New York City life and death trip
A couple of years ago I was roped in to clean the leaves from gutter around my elder sister’s house. At one stage, fumbling with the trowel I momentarily lost my balance, the aluminium ladder clattered against the wall and the cry went up “Health and Safety!” Luckily I stayed on my 10 feet low perch and we all chuckled about the madness of our modern obsession with Health and Safety.
Tightrope walker and circus performer Philippe Petit has a unique attitude to his health and safety, and Man on Wire tells a part of his remarkable story. On the seventh of August, 1974 Petit walked a 120 foot-long wire strung between the tops of the World Trade Centre towers. He’d been dreaming of this decidedly dangerous exercise since he first saw the architect’s drawings of the buildings in a magazine seven years earlier. The exuberant dreamer was only 17 when he first glimpsed his future.
From the first, Man on Wire is an utterly gripping movie. The ‘coup’ itself occurs three quarters of the way into the movie, by which time the tension has been built to a fever pitch. The prelude has Petit, with the help of his band of trusty pranksters, walking the between bell towers of Notre Dame in Paris and across one of the towers on Sydney Harbour Bridge. By the time they start planning the New York job they have forged a bond based on sustaining their maestro’s death defying acts and the emotional intensity his walks create.
The story itself is so extraordinary, that one wonders if the strength of the film comes from the tale or its telling. The director of Man on Wire, James Marsh, has made a some excellent documentaries. The Burger and The King amusingly and disturbingly investigated Elvis’s life and social background through the food he ate. While a collection of bizarre photographs and newspaper stories of murder, madness and disarray in the 19c Midwest make up the impressionistic, Gothic Wisconsin Death Trip. Man on Wire skilfully uses the techniques used in his earlier works. Like in Wisconsin Death Trip, Marsh uses sped-up, shadowy German Expressionist-style dramatic reconstructions. But as with Elvis’s sad life, the meat of the film comes from interviews with compelling characters who tell great stories.
I read an interview with Petit in The Telegraph and half-expected the film to reveal an arrogant egotist; but although bold, he’s not boorish. Petit seems to have retained an unaffected enthusiasm, but his single-minded devotion to living in the moment was not at the expense of recording his exploits. Members of the tightrope-walking fellowship filmed and photographed much of his preparation for the walk. The photos taken of the final walk are vertigo inducing.
Fear of heights as an abstract concept is obviously not something that Petit seems to suffer from, but he still makes all the preparations he can not to fall to his death. Danger is none-the-less what turns him on, but also makes this walk so life affirming. Emotions are so intense that members of the band run off on the final night of preparation. The hard core, who have prepared over years, stay focused and pull the job off. The next day, the simple, audacious beauty of a single man on a wire is replaced by a fur coat and fame. The league is scattered and the space between the towers, once more, is empty. Until they too were gone.
Tags: James Marsh, Man on Wire, Philip Petit, tightrope walking, twin towers