Ronde van Vlaanderen 2022: Flemish at Heart

(Text: Victor Morozov)

The absurdity of watching a cycling race by the road can only be grasped after the passage of the last rider. How long did it take? Twenty seconds, maybe. Then they are gone: a moving tapestry of flashy colours, lines, and dots disappearing around the corner. All you have left – for evidence – is perhaps a shaky video or a blurry photo and, in any case, the sensation of being sandwiched against the protection fence by those whom you suddenly feel a kinship with. The crowd quickly disperses, each one going his or her way. What was that all about? A question not to be asked on such occasions; for with road cycling, as with love, we tend to be driven by passion, acting irrationally in search of the mythical precise moment.

I once read a wonderful essay of “cinephile semiology” by film theorist Patrice Blouin, where he stated, in regards to the Tour de France, that “[t]he open field spectator pays for his amateurism with the high price of frustration: hours of waiting for a lightning passage.” This is certainly true in most cases of professional road cycling – as opposed to the “mountain spectator”, who “benefits from a natural effect of slow-motion” –, but not for the Ronde van Vlaanderen. As I was quick to discover by myself, the appeal of the Flemish sea level, with its picturesque small towns and crowded pubs and this well-known desire for cycling – as spectacle, praxis, topic of conversation – is not something you can shrug off without an effort. That’s how I ended up spending the afternoon in Oudenaarde, the finishing location of the race, although I originally meant to reach Koppenberg, one of the decisive climbs of the course. But the prospect of a Kwaremont (6,6%) – the beer, obviously, not the homonymous climb – to be sipped amongst the locals, and the shiny showcase of the De ronde store – a Parthenope of sorts for cycling consumerism – took the better of my intentions to head uphill.

Now, I have to say that back in October 2021, when I watched the Paris-Roubaix finale on the famous velodrome, soaking wet as I was from hours spent in the stubborn rain of the Nord, I realized that these on-site experiences could serve – if certain conditions were met – as pipes filled with sheer emotion flowing in your direction. These conditions, of course, come together under the ideal of a beautiful race, whatever that means. Beautiful, this year’s Ronde surely was. I could already see it coming some hours earlier when, overlooking the fully packed Grote Markt in Antwerp, Florian Vermeersch of Lotto-Soudal blew a ram horn (!) and was answered by his teammates’ haka-like celebration, quickly adopted by the crowd. Yet it’s not the entertainment sequence per se that interests me, nor its charismatic host, Victor Campenaerts, whom I hoped to see up front at the end but didn’t; it’s this simple gesture by which Vermeersch put his horn into his back pocket with a matter-of-fact pose, as if the textile feature had been conceived for this purpose all along.

With the horn placed where gels and bars are usually kept, Vermeersch drove his team off-stage, concluding a moment of interactivity which otherwise contrasted with a monotonous series of riders taking a smooth right turn, waving their hand, then going away. For all its resemblance of principle with televised cycling – the same landscape (open field), gesture (pedaling) and visual shape (peloton) for hours – this presentation could only underline the massive, almost shocking dichotomy between the rider as showman (or, in any case, homme de parole) and the rider as athlete. It was not these fundamental platitudes – “amazing spectators”, “I love this race”, “glad to be here” – which everyone kept saying over and over, amounting to a hypnotizing show of excess, that ultimately intrigued me. It was the superimposition between, say, Pogačar receiving a huge bottle of champagne, and the same Pogačar dominating all the climbs that did, as it lingered in my mind throughout the day in the form of an irreducible montage.

The presentation was more than just glamorous show – it was also a ghostly ceremony, as the name of Wout van Aert, the absent VIP of the race, landed on everyone’s lips, either in dismay or in relief. Yet the men contending for the cobble prize this year seemed determined to outlive his shadow. They rode with particular generosity towards energy waste. Pogačar – who else? – proved capable of changing the rules of the game by himself, storming past the peloton as if on an electric bike. Only Kasper Asgreen, for a brief period, and Mathieu Van der Poel, the revenant, were able to respond. Yet it all got out of hand in the last few hundred meters, after what looked like a perfect collaboration between the two leaders, who controlled the last 30 kilometers at a steady pace. But after all this effort, so intense it made everyone in Oudenaarde’s central square keep silent in awe, Pogačar tried to play it safe: the gratuitous gesture turned into selfishness. It doesn’t take more to invoke the wrath of the gods of cycling. There was this incredible moment when, thanks to the frontal video camera, all notions of perspective became ineffective, and it was suddenly unclear whether the two in front were within reach for the two men who set off in pursuit. As it turned out, the gap had indeed closed in – so much so that Pogačar found himself in the unlikely position of losing both a massive sprint and a tight breakaway. De Ronde was actually testing hybrid vehicles in its own way.

The image of the day was not, however, the one with Pogačar raising his arms in deep frustration, although it did occur almost simultaneously. Indeed, one could make out the silhouette of a man jumping beyond the protection fence and advancing down the road just as the remaining carré des as was sprinting for victory. And if this act became an image, it was not by means of recklessness – what’s this compared to the woman who caused the crash of the entire peloton on the last Tour de France? – but through a sort of poetic reverse shot to the actual race. Of course, the message that was displayed in big capital letters on this man’s chest – CLIMATE JUSTICE NOW – was no news in itself, and it would have probably gone unnoticed in the vicinity of a Formula 1 pit-stop. Yet demanding climate change awareness behind the non-motorized wheels of Van der Poel and the likes suddenly seemed to call for an in-depth examination. This person clearly belonged to another scenario of De Ronde. But he somehow participated in the same global movement of discarding utopias that we experience everywhere now. His message alluded to the end of the dream: we were to go back into the real world, with its wars and its diseases. It was painful, like light bursting into the movie theater at the end of an old classic. Eating a cone of French fries on a pub terrace in Oudenaarde, trying to catch a glimpse of the action as it unfolded on a small TV screen that was obstructed by fans moving all around, I suddenly had the vision of a fleeting moment of beauty that blossomed in the midst of chaos.

