There are moments in the film Sancity of Space, rare for me while seated, that induce both terror and verve.
The documentary centers on climbers and filmmakers Renan Ozturk and Freddie Wilkinson as they ascend the treacherous Moose’s Tooth massif in the Central Alaskan range south of Denali (formerly Mt. McKinley).
How treacherous? Ozturk refers to it as “steep Alaskan corniced ridged climbing,” and he and Wilkinson, armed with gear markedly better than a GoPro, and with an assist from the big screen, show us grandly and viscerally.
The inspiration for Ozturk and Wilkinson and their climbing friend Zack Smith—and really the centerpiece of the film—is Bradford Washburn. The film makes his legacy matter to us, replete with filmic, aural and photographic footage.
Why Washburn? It’s hard to exaggerate how remarkable Washburn’s life was, both in the climbing world and beyond. (He died in 2007 of natural causes at 96.)
He was an explorer, mountaineer, cartographer and photographer of the Alaskan wilderness when it was largely untraversed by non-natives. In this last role he became known for taking large format (8×10) aerial photographs in the early days of private aircraft. He was admired greatly by both Ansel Adams, who was a friend, and Amelia Earhart.[1]He was recruited by Earhart to be her navigator on her last flight. During an interview Washburn had told her to put a radio beacon on Howland Island in the South Pacific, where Earhart would later … Continue reading He regularly climbed with his wife Barbara and she became the first woman to climb Mount McKinley. (She was nonplussed at the attention.) He also served as the pivotal director of the Boston Museum of Science from 1939-80.
Ozturk, Wilkinson and Smith are traversing the ground Washburn did from the 1930s through the ’50s, where he achieved at least a dozen first ascents. He also mapped the land they wish to traverse. They owe much of their inspiration to him.
Sanctity of Space is about life, death, reverence, uncertainty, survival, history, science, curiosity, love, inspiration and elation.
It’s also a film (we are reminded only once or so) about filmmaking. And this, especially while climbing already deadly terrain, is arduous in its own right. It’s what made this film both possible (for us) and also, one can imagine, impossible (for them). As Zack Smith laments: “The filming has been a distraction that’s taken away from experience of climbing.”
In other words, the very thing that allows nearly all of us unprecedented intimacy to this rarefied space must greatly have interfered with theirs. One hopes that after sharing this expansive film with the world they too may return unencumbered to the cameraless, unromanticized essence of the world they so lovingly depict.
Notes, etc.
| ↑1 | He was recruited by Earhart to be her navigator on her last flight. During an interview Washburn had told her to put a radio beacon on Howland Island in the South Pacific, where Earhart would later disappear. Washburn told The Guardian: “An excellent pilot but pathologically self-confident.” |
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