Moun­tain

Open­ing with footage of a climber cling­ing to the crag­gy incline of a sheer rock face with a grin of pure ecsta­sy, Jen­nifer Peedom’s doc­u­men­tary Moun­tain nev­er under­plays the awe­some scale of its epony­mous sub­jects. Nei­ther does it dimin­ish the fact that our nat­ur­al incli­na­tion towards dan­ger is often out­weighed by a sense of grandeur and wonder.

Despite the oppor­tu­ni­ty for indul­gence, Moun­tain man­ages to avoid the pit­falls of many a nature doc­u­men­tary which relies sole­ly upon images of spec­tac­u­lar land­scapes. Here, excerpts from Robert Macfarlane’s med­i­ta­tive trav­el jour­nal Moun­tains of the Mind ensure the film main­tains its spec­ta­cle with­out skimp­ing on infor­ma­tion. Espe­cial­ly when Willem Dafoe’s lends his dul­cet tones to the narration.

Peedom casts her net wide over the his­to­ry of moun­taineer­ing explo­ration. One par­tic­u­lar high­light is how Macfarlane’s text deals with an impe­ri­al­is­tic past – where west­ern­ers used moun­taineer­ing as a prece­dent for claim­ing ter­ri­to­ry and instill­ing order over small­er com­mu­ni­ties – that presents uncom­fort­able par­al­lels with the present day. It’s an insight­ful moment, but it hints at how the text occa­sion­al­ly veers into ter­ri­to­ry cov­ered by the director’s pre­vi­ous film Sher­pa.

More damn­ing­ly, not all of Macfarlane’s obser­va­tions are pro­found enough to con­tend with the sim­ple plea­sures of watch­ing a man launch him­self into obliv­ion off a rocky out­crop­ping, or two climbers shar­ing a joint atop a snowy peak. His mus­ings have a ten­den­cy to veer from one extreme towards the next. In one moment these men rev­el in the reck­less aban­don of dare­dev­il­ry, U‑turn into an admo­ni­tion of West­ern igno­rance and then set­tle in to gawp at some gnarly snow­board­ing, man.

Moun­tain sheds the occa­sion­al fat of its source mate­r­i­al when it rec­on­ciles cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Renan Ozturk’s breath­tak­ing cam­er­a­work with Macfarlane’s more focussed insights on why we look to the tit­u­lar behe­moths with such rev­er­ence. It’s less effec­tive when offer­ing GoPro footage of cyclists tra­vers­ing pre­car­i­ous ledges in scenes that fall more in the YouTube/​extreme sports ballpark.

The accom­pa­ni­ment of Tognetti’s Aus­tralian Cham­ber Orches­tra cul­ti­vates an air of men­ace and brings a heft to the under­pin­ning of threat and the knowl­edge that at any moment the bal­ance of man and moun­tain can tip in the latter’s favour. Part­ner­ing a track­ing shot of a wing-suit div­er across fields of cat­tle, through val­leys and over shim­mer­ing rivers, they cre­ate a moment of gen­uine awe that steals the show. It’s iron­i­cal­ly the film’s peak, one of a hand­ful of moments that redeems a scat­ter­shot approach.