You don’t have to be a mountaineer to love mountains. Likewise you don’t have to be a mountaineer to love this film.
I managed to get to the cinema to see Mountain last week. And, after having watched a succession of
brain-frazzling, SFX-heavy films lately, watching it felt like I’d sunk into
the glorious waters of a warm bath – interrupted by the occasional bucket of
ice water thrown over my head.
Mountain
transfixes in scale and scope but there’s a significant absence – there’s
little narrative about the people who live and work in these mountains. Peedom’s
earlier film Sherpa focuses on Phurba
Tashi, and the people who risk their lives leading tourists up Everest to make
a living. Peedom started shooting Sherpa
in 2015 after the infamous
confrontation on Everest that drew attention to the battle for sherpas’
rights – the film changed direction when a devastating earthquake hit Nepal,
focusing on the aftermath of these terrible events. But despite using some
footage from this film, Mountain is
firmly positioned from a Western viewpoint.
The film is billed as a documentary but it’s more a love letter
to mountains. Peedom’s omniscient camera drifts and glides above nameless,
towering protagonists; observing the peaks of fifteen
different countries, from the Himalayas to the Andes and everything in between.
There’s little labelling of anything, which my cinema companion found
frustrating. But the film is impressionistic. It’s about the mountains that we imagine
and dream about, and have romantic attachments to, rather than those that are
categorised and branded with contours on a map.
The elevated camera angles are reflected in the words,
which are narrated from what feels on high by Willem Dafoe and penned by Robert
McFarlane, who wrote Mountains of the Mind (2008). McFarlane’s book is an examination of the West’s obsession with
mountains, charting its beginnings in the 17th century up to modern
times. There’s a nice little section in the film with footage from the early
twentieth century that shows the vast Western expeditions that set out to
conquer Everest, a fascinating phenomenon in itself that’s since given rise to
the mass tourism that is proving to be so damaging.
Peedom moves from macro to microcosm, from ravishing
helicopter shots of tiny people on giant rockfaces to the detail of a magnified
single snowflake. ‘Deep time’, is a phrase that MacFarlane uses frequently in
his book and crops up in the film – the idea that time itself is etched in the earth
around us. And deep time moves at a much slower rate, as mountains rearrange
themselves over millennia through erosion, landslide or earthquake. All the
while we’re reminded by Dafoe’s godlike narration that the mountains watched us
arrive and will watch us leave, no matter how many Instagram followers we have.
Alex Honnold, still from Mountain, 2017
Mountains don’t give a rat’s ass what happens to us – they’re wild, they’re brutal and they’re cruel but most of all highlight our own insanity. In the film we see bloodied fingers and people pleading for home as chunks of ice fall and buffet them. But despite their cruelty, some of us humans still cling to the sheer rock with our fingertips and will come back for more if the mountains allow us. We spend time with mountain daredevils, from Alex Honnold, the free climber who scaled the sheer face of El Capitan in Yosemite earlier this year without ropes, to Danny MacAskill mountain-biking along the ridge of the Cuillin Mountains in Scotland. There are skiers, snowboarders, base jumpers, heliskiers and, yes, parachuting mountain-bikers.
The music is pivotal to this film – the classical soundtrack
is performed by the Sydney Chamber Orchestra. Richard Tognetti's score is
extravagant but unsettling, moving between solo strings, solo piano and full
orchestra, successfully capturing the capricious nature of mountains. There’s
also some nice use of Grieg, Vivaldi and Beethoven in the sections describing
humanity’s attempts to civilise, control and shape the mountains for their own
pleasure, whether by climbing them, playing out extreme sports on their
surfaces or carving out ski resorts for thousands of visitors a year.
If you love mountains – or even if you just like the dramatic
– this is pretty satisfying.
Comments
Post a Comment