Everest again

About a month ago we saw a film on Film 4 called Everest, an event noticed at reference 2. And after that I read a book which had been used in making the film, an event noticed at reference 1. Then yesterday evening, Film 4 offered the film again, an offer which we accepted. Along with a spot of our excellent Rolly Gassmann.

Much more coherent this time, armed as I was with a recent reading of two books about the same climb and with my fine new map of Everest itself. With the result that the film was a lot more coherent than last time, with a much stronger sense of what it might have been like up there: a sort of striding edge, nine thousand metres up with lots of ice and snow rather than a thousand metres up with occasional ice and snow. With my limited experience being that weather can be vary changeable and very grim even at the lower of these two heights.

There were also lots of clues about the back story, but no more than clues, so clues which I would have thought would be largely missed by someone who did not know the story already.

So the sometimes stunning photography uses up all the available bandwidth of the watching brain. Not enough left to take on even the modest amount of bandwidth needed to tell the story. Or perhaps the makers of the film judged that what people wanted were the pictures, the sensations, and were not really that interested in anything else. Or perhaps they did not have the knack of working bits of story into the action in an unobtrusive way. Would a bit of rolling text telling some of the story at the beginning have worked? After all, the Bard himself was not above such devices from time to time - at least in the introductory chorus to Henry V.

A question which was raised, but not really answered, was why people did it at all. Why put yourself through all that expense, pain and misery to spend five minutes standing on top of the world? Not to mention the risk of accident. But maybe all the film can do is pose the question: we have to try and answer it for ourselves, drawing on what experience we may have of extreme physical activity and of the people who do it. Speaking for myself, I have walked up and taken pleasure in small mountains, but I think I would be terrified on this one. To the point where I very much doubt whether I could get across one of the many makeshift bridges set up in the Khumbu Icefall. When younger, I dare say I could have screwed myself up to make the attempt, but I think now that my freezing - with fear rather than cold that is - on the way across would have been a likely outcome.

A question which was not really raised was the wisdom or otherwise of running for-profit adventure trips up Everest for journalists and rich fitness freaks.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/left-for-dead.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/everest.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=everest. For the whole story.