Paris-Nice 2022 in a bouquet of highlights (and a bonus)

Text: Victor Morozov

The medium

Cycling was not made for Video on demand. The temptation to skim through the race is too strong, as if denying, through a click, half a century of efforts to take hold of the spectator. Yet perhaps, by diving through the images of races as freely as possible, as I did in the course of the last week, we somehow reach the essence of the cycling event as it was when it all started: loose impressions, bits and pieces. Some glimpses you picked from the newspaper, via majestic thrills that only the purest literature – the one written by storytellers dreaming of epic heroes – can ever produce. Others you glimpsed by the road – the dusty, sloppy road that cut through the fields–, but only if you had it in you, this understanding of the inhuman pain that cycling seemed to stem from. With the arrival of VoD, one no longer depends – as far as cycling matters go – on the unique truth of television (the live broadcast), nor on the unique truth of old-school journalism (the sports column of the morning after). Following years and years of relevance achieved by maintaining an insurmountable gap between those who had access to the race itself, and those who didn’t, is this sport about to lose its media soul, after losing its popular one? Caution is advised. For ultimately, what the erratic mode of VoD watching has to teach us is hardly news: namely, that the fragment, taken out of context, is for show, while the essence of this sport, its unflinching capacity to amaze us, comes from duration. Montage interdit, as a famous film critic wrote.

Timing

These days, Slovenian Primož Roglič is a familiar view in yellow (or red), yet he doesn’t seem to be made from the same implacable material as some older (Coppi, Merckx) or younger (Pogačar) champions we’ve seen. Indeed, you never know with Roglič, and this doubt, this permanent possibility of fallacy, is what makes him so likeable. Roglič does not compete often – few ticks on his calendar –, and, of course, he always sets out to win. But he still gives the impression that each race is a stage too long. (Or too short: perhaps one of the finest moments in cycling from last year was the Olympic time trial race in Tokyo, when he maintained his maddening pace well beyond the finish line – he had won gold –, in a trancelike pose.) This last-minute improvisation from Roglič turns him not only into a sympathetic character – somehow similar to you and me –, but also into a finer showman than average. It’s as if, unlike Pogačar, who has already made it clear he has no regards for the notion of suspense, Roglič was there to make sure it all comes down to the last kilometer.

Bibliophile intermezzo

In the past few years, Guillaume Martin from Cofidis became famous not only as the highest ranking Frenchman on the general classification of the Tour de France (9th of the last edition), but also because he seems particularly adroit with words. At the end of the ITT stage in Paris-Nice this year, he found himself on the podium. Not in his cyclist capacity though, since he only took 57th – “a performance within the usual standards of the discipline”, as he said –, but as a writer for his (already!) second book, „La Société du peloton“.

A man of his words

Back to sport and, to our man Roglič. Because unlike Martin, who has been nicknamed “le vélosophe du peloton”, the Slovenian is much less a spender with his ideas. Understandably, not everyone can match Patrick Lefevere, the ultra-charismatic cycling manager. Yet watching this man talk – and keeping in mind that English might be a barrier –, one cannot help but remember those brilliant athletes whose craft, and indeed artistry, were so intense that they bore no possibility of being put into words. After taking the yellow jersey from Wout van Aert during stage 5, Roglič praised teammate Rohan Dennis as “half human, half motor”. Cut to three days later, after he secured the overall lead in Paris-Nice, and there he is again, describing van Aert with the exact same words about a motorized centaur. He should, however, pay closer attention to his metaphors: there have to be better ways to describe such wonderful a team play than this quasi-Freudian slip. The UCI is known for taking things literally.

From Roglič & Co. to BikeExchange-Jayco

All in all, it was a strange race. There lay an emptiness at its core, with the pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine and the not-so-distant horizon of death being inscribed directly into its course of events. The roads felt ghostly as only 59 riders got to the finish line, and the Course au soleil turned into a rainy battle towards the closest hot shower. The flu took out many riders. For the AG2R-Citroën Team alone, Ben O’Connor, Clément Champoussin, Stan Dewulf, Oliver Naesen and Damien Touzé had to abandon, turning the remaining crew into a fragile duo. This only reduced the stakes to around a handful of contenders. After two full stage podiums for Jumbo-Visma, finishing in yellow was still no formality for Roglič, as he barely dodged a well-coordinated attack from Simon Yates on the last climb. It all got quite emotional after Wout van Aert, the homme à tout faire, dragged his struggling team leader beyond the Col d’Èze and onto the finish line. As always with van Aert, cycling’s tension between the individual and the collective was once more put to the test.

Bonus from the Tirreno-Adriatico

At the same time, on the sunnier and more populated Italian roads, another battle was being fought, with perplexing results. It concerned the most impressive young riders out there: Remco Evenepoel, Jonas Vingegaard, and, of course, Tadej Pogačar. They were on the attack. They were cruising past everyone else. And then they missed a turn and found themselves off track. A rare moment of truth, reminiscent of an era of unmarked roads, so unbelievable it happened off-camera. For Evenepoel, the last one from the trio to realize the mistake, it was a fatal blow. He was going so fast all landmarks disappeared into a blur.

