Life Cycles

The forty-seven-minute documentary follows the life of a mountain bike: its making, its use, its wear and finally its destruction. The account builds this not as a sports film but as the story of an object. In between come trail building, repairs, road trips and the struggle with the weather. The footage was shot with high-resolution cameras and a great deal of slow motion. Riders known in the mountain bike world carry the film, with names such as Semenuk, Hopkins, McIntosh and McCaul in front of the camera. Its strength is in the images rather than the narration: the shooting technique was well ahead of what was being done in the field when it came out and was treated as a threshold within the genre. The voice-over drifts at times into something too poetic. The reason it holds up even for someone who does not ride is that its subject, in the end, is an object being born and dying.