Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site

Charles Manson stole this song from the Beatles…we’re stealing it back

As the second in a series of movie night documentaries of unknown duration, I decided to go with the 2008 Oscar winner for Best Documentary, James Marsh’s Man On Wire.

Man On Wire isn’t a documentary that delivers any particular surprises.  It’s about a tightrope walker who managed to illegally string a tightrope between the roofs of the two World Trade Center towers in New York City on August 7th, 1974, and performed perhaps the craziest feat ever known to man.  There’s no particular tension to be developed – you know he succeeded and you know he didn’t fall.  But it managed to be a really good film despite the predetermined ending.

The tightrope walker is Philippe Petit, a Frenchman who devised the scheme at the age of 18, when he saw a story about the twin towers in a magazine several years before they were actually built.  Why did he want to tightrope between these 1368-foot high buildings?  More or less because they were going to be there.  And they were (almost) the tallest buildings on the planet at the time.  (By the time of Petit’s walk, the Sears Tower in Chicago had opened and surpassed the World Trade Center, but to be fair, from the Sears Tower there was nowhere to tightrope to.)

Man on Wire includes a remarkable amount of actual documentary footage from Petit’s preparations to perform his feat.  He had a full support team, including his girlfriend Annie Allix…

…and his childhood friend Jean-Louis Blondeau.  All told, there were probably a dozen odd individuals that contributed in one way or another to the effort, though only four (including Petit) were actually present on the towers for the walk.

In addition to a fairly thorough review of the preparations for the walk, Man On Wire also includes footage of two of Petit’s earlier illicit walks – one between the two towers on the west façade of Notre-Dame de Paris, and one between two pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Much of the film concerns itself with the logistics of pulling the feat off.  It wasn’t easy, and Petit and crew made several recon missions (including one aborted but probably too-early-anyway attempt) before finally accomplishing their task.  They had to get fake access badges to the buildings, use recruits on the inside to help hide their equipment, find a way to catch the freight elevator to the roofs (one team in each building), and dodge security, all of which they managed – though both teams had to hide for a time, and Petit and his partner actually walked directly past a security guard they did not know was stationed on the penultimate floor and had to just act nonchalant like they were supposed to be there.  It worked!

Of course, then there was the problem of getting a 440 pound metal tightrope cable across the 138 foot gap between the buildings.  The obvious solution, come up with by Blondeau, was to tie a fishing line to an arrow, and to shoot it across the gap and to use first the fishing line and then thicker and thicker ropes to pull the next in the series across the gap until finally there was a rope spanning the towers strong enough to pull the cable.  Of course, since they began their (hours-long) work after sunset to avoid detection, finding the shot arrow in the first place was a bit touch-and-go, and apparently Petit very nearly knocked it off the edge of the tower.

One of the biggest issues was that tightropes require stabilization wires, typically mounted to the ground – but that was clearly not going to be possible in this circumstance.  Petit designed some clever crosswise stabilization wires that could be run diagonally across the main wire and mounted to further parts of the towers themselves.  (If I had one complaint about the film, I really wish they took the time to explain the physics of this for another minute or two.  I’ll live.)

Despite some setbacks, the cable was finally attached, and once dawn broke it was time for Petit to begin his walk, which lasted for 45 minutes and on which he took 8 passes between the buildings, often taunting the police presence which eventually showed up to arrest him. Obviously they were going to have to wait for him to come to them.  They weren’t going out on that wire.

Despite the amazing nature of the feat, there were repercussions which went beyond the legal slaps on the wrist given to Petit and his accomplices.  For one, Petit succumbed to the temptations of instant celebrity and did some things that lost him his girlfriend.  It also appears that the stress of the entire many-years ordeal strained the relationship between Petit and Blondeau beyond the breaking point.  It’s not exactly dealt with, but the interview with Blondeau cuts off with a relatively ominous ellipsis.

But it wasn’t all bad.  The WTC authorities ended up going pretty soft and actually providing Petit and his crew a perpetual access pass to the roofs.  Petit became famous and by all appearances has led quite the comfortable life (surviving one 45-foot fall in a practice walk – his only fall – the obvious exception) doing what he loves.

That’s all well and good for Petit, but Man On Wire does something quite remarkable for us.  By not mentioning the events of 9/11, despite being produced seven years later, it rolls credits and leaves us with a joyous sense of these living buildings and their symbiosis with the man who conquered their challenge.  There they are, standing in perpetuity, with Philippe Petit’s signature on the guardrail to commemorate his feat forever.  Yes, these towers were stolen from us, but Man On Wire steals them back.