Somersault on the Moon – Notes on Strade Bianche 2022

(Text: Patrick Holzapfel)

The fancy signs of wineries – tellingly written in perfect English – on the side of the eponymous white roads across the Crete Senesi, a beautiful landscape in Tuscany transformed by humans over centuries, must have looked as if they were put up in defiance of the dust covered bodies and bicycles racing past them in what has become the most attractive one-day race in professional cycling next to Paris-Roubaix. No wine in the world, not even the famous Chianti produced alongside the route, could ease the pain of the riders participating in Strade Bianche. However, their reward is a narration embedded as thickly in myth as the modern world can possibly accept. The word hero grows as close to these roads as the rows of cypress trees – the race was even founded as a L’Eroica. The reporters there refer to the natural elements as if they were some Homeric mischief brought to the mortals by gods; they speak and write of eternity as if that’s all we aim for when pedaling towards our own exhaustion; their sounds of awe are accompanied by the frenzied excitement of the people standing on the side of the road like lost markers of forgotten civilizations. Those visitors from the real world – some of them looking surprised as if the race passed their gardens without warning – wear jackets and sunglasses to protect themselves from the dust whirling through the air (we know the metaphoric of dust), and even a frightened horse has to watch in panic as the caravan thunders past its once-so-quiet refugio at the foot of a rolling clay hill.

Cycling’s hunger for legend and archaic experiences is almost ridiculous, but it is also the most romantic justification for the absurd task of trying to ride your bike faster than everybody else. In the case of Strade Bianche, make no mistake about it, this hunger is a calculation. As opposed to other great races, this one comes with next to no history. It was only in 2007 that the race became a fixture in the international calendar of professional cyclists, and though there have been some remarkable editions in those fifteen years, it’s hard to compare them to the century old stories of steel bikes other races come along with. The race is built on nostalgia for a certain type of racing which is very hard to find in modern cycling; racing without being able to calculate. It leads uphill and downhill over kilometers of gravel roads (which make up more than a third of the total route), small streets and finishes after a narrow and steep climb up Via Santa Caterina on Piazza del Campo in picturesque Siena.

In this sense the Strade Bianche might be one of the few events in public sports in which we can see a successful attempt at historical preservation. While the interests of money and power subvert most attempts in other occasions (for example in football or the Tour de France), the rather naive and passionate desire for legend gives Strade Bianche an air of history in the making. It helps when the riders are reminiscent of what was once referred to as heroes, like in the edition of 2022.

It’s true that observing cycling races on television comes with a lot of patience, which is a euphemism for boredom. This is not the case with Strade Bianche. The first image of the men’s race we could see this year was a somersault on the moon. In a horrible crash caused by gusting winds, almost half of the riders fell down on the grey-blue, lunar-like soil. One of the them was World Champion Julian Alaphilippe, a favourite who loves the cameras and didn’t disappoint them with a spectacular salto off his bike. Later, he would pay the price for his crash as he strained to catch up to the other favourites through heavy headwind. He couldn’t keep up with the best rider on that day but then, nobody could.

Right behind Alaphilippe, a certain Tadej Pogačar fell less spectacularly but – undoubtedly – with a smile on his lips. This smile is hard to explain. There is a lot that is hard to explain. In cycling, we’ve learned that whenever something is hard to explain, it’s probably a cause for doubt. Pogačar is a 23 year old, two time winner of the Tour de France. He also won the Il Lombardia and Liège–Bastogne–Liège in 2021. Actually, it seems as if he wins whenever he wants to on whatever terrain. The only rider comparable to him in the history of cycling is Eddy Merckx, the cannibal, who is referred to as the greatest of all time. Pogačar, who looks like an enthusiastic schoolboy, is a force of nature, and the perfect winner for this race. He didn’t only win it, he attacked around 50 (!) kilometres before the finish line and managed to go all the way without any help, leaving the bunch of world-class chasers no chance. Such an effort is what journalists refer to as epic.

In the past couple of years five riders and three teams have taken control in the world of cycling and released it from the cold, data-driven, robot-like bureaucracy dominating the sport for a decade with champions like Chris Froome, Bradley Wiggins or Geraint Thomas. These riders are Pogačar, Wout Van Aert, Mathieu Van der Poel, Julian Alaphilippe and Primož Roglič. All of them risk losing in order to win. They ride not only for records but for glory. Four of those five have now won the Strade Bianche in the last four years. That’s no coincidence. In them glows the very same desire and nostalgia as in the race itself. Their style is more daring, wilder, more erratic than anything we’ve seen in this sport in the last thirty years (with honourable exceptions like Marco Pantani or Alberto Contador). Embedded in tradition as they are (Van der Poel is even the grandchild of the great Raymond Poulidor) we basically already know – because such is the history of this sport – that they will fall at some point. However, they will fall in style just as Alaphilippe demonstrated, and to witness their fall and possible resurrection might just be another cause for beautiful legends carrying eternity across time.

Further remark: There is another type of a long fallen hero resurrected. His name is Alejandro Valverde. He will turn 42 years in April. It’s his last season. One should write a book about his career. He finished second. It’s not an overstatement that he is the real hero of this race. Like Pogačar he seemed to smile throughout the whole race. It’s sort of his trademark.

Smiling in pain. I find it hard to imagine that despite the pressure and the fierce competition involved these smiles do not display a love for the sport.

1 Tadej Pogačar (Slo) UAE Team Emirates 4:47:49
2 Alejandro Valverde (Spa) Movistar Team 0:00:37
3 Kasper Asgreen (Den) Quick-Step Alpha Vinyl Team 0:00:46
4 Attila Valter (Hun) Groupama-FDJ 0:01:07
5 Pello Bilbao Lopez De Armentia (Spa) Bahrain Victorious 0:01:09
6 Jhonatan Narvaez Prado (Ecu) Ineos Grenadiers
7 Quinn Simmons (USA) Trek-Segafredo 0:01:21
8 Tim Wellens (Bel) Lotto Soudal 0:01:25
9 Simone Petilli (Ita) Intermarché-Wanty-Gobert Matériaux 0:01:35
10 Sergio Higuita Garcia (Col) Bora-Hansgrohe 0:01:53

Last hero to arrive in Siena:

87 Marijn van den Berg (Ned) EF Education-EasyPost 0:18:31

COPPI & PASTE: Memories of Cycling

COPPI & PASTE aims at giving voice to the narrative threads connecting the world of (professional) cycling. We will report on races, think about riders, visit the most famous roads, ride on our bikes and dream about it all in words and images.

