(Bike Race -2010)
Lance: We are feeling . . .
Hilde: . . . very much in love and because we couldn’t see each other, like, every day
Lance: You found a tree . . .
Hilde: . . . which was hollow and we could leave little notes in that tree.

The fundamental level of acting and storytelling in an animated film occurs for me with a pencil, drawing in response to an edited audio track. When I started blocking out the character performances with gesture drawings, it was surprisingly easy to conceive of my own life as a movie. The thematic relationships in “Bike Race” felt as if they followed a premeditated literary structure: the mock-nationalistic arguments in bars about Eddy Merckx and Lance Armstrong evolving into a low-stakes, male, playground competitiveness, which in turn reflects upon the developing “Jules and Jim” love triangle. It was as if the life that was the basis of the documentary film had itself been written. In self-consciously performing the theatrical melodrama of the race, Cis, Hilde and I were unconsciously playing out our fatalistic destinies.

(Bike Race -2010)
Eddy: When we turned, I think, we looked both to each other. We were both so surprised because it was just a wall of wind that hit us.

In the first episode of this story, I described Sayer writing the script for the end of our marriage; that was clearly an act of semi-conscious will, of creative work as wish fulfillment. After playing my role as actor in Sayer’s script, I had apparently learned the lesson that it’s better to be the author of one’s own story.
In 2019, Sayer’s script now appears to me to be the first act of the documentary film which Hilde and I have been continuing to make over the last 17 years. I presently maintain the belief that my partnership with Hilde was always fated to be, that we arrived at the crossroads toward which our individual paths and histories had been inevitably leading us. But is my awareness of an underlying order in these events entirely an imposition of my own desire for meaning, seeing images in the shifting clouds that help me rationalize my behavior after the fact? This trilogy of film-obsessed love stories is now complete and fixed, a reflection pulled from the flow of time; at least until I revise the storytelling again in some other form twenty-five years in the future.