaded into black Marias on the street, a crowd gathers and starts protesting. As the police withdraw, the crowd begin to throw bottles and stones at their vehicles, shouting, jeering and laughing, and then one man breaks open the shutters and smashes a shop window across the street, pulling a gold bicycle out of the window display. A few others join him in emptying the window, and the film then shows us buildings being torched, and the city burning, as violence escalates with the national guard and the army being brought in to support the police.

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Although the bicycle is a marginal detail, in the context of a film about the ‘motor city’ (and Motown) it is a reminder of the various inequalities experienced by African-Americans. The film’s prologue explains that after the first world war, African-Americans migrated north in search of industrial jobs and a less segregated society, although they found themselves dealing with unemployment, economic hardship and a different, less overt form of segregation as white Americans evacuated cities for the economic security and racial homogeneity of the suburbs. In this sense, the film is a meditation upon racialized mobility, telling a story of economic migrants who have found themselves stranded in a city with vanishingly few escape routes (and subject to curfew during the riots). The fact that Detroit was home to America’s major automobile plants – General Motors, Packard, Chrysler – and was thus central to a culture that regards automobility as a right and an essential freedom, and car ownership as a sign of adulthood, compounds a bitterly ironic sense of the unequal distribution of mobility. Whereas in a European film, the shiny bicycle might have been a rich symbol of freedom, mobility, and employment, in this film by the most American of directors, it is a sign of the opposite, a reminder of how little agency the angry protestors have.

 

Kathryn Bigelow’s critical reputation is that of a particularly self-aware film-maker. University-educated, with a background in the NYC art scene and a familiarity with cultural and literary theory as well as film history, her films tend to be regarded as critical reflections upon the film genres she works with; not just war films, action films, or science fiction films, but formally innovative interrogations of the ideological structures and value systems embedded in mainstream cinema. In that respect, the fact that the riots begin with a bicycle theft invites us to think about the relationship between Detroit and Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di Biciclette [Bicycle Thieves] (1948). A key example of post-war Italian neo-realist cinema, Bicycle Thieves has provided a template for low-budget, politically committed film-making around the world, as well as serving as a measure of artistic accomplishment; as Woody Allen observed glumly in a 2015 interview, ‘You always set out to make Citizen Kane or to make The Bicycle Thief and it doesn’t happen’. Although she is a big-budget Hollywood director, Bigelow’s last three films have been an exploration of cinematic realism, blurring the boundaries between historical reconstruction, reportage, documentary and fiction. This trio of narratives about state violence, The Hurt Locker (2009), Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Detroit, were all written by a former journalist, Mark Boal, while Detroit and The Hurt Locker were lensed by British cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, who previously worked on several major films by Ken Loach. For Detroit, Ackroyd had vintage lenses mounted on the digital cameras used by the crew, to achieve a historically authentic visual quality, as the film intercuts digitally shot footage with stock film and photography from the 1960s. Thus, in Boal and Ackroyd, Bigelow has found collaborators who are similarly preoccupied with questions of accuracy.

 

So, while the stolen bicycle is a minor narrative and visual detail in Bigelow’s long, dense film, it offers us a key to understanding the intentions of the film-makers to produce a film that approaches its brutal material with a similar degree of authenticity, empathy and anger to that displayed by De Sica’s film.