Landscapes Becoming Liquid

by Victor Morozov

One day I hopped on my steel bike – green, rusty, and as heavy as you like – and I realized I was able to keep my balance. The scene is blurry, yet poignant. There’s my uncle, keeping the pace behind me. There’s that one way “garage street” with rough tarmac, the kind you used to see everywhere in post-communist Romania. And then there’s that feeling, one that never gets old; the sheer amazement of the landscape becoming liquid, going crazy. Once, just once, I could hold the secret of it, amazed at the principle of ideas becoming things, in the short lapse between assisted movement – my uncle grabbing the saddle – and the stability I established by my own force of will.

There’s probably more to the first solo bike ride – which is only just a couple of meters long– than a mere cliché. This monotone discourse about the personal freedom a bicycle is supposed to miraculously enable proves to be, at the same time, an exaggeration and an understatement. Things are more complicated than that; we can find a secret written in invisible ink throughout the history of each bicycle. A couple of months ago I was convinced by some evidence to get a tube of silicone spray for my road bike. There was the strange need to make this object – slender, light, robust – even more beautiful. The shameless pride was almost physical. One year before, after I bought the bike in a bourgeois village near Paris from an aging man who unloaded it from his cranky Peugeot and told me with a sigh: “I’m done with le vélo”, I would watch it furtively, as if in fear of discovering myself an impostor, filling a corner of my empty, sad student dorm. “My first road bike”, I thought, and to my mind came all these sepia pictures of rectangular bicycle frames from a working-class France, all of them long gone by now. I was finally joining the imaginary peloton at a time when the bike, as a social activity, was once again gaining terrain (it’s unbelievable how the pandemic prompted people to start commuting by bike in Paris), while simultaneously losing its soul. But that is another matter.

In the Romanian town where I spent most of my life, bikes would come into your life before cars: unhandy, ugly bikes that the boys could take for a Friday evening ride by the Danube. It was fun. We all had them: some had on “full” wheels for show, while others styled some strange, completely senseless drops for the handlebars. Then the boys would grow up, discover love, and forget about the bike. By the time most of them were of age to drive a car, no one would think anymore of the so adequately named “First Bike” (the most common Romanian bike manufacturer of the time) and the memories it brought. I myself followed the designated path up to a point. Once or twice, around 14, I took part in the so-called “Saturday ride” that the local cycling club would organize weekly. I still remember the feeling of belonging with the cool guys, as we would form a long chain and slowly cross the city center. The ride always finished with a short but steep climb which, for me, acted as a wake-up call: I was the last one to reach the top, panting, while the others would give me a dismissive look. Nowadays I follow some of their accounts on my Strava app, and sometimes we even get together for a ride in the countryside. Some are now firefighters and engineers – back then their cheeks were red with acne, and they were already fighting gravity.

Luckily, I had no interest in getting a driver’s license. It somehow made it easier for me to get back into cycling. During high school, I clearly found it smarter to impress my sweetheart by reciting a poem than by climbing a hill “en danseuse”. I’d think twice now about that now, though. There was this very firm idea, instilled by our teachers and by the entire society, to be honest, that some habits were appropriate, while others were not. I could feel it, without reading Bourdieu, that literature was acceptable and sport wasn’t, at least for a young man destined for a career in the cultural field. (By a similar logic, I chose to study cinema, a sort of ideal mauvais objet which, during those years, still gave off a sulfurous smell to some of my teachers.) Getting back in the saddle, in the aftermath of a painful breakup, also meant completing the loop. Like cinema, although in greater measure, sports are still looked down on by a whole range of intellectuals. I skip their fallacious reasons, for I don’t want to give any credit to their ignorance: it goes without saying, for instance, that the meanings a football coach extracts from a match in front of him can achieve unsuspected levels of complexity. On the other hand, sports fans only seldom have the opportunity to develop a reflection about their passion. This is why, nowadays more than ever, paying close attention to what a sport such as cycling does to us – in terms of image, gesture, passion – feels necessary.

Back in 2013, I read a book about a journalist who had a longtime interest in cycling, and was then assembling his dream bike. The frame was from Raleigh, the saddle was from Brooks… I don’t know how I would feel about this dandy position of his now, but I remember the lasting influence that this book had on me. Two years later, I would watch cycling races on Eurosport, just for the pleasure of the immersion into a bike-filled flow of images. Life for me, at the end of junior high, was as plotless as a transition stage from a grand tour. There was a form of absolute beauty inscribed into the frame, with its synthetic explosion of colors and the eerie equipment that covered as much as it revealed, which suddenly didn’t require any context at all. Indeed, I lacked all information necessary to establish a minimal context, like what the names of the competing teams were, how this strategy game worked, what race was on, what the sport’s history was (I was no child of the doping controversies), or even what a technical guideline for the complex progression of a course par étapes was. Some names I recollect vaguely, like Valverde, who was already “old”, or Bardet, who had very bold moves, and also rode for a French team, so he stood away from big money…

I now hold televised cycling to be the challenge of truth for any proclaimed image analyst. In terms of boredom, it doesn’t get any better than a five hour plain stage, when an indistinct mass of wheels glide through the arid valleys of Oman or Andalusia, going on forever. While we can easily understand the point of televised football or tennis, one cannot help but wonder at the massive audience success of this endearing, if somehow perplexing, enterprise of recording, under every possible angle, kilometer after kilometer. Yet the epic quality of a grand tour was by no means destined for television, nor was it enhanced by its live broadcast. Having started as a promotion event for a printed journal, the Tour de France would be nowhere near the mythological exploit it has become had it not been for the writers and journalists who saw heroes and epics where previously there had only been reportage. Could some of this enthusiasm be revived in our age, when all the images have been seen and all the heroes have fallen from grace, compromised by substances with angry names? Regardless of the outcome, I think it’s worth a try.

