I My Bike
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2002
16mm, color, sound, 5.5 minutes. Director, Writer, Camera, Editor, Sound: Ken Paul Rosenthal

A cinepoem that traces the conflict between urban space and the body from a child’s compulsion to stare into the sun to an adult’s obsession with dying and moving towards the light. Guided into a trance state by an unseen therapist, a disembodied voice reveals his loss of innocence upon moving to the city, his increasingly fragmented state of being and longing for death. The past and present collide within a round portal containing fleeting images of 1905-era Market Street, San Francisco over a dense sea of modern day bicyclists.
– KPR

“A boyhood gift of a bicycle transcends from the sunny and smiling overexposed youth of innocence to the hustle and bustle and flight of the city fight. Traveling through the concrete on petal-ed wings, through the man-made dynasty of high rises, constant and furious the pace that innocence and simplicity is rendered as a single circle in center frame, looming as the eye of the turning wheels, contrasting the frenzied commotion. I feel I am going to get smothered and collapse from a bus, a building, or a passing pedestrian, for the camera and I are the vehicle, the messenger sent through the streets and the viewing audience with questions; our deaths are inevitable but what is left for the industrialized future? Will I be re-incarnated as a rose petal or recycled as a bike pedal? Possibly, re-invented as a blade of grass that emerges through the cement? We are not simply what we can create, but also what we can destroy and how we choose to be in the natural world; existentialism through a vivid re-photography binocular.”
- Matt Bowler, Filmmaker

“LOVED ‘I My Bike’. I found the images combined with the poignant nihilism on the soundtrack to be quite riveting. AND it reminded me of my days as a bike messenger in SF.” - Mark Street, Filmmaker

Screenings

Director’s Lounge, Berlin, Germany – Urban Research on Film, 2008
AudioVision Festival, Static Gallery, Liverpool, England, 2008
Festival Internacional del Neuvo Cine Latinoamericano, Havana, Cuba, 2007
Anthology Film Archives – Canyon Cinema Program, 2005
Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco - Schematics from a Memory Grid, 2005
The Art Museum of the University of Houston – Collaborating With the Moving Image, 2003
Anthology Film Archives – Fresh Film, 2003
3rd Bicycle Film Festival, New York City, 2003
27th Cine Poem Festival, San Francisco, California, 2003
19th Film Arts Festival of Independent Cinema, San Francisco, 2003
ICON Digital Salon, New York City – auto:IDENTITY, 2003
Museu do Chiado, Museum of Contemporary Cinema, Lisbon, Portugal – Intermittent, 2003
34th Poetry International Festival, Rotterdam, 2003
SF Camerawork, San Francisco – Self/Projected: The Moving Image As Self Portrait, 2003
Other Cinema, San Francisco – New Experimental Works, 2002
40th Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2002
Artists Television Access, San Francisco – Penumbra, 2002
29th Athens International Film and Video Festival, Athens, Ohio, 2002
35th Humboldt International Film Festival- Film Arts Foundation Award, 2002
3rd Sarah Lawrence Experimental Film & Video Festival, Bronxville, NY, 2002
San Francisco Cinematheque - New Terrain; Recent Additions to Canyon Cinema, 2001
15th Singapore International Film Festival, 2002
Video Ex ‘02 Festival, Zurich, Switzerland, 2002
Zebra Poetry Film Festival, Berlin, Germany – Honorable Mention, 2002
5th Splice This! Super 8 Film Festival, Toronto, Canada, 2001