The BQE: Sufjan Stevens’s Ode to a Freeway

Sufjan Stevens is no stranger to the odd, ambitious musical project.
His best known: a plan, launched with his 2003 album Michigan,
to release one full-length record for each of America’s 50 states. So
far, he’s completed just two (the other being 2005’s outstanding
Illinois). With The BQE, Stevens sets his sights on a
more manageable geographical swath—New York City’s
Brooklyn-Queens Expressway—although he tackles it in his usual
grand, symphonic style.

Commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The BQE debuted in 2007 as a multimedia performance piece featuring three
side-by-side
16 mm film projections, a live orchestral score, and
Hula-hooping dancers. This film doesn’t document that performance but
instead presents its tripartite film projection and accompanying score,
which were shot and composed by Stevens.

The films consist of vintage-looking 8 mm and 16 mm footage shot on
and around the BQE, traffic and architecture intercut with scenes of
three colorfully uniformed, Hula-hooping muses (the “hooper heroes”)
gyrating their rings by the roadside. An unsubtle cut from hoopers to
some tires indicates that these are goddesses of the perpetual motion
of the highway system, patrons of all those wheels stuck spinning in
traffic.

The three-panel format creates some engrossing visual effects. A
sequence of synchronized, mirror-image shots casts the flow of cars as
a kind of choreography set to Stevens’s flighty woodwinds or honking
brass, with traffic diverging and converging at the borders between the
frames. Bridges double-joint and reconnect, forming artificially
elongated landscapes; streets go on too long; nonsensical eddies and
islands of traffic form; ships glide smoothly into each other along the
waterfront and then disappear. Three Hula-hoopers spinning at different
speeds slowly synch up for two or three twirls before falling back out
of time.

There are other striking moments as the film passes into night: a
sequence of sped-up, dashboard-shot night-driving footage set to an
electronic rhythm track incongruous with rest of the score; lit-up
Hula-hoops against footage of a carnival shot from a Ferris wheel;
rivers of headlight trails; a crescendo of fireworks. One muse’s smile
keeps flaring up, unexpectedly bright.

As the credits roll, we see the BQE abandoned but for some
bicyclists, lending only the slightest hint of urban-planning critique
to an otherwise lyrical but seemingly neutral ode to an American
freeway.