© Victor Morozov

The Yellow of Pirates

by Patrick Holzapfel

It took a long time until I was able to understand how the seemingly weightless movements of the cyclists I observed on television were basically of the same nature as the painful fidgeting I undertook while struggling on my own bike to get to school. My imagination followed its very own cadence, and suddenly I found myself imitating the gestures and movements I saw on television: lifting myself above the saddle to accelerate until my legs exploded, stretching while descending, merging onto the other side of the road right before sprinting against a surprised sheep grassing in the field next to where I imagined the Flamme Rouge to be. As my father runs a bicycle shop, he was able to get me a few items that helped to spark my imagination further: sunglasses, drinking bottles, helmets, shoes for my clip-less pedals (I learned to fall and get up again), power gels, rain-jackets, speedos and most importantly, the bike itself. It was shaped like my Pulmo dexter, pitch black with a fire red saddle. Everything about it smelled like oil and blood and nobody was allowed to touch it.

Imagination was also key to my initiation into the world of professional cycling, a world that had been blown away by a storm of horrible betrayal and moralistic witch-hunts as soon as I discovered it. It’s all worthy of Greek myths, really, but I don’t know who lives up on Olympus anymore.

I remember strained hours in front of a tiny tube television my grandfather put on top of a shelf in a cubbyhole in his cottage. It was 1997. The colours were hardly distinguishable on the screen far above me, but I was barely able to make out a yellow shirt in the midst of a moving serpent weaving through the most famous streets of Paris. I have never seen so many impressions of yellow dots in my eyes as I did that night after spending so long trying to find the one on that screen. They told me, “If he doesn’t fall, he will win.” I was sure he would fall. Even as a child, I’ve always been certain of coming tragedies, and years later he really would fall. He would fall so often until I couldn’t care anymore. But in 1997 I cared and he didn’t fall. He crossed the finish line at the Champs-Élysées and there he was, in yellow.

The next thing I remember is rain. Heavy rain and again I had to imagine things. Due to the heavy rain there were no televised images from the road and those competing on it. Instead I heard worried voices declaring: “Er hat einen Hungerast” (he hit a wall). He didn’t eat enough and it was cold and it rained and he felt like shit and another man, much more inspiring, took the stage. He was bold and everybody called him a pirate and he took the yellow shirt I was still looking for with feverish eyes (both of us had feverish eyes). He really seemed to be from another world. As he moved up mountain roads through corridors of cheering people, I observed something I understood very well as a child: the relief of climbing, which is the same as the relief of growing-up. When ingredients, opponents, strategic thoughts, parents and the world are overcome in a painful scream for recognition, I really felt joy for the pirate in yellow climbing with the fury of someone who is bound to lose everything but inspires everybody. There it was, Mount Olympus, even if only for a second, I saw it. The pirate had conquered it.

It was all beautiful beyond comprehension. I didn’t understand anything about cycling but slowly I learned a whole new vocabulary and more importantly, I learned about its myths and heroes, and something took flight in me which hasn’t ceased to inspire my imagination up to this day.

Variations on T.S. Eliot — V

T.S. Eliot: Spleen

Sunday: this satisfied procession
Of definite Sunday faces;
Bonnets, silk hats, and conscious graces
In repetition that displaces
Your mental self-possession
By this unwarranted digression.

Evening, lights, and tea!
Children and cats in the alley;
Dejection unable to rally
Against this dull conspiracy.

And Life, a little bald and gray,
Languid, fastidious and bland,
Waits, hat and gloves in hand,
Punctilious of tie and suit
(Somewhat impatient of delay)
On the doorstep of the Absolute.

Variations on T.S. Eliot — IV

T.S. Eliot: Virginia

Red river, red river,
Slow flow heat is silence
No will is still as a river
Still, Will heat move
Only through the mocking-bird
Heard once? Still hills
Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,
White trees, wait, wait,
Delay, decay. Living, living,
Never moving. Ever moving
Iron thoughts came with me
And go with me:
Red river, river, river.

Variations on T.S. Eliot — III

T.S. Eliot: Conversation Galante

I observe: „Our sentimental friend the moon!
Or possibly (fantastic, I confess)
It may be Prester John’s balloon
Or an old battered lantern hung aloft
To light poor travellers to their distress.“
She then: „How you digress!“

And I then: „Some one frames upon the keys
That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain
The night and moonshine; music which we seize
To body forth our own vacuity.“
She then: „Does this refer to me?“
„Oh no, it is I who am inane.“

„You, madam, are the eternal humorist,
The eternal enemy of the absolute,
Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!
With your aid indifferent and imperious
At a stroke our mad poetics to confute—“
And—“Are we then so serious?“

Glimpses at DANCING

PATRICK HOLZAPFEL: Only the slow ones oder zumindest so wie Grégoire Colin in US Go Home, das heißt so, dass man sich allein und frei wähnt (sich selbst vergessen). 

Agnès Godard ist die beste Kamerafrau, wenn es ums Tanzen geht, ich weiß es. Ich glaube, dass sie verstanden hat, dass man Tanzende so filmen muss, als wäre man an zwei Orten zugleich. Die eine Hälfte ist in einem Schlafzimmer, alles ist in Zärtlichkeitsfarben getüncht, man sieht durch die Haut und wie sich Finger umschlingen. Die andere Hälfte ist in einem Raubtierkäfig, auf Zehenspitzen und darum wissend, dass jeder Schritt, ach jeder Mucks ins Verderben führen kann. Wenn Godard im Schlafzimmer ist, tanzt sie mit. Wenn sie im Käfig filmt, verharrt sie am Rand der Tanzfläche, so wie jene, die sich nicht ganz trauen, aber die trotzdem jeden Abend dastehen und warten, dass was passiert oder sie wer anspricht. 

