Mountain

Through cloud shrouded ice floes that produce skeletal snow sheet patterns abutted by that sheer rise upward, what was once a place of peril and hardship reserved for the holy has become an alluring challenge of ascension, providing the basis for director Jennifer Peedom’s movie centered around Robert MacFarlane’s words, narrated by Willem Dafoe and set to the music of Richard Tognetti. Using stock footage of early climbers and cable cars to skiers and parachutists in a campaign to vanquish Everest, what first recalls Koyaanisqatsi (which refers to “life out of balance”) is in fact the total opposite by suggesting that nature, in order to be commanded and controlled, must be obeyed as a discipline of the mind. Great aerial photography of the resistance encountered in climbing.

[NR]