If the past is guide, the 22nd MountainFilm in
Telluride this May will be more than the sum of its parts. The
individual elements will be impressive – a day-long opening
symposium on the Andes and miles of celluloid about nature, other
cultures, and jocks playing on rocks, glaciers and rivers. But the
power of MountainFilm is the ability of director Rick Silverman to
play festival goers like the metal ball in a pinball
machine.
Last year, for example, you could start
off a day in the dark with a paean to a vanishing subsistence
culture of Inuit people in the movie Vision Man
by director William Long. Then the schedule might send you caroming
across the street to Caveman’s Return, in which
a family of cave dwellers in the Philippines decides it can no
longer take the socially stultifying and unhealthy (though
certainly primitive and sustainable) life it has been leading.
Having weighed modern vs. primitive life, off they head for the
nearest urban center.
MountainFilm, with four
venues, has material for all ages. A relatively large number of
pre-teens hung on anthropologist Christy Turner’s every
blood-soaked word as he explained how he knows that cannibalism
played an important role among that most idealized of early
cultures: the Anasazi of Chaco Canyon (HCN, 10/25/99: Bones of
Contention).
There are also enough
adrenaline-soaked films, all edited for the MTV generation, to
satisfy those who love that genre, and enough beauty to make even
Telluride, with its soaring peaks and high valleys, look bland when
you emerge, blinking, into the daylight. But MountainFilm never
lets you settle in for a predictable experience. There’s always at
least the hint of irony, as in this description of one film from
the 1999 guide:
“… traverses some of the most
exquisite country of South America to find unthinkably exotic
backdrops for unthinkably beautiful windsurfing.”
My favorite irony was the 1999 guide’s
back-cover advertisement showing a mountain climber and the
headline “Go light or go home.” The sponsor was that symbol of
industrial recreation lightness: a helicopter ski company – just
you, your skis, and a multi-ton hornet.
A basic
pass to the festival is $150. It runs over Memorial Day weekend,
from May 26 to May 29. For a pass or information, call
970/728-4123; info@mountainfilm.org; or
www.mountainfilm.org/.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Telluride’s MountainFilm.
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