Bicycle Trip
16mm,12 min., 2005, USA
Starring: Peter Garaway
Animation: David Gardener, Music: Ray Barbee, Camera: Roman Bellisario
World Premiere: Anthology Film Archives, NYC, 2005
Finding Form: A Study of Movement, Structure, and Light In Bicycle Trip
Bicycle Trip begins, traditionally enough for a surf film, with an animated sequence. Santa Cruz artist, Dave Gardner, takes a line and bends it into a wave that spills on a forested shore, then spins into a clicking bicycle wheel with a sound not unlike the mechanical thrum of a movie reel. The world of the film is set in those opening seconds: a bicycle, waves, and a mountainous environment. What follows is more suggestion than statement, more mood than fact; images of a crackling fire, a turning bicycle wheel, and a lone figure regarding the flames. He tires, his eyes close, so begins the dream …
We linger with form in Bicycle Trip-the gnarled limbs of the majestic oak against the deep colors of the evening sky suggest to us a sheltering goodness in the trees.
And throughout we’re invited to wonder at all the movement in these lives of ours.
The surfer (Peter Garaway) awakens to the day, wetsuit peeled to his waist, trusty single fin under arm, and sturdy beach cruiser gliding across the land, downhill to the waves in perpetual movement. Ray Barbee’s acoustic guitar strums over the scene, diamonds of light sparkle the meadow, our surfer drawn to the coast. This is the country feeling of living and surfing out amongst the meadows and hills of Santa Cruz. The film/dream/meditation is an overview of such a lovely place a place you may know, but have never seen in this way. But to touch on the study of form once again: trees are such wise old friends their enduring shapes tell us. But the buildings too, the bridges, the roads, even the cars are wonders of design and knowledge in the late afternoon light of Santa Cruz. And weaving it all (a most circuitous route to get to the waves) the surfer moves towards his destination.
“I came to the studio one morning and told Petey about a dream I’d had,” Parick Trefz said in explaining their collaboration. Garaway, Trefz and Roman Bellisario, acting as first camera man, worked together to bring Bicycle Trip into the collective, visual world by translating the invisible world of their own concepts and ideas. So there’s the dream, there’s the nod to the beauty of Santa Cruz, perhaps a nod to the beauty of simplicity too in the beach cruiser and single fin in our otherwise overly motor-drive age. But there is also surfing. And to a great extent, the surfing represents Peter Garaway’s vision. Where the film goes into wave riding it’s Peter’s baby- he shot a lot of the surfing footage. The surfing also contributes to the film’s study of form and contrast. The color, action, and texture of the surfing all play against the black and white the deeper grain—of the region, the static and transitory elements that comprise the physical world. As much as anything, Bicycle Trip is a celebration of movement and form.
The featured surfers have all been deeply influential to Garaway-both the great Santa Cruz surfers as well as other surfers like the Currens and Rob Machado-as he developed his approach on the waves of his home waters. Santa Cruz is notorious for its legions of great wave riders and highly competitive line-ups, and it’s been through steady, quite study and practice that young Garaway has found his place in the ranks of Santa Cruz’s surfing elite. Yet clearly, in the making of this film Peter Garaway shows an appreciation for the whole of things. Hardly a slam-till-you-drop surf video, this first feature of his, Trefz, and Bellisario makes a case for a contemplative look at the relation of movement to stasis, form to chaos, and, come to think of it, a compelling case for the way that surfing is perhaps our best example of how the solid attends the amorphous, of how light makes form, and for the very way that we pass through the world.
—Christian Beamish