ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some of the dominant themes with which cinematic depictions of cycling are concerned: comedy, work, sport, gender and childhood. Cycling on film is, typically, not about the bike, but is a means to explore a wide range of topics, including individual identity and the body, gender, sexuality and racism, family and community, politics and injustice, capitalism and technological progress, urbanization and environmental change. The spectacle of people riding – and falling off – bicycles is a rich source of comedy for the cinema. In addition to their function as, variously, means of transport, tool for work, sports apparatus, exercise equipment, badge of social class and symbol of gender, cinema also reminds us that bicycles are associated with childhood as a means of establishing independence through greater mobility and joyful escape from the constraining gaze of parental authority.
