Girl on a Motorcycle: Jack Cardiff's Pop-Art Reverie

Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) is a film with almost no plot and one of the most beautiful eyes in cinema behind the camera, and the tension between those two facts is the whole experience. A young woman gets out of bed before dawn, climbs into a leather catsuit, and rides a motorcycle across the French and German countryside towards her lover, and that is more or less the entire narrative. Everything interesting about the film happens in the seeing rather than in the story — because the man directing it was Jack Cardiff, one of the greatest cinematographers who ever lived, and here he is turning an erotic road trip into a delirium of colour and light.

The colourist who wanted to direct

To understand Girl on a Motorcycle you have to know what Jack Cardiff was. He was the Technicolor genius of British cinema — the cinematographer of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, films whose colour is so ravishing it has never really been surpassed. He shot The African Queen for Huston and won an Academy Award for Black Narcissus, and he understood colour and light the way a great composer understands harmony. In the late 1950s he turned to directing, with real success — his Sons and Lovers earned an Oscar nomination — and by 1968 he was an established, if uneven, filmmaker in his own right.

His eye had been trained in the most demanding school imaginable: he learned Technicolor when the process was new and its cameras were monstrous three-strip contraptions, and he studied the old masters — Vermeer, Rembrandt, the way light falls on skin in a gallery — and carried that education onto every set. By 1968 he had four decades of looking behind him, and it is that depth, not the fashionable trickery, that makes the film’s images hold.

Girl on a Motorcycle is the film where the cinematographer overwhelms the director, and gloriously so. Adapted from La Motocyclette, a 1963 novel by the French surrealist André Pieyre de Mandiargues, it takes a thin, interior story — a young married woman’s ride to her lover, her mind wandering across memory and fantasy as the road unwinds — and treats it as a pretext for pure visual invention. The narrative is a clothesline; the images are the washing, and Cardiff clearly cares far more about the second than the first.

Solarisation, and the honesty of the trick

The film’s signature is a technique called solarisation, and it is the reason Girl on a Motorcycle still gets programmed. During the riding sequences and the erotic reveries, Cardiff pushes the image into chemical abstraction — colours invert and flare, edges dissolve into psychedelic negative, reality curdles into a moving pop-art canvas. It looks like the visual language of an acid trip, and it arrived at the exact cultural moment, 1968, when that language was everywhere in music, design and posters. Cardiff, the old Technicolor master, turns out to be perfectly at home in the psychedelic idiom, because it is still, underneath the novelty, a question of colour and light, and colour and light were his native tongue.

There is a candid double function to the solarisation that is worth naming. It renders the film’s more erotic passages as abstraction, which conveniently let the picture past the censors of 1968 while still selling itself on sensuality — a way of showing everything and nothing at once. The technique is at once an aesthetic flight and a discreet fig leaf, and the film is honest enough about its own commercial position that the two purposes never feel at odds. The abstraction is beautiful and it is also expedient, and Cardiff, an old professional, was untroubled by serving both masters.

Faithfull’s own life at the time gives the casting an extra charge in hindsight. She was in the thick of her relationship with Mick Jagger and at the height of a fame she would soon find ruinous, and the film catches her as an emblem of the moment just before the 1960s dream soured — which is more or less what the picture is about, an intoxicated flight that cannot last. The screen persona and the historical figure rhyme almost too neatly.

The film reaches us under two titles, which tells its own story about how it was received: Girl on a Motorcycle in Britain, and, in a cut American release, the frankly exploitative Naked Under Leather. It carries the historical footnote of being among the first films handed an X rating in the United States, and it was slated for the 1968 Cannes competition before the festival collapsed amid that May’s political upheaval — a film about a woman riding free through Europe, grounded by the year Europe caught fire.

Marianne Faithfull, icon in a catsuit

The image the film left to the culture is Marianne Faithfull zipped into a black leather catsuit, riding a Harley-Davidson across a continent. Faithfull was, in 1968, one of the defining faces of the British 1960s — a pop star, a muse, a tabloid fixation — and casting her as Rebecca imports all of that wattage into the film. She is less an actress here than a presence, a sixties icon photographed with total adoration by a man who knew exactly how to photograph a face, and the film is content to let her be looked at rather than asking her to carry much drama.

The famous catsuit, designed by the fetish couturier John Sutcliffe of the AtomAge label, did as much cultural work as the film itself; it fused the biker and the fetishist into a single silhouette that fashion has been recycling ever since. A small, deflating production fact sits under the glamour: in many of the high-speed riding shots Faithfull was perched on a bike bolted to a platform and towed by a camera vehicle rather than barrelling down any real autobahn. The freedom is, like the solarisation, partly a beautiful illusion — which is arguably the film’s truest subject.

Why it works, and where to file it

Girl on a Motorcycle fails completely as narrative and succeeds completely as object, and the collector’s pleasure is in watching a supreme technician set the story aside and simply paint. The reason it holds up where a hundred other 1968 psychedelic curios have faded is that a genuine master is running the images. Nobody dabbling in solarisation for a quick trippy effect had Cardiff’s half-century of understanding of what colour does to an eye, and it shows in every frame; the abstraction is composed, not merely applied.

File it beside other late-1960s-into-1970s European films where a visual craftsman let the image swallow the plot. The closest neighbour is Walerian Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales, another erotic art film made by a former visual specialist who treated bodies and objects as elements of a composition rather than as narrative — a colder, more archival sensibility chasing the same conviction that how a thing is looked at is the whole content. For the broader story of how the adult and erotic cinema of these years fought to be taken seriously as film, the sexploitation canon is the survey to read next. And for the maximalist pop-culture excess of the exact same moment on the American side, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls makes a wild companion piece — another 1970-ish fever dream where a studio handed a genre stylist the keys and let the imagery run riot.

Spoilers below

There is little plot to spoil, which is the point, but the film’s shape and its ending matter. Rebecca, newly and unhappily married to a mild schoolteacher, rises before dawn and sets off on the motorcycle her lover Daniel — played by Alain Delon — once gave her, riding towards a rendezvous with him. The film is structured as her interior monologue across the journey: the road triggers memories of how she met Daniel, of her marriage, of her divided desires, and Cardiff externalises this drifting mental state through the solarised passages, so that the abstraction is meant to be read as the inside of her head as much as the surface of the film.

The reverie has a hard edge waiting at the end of it. Caught up in the sensations of speed and freedom and the fantasies the ride keeps summoning, Rebecca grows increasingly reckless, and the journey towards her lover ends in a fatal crash — the flight to freedom terminating in the most abrupt possible way. The film’s final irony is bleak and entirely of its moment: the machine that carried her towards liberation is the thing that kills her, and the psychedelic dream of escape resolves into a wreck on a European road. The freedom the whole film has been intoxicated by turns out to have been an illusion all along, which is the note Mandiargues struck in the novel and Cardiff, for all his rapture with the surface, is careful to honour.