Ich stelle mir gern vor, dass die, die ins Kino gehen, eigentlich nur kommen, weil sie hoffen, dass sie angesprochen werden. Sie schauen auf die Leinwand und für einige Minuten scheint diese Vorstellung zumindest halbwegs plausibel, ja, warum eigentlich nicht…aber wenn die Lichter angehen (und das ist etwas, was die Lichter immer tun), dann verpufft diese kurz aufkeimende Hoffnung genau so wie die erschöpften Körper nach einem Tanz plötzlich merken, dass sie atmen. Inzwischen gibt es eine ganze Apotheke an Medikamenten, die man sich auf verschiedenste Arten einverleiben kann und die dafür sorgen, dass die Musik weiter durch den Körper fließt, auch wenn sie längst verstummt ist. Hört man die gleichen Rhythmen wie sie, schwingt die ganze Erde wie eine Schaukel und man tanzt, wie es so abgedroschen heißt, durch die Nacht. Hört man den Rhythmus aber nicht, fragt man sich, wer da mit krummen Rücken und ulkigen Sprüngen über den Asphalt torkelt. 

Ich habe festgestellt, dass man eine Tanzszene in einem Film ohne Ton betrachten muss, um zu sehen, ob die Menschen wirklich tanzen oder ob sie nur Bewegungen für die Kamera vollführen. Sie tanzen wirklich, wenn sie verstummt auf mich wirken, wie die durch die Nacht Stolpernden auf den Straßen, also die, die spüren, dass sich die Erde dreht. 

Trotzdem only the slow ones, denn nur dann hilft das Tanzen dabei, die Gefühle zu verlangsamen und ich will wenig so sehr, wie langsamer zu fühlen.

JAMES WATERS: Until recently, I’d assumed a level of irony in Claire Denis’ use of Corona’s Rhythm of the Night in Beau travail; an irony stemming from my belief that there has to be something behind a filmmaker as established resorting to such music. The implication I carried to it was that “Rhythm of the Night” isn’t what I consider “real music” – at least, compared to Tindersticks. Poisoned by a sense of irony, the closest I’d gotten to Galoup’s (Denis Lavant) final, transcendent dance was in my conception of Corona as a “guilty pleasure”, a perspective inevitably eclipsed by Denis’ filmmaking; one deprived of irony and yielding to the perfect club song that mirrors Galoup’s eventual, mortal submission (aided by a lit cigarette, a glaring spotlight and rising tempo of the song’s build-up). 

Dealing with a more recent song that has yet to be “reclaimed” in the same way, Valeska Grisebach’s Sehnsucht also shows – through dance – the untainted bliss that can be elicited from an excerpt of Robbie Williams’ Feel, a piece of music I’d also dismissed up until watching Grisebach’s film. One can read as much as they like into the choice and the film’s general music editing, but its intent can be nailed down to the facts that: 

a) It was popular enough at the time to circulate the airwaves (or, at least, within the 5–10- year release window in which a song like “Feel” existed; remaining a ubiquitous chart- topper/record holder for years without seeming either old or new). 

b) As with most public spaces, an environment like a small, mess hall party for German firefighters would be absent from on-the-pulse music curation. So, the best choice of song should re-create what’d already exist if Grisebach and her crew weren’t there to film it.

The film’s lead, Markus (Andreas Müller), seems timid at first, swaying timidly in front of the camera as the song’s percussive beat kicks in. He shuffles along in what could equally be attributed to his character’s drunkenness or the first-time actor’s reticence at being vulnerable in front of the camera. He sways according to the song’s continual build-up, with two jump-cuts interrupting his flow (yet the song flows through these cuts’ continuity, uninterrupted). After the jump-cuts he seems genuinely into the song’s rhythms, carrying the viewer along with him. He evolves as a listener and dancer, swaying – with eyes closed – to the ecstatic build-up of Williams’ song. It’s an evolution that mimics my own cynicism as a listener: I may hesitate to listen to it because of previous misgivings, but the song will continue playing regardless. It’s only up to the listener to submit to its sway.

IVANA MILOŠ: There are few things I love more than my favorite dance scenes in cinema. Not only do I watch them time and time again, I hear them, I listen to them, I dance to them, together with them, for them, for the characters whose movements are akin to mine, whose ears are akin to mine, and whose musical hearts beat to the same rhythm, even if for just a few brief instances. In truth, what is better than music? This is, undoubtedly, a rhetorical question, and let’s not leave it at that.

1, 2, 3, 4, it’s time to share and more.

Gregoire Colin and The Animals getting down, cigarette-in-mouth, youth in body, what a dance, what a feast of feeling:

Denis Lavant and David Bowie, the epitome of modern love in all its shapes and forms. Let me run like that for once in my life, I might never stop. He hardly does.

Denis Lavant again, now and forever, in a rendition of Corona’s Rhythm of the Night unlike anything else known to humankind:

Melina Mercouri takes up Ta Paidia tou Peiraia, dancing and singing in her bedroom, not to mention those snapping fingers:

Ana Torrent plays a record of Porque te vas in Cría cuervos. It’s music and joy on a whole new level, and childhood at its most moving:

Everyone can dance beautifully in Ermanno Olmi’s I fidanzati. A motion goes through the room and the importance of dance becomes vividly manifest:

Don’t let it end at that. Dance, dance, dance to the music!

