a film festival about mountains?
Watching films at the 2002 Mountain Film Festival in Taos was like reading books about mountaineering.
- I love to climb mountains.
- These are films about climbing mountains.
- Therefore: I love these films.
The first three films that we saw were about climbing K2: two failures, two successes, and then a film about a climbing season in which more people died than reached the summit. Given the way thousands of people like myself enjoy mountains, why is that sort of thing the subject of nearly every book or film about mountaineering? I jotted down two of the classic phrases from the narration: “Now, something went drastically wrong.” “But, cruelly, the weather broke.” After that, John Middendorf showed slides of a climb on one of the Trango Towers in Pakistan. It was the views, Middendorf said, that he remembered. He mentioned how a 180-degree view—or even a 90-degree view, if you were climbing in a corner—opened out to 360 degrees at the top. (Now, that was something I could relate to.) The next film, “The Mystery of Mount McKinley,” was an enjoyable one about the history of early ascents. It told about claims of successful climbs which were later disproven and about later climbs that actually took place but were disbelieved for many years. Amusingly, the last scene showed crowds of modern climbers setting off for McKinley while the narrator said, “They fly in and they fly out, and most of them reach the summit. Or so they say.”
It’s not that the films about difficult and dangerous climbs were uninteresting. Many of them were very interesting. But there’s a vast array of mountain climbing experiences, many of which I've participated in, that are also interesting but were completely unrepresented among the films—and they’re also missing in the mountaineering literature. I longed for films showing the beauty and spectacle of mountains as enjoyed by people going there quietly and receptively, as opposed to the exploits of people pushing the limits of their own abilities. Once again, it's the difference between Actives and Passives—whether your main focus is inward (on what you can accomplish) or outward (on what’s there to see and experience).
Laurie and I looked forward to a film titled “Common Ground” because the program said it was about the northeastern U.S. We feared it would be a rock-climbing film about places like the ’Gunks rather than a film about mountains that we might have climbed, but at least it wouldn’t be K2 or the Trango Towers again. As it turned out, the film was about rock climbing. Even worse, it was about bouldering, which I find even less interesting than rock climbing. Not that the film wasn't riveting: my own muscles tensed as we watched the climbers’ moves. “It’s an extremely good way to seek out adventure in the world,” said one of the climbers. “It’s something you can put your whole energy into. All of it.” They spoke of “expression,” “movement,” and “challenge.” The entire film, I noted, was about difficulty, not beauty. John Middendorf on the Trango Towers might have enjoyed the views, but there was no sign that anybody in this film did.
In another session of the festival, “Turtle Island” was a short whimsical animation about the spoiling of the planet by human beings. “Ganga Ma” was a beautiful portrayal of religious life along the Ganges River from its mouth to its source, filled with colorful images, Indian music, and no narration except a few printed words on the screen and periodic remarks by holy men. “Devil’s Tower” was a fascinating film about conflicts between rock climbers and the Lakota, for whom Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower is sacred ground.
On the second day of the festival, we saw “Sentinel, West Face,” about a 1960s climb by Royal Robbins and Yvon Chouinard; “Descending the Dragon,” about a kayak expedition along the coast of North Vietnam in which one of the kayakers was a young South Vietnamese woman whose family had escaped to America during the war; and “Jump,” about the sport of jumping to sandstone towers in the Czech Republic. In another session, Tom Frost showed beautiful black-and-white slides of 1960s climbs on El Capitan, and Royal Robbins presented a program of slides about the Yosemite portion of his 40 years of climbing adventures. “You have to have that edge of danger,” Robbins said. “That’s what gives the sport its spice.” He repeated the common sentiment that successful climbing is less the conquest of mountains than the conquest of the mountaineer. My own idea, however, was that it wasn’t either one. Even conquering the mountaineer was too self-centered to capture my idea of what mountain climbing was about.
The next films that we saw were produced by the younger generation. Timmy O’Neill was crazy and funny (although his humor was the in modern style of saying so much that something was bound to be funny). He showed a short outrageous film of himself climbing buildings in Boulder, Colorado, followed by slides of climbs in Yosemite and Patagonia. The Yosemite climbs seemed oriented toward the setting of speed records. The Patagonia ones, I had to admit, included some gorgeous and truly spectacular scenery, much of which could not have been obtained without climbing the spires and towers. By contrast, Timy [sic] Fairfield’s program was terrible. A combination of motion picture and slide images was projected on multiple screens. The program was accompanied by intensely loud music, and there was nothing interesting in the images. The majority of the activity was bouldering, which is like skateboarding: it might be fun to do, although it looks more frustrating than fun and is about as interesting to watch as paint drying. Images that weren’t very interesting to begin with were repeated over and over in film loops. The presentation was produced with a lot of technology, but the content wasn’t worth the trouble. To paraphrase Tom Lehrer: If you don’t have anything to say, the very least you can do is shut up.
O’Neill and especially Fairfield were Actives to the nth degree, so completely self-absorbed that they assumed the rest of us would care as much as they did. They might have had a good time climbing buildings and falling off of rocks, but what made them think I would want to see a movie about it? The film about the kayakers, on the other hand, stood out for its gentleness amid all the risk and challenge. But I found it excessively focused on people at the expense of the surroundings they traveled through. Since it was a National Geographic film, I shouldn’t have been surprised. (In my view, National Geographic is always excessively focused on people.) Early in the film, the kayakers happened upon a colorful local festival (an excessively trite occurence, even for National Geographic), and the film ended with a wedding.
The more I thought about it, however, the more I realized that all of the films and slide shows had people as their central focus. If the film was about Mount McKinley or El Capitan, it focused on the climbers. If it was about jumping, it focused on the jumpers. The bouldering film wasn’t about the northeastern U.S.: it was about the boulderers. The single exception was “Ganga Ma” (though not a film about mountains, of course). There was no central character or group of characters in that film. Or, if there was, it was the camera, the effect of which was to make the viewer the central character. The film was a progression of scenes along the Ganges River: people, towns, temples, funeral pyres, natural scenery, wildlife—as if we were making the trip ourselves: traveling, looking, and listening. In the other films, we watched somebody doing something; here, it was as if we were having the experience ourselves. And it was a sublimely Passive, rather than Active, experience.
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