(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Bikes vs Cars
Director: Fredrik Gertten, photo: Janice D'Avila and Kiki Allegier
In the opening of Miami Vice (Michael Mann, 2006) we witness a suicide scene added to a freeway. An informant has been discovered by the criminal environment he has infiltrated, been tortured, and has ended up silencing many of his colleagues. Now he stands on the side of a freeway and learns that his family has been killed.
The shattered man looks around – the cars buzz around in Miami's darkness of night – and leaves. We do not see him being hit, but understand it from what we see and hear: The sound fades in the background, and we see a long, line-shaped bloodstreak behind a truck.
This is a scene that – in the typical Mann-Impressionist style – gives a strong sense of the mood of the place and the situation. We hear the anonymous cars in the background, see diffuse traffic lights under a dark, contourless sky, and take in the view of the suicidal, staring blankly into the urban night.
It might seem a little strange to start a text about Bikes vs. Cars (Fredrik Gertten, 2015), a prolistlist documentary, by highlighting this scene from Miami Vice. But it was actually the first scene I thought of after Gertten's movie. Not that it matters in itself – but despite all the differences between the two films, I think they share something – something I consider a core quality in Bikes vs Cars.
In the chaos of big cities. The scene described above gives, as mentioned, a feeling of anonymity of cars. There is something particularly sad about this suicide because it happens so easily, because it is so impersonal, and because it happens because of two, three steps. The feeling of this anonymous – and deadly – thing about cars also becomes important in Gertten's film. And although Mann is an action lyricist, while Gertten is a documentary rhetorician, they employ similarly impressionistic means – including an intensive manipulation of sound and camera settings that define people's subjective point of view – to place us in the midst of a chaotic urban car world.
Film critic Joe Friar calls Bikes vs Cars an "informative documentary", but that description can give a completely wrong picture. Gertten is a pathos-filled filmmaker with a clear message, and uses cinematic effects to create a nightmarish image of a society overrun (!) Of cars.
During the film we visit Los Angeles, São Paulo, Toronto, Copenhagen and Bogotá. At the center is the city's traffic environment, and cyclists trying to survive in this environment. One of the key steps the director makes is to consistently place those he interviews (and us) in the midst of the buzzing traffic noise. A professor of urban planning, Raquel Rolnik, sits in a car she hates and talks about the daily, hour-long queues while she is stuck in a traffic jam. Several times we see a cyclist in São Paulo (Aline Cavalcante) maneuvering ahead in a dangerous urban environment; we get a point-of-view so we ourselves "sit" on the bike and sense the dangers.
Activism. Cavalcante is an ativist, and one of the film's main characters. In one of the scenes, she sits at the PC at home in the apartment and communicates with an activist friend. There is one reason why Gertten chooses to film her in this homely, peaceful, closed setting: She has a puff of grass in which she rests her feet. A slogan-like image of a society out of sync with nature.
These are rhetorical grips from a filmmaker who has made an activist movie. One can praise the film for the same qualities one can criticize it for: an intense portrayal of the troublesome, dense, noisy, polluting, impractical and inhumane of the city's transport system. Bikes vs Cars is not a documentary that strives for impartiality or nuance; it is a clear attack on a society that relies too heavily on passenger cars.
What makes it hard to get people to drop the car? One of the film's main points is that the automotive industry is a huge economy that obviously does not want people to start cycling. The automotive industry has a gigantic marketing power, and the film becomes an emotional polemic against this power, where cyclists are idolized and motorists are demonized.
The film becomes an emotional polemic against [the automotive marketing power], where cyclists are idolized and motorists demonized.
You can call it bicycle propaganda or bike advertising. And there is something annoying about selfish and slick slogans like "The bicycle, an amazing tool for change", which the producers, for example, fronts on the film's website. But all the time we are bombarded by car advertising and living in a world that has to change its emission habits, is it perhaps positive with the crass counterparts exemplified by this film? Do we have informative and nuanced documentaries, or do we also need emotional contraptions for the mass produced car commercials? In any historical situation, and not least in a society overflowing with advertising, documentaries must in any case enter into the struggle for the aesthetics of things, not just inform about the state of things.