ANDREW CHRISTOPHER GREEN: Not long into Angela Schanelec’s Plätze in Städten the main character Mimi dances with her mother at a public swimming pool to Joni Michell’s California. They’re listening to it on a portable speaker at first, and we’re listening to the song with them as it echoes through the room, but then the track gets louder and is synchronized over the ambient audio. There is a curtain of glass windows behind them, and they twirl around in their swimsuits against a cold cityscape. The shot is three and a half minutes long, long enough for Schanelec’s strange composition to take our focus from the dancers moving peripherally through some pillars to the space they’re in and its relation to the barren trees and environs beyond. They stand over the hostile outside like one of Caspar David Friedrich’s Rückenfiguren, only they’re not contemplating their relationship to the distance beyond as Friedrich’s figures would. They dance indifferently to the foreground/background and inside/outside dialectics the framing composes, absorbed in themselves and their movements.

I don’t know how one ought to dance to Joni Mitchell’s folkish songs, but the way they do seems wrong, or at least excessive. The mother is more enthusiastic than Mimi is, but they’re both very present in this scene, experiencing something like joy and togetherness. It’s a presentness which foreshadows Mimi’s constant displacements between cities and sexual partners and her estrangement from her mother. Towards the end of the film she gets pregnant and runs away, probably to Paris (her locations aren’t always made explicit but just appear in the backgrounds), winds up homeless, and is sitting in the cold outside a bar when someone sees her and invites her in to dance. A bass-heavy, electronic song plays first, and she just stands there. The flickering lights show everyones bodies in different positions as they strobe, but Mimi doesn’t hardly move at all. She’s offered a drink, an outrageously nostalgic song by Ben Folds Five comes on (we heard her listening to this same song at home earlier), and she sways around like a zombie. Somebody probably slipped something. Next we hear a song by Portishead, which itself sounds like a bad drug trip. Another composition; there aren’t surroundings anymore, just a black wall behind Mimi. We see outlines of her body in an ominous red with sporadic flashes of blues and greens. She’s not twirling but spiraling, something like the inverse of her mother at the beginning of the film when they were together at the swimming pool. She falls asleep on a chair and we don’t know what happens after. I couldn’t help but think that the lights were perfect in their sobering irregularity, plotting out the spatial coordinates of Mimi’s regression into a womb of darkness. It’s a cruel and ironic twist of fate that the ones who feel the most intensely in our world are the ones most vulnerable to being disarticulated by it. In these final scenes I thought of Friedrich again, this time one of his moonlit compositions, Der Mönch am Meer. They share the motif of an individual surrounded by darkness. One stands looking out into the abyss, the other is being swallowed up by it.

ANNA BABOS: “It’s not the music that gets to you. It’s the marching feet.“

Máté and Mari, the peasant protagonists of Fábri Zoltán’s Körhinta, are in love. Their longing for each other is hindered by political circumstances and the expectations of Mari’s family. Mari has a fiancé, Sándor, and her parents rather support their marriage, because Sándor, like them, opposes the concept of forced collectivization of land. The family and Sándor hope to keep their land and unite them by marriage, in accordance with the tradition. 

Despite the difficulties, Máté does not give up his love for Mari. His fiery and combative desire culminates during the wedding of another girl from the village. To the astonishment of the community, Máté asks Mari to dance. The provocation manifests physically in his virtuoso and intimidating dancing: like the stars of the classical Hollywood musical, Máté uses movement to express dominance. But it is not strictly choreographed, nuanced movement, and Máté is not aware of his virtuosity. Folk dance is his only weapon in the fight for the freedom of their love, which has the undertone of fighting those who are against the new regime and refuse collectivization. When other men from the village ask Mari to dance, Máté seizes her, and, seizes the day. They dance until they light-headed; Mari hallucinates in exhaustion.  

The increasingly rapid spinning recalls an earlier encounter when Máté and Mari were on a rapidly spinning merry-go-round (the title of the film) at a village fair. The combination of dance and flight, set to the liberating rhythm of Hungarian folk music, evokes a romantic image of the burning flame or the free-flying youth. At the same time, the scene conveys something else.

La grand illusion comes to mind. “It’s not the music that gets to you. It’s the marching feet“, says Jean Gabin as lieutenant Maréchal. 

The sounds of Máté’s and Mari’s dance steps slowly take the place of the joyful violin playing, and the music almost gets disoriented by the hard thuds of feet in a dreamlike tangle. Dance becomes a militant gesture through Máté’s wilfulness. He experiences the fight for communism through his fight for love.

DAVID PERRIN: „Im Pariser Jeu de Paume hängt ein Bild von Cezanne, vor dem ich dann zu verstehen glaubte, worum es geht, nicht nur ihm, dem Maler, und nicht nur jetzt mir, einem Schriftsteller…

Schwer zu sagen, was ich da verstand. Damals hatte ich vor allem das Gefühl ‚Nähe‘. Im Bedürfnis, das Erlebte doch weiterzugeben, kommt mir jetzt, nach langem ‚Bedenken des Geschehen‘ (eher ein Denksturm), ein Filmbild in den Sinn: Henry Fonda, wie er in John Fords The Grapes of Wrath mit der eigenen Mutter tanzt.

In jener Szene tanzen alle Anwesenden miteinander, zur Abwehr einer lebensgefährlichen Bedrohung: so verteidigen sie, vor der Landnot Umgetriebene, das Stücken Erde, auf dem sie endlich Bleibe gefunden haben, gegen die sie umzingelnden Feinde. Obwohl das Tanzen demnach pure List ist (Mutter und Sohn, sich rundum drehend, werfen einander, wie auch den übrigen, schlaue wachsame Blicke zu) ist es doch ein Tanz wie nur je einer (und wie noch keiner) der überspringt als ein herzlicher Zusammenhalt.“ – Peter Handke, Die Lehre von Saint-Victoire, S. 60-61.

