MAN ON WIRE

http://www.univie.ac.at/cga/art/WTC-crossSmall.jpg

http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/5433/wtc4300x400ua5.jpg

http://www.adabyron.net/images/Petit1.jpg

http://www.brianrose.com/outtakes/petit01.jpg

http://www.brianrose.com/outtakes/petit02.jpg

Petit first received the inspiration while he sat in his dentist's office in Paris in 1968. He came upon an article on the not yet built towers, along with an illustration of the model. He then became obsessed with the towers, collecting articles on the towers whenever possible. Petit also traveled to New York on several occasions to have some first hand observations. Since the towers were still under construction, Philippe and N.Y. based photographer Jim Moore went up in a helicopter to do aerial photographs of the WTC. It was for the purpose of having these photographs for Petit to make a scale model of the towers to help him figure out the rigging he needed to prepare for the upcoming wirewalk. Petit and three others made fake identification cards claiming that they were contractors that were installing an electrified fence on the roof in order to gain access to the towers. Prior to this, Petit sneaked into the towers several times, hiding on the roof and other areas in the unfinished towers, in order to get a sense of what type of equipment he needed.

To make it easier to sneak into the buildings, Petit thoroughly observed the clothes that construction workers wore, what kinds of tools they carried, and what businessmen dressed like so that he would blend in with them when he tried to enter the buildings. He also noted what time the workers arrived and left, so he could figure out when he would have access to the roof. He once even claimed that he was with a French architecture magazine wanting to interview the workers on the roof. The Port Authority allowed Petit to conduct the interviews, but the real reason he wanted to be up on the roof was to make more observations. He was once caught by a police officer on the roof, and his hopes to do the high wire walk were dampened, but he eventually regained the confidence to proceed with it.

Petit and his crew were able to ride in a freight elevator to the 104th floor with their equipment the day before the walk, and were able to store this equipment just nineteen steps from the roof. In order to pass the cable across the void, Petit and his crew decided to use a bow and arrow. They first shot across a fishing line, and then passed larger and larger ropes across the space between the towers until they were able to pass the 450 pound steel cable across. Cavalettis (guy lines) were used to stabilize the cable and keep the swaying of the wire to a minimum. For the first time in the history of the Twin Towers, they were joined. The 'artistic crime of the century' took six years of planning, during which he learned everything he could about the buildings, taking into account such problems as the swaying of the towers because of wind and how to get the walking cable across the 140 foot gap between the towers.

looking at these pictures gives me a little vertigo

http://www.hbo.com/thewire/img/castcrew/actor_season04/idriselba.jpg

another great mr. que thread. lets all put phones in out mouths to celebrate.

why did I unban you from the noise bored

http://image.com.com/tv/images/processed/super/b7/0b/11317.jpg

i love that show

http://www.fraudfactor.com/scandals/ca_ag_lawyer_art/images/Anti-Semitic_Painting_LG_BAL-1-80.jpg

http://www.adabyron.net/images/Petit2SM.jpg

http://emu.music.ufl.edu/femf/cnrphotos/lucierroad.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S46XKa3uj2U

they showed this movie at the full frame doc festival here, people were crying with joy about it. so good.

almost went to watch it this evening! definitely worth a viewing, then?

YES

god i was so into it.

he's like a superhero. the way he's always doing magic tricks or something like that... like when he steals the policeman's watch...

man this movie was great. the ending gave me such vertigo but man. man.

I even got vertigo from that knowingly fake-ass scene from Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay!

I even got vertigo from...Vertigo!

Awesome, what a wonderfully outrageous feat!

The final minute of this movie was the best bit btw. Magnificent piece of filming.

http://theworldtradecentermemorial.org/images/philippe_petit.jpg

Ha.

http://theworldtradecentermemorial.org/images/philippe_petit.jpg

Young Philippe Petit sort of looked like Alba, I thought.

this was entrancing

What did you guys think of Wisconsin Death Trip?

oh i think this is still playing nearby? i will go

i am probably going to talk to this dude this week :D

i really disliked wisconsin death trip! didn't realize this was the same guy, but i still want to see it.

this film did nothing for me.

not bad (I remember the event well), but I really don't get the "greatness." Style was a bit sub-Errol Morris.

And a couple critics have raised the evaded question: WHERE'D HE GET THE FUNDS? for all those transatlantic flights etc?

you make it sound like a conspiracy. FOLLOW THE MONEY AND FIND OUT WHY HE DID IT.
i figured it was just that they were all from super affluent families, but that delving into it would be distracting or against the generic young-humble-boy-with-a-dream narrative. i think purposefully avoiding a whole side of his life was a slight downfall to the film. but it was good. nicely used satie and nyman stuff too.

