Bikes and Movies: A Brief History Of Motorcycle In Cinema (original) (raw)
Related papers
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture , 2019
The paper analyzes the ways in which Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963) and Steven Spielberg's Duel (1971) draw on and challenge selected road movie conventions by adhering to the genre's traditional reliance on cultural critique revolving around the themes of rebellion, transgression and roguery. In particular, the films seem to confront the classic road movie format through their adoption of nomadic narrative structure and engagement in a mockery of subversion where the focus on social critique is intertwined with a deep sense of alienation and existential loss "laden with psychological confusion and wayward angst" (Laderman 83). Following this trend, Spielberg's film simultaneously depoliticizes the genre and maintains the tension between rebellion and tradition where the former shifts away from the conflict with conformist society to masculine anxiety, represented by middle class, bourgeois and capitalist values, the protagonist's loss of innocence in the film's finale, and the act of roguery itself. Meanwhile, Anger's poetic take on the outlaw biker culture, burgeoning homosexuality, myth and ritual, and violence and death culture approaches the question of roguery by undermining the image of a dominant hypermasculinity with an ironic commentary on sacrilegious and sadomasochistic practices and initiation rites in the gay community. Moreover, both Duel's demonization of the truck, seen as "an indictment of machines" or the mechanization of life (Spielberg qtd. in Crawley 26), and Scorpio Rising's (homo)eroticization of a motorcycle posit elements of social critique, disobedience and nonconformity within a cynical and existential framework, hence merging the road movie's traditional discourse with auteurism and modernism.
The Motorcycle Diaries of a Topolect Cinema
Screen, 2023
In this essay, I address the limitations of the highly politicized discourse found in recent scholarship on Taiwanese-language cinema (taiyupian). To construct a new theoretical model for studying transnational dialect cinema, I carry out a two-step topological-topographical analysis in hopes of circumventing the essentializing tendencies of current emphasis on ethnicity and nationality. To register the rich dynamics afforded by this two-pronged analysis, I focus on Weixian de qingchun (Dangerous Youth, 1969), a new wavish film made at the tail end of the taiyupian boom, as a site where questions of the social, the economic, and the libidinal surface, congealing around the proliferation and circulation of the trope of the motorcyclist in global 1960s media.
Easy Rider and the conventions of the road movie
Huarte De San Juan Filologia Y Didactica De La Lengua, 2000
So me da y !' d like to see so me of th is country we ' re travelling thro ugh '. This spontaneous, 'out-of-the-hat' comment made by the protagonist of Nicholas Ray's early Road Movie The,J' Live by Nigh t (J 948) is a good illustration of the fa ct that, despite their apparently simple storyline-some character(s) moving from point Ato point BRoad Movies bear a deeper insight, differing substantially from mere travelogues in their distinctive concept of movement. This characrer's complaint suggests thar in Road lV lovies the journey along a given road does nor constitu te an essential ingred ient to get ro know a fo reign culture or a distant location in depth. Their ultimare aim is not the reaching of a particular destination eithcr. but the 'journeying', the travelling process, the being and experiencing 'On the Road' or, as Cen•anres wrote in Don Qui:xote, 'Vale más el camino que la posada, mi fiel Sancho' (Cuero 1995:130-133). However, this simple plot framework allows for the widest range of possibilities in terms of wandering protagonists, road happenings and unforeseeable meetings between strangers, therefore resulting in rhe Road Movie's rieh and varied corpus. And ir is not only this new genre's versatile and prolific historv. but also its sometimes blurred and overlapping borderlines wirh other fi lm genres that makes its analysis and classification somewhat complex. This paper intends ro analyse the most relevant traits of this new fi lm genre by examining whar has become the foundational Road Movie: Dennis Hopper's Easy Rirler (l969). The point of departure will be the study of the genre's m a in infl uences and the complex blending of cultural and historical facrors from which Road Movies derive, all of them analysed through Hopper's film. Road Movies such as Easy Rirler are direct heirs of the \Ve ste m in the first place. Thev not only share the travel narrati\•e (eirher by car or on horseback, its essence is the same) but also rheir main characters' eagerness ro move, through which they both represent an important pan of US American national identi ty, though each in its own way. The stereotype of the \Ve srern hero is that of a tough mobile maJe superpatriot who rravels from the East rowards the \Vc;st, so far coinciding \\-ith the stereotype of the early road hero. l\lobility, acrion and maleness are closely related
Participant observation and interviews with bikers on the Old Road north of Sydney demonstrate that the performance of a motorcycling identity is related to naturalised discourses of masculinity. The mythological scripting of motorcycling masculinity is reinforced through the motorcycling media and the socialisation and initiation of young riders. The myths that are enacted are essentially myths of mastery, predominantly over self and machine, but by extension over nature, women and homosexual masculinities. We argue that the non-conforming behaviour of motorcyclists reflects not class-based alienation and resistance to authority but the performance of motorcycling mythologies based on aggressive masculinity.
Culture on Two Wheels: The Bicycle in Literature & Film
While this collection is certainly not the first to address the bicycle and its significance in literature and screen, it is, as the editors state, "the first sustained examination to date" of such a vast project (9). Jeremy Withers and Daniel Shea undertake the mammoth task of incorporating several countries and over a century of history to declare that the bicycle is indeed more than just
2021
This thesis examines the political dimensions of linguistic and semiotic preservation of biker subculture as it relates to race, gender, and class among contemporary bikers in the United States. Propelled by the biker colloquialism "freak out the squares" – which is used to draw boundaries of ideological and behavioral difference between bikers and the non-biker mainstream – I investigate the embodiment of this prominent attitude within the aesthetic, material, and language practices of a subcultural group of bikers who preserve a style of choppers (custom motorcycles) that originated in the post-WW2 and countercultural eras. This style historically has influenced mainstay American biker ideologies and its authentication has become evident through the working-class cultural production of motorcycles, magazines, dress, and language that reproduce sexist, racist, and xenophobic fields of signification. While this style paints bikers as stereotypically White, male, libertaria...