Nilda Whitsitt's blog ::... happened at the Twin Towers, but it couldn’t possibly have ... into bed. You remember the news footage. It was surreal. For the next...
On the morning of August 7, 1974, a 24-year old Frenchman named Philippe Petit walked, danced, strutted, knelt, and reclined flat on his back on a metal cable less than one inch in diameter strung across the 200 foot gap between the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City for about 45 minutes. This amazing fact is the kind of thing that it is difficult to grasp, to get one's mind around, and even to believe. But it did happen and is well-documented. In fact, the 2008 documentary film Man on Wire recreates the event in vivid detail, skillfully interweaving contemporary footage with still photographs and re-enactment segments. The film was directed by James Marsh, an Englishman, and sponsored by Magnolia Pictures, Discovery Films BBC, and the UK Film Council. It is "based on" Petit's book To Reach the Clouds, but Petit himself was very directly involved in creating the film itself. The nearly 60 year old Petit recounting the events is as much the star of the film as the 24 year old artist. This 94 minute documentary film won a Best World Documentary award at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and a Best Documentary Oscar at the February 2009 Academy Awards ceremony, among other well-deserved awards. It is now available on Blu-ray and DVD, which is the form in which I watched it. It has been widely released internationally under various titles. Whether you were around to read about this feat in 1974, missed it entirely, or are too young to have known about it, you need to see this film. For myself, my recollection of Petit's walk is very vague or non-existent because that summer I was rather pre-occupied. I was a brand new college graduate working as an intern on Capitol Hill, following the Watergate hearings with intense interest, developing a relationship with the man who would become my husband, preparing to enter graduate school at Yale in September, traveling to California for the first time, meeting my future husband's family there, watching Richard Nixon resign on TV, etc. It was one of the busiest summers of my life! But right then, on August 7, 1974, a truly extraordinary thing happened in New York City that is worth learning about decades later. Philippe Petit's Lifetime of Preparation for the Walk The event was years in the planning, beginning with Philippe's discovery of the twin towers project at age 17 from a French newspaper article. Even before the towers were built, he imagined stringing a wire between them and walking in the clouds. Philippe was a rebellious, artistic, restless young man who ran away from his middle class family at age 15, became a street performer-juggler, mime, unicyclist, magician-in Paris, and taught himself to walk on ropes or wires above ground. He was never affiliated with a circus or the tradition of tightrope walking in a circus. His wire walking was more in the vein of performance art. And the fact that the walks were sometimes illegal added to the drama and the excitement in his mind. Prior to the twin towers walk, Philippe had successfully walked between towers that make up the facade of the Cathedrale Notre Dame de Paris and between piers of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia. Both acts were illegal of course, but seemed to result in only minor penalties for him and his accomplices. But the piece de resistance, the big coup for Philippe was the World Trade Center walk and he and his friends spent literally years researching and planning. They also secured the cooperation of several Americans on site in NYC. Executing the Plan When the day came to execute the plan at last, Philippe and his accomplices sneaked into the two towers with their equipment. During the dead of night, they used a bow and arrow to start a line across the gap, which was then used to send a a cord, and finally a cable across. They secured the cable on either end and stabilized it with additional diagonally arranged cables. This was not easy! Then, as the city was coming to life the next morning, Philippe stepped out onto the wire with his stabilization pole and cavorted for the next 45 minutes. It was not an act of bravery or terrorism, not a "stunt," but an artistic, theatrical performance designed to be a thing of beauty and wonder. Certainly Philippe's girlfriend, interviewed on film, saw it that way. The police were called and came quickly to the scene. They were powerless to stop Petit; however, when he decided to come back onto the roof, he was quickly arrested. After a psychiatric evaluation, he was soon released on the understanding that he would pay for his crimes of trespassing, etc. by putting on a performance for the children of New York City. Why the Film Works and its One Big Defect The filmmakers did an amazing job of locating and interviewing many of the people who helped Petit plan and execute the twin tower operation, including his girlfriend, several close friends in France, an Australian friend he met on the Sydney Harbor mission, and some Americans in New York. These interviews and Petit's personal footage added rich detail to the human relationships involved as well as the logistical challenges. Petit himself is a hugely engaging raconteur, communicating not just the facts, but the feelings that propelled him through this era. Although his capacity for self-absorption is vast, so was his accomplishment. The film has one huge gaping defect and that is its complete failure to acknowledge, even in the smallest and most subtle way, the fact that the towers no longer exist. If there was such an acknowledgement (and I looked hard for it), I missed it. I can imagine what the filmmaker's artistic purpose might have been in ignoring this reality; however, conducting extensive interviews in 2007 or 2008 without acknowledging in some way that the buildings were destroyed in 2001 seems to me disingenuous. This is, after all, a documentary film. The scenes of the towers being built were intensely poignant because we can see the metal grids going up on the outside of the buildings that we remember so well in the wreckage after 9/11. And the scenes early on when the foundation is under construction look much like ground zero today. Of course one of the reasons why Philippe Petit's extraordinary adventure of August 7, 1974 is extra interesting to us now is because we have all thought so much about those buildings because they were utterly destroyed by the violent attacks of 9/11/2001. The towers were still under construction in August 1974 (although they had reached their full height) and they were somewhat controversial. In fact, Petit's walk had the effect of helping New Yorkers to think more positively about the stark monoliths, a quarter of a mile high, that had just been built in their midst. As we look back on Petit's minor act of civil disobedience and major act of artistic expression in 1974, it gives rise to a bittersweet nostalgia for such an innocent time. Little did we know then that a small number of terrorists trained in the Middle East could sneak into the U.S., highjack four commercial airliners, and fly two of them into the World Trade Center towers, causing the buildings to collapse. The loss of life and the economic impact were unthinkable. We did not realize when Petit walked on the wire that the towers would stand for fewer than thirty years. Nor did we foresee that nearly a decade after the towers fell, we would still be so torn up by the painful event that we could not agree on a fitting use of the site. Ground zero remains a raw sore. See this film to remember when the twin towers represented hope and progress and, to Philippe Petit, an artist's canvas. Man on Wire is available here from amazon.com on DVD or Blu-ray. It is also widely available from rental services or free from public libraries. It is rated PG-13 (for brief discussions of smoking pot and sexuality and fleeting distant nudity) and is appropriate for a broad audience. Minimal profanity. Definitely appropriate for teens and up. |
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