Bicycle Kick (6)
By:
April 2, 2010
We might define Fairy Splendor as furniture transfigured, for without transfiguration there is no spiritual motion of any kind. But the phrase “furniture-in-motion” serves a purpose. It gets us back to the earth for a reason. Furniture is architecture, and the fairy-tale picture should certainly be drawn with architectural lines. The normal fairy-tale is a sort of tiny informal child’s religion, the baby’s secular temple, and it should have for the most part that touch of delicate sublimity that we see in the mountain chapel or grotto, or fancy in the dwellings of Aucassin and Nicolette. When such lines are drawn by the truly sophisticated producer, there lies in them the secret of a more than ritualistic power. Good fairy architecture amounts to an incantation in itself. —Vachel Lindsay, Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
Lindsay was a strange poet and a prescient film critic. To him, the cinema’s power was found in its capacity to re-enchant the world, to evoke an earth-magic as old as the human race. But looking at the bicyclists in Edison’s movies today, a different side of that power makes itself apparent. On the one hand we have the evidence of another era: the clothing, the scenes, even the shadows seem to delineate a time removed from our own. And yet the kinesthetics of cycling are intimately familiar; kids on a street corner in my neighborhood, although differently attired, are rehearsing the same motions. The films reveals how the gestures of the bicycle are like a modern vernacular — but our fascination is powered by an age-old glamor.
Sixth in a series of twelve.