the guardian newspaper on wednesday of this past week ran an article by matt seaton on the first london bicycle film festival. this was held at the cochrane theatre in holborn from september 1 - 3 and it even has a website at www.bicyclefilmfestival.com from which it is immensely pleasurable to discover that there are also bicycle film festivals in new york (would you expect anything less?) in may, los angeles in june, san francisco in october and, surprisingly enough, tokyo in november.
these festivals don't show the last running of the tour of flanders or lance's seventh win in the tour. attendees (always thought that was a good word) at the london event were shown a series of short movies, including one of a chap managing to publicly steal his own bike several times in full public view without being stopped, a movie involving new york city bicycle couriers and one about the american bicycle celebration 'critical mass' - in short the the 'seamier' side of cycling, and i mean that in the nicest possible way.
while we all have our own wee niche of cycling - weekend mountainbiker, commuter, person who spends far too much on carbon fibre... whatever, the idea of a filmfestival that celebrates cycling as an entity on its own, is much to be desired in my book. maybe we could persuade them to run it on the screen machine, since, short of a hefty travel bill, it's the only way those of us in the scottish hinterlands can take part.
photographs from the various festivals show a healthy number of bicycles parked outside the cinemas, and as matt seaton states in his guardian article, how else would you arrive at a bicycle film festival? one of the festivals even had valet cycle parking.
but the best thing about the festivals and the website has much in common with edinburgh bicycle co-op's slogan 'the revolution will not be motorised'. www.bicyclefilmfestival.com simply states p.s bikes rule! never a truer word was blogged.
so why am rambling on about this? well, festival organiser brendt barbur started the whole wheelie thing by trawling the archives for movies with bikes in them. this year he was choosing from 350 short movies submitted by 'ambitious young videographers with a biking passion'. and this is where we come in.
since there are doubtless many of us out there in washingmachinepost land with a canon handycam and a copy of imovie or somesuch, wouldn't it be a great idea to rush out, film something bikie anad send it in. well, maybe there's a bit more too it than that, but in principal it seems like a good idea to me (yes, it would wouldn't it:-) if you figure this to be true, make a click or two to go to their website and have a look.
meanwhile i may just have a word with graham at the screen machine about bike racks
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................this website got its name because scotland's graeme obree built his championship winning 'old faithful' using bits from a defunct washing machine
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................as always, if you have any comments on this nonsense, please feel free to e-mail and thanks for reading.
this column appears, as regular as clockwork on this website every two weeks. (ok so i lied) sometimes there are bits added in between times, but it all adds to the excitement.
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