SENA KAYASÜ (ARCH/III)
sena.kayasu@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
I don’t know how many of you have heard of parkour. Probably a lot. In any case, here’s a small introduction:
Once upon a time, there was a French soldier who was really good at gymnastics. He taught his son what he knew. His son also became a soldier who was really good at gymnastics. Then he left and developed his technique until he and a friend perfected it to become “le parkour.” The son is named David Belle. His friend is Sébastien Foucan.
Today, this form of “urban exercise” is enjoying a lot of attention. Like many famous disciplines, it did not gain its popularity easily. But it was helped by its founders’ efforts to promote it in ways that aren’t, strictly speaking, advertising.
For example, I know about parkour because of a movie called “Banlieue 13” (District 13). This is a 2004 French movie starring David Belle and Cyril Raffaelli, a fight choreographer. It has a pretty basic plot: a post-apocalyptic environment (but only in District 13, where all the bad guys are left free to roam lawlessly among a handful of innocents—somehow the rest of Paris is still doing pretty well) where our heroes try to save helpless civilians from a rather large bomb. There are, as there must be, personal stakes involved, but I won’t give you any spoilers. I’ll just tell you that the only weapon our protagonists wield is their superhuman ability to move around in a concrete jungle faster than you can watch them. And there are practically no cars involved.
As it turns out, it’s not superhuman. It’s amazing, it’s incredible, but there were apparently no computer effects involved in the escape and fight scenes. There were no stuntmen either, because for once, the stuntmen were the actors. They jump off roofs and kick themselves off walls, and make a dance of it. It really is choreography, and extremely fun to watch.
It’s not just entertainment, though. I find that this movie is food for thought. The discipline of parkour, also known as freerunning, is a checkpoint in our evolution. Cars, trains, subways and boats are all well and good. They are great ways to travel within and between cities. But parkour explores something else entirely: moving with your body. With only your body. Except it’s fast. You don’t have to stick to preordained paths. This was developed by soldiers and inspired by obstacle course training, and the whole point is to assess your environment and move around as quickly and stealthily as possible. You have to evaluate not only which constructed paths to take, but also every window you can crash out of, every railing you can use to heave yourself up and gain momentum. Momentum is paramount. If you stop moving, you’ll never pick up the same speed in time to get away from Taha’s men. You can’t have time to think. What would happen if you did? You would start seeing again. You would see the pathways and behavior patterns that you were taught to follow. If that happened, who would leap off a balcony in the hope that they would land on another one two floors below?
For the sake of efficiency, practitioners of parkour get down to the fundamentals. No patterns, no previous compositions. They have to see the environment in its basic elements so that they can form new conclusions and cut new corners. Otherwise, they cannot reach the main target of efficiency. That’s why parkour is also called freerunning.
There is something exhilarating about that word, isn’t there? Freerunning. FREErunning. The ability to be free in an urban setting, where everything is supposed to have been dictated and prepared for you to behave in predictable patterns by structures and suggestions. Trust me, I’m an architect (well, kind of). People who can move like that have evolved to the point where they completely belong in this consciously constructed habitat. I would almost say that they show new instincts, except that that fearlessness, that urge to go ahead and jump off the ninth floor is actually an old instinct: the instinct to jump to the next branch and look for delicious bananas.
It’s quite far from being a cinematic masterpiece (very, very far), but I’m still going to go ahead and recommend this movie to you, if for nothing else than the chance it gives you to watch better thought-out parkour stunts than you can find on YouTube: it’s a sequence, and can gain momentum in a way those five-minute videos do not. There is also a sequel called “Banlieue 13: Ultimatum” and an English remake starring Paul Walker, called “Brick Mansions.”
I’d just like to leave you with a little more food for thought: people who do parkour are called tracers (les traceurs). Can you guess why?