James Marsh (2008)

It’s no surprise that this documentary was a popular as well as a huge critical success and won the Best Documentary Oscar (among many other prizes).  Man on Wire is about the French high-wire artist Philippe Petit and his walk (comprising eight crossings) between the summits of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in August 1974.  The illegality of the enterprise appealed to the naturally rebellious Petit and James Marsh describes its planning as if the film were a crime caper.  The sky-walking, needless to say, is wonderful to behold on the screen.  (One of Petit’s earlier coups de théâtre was a walk between the towers of Notre Dame de Paris.  The miraculous aspect of what he does is amusingly underlined with intercut still photographs of priests inside the church in prostrate prayer.)  But 9/11 is the elephant in the room.  According to Wikipedia, Marsh justified the decision not to mention the subject in Man on Wire as follows:

‘[Petit’s] act was “incredibly beautiful” … it “would be unfair and wrong to infect his story with any mention, discussion or imagery of the Towers being destroyed”.’

Of course the fact of 9/11 was no reason for not making Man on Wire but it’s disingenuous to pretend that keeping quiet about it in the film excludes the terrorist attacks from the audience’s mind.  When the participants in Petit’s great escapade describe walking down the more than hundred floors of the WTC or their horror when they saw something falling from the top of the Towers and weren’t sure if it was a body (it turned out to be a piece of clothing), there’s a built-in and grimly compelling resonance.  We see a shot of Petit on his tightrope-cable with a plane passing overhead in the top left-hand corner of the frame:  I don’t believe that viewers – however entranced they may be by the film – aren’t reminded of those other planes.   The Wikipedia article also explains that:

‘The film’s producer Simon Chinn first encountered Philippe Petit in April 1995 on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, after which he decided to pursue him for the film rights to his book, To Reach the Clouds. After months of discussion, Petit agreed, with the condition that he would play an active, collaborative part in the making of the film.’

Yet the bibliography in a separate Wikipedia entry on Petit himself gives the publication date of his book To Reach The Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between The Twin Towers as 2002.

There’s a wealth and variety of interesting archive film in Man on Wire (the title refers to a phrase used in the police report on Petit’s ‘crime’ – for which he was arrested, then released).  This includes footage of the original building site and construction of the WTC; Petit’s 1973 walk between the two north pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge; and Petit and his collaborators planning the New York walk.   I assume this was shot by one of the team for posterity and that the same goes for a colour film sequence of Petit and his team practising and gambolling in ideally verdant meadows, which James Marsh scores to ‘The Lark Ascending’.  The choice of music is pretty obvious throughout – Grieg’s ‘Hall of the Mountain King’, the most familiar of the ‘Gnossiennes’ and ‘Gymnopédies’ by Satie, etc.  The liberal use of Michael Nyman’s music is effective, though:  each time it starts up, you register relief that you’re watching Man on Wire rather than the Peter Greenaway film in which it previously featured.  Marsh also works in some bits of (wordless) reconstruction, featuring actors.

It seems pretty clear from his performance in interview in Man on Wire that Petit was determined, as the Wikipedia entry suggests, to have a say in the making of the film, and much of what he says comes across as well prepared.   When in 1974 reporters asked Petit why he’d done the walk, he replied, ‘There is no why’.   This is a good line and it makes sense of James Marsh’s concentration on the ‘how’ of the walk but it shouldn’t be taken at face value.   Petit’s girlfriend at the time, Annie Allix, says that the adventure was ‘like a bank robbery – that pleased him enormously’.  So that’s one why – even if it’s obviously not the whole story.  What’s more, Petit, even if he stops short of an explicit explanation of what drove him, has the French penchant for poetical existential aphorism:  I felt I heard plenty about what was in his head before and during the walk – and that he’d scripted it.  (To Reach the Clouds was reprinted last year with the title Man on Wire.)

I didn’t take to Petit as an individual and the circus tradition from which his speciality derives leaves me cold.  (There are clips of him whizzing round French streets on a unicycle, wearing an outfit that recalls Marcel Marceau – who wrote the preface to Petit’s 1985 book On the High Wire.)  What’s more absorbing about Man on Wire is the testimony of others – Annie, his close friend Jean-Louis Blondeau et al – and that Petit’s obsessive personality inspired them and commanded their fierce loyalty.  (There’s no explanation of that either but it’s powerfully evident.)   It’s striking too that the Twin Towers walk – in every sense the high point of Petit’s career – appears to have spelt the end of his different partnerships with Annie and Jean-Louis.  Both seem to have retained more love for and commitment towards him than he has for them (Jean-Louis twice breaks down in the closing stages of his interview).  Once Petit is aloft above the Twin Towers, the eyewitness accounts prove to be well worth waiting for – not only those of Annie, Jean-Louis and the rest of the gang but also old footage of an interview with a WTC security guard.  This man has a winning combination of professional wariness (Petit was breaking the law) and stunned admiration (how did he do that?).

2 August 2009