Dancing Over The Void

Sharing thoughts about a new film tonight, and I hope it won't seem tedious. I know, I know . . . mine is not a film blog. But I'm entranced and delighted and I want to stop people on the streets and share the good word about this remarkable story about passion, to shepherd my brothers and sisters away from their sad lacking of Man on Wire. All of my random thoughts are floating away from a central iconic image from this film: I even dreamt last night of green hillocks in France marked off with cables, the hillocks giving way to a grassy, rock-strewn path lining a wide brook. As I walked along the brook, I imagined myself slipping but I never hit the water. I knew, though, that what I imagined was both a fall to grace and a fall into the void.

Man on Wire

A film by James Marsh
2008 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Winner, World Cinema/Documentary,
and Audience Award, World Cinema/Documentary

http://www.manonwire.com/

Wire-walker Philippe Petit, an expatriate Frenchman-in-New York, is high-strung, even when he's not tripping the light-line fantastic. His expressions are intense, but his movements are never jerky. He is a disciplined athlete, an Atlas among his cadre of street performers. He is focused, though he prefers "tenacious"--no problem with English as a second language here. His screen personality is a mélange of poetry and showmanship. He talks like an anarchist, motivated by breaking rules. He dares gravity to pull him netherwards: he is a fool, tricking us (and himself) into thinking that gravity won't take him for a ride. He is also a philosopher.

Petit's most famous lark on a wire was six years in the making. On 7 August 1974, while the finishing touches were still being put on the World Trade Center complex in New York, Petit and his crew strung a tightrope between the twin towers and Petit made history by dancing on air. The gathering crowd in the streets below held its collective breath for three quarters of an hour while Petit performed and played a comical game of keepaway from the policemen who had also gathered on the top of each building to arrest him.

Petit's famous stunt was 34 years ago and his story is by now a tightly told one. For Man on Wire, director James Marsh draws on a stash of home movies and then spins out more of the tale with period stills, contemporary interviews, and cleverly-staged reenactments. Oddly, Marsh does not contextualize this film with the destruction of the twin towers, though the prospect of a dramatic plummet hangs over this film in a surreal, psychic echo.

Marsh seems to be more interested in what Petit's existential romp meant to those who helped him pull it off, and so Marsh turns the lens on Petit's friends and sundry recruits. The poignance of their lingering awe and sense of loss is hard to bear. Petit's girlfriend Annie Allix and his co-conspirator, Jean-Louis Blondeau, both knew that they were as likely to be enabling suicide as success, and watching a loved one gleefully dance with mortality certainly took its toll. And though they may not have lost Petit to the void, they lost him, nonetheless, because celebrity corrupts immediately and absolutely.

Now a late-50-something artist-in-residence at St John the Divine Cathedral, Petit relishes the new wave of attention to his dramatic pas de deux with gravity. And though Marsh might hold that the devastation of the twin towers is outside the realm of Petit's story, Petit disagrees and freely discusses his opinions on the subject: "I think they should be rebuilt exactly the same, or maybe even a little bit higher—as a rebellion against doom."