RONNY GÜNL: Alltäglichen Bewegungen gleicht selten etwas Tänzerischem angesichts ihre Unbeholfenheit. Routinemäßig lässt sich das Geschirr durch die eigenen Hände abspülen, ohne dabei nur einen Gedanken daran zu verschwenden. Fast scheint es so, als bestimme das Geschirr den Vorgang selbst. Im Film ist dem offenbar nicht so; es ist möglich jede noch so erdenkliche Schwerfälligkeit tänzelnd in Schwebe aufzuheben. Der Unterschied ist zwar ein geringer, aber umso entscheidender. Nicht der Ort der Bewegung beziehungsweise dessen Gravitation hat sich verändert, sondern die Zeit.

Die Filme von Maya Deren erkunden diese Verschiebung. In Rituals in Transfigured Time erlangen die tanzenden Bewegungen nicht jene absoluten Form, worin die Person ganz in der Choreografie transzendiere. Vielmehr beschreibt der Film – ohne Musik – nur mit seinen Bildern einen balancierenden Zustand, der um seinen Schwerpunkt kreist: Für kleine Momente deuten sich rhythmisierende Fragmente an, die sogleich verschwinden, als wären sie nie geschehen. Immer wieder wird der Fluss der Bewegung unterbrochen und zeitlich versetzt weitergeführt.

Es ist eine Tanzfläche in einem Lokal zu sehen. Menschen sind willkürlich im Raum aufgestellt. Sie gestikulieren und reden aneinander vorbei. Sie treffen aufeinander und trennen sich. Weder Orientierung noch Sinn fängt das Bild der Kamera dabei ein. Während die Protagonistin (Rita Christiani) Hals über Kopf im wellenartigen Treiben genau danach zu suchen scheint, sehen wir Anbahnungen, von etwas, das beginnen könnte, sich jedoch unmittelbar – zugleich zyklisch – in der Luft verflüchtigt.

SIMON WIENER: Often I think of experimental film as a dance. I think it is no coincidence that both can give me joy like little else can, maybe because both are expressions of a peculiar movement through space, one not usually explored in our day-to-day-life. They both estrange us from our usual movements, which can be seen as the most efficient means of connecting the dots that make up a space. One leaps through space in order to reap it, thereby distilling space into movement. A hierarchy is created: space serves us, feeds our desires, adorns us. If our usual movement affirms the self, Dance-Film-movement, instead, proposes an opening for the abandonment of the self, it proposes a spring-board for dissolving into the Other… dis-selving. The joy of this dissolution is best denoted by the German word aufgehoben; we are lifted, nullified by the object of our devotion, namely space. Maybe the hierarchy is inverted; space cracks us open, finds a means of expression through us, a revenge of sorts; or maybe the hierarchy is preserved but given a twist, wherein the desire fed by space is directed towards space itself. An urge to move, in order to reveal and preserve space – a negative expression where the self is defined by its surroundings.

SEBASTIAN BOBIK: Like many other things in life that bring us joy, dancing is something that always seems to have been a part of cinema. One of the earliest films to show us a dance is the beautiful Danse serpentine by the Lumiere Brothers. Since then dances have been everywhere in films, and every film has at least one or two dancing scenes, which are especially important and touching. Dancing also seems to be something that shows up in the oeuvres of even the most different filmmakers. They can be found in images as different as those of Agnès and Jean-Luc Godard, Donen and Donschen, Deren and Leisen, Chaplin and Tashlin and many, many more.

When I am asked to think about a scene of people dancing in a film my mind will often go back to one of the early instances of a dance being captured on celluloid. The Dickson Experimental Sound Film was an early attempt to create a film with synchronized sound to accompany the images. The attempt failed at its time. The film is only about 30 seconds long. We see several things in one image: On the left side we see a man playing the violin into a device, which is supposed to have recorded the sound. On the right hand two men are sharing a small dance with each other. Are they waltzing? As they dance one of the men can be seen visibly smiling. Another man walks into the image from the left, then the film ends.There are versions of this film that are silent, though I have also seen some versions with the sound of a violin. It is a small film, but it sparks of joy and delight. Somehow it always touches me, whenever I see it.

SIMON PETRI: Dance scenes in cinema are often described as liberating although the characters in motion in the image are already liberated; they have either overcome the constraints of self-consciousness or never suffered it to begin with, unlike those sitting around them, squirming on the margins of the frame. They go well together, those who enjoy the attention (or at least don’t mind it) and those who attract attention by existing in the shadow of the spectacle just to performatively deny it.

Trees, leaves and flowers dance involuntarily, without an audience for the most part: algae in the unexplored depth of oceans, miniature branches of lichen in the Scandinavian frost, odorous linden towering over entire counties give themselves up to forces without a predictable trajectory.

For the fortunate the wind blows a metronomic rhythm to the fertile pollution. More violent movements happen in and because of human presence: mimosa leaves close and open with the discipline of Busby Berkeley’s objectified legs, grass and pine fall and whirl as dictated by the scythe and the jigsaw. 

The most heavenly of dance genres is heliotropism. It’s free of contact and violence: there’s unparalleled distance between choreographer and dancer, yet each movement follows a perfect curve. 

 

Variations on T.S. Eliot — II

T.S. Eliot: Lines to a Duck in the Park 

 

The long light shakes across the lake,

The forces of the morning quake,

The dawn is slant across the lawn,

Here is no eft or mortal snake

But only sluggish duck and drake.

I have seen the morning shine,

I have had the Bread and Wine,

Let the feathered mortals take

That which is their mortal due,

Pinching bread and finger too.

Easier had than squirming worm;

For I know, and so should you

That soon the enquiring worm shall try

Our well-preserved complacency.