The way Gertten insists on portraying cars as reckless, faceless and deadly can be called documentary manipulative and flat – one could argue that the film produces rather than evokes the impressions left behind. But there is something positive about turning down the manufacturing of cars as symbols of freedom, flexibility and high status. Just as the automotive industry uses advertising to link positive values and lifestyles to its product, Gertten employs cinematic means to construct a negative image of the same product. It is manipulative, but perhaps it is a necessary compromise in a voluminous marketing world?
Bikes vs. Cars, though, also points to some facts and presents arguments in a more sobering way, as in its mention of traffic jams. Here, the film sets out to explore alternative forms of urban infrastructure. City planner Rolnik says the delicate traffic jams in São Paulo have a positive effect: A crisis forces greater openness to look at things differently, to participate in change. Here perhaps other films will take up Gertten's initiative and explore new ideas about urban planning.
In Bikes vs. Cars, Gertten is largely content (to lend a phrase to one of the film's activists) to "create a sense of immediate necessity" to change the existing system. He thus chooses – as a skilled rhetorician – some of the worst car cities in the world, and some of the worst car sounds from the film's toolbox. Gertten wants us enthusiastic on behalf of the bike, and that we are bothered by the cars.
Rationality and enthusiasm. One of the interview subjects is a car enthusiast in the US, who is interviewed during a motor-driving car accident. He explains that he is concerned about the environment, but that he will never give up on car interest.
That's how it is for many people: Rationally, we understand that we should change some of our habits (or society's transportation system), but emotionally we can't quite understand it, or really act on it. Here's another problem with the climate crisis: The problem is not affective (like the sound of a car engine), but rational for most of us.
Gertten is just trying to affect us emotionally. Therefore, he sets the car sounds to the max, and simply tries to make this urban community troublesome. He wants us to know the mortality of cars, the stupidity of traffic jams and the freedom of the bike.
War. It focuses on the many deaths in traffic – and some examples are grotesque. We hear about a cyclist who got his arm torn off, and about the motorist who drove on, with his arm left in the car. After a while he lifted it out the window.
In a filing, Toronto politician Rob Ford says his "heart is bleeding" for the cyclists who die in traffic, but that they "really have to thank themselves." Gertten uses this unkind comment to his advantage. And not only that: He responds to it by presenting the cars as a voice of mortality.
Do we perhaps also need emotional contraptions for mass produced car advertising?
Ford believes cyclists are waging a "war on cars." He aims at those who want their own bike lanes on the roads. Everything is war for some politicians, and not least in the United States the war rhetoric has been extensively used in the fight against social problems: "War on Crime", "War on Drugs", "War on Terror", "War on Poverty". Gertten ends his film with an appeal that this is not about a "war" but about living together in a good community. But it is hard to believe completely in this appeal; the whole movie uses all the power to portray cars as attacking enemies.
Fortunately, Bikes vs Cars are not without humor. Copenhagen is considered one of the world's most bicycle-friendly cities (we are told that about 40 percent of Copenhageners cycle to work), and I was excited when Gertten introduced the sequence about the Danish city. It could get ugly – a self-satisfied tribute that didn't know its limitations. Fortunately, humor is added to this sequence, which avoids the otherwise sentimental and assertive character of the film. We are put in the perspective of a taxi driver. Not only does the sequence act as a comic relief – it is also a perspective release. Now we get a motorist's sarcastic view of cyclists.
Bikes vs Cars was partially funded through a Kickstarter campaign. The film should be seen in light of this. It works well as a backlash and a frontal assault on an economically muscular automobile industry that spews out glamorous car advertising and intensive lobbying (the film states that German carmaker BMW supported Angela Merkel's party before allowing for less stringent emissions requirements). Car use is not only environmentally hostile, the film claims, but outdated, not practical and asocial.
Gertten's documentary thus corresponds to the numerous advertisements that give cars a positive personality. Here lies one of the film's (problematic) strengths: It goes a long way in depersonalizing cars, giving them a killing anonymity, and thereby destroying its status as a symbol of freedom.
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