Film Diary

Having spent two months indoors on a diet of candy bars and beer working on the business aspects of this film, I decided it was time for a climbing vacation, and the choice was Tahquitz.

Next thing I know, it’s a little before ten pm, pitch dark. I find myself 700 feet up, in the grips of a mid-sized squeeze chimney (my er, ‘least favorite’ type of climb) with two more pitches before the summit. I’m sunburned everywhere except my kneepads, and everytime my skin touches rock, rivulets of pain shoot through me. To top it off, my headlamp’s broken swivel angles it 20 degrees away from my line of vision, I’m out of water, a mosquito flies into my ear, and I’m hauling a huge pack up from the abyss as I go. And I found myself asking the question that climbers have been asking themselves in a pickle since the dawn of time: What the hell am I doing here?

(Hoping to land in some medical book for symptoms of pedalicus chimney crackicera)

After getting to the top, a two-hour descent down a loose and unknow dark north gully, losing my sweatshirt, losing my mind, tired, thirsty, feet cramped in climbing shoes…

…I finally topped out back at ol Beasty at one thirty in the morning.

Beer, water, and sleep.

The next morning, my sweatshirt revealed! I know this picture looks fake, but honest this is exactly how I found it, hanging snagged perfectly middair between a branch and a boulder.

The point of the trip was to learn how to use my fathers medieval jumars (circa 1970)…

…with my brand new untouched etriers.

Despite the bruises, the ridiculous sunburn, the fatigue, the bleeding cuticles, the uncertainty in the dark…or maybe in spite of them…graceless, yes, but it was a bonafide Tradventure.

I don’t see how hanging on the end of a rope to send a big numbers route sixty feet of the ground can compare to the experience of a real climbing adventure. Tahquitz oozes with the history of tough routes being done in big bulky shoes with questionable ropes and handmade gear by real adventurers. It’s great to climb.   To get stuck and lost.  And it’s great to just look up, read the FA in the back of the guidebook, and wonder.

Crawling out of the VW after leaving the clutches of the thriving desert for the screeching tires/concrete amalgamations of LA, I try to explain how the Joshua Tree trip went to my LA base, but I keep trailing off while my eyes glaze over…I’m replaying the footage we shot 24 hours earlier in my head.

I think I have my hands on something good. It’s part of an answer that I’ve been looking into for some time. No, sadly, not the answer to the Meaning of Life (this was a peyote-free trip) but rather, part of the answer to the question: how to best film a climb.

Five days earlier I picked up the Davis boys (Max and Sam) from the Ontario airport and jetted off (ok, crawled up laboriously in 2nd gear) to Jtree with the purpose of climbing and filming a climb which would be used in conjunction with the excerpt interview I had just gotten from Lars Holbek two days before (he was here on a brief CA stint relocating endangered tortoises in 29 Palms so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.)

After two days of climbing and location scouting for a good route (one which, for example, didn’t include a remote 5.9 crack in Oz where the approach was a 5.10a lieback and the crux was an angry swarm of bees…) we settled on a nice line in split rocks which would suit all the requirements of filming.

Luckily, Max eats 5.7 cracks like this one for breakfast and was graciously (almost mischievously) willing to do the climb a gazillion times up AND down, basically free soloing the thing repeatedly to get the shots. (Max was using gear from the 70s with worn or even melted perlon, wearing a swami belt while Sam belayed him using a loose hip belay at best…) But he’s got the grace of a young Henry Barber and biceps the size of small children, and as such, made it all look really great.

We experimented with lots of different ways to film the crack (helmet cam, jib arm, me on top rope dangling nearby…)

Though initially not jazzed on the helmet cam idea (seemed too gimmicky in my mind, and did nothing to solve the need to go ‘beyond documentation’) now I’ve had a 360 turn around. The footage, unnaturally jerky and fast moving, gives an animated life to the climb which I hadn’t anticipated.

It can’t replace necessary shots, like those from the camera on belay, but it gave me something much more unusual than I had expected. As for filming from a hanging belay, I think to throw in some etriers and get more practice with the jumars (you know, so people don’t have to literally haul on the other end of the tope rope to get my ass started on the rock) oughta solidify that setup.

The most successful setup that we used was definitely in conjunction with the jib arm.

There is something mysteriously poetic about the movement of the camera up along the vertical crack, in conjunction with, but not simultaneous to, Max’s jamming movement upwards. The two movements are at once quite different, a flowing, endless vertical crack mixed with episodic rhythms of hands and feet jamming one by one horizontally; with a moving crane as simple as the jib arm, the intersection of the two is visualized, and the whole magic of the climb is expressed with one sweeping shot that takes less than maybe 5 seconds.

Perhaps now I am heading into eye glaze territory, but I do believe that I’ve stumbled onto a key element to dramatizing a climb.

Now, how to get this setup in a place where theres not a wide ledge at the bottom of the climb? Perhaps we can lure the guys from Piton Productions with their helicams to entertain an experimental collaboration…

As has been shown from countless amateur (or less than amateur…) climbing videos which go no further than simple documentation…watching someone do a climb is either boring or untrue to the nature of the climb (ie filming a slab climb from the bottom looks wimpy, versus heel hooks on extreme overhangs become the desensitized norm). And watching a climber doing a really hard climb, filmed without strategy, is just climbing porn. After a few shots of one crux after the other, we’re desensitized, bored. It means nothing, has no effect on the viewer.

Basically, the entire art of filmmaking rests in the craft of faking real experiences. “Jaws” isn’t the movie that made us all afraid to go in swimming pools because we saw an animatronic shark zooming through the water. No, it made us afraid because of the way the camera bobbed up and down at sealevel for those shots when we know the shark is about to pounce…that’s our eye level, our perception, what we feel every time we are waiting around for a wave…when we start to play the epic theme song in our heads…and thats how Jaws gets us. (Wow, can’t believe I’m using Spielberg references…i must be going mainstream, might as well enroll at USC…) Enough of this film school mumbo gumbo. The end.

So all that was one major point of the weekend: to find out how to convey the drama of a climb, the tension, the grace, the psychological mapping, the experience…