Man On Wire

Man On Wire (2008, Director: James Marsh): Winner of both the Grand Jury Prize: World Cinema Documentary and the World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, James Marsh’s stun­ning film brings an inex­plic­ably obscure story to life in a fresh and exhil­ar­ating way.

On August 7, 1974, a young French wire­walker named Philippe Petit spent 45 minutes sus­pended on a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center. He made eight cross­ings before the police con­vinced him to return to safety. Though this story, according to the dir­ector, is part of New York City folk­lore, not many people out­side the city seem to know any­thing about it. But what a fant­astic story, and Marsh does a mas­terful job in telling it, mostly by let­ting Petit and his com­pan­ions bring it to life.

Petit is a fas­cin­ating figure. An accom­plished jug­gler, wire­walker, and pick­pocket(!), he had sup­ported him­self since his teens by working as a street per­former. A born storyteller, he brings the nar­rative alive, even almost 35 years after his great “coup.” But best of all, Marsh gathers all Petit’s accom­plices as well and has each of them recount their own part in the story. Some were stead­fast, like his lover Annie and his child­hood friend Jean-Louis, and others fickle and cow­ardly, like Americans David Foreman and Alan Welner, who both abandon the quest at the cru­cial moment. All tell their stories can­didly and all still seem envel­oped in wonder that such a thing could be accomplished.

Petit and some of his com­pan­ions had already planned and executed two other auda­cious feats of wire­walking, first at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and then on the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia. But the Twin Towers had obsessed Petit ever since he’d read about plans to build them, and the team’s pre­par­a­tions are car­ried out like the plan­ning of a bank heist, with one important dif­fer­ence. As con­spir­ator Jean-Francois says, “It may have been illegal…but it wasn’t wicked or mean.”

Marsh art­fully com­bines lively inter­views (espe­cially when Petit is on screen) with stills and film from each of the various events, and even some re-creations (which he later admitted were part of someone else’s aborted film on the sub­ject). A haunting and beau­tiful score by Michael Nyman (com­poser for many of Peter Greenaway’s films) and fea­turing music by Erik Satie, among others, cre­ated the dream­like atmo­sphere neces­sary to appre­ciate this beau­tiful “art crime.”

Of course, it would be impossible to see a film fea­turing the Twin Towers without thinking of the events of 9/11. Marsh wisely avoids making any con­nec­tions, let­ting the footage of the build­ings’ con­struc­tion speak poignantly for itself. Petit’s feat seems even more won­drous when you con­sider that the fra­gile Frenchman sur­vives while the mighty towers lie in ruins.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector James Marsh from after the screening:

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Duration: 11:00

UPDATE: Mongrel Media will be releasing the DVD of the film in Canada on Tuesday December 9.

Official site for the film
Video inter­view with dir­ector James Marsh and wire­walker Philippe Petit at Sundance 2008

(10/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs08, newyorkcity, nyc, worldtradecenter