“To See the Fissures and
Hear the Rumblings”

A Review of
The BQE .
a film by Sufjan Stevens.

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

The BQE .
A film by Sufjan Stevens.
Copyright 2009, Asthmatic Kitty Records.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

“Listening has something to do with being willing to change ourselves and change our world” – Sr. Joan Chittister

Sufjan Stevens’ new movie The BQE is one of the finest and most creative works of social criticism in recent memory.  The film, commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, primarily features footage of traffic on the twisting and often congested highway known as the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE).  Stevens intersperses other footage from Brooklyn (architecture, waterways, amusement parks), but his primary counterpoint is three colorfully-clad female hula hoop spinners, working under the pseudonyms Botanica, Quantus and Electress.  As a complement to the movie, Stevens has also produced a comic book in which the three hula-hoopers are portrayed as super-heroes who fight the evil Dr. Moses – a reference to Robert Moses, the progress-oriented urban planner who designed the BQE.  Stevens’ cinematography – presented in a triptych format – captures the winding, free-for-all insanity of the BQE.  In his artist’s statement about the film, Stevens observes that the twisting design of the BQE was mandated by navigating through an already-well-established city with a variety of geographical features like rivers, islands and tidal straits and by the NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) politics that kept the BQE out of prestigious neighborhoods, like Brooklyn Heights.  As Stevens’ comic book illustrates in its simplistic way, the critiques that the BQE raises are aimed primarily at Robert Moses and his visions of cities designed around technological concepts of progress that pay little heed to the holistic health of humanity.  Moses, for instance, designed parks that were “fiercely antagonistic to the natural, bucolic and egalitarian…more prison yard than public park” (Stevens artist statement), and instead were typically focused around competitive, athletic endeavors.  Thus, hula hoopers serve to contrast these focused notions of progress – speeding ahead pell-mell into the future like the BQE traffic on any given day – with the circular motion of the hula hoop, a symbol of a recreational idleness (a la Tom Hodgkinson), which spins in harmony with a person’s motions and never seems to get anywhere.  Stevens further exposits the hula hoop in his artist’s statement:

[The] Hula hoop couldn’t be more at odds with modernity.  Americans of the 1950s were linear people, hard working and industrious.  They fought world wars, drove big cars, and built mammoth roadways in the name of progress.  Their popular sports reflected the same: baseball and football were competitive and strategic games … The hoop couldn’t be more different.  It required no teams.  It wasn’t competitive. It wasn’t linear.  It was philosophically personal and metaphysically absurd, a gratuitous recreation built around a simple circular tube of plastic meant for nothing more than idle enjoyment and exercise.

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