I was saying to meself throughout, where's the annoyingly familiar music from? oh, Nyman.

delving into the money source WOULD have been, y'know. factual, however.

how many transatlantic flights did he take? maybe five returns over a couple of years? were flights a lot more expensive in real terms back then? finding $4000 over a couple of years today does not seem that mysterious.

esp for a Parisian street acrobat, amirite

I believe the movie did in fact address that he had to ask people to fund his flights, but one oughtn't let the content of the film affect how one critiques what was missing from the film

I loved it when they revealed how the gentrified Wyatt Earp country-club dude looked like thirty-odd years previous. Suddenly the moustache made sense.

And a couple critics have raised the evaded question: WHERE'D HE GET THE FUNDS? for all those transatlantic flights etc?

― Dr Morbius, Thursday, November 27, 2008 4:47 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

really, could you find a more boring angle to this story to concentrate on? how did he pay for his flights???

I guess I just didn't find his achievement so much as "beautiful" as impressive. Couldn't one of his buds shot film with a Super 8 camera or something?

I'm OK with the film, but to mention it for doc prizes in the year of Standard Op Procedure & Up the Yangtze seems excessive to me.

you mean shot film of the event itself?

apparently they did have a 16mm camera there but dude's arms were so wrecked from shlepping that cable all night he couldn't hold it up!!

oh. well at least they had the right idea.

i really can't go gaga for a doc that has this much 'recreation' in it (more than SOP).

i don't know about proportionately, but i thought that there was more recreation in sop - they both use basic shots just to fill in the blanks, so morris uses a ultrasaturated slo-mo string-scored shot of an ominously clanging jaildoor key to accompany someone's words, and man on wire uses some black and white generic tiptoe-ing-burglar shots for the same purpose. i was impressed at all the documentary that was in the film -seeing them training, lolloping around in gardens etc was the thing that made it seem impressive, rather than just a feat.

Morbs a big part of the point of the whole film was that there is no film of the event - this film is about youth, and peak moments, the unreproducable temporal incandescent once-only-for-you-alone nature of it. it is about things that can only be experienced by the people who were there, and an attempt to take one of those things - this remarkable peak moment, whose greatness can partly be gleaned by others because of the outrageousness of it - and communicate it to others. that's why people cry when they see it: if I can get maudlin for a sec, it's because people are reminded, seeing this movie, what it felt like to be young and know it - to be on that cusp where you feel that something is ending and you ought to give it its due. Most of us don't, at that moment, walk a tightrope between the towers of the world trade center. Most of us dance all night or get as high as we can or try to write our novel, and that's great, too, but this one stupid insane gesture is iconic - one can invest oneself in it. The less direct documentation of the event, the better: it's a myth, an archetypal story, a dream. The key moment of the film, really, is when his girlfriend from the time reveals that in the frenzy of feeling post-even, the first thing he did was betray her with some nobody.

So that's the point of the recreation, too - that that's all you can really do, try to recreate things whose documentation would have been in vain, anyway - the difference between life and representation thereof, etc.

"post-event," I mean

I sorta get that John, but I don't relate to this stunt as the stuff that dreams are made of, and when I was young I essentially did nothing and waited til I was 'old' to even attempt anything ambitious and foolish.

also, maybe he betrayed his gf quite often and it had shit to do with fulfillment and euphoria. I didn't even LIKE Petit when the film was over.

I didn't even LIKE Petit when the film was over.

Me neither.

that's ok--i'd rather he be a flawed interesting character than them try and make him all cuddly

I'm watching this right now. Unfortunately, the copy I have doesn't have subtitles (do any of them have subtitles?), so I am missing all the French material. Is it worth watching if I don't understand any of the French? Or should I rewatch it when I've got a better copy?

dude, where's my wire?

wait

this film did nothing for me.

― caek, Tuesday, 30 September 2008 13:06 (2 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I liked it.

this

they showed this movie at the full frame doc festival here, people were crying with joy about it. so good.

― J0hn D., Wednesday, August 13, 2008 11:48 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

reminds me of those things in Arthur magazine where it's like "Roll an avocado in poppy seeds... Transcendent!" Where it's like, Aren't you the same age as me, why are pretending not to be jaded?

ya why not just be dead inside.

don't understand whiney's last post

didn't think the movie was all tht joyful; OK he does something extraordinary (I don't see the beauty in it but w/e) but he's a wee fanny

really, "You didn't love this film, you're a misanthropic zombie" is not very generous. I don't even say that to ppl who like fucking Dogville.

Why would you? They liked it.

yeah, I mean the obverse or whatever.

that's not what i was saying, i was responding to the "why are you pretending not to be jaded" comment, which is kind of the inverse of that.

and which im sure was jokey.

