![]() They wanted to own that bike and ride it and eat it and absorb everything the bike stood for into their very beings, to become the gods that bike promised we could become. ![]() Those admiring the Easy Rider choppers didn’t want to be Peter Fonda, they wanted to be Captain America. Its lines and proportions are perfect, as is the American flag paint job, which slip under one’s skin and electrify subconscious associations: the cowboy, the outlaw, America, freedom, power, speed, sex, drugs and rock music. If anyone thought to ask ‘who built that?’ (and few did), they might have assumed Peter Fonda built it, but most admirers of Captain America were simply glad it existed, as if it had been delivered from the gods. The Easy Rider choppers: ‘Billy’ and ‘Captain America’, ridden by Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda ![]() Far more people idolized that motorcycle than ever saw the film all they needed was a photograph of Dennis Hopper (on the ‘Billy’ bike) and Peter Fonda, riding through the anonymous landscape of the American West, modern day cowboys roaming the land free, just free. Such is the power of the machine’s image, and its place in the cultural history of motorcycling around the world. The Captain America chopper transcends its own story nobody needs to have seen the film, nor recognize Peter Fonda, to understand they’re looking at an icon, a magical talisman of Freedom. Show them TE Lawrence on his Brough Superior, and they’ll recognize neither the quizzical WW1 hero, nor his Brough Superior. Show them Rollie Free stretched out in a bathing suit over his Vincent at Bonneville in 1948, and they’ll laugh, but won’t know a thing about the bike or the man. Show someone a photograph of the ‘Captain America’ bike from ‘Easy Rider’, and everyone knows what they’re looking at. It’s the most famous motorcycle in the world, period. With songs by Sadie Benning, Chan Marshall, Suzy Soundz and The Sibleys – the music Benning listened to on the road.Adapted from Paul d’Orléans’ book ‘The Chopper: the Real Story’ An image Benning returns to five times is that of a camp fire so that viewers can think back to the scene in which Jack Nicholson expresses one of the film’s themes to Billy (Dennis Hopper) saying: “What you represent to them is freedom.” For example, Benning ‘copies’ its association between a real horse and a gleaming motorcycle: both have their strength expressed in horse power. In his characteristic long takes, he for instance shows a lit-up vacancy sign while the soundtrack treats us to a line from Easy Rider: ‘You’ve got a room?’ Sometimes the images are more abstract, like the 10-minute shot of a flowing brook.īut there is always a connection with Easy Rider. More about the film from the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it screened in 2013: Benning’s film screens as part of Biennial artist Julie Ault’s Afterlife: a constellation.įor Benning’s Easy Rider (2012), the filmmaker drove across the United States and re-shot scenes in their original locations, “raising questions about the legacy of 1960s counterculture in America’s landscape today.” On Sunday (April 6), filmmaker and CalArts School of Film/Video faculty James Benning screens his 95-minute re-creation of the late Dennis Hopper’s 1969 classic feature, Easy Rider, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York at 4 pm. ![]()
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