Being me, it's very hardevidently impossible not to respond to that in earnest, because I think the sense of people who've embraced their jadedness is "inside, everyone is exactly as I am whether they're admitting it or not," which I think is an utterly false assertion but also one that ends up taking on persuasive force for a lot of people - this notion that once you've crossed a certain line, finding heav'n in a grain of sand & eternity in a wildflow'r etc isn't actually possible, that you're posing if you describe your own experiences as transcendent after you've (say) seen 2 Girls 1 Cup like everybody else, etc - whereas I would argue, actually, that the reason people at the Durham screening of Man on Wire got so emotional (not me, I should say, I was just describing the scene above) is precisely that the film is goading you into comparing your own present-day experience, with all its "you're not really capable of transcendent experience, none of us are" (nb: people have been saying that to each other since the end of the first world war at least and probably since 1840 or so, this generation isn't actually special) to this posited simpler time/simpler guy, in the hope that you'll look at the latter and feel you've come up short, and will mourn your condition/celebrate the other: an emotional experience, the film's payoff. what it does in other words is provide a saintly figure/event, an iconic experience minus the religious stuff. which I'd posit is why some people find the whole thing annoying. me, I love me some icon/worshipper dynamics in play, movie generally works for me although the most moving bit is how the hero destroyed the most important relationship in his life within hours of being released from custody, it reminds me of the Borges poem about the good thief.

if that reading conflicts with my earlier one take whichever one seems to present its case less incoherently

the film is goading you into comparing your own present-day experience, with all its "you're not really capable of transcendent experience, none of us are" (nb: people have been saying that to each other since the end of the first world war at least and probably since 1840 or so, this generation isn't actually special) to this posited simpler time/simpler guy, in the hope that you'll look at the latter and feel you've come up short, and will mourn your condition/celebrate the other: an emotional experience, the film's payoff.

Okay. I'm gonna say OTM even though I haven't seen the movie (BEAR WITH ME!) 'cuz this is exactly exactly exactly the feeling I got from the final segment of that PBS "New York Story" thing, which was largely dedicated to Petit's walk. Transcendent, chastening, joyful, encouraging and mostly just overwhelming. An unashamed celebration of limitlessness, optimism and human potential.

And, yeah, joke only to to the extent it isn't, "why are you pretending not to be jaded?" totally stuck in my craw for this reason -- no offense, Whiney. Snark always rises to smack fruity optimism back down, but fuck that. (Except when it's about avocados or some shit.)

http://edendale.typepad.com/weblog/2009/02/an-open-letter-from-man-on-wire-producer-simon-chinn.html

i thought this was very boring! i must be jaded and dead inside

well ive always said that

people have been saying that to each other since the end of the first world war at least and probably since 1840 or so

40s, 50s

i thought this movie was fantastic as a portrait of a group of friends

totes

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Walked-Between-Towers/product-reviews/0761317910/ref=cm_cr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addOneStar

the french concluded that a pen in the shirt front pocket was a very "american" look

this movie made me want to be a tightrope walker

wtf is the point of doing anything else really

4 DR MORBIDLYCURIOUS:

PP: I had to find a way. It was my nightmare that the towers would be built and I had missed my opportunity. I spent eight months in New York making several trips to the towers, finding people to help me, borrowing equipment, getting to know the towers, so how did I finance this? It’s a laughable set of costs. I rented rooms, bought steel cable – which was a lot of money for me, and I had no money. So I did it the way I always did it in Paris, by passing my hat out and street juggling. But this actually was still not enough. Back in Europe, I persuaded my friend Francis Brunn to put up the money to help finance 'le coup'.

thought this was one of the greatest uses of Fleetwood Mac "Albatross" on film.

i miss yr point.

not bad (I remember the event well), but I really don't get the "greatness." Style was a bit sub-Errol Morris.

And a couple critics have raised the evaded question: WHERE'D HE GET THE FUNDS? for all those transatlantic flights etc?

― Dr Morbius, Thursday, November 27, 2008 4:47 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

otm

it wasn't a bad doc, but it didn't even explain basic things. and it was named as one of the best of the decade smh.

your first post on this thread:

And a couple critics have raised the evaded question: WHERE'D HE GET THE FUNDS? for all those transatlantic flights etc?

― Dr Morbius, Wednesday, November 26, 2008 8:47 PM (1 year ago)

i never found myself once asking how dude paid for his plane tickets. what a mundane detail to get hung up on.

THE DOC NEVER ONCE MENTIONS WHERE HE BOUGHT HIS PANTS.

if i'd found the film more gripping, i guess it wouldn't have come up. but i didn't so it did.

the guy was a colossal dbag, which didn't help, but the mind wanders, and transatlantic flight was p fkn expensive in the 70s.

yes but he was an awesome dbag

i'd rather he be a flawed interesting character than them try and make him all cuddly

Coming in 3D from Zemeckis and JoGo!

http://www.filmlinc.com/daily/entry/robert-zemeckis-gordon-levitt-team-up-for-3d-take-of-man-on-wire

EET EES MY DWEAM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iEZhTuICx0

lol how is this at all necessary

looking at these pictures gives me a little vertigo

ppl gettin nauseated at the Zemeckis 3D

OR could it be the script?

It's the dude's shitty fake accent

and his dumb face.

sorry.

so they're basically turning this story into a piece of shit about *THE TRIUMPH OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT* right? Barf.