i figured i'd pen my post this week on the pretty incredible high-wire tight-rope walking between the erstwhile twin towers of the world trade centers because a documentary that deals with this event in immense detail and depth, Man on Wire was aired on SBS on wednesday or tuesday night of this week, and though i tuned in halfway through the screening, i was so captivated that i didnt even have time to get my cheese toastie from the kitchen.
i'll surmise the plot of the event for you readers who are unaware or unfamiliar with it. Phillipe Petit was a french high-wire artist born in 1942 who was obsessed with the public act of tight-rope performances on urban structures. he started with streetlamps, worked his way upto notre dame and upon seeing plans of the construction of the twin towers as he waited in his dentist's office became fixated upon the notion of traversing them on a cable.
this act he achieved on the seventh of august, 1974, an act Phillipe and his group of collaborators (or, given the heightened illegality and conspicuousness of this performance, perhaps co-conspirators is a slightly more apt term) referred to as 'le coup'. It was a feat of orginization and the culmination of a lifetime of training and preparation, it utilized a behemoth 200 kg cable and custom-made 7.9 m long 25 kg balancing pole.
more than the story of how he executed this 'coup', a narrative delivered to place you on tenterhooks, i was more interested in how his girlfriend at the time described the act from the plaza at the ground of the twin towers, and looking at the performance from a relational perspective.
she was so moved by the beauty of this act, that she described as a 'gift' to new york, and the way that he quickly became this kind of 'celebrity' of sorts amongst the people of new york who looked at his tight-rope walk as a 'breath of fresh air', something that whimsically reimagined the fabric of the city as a space for living and working by transcending all barriers and definitions as a kind of miracle or vision.
this is heightened by the fact that viewers on the ground or in other buildings often could not see the wire, only the man, floating like a mirage or a vision against the sky.
its pretty captivating stuff. especially when you think that now that the twin towers are gone this act is almost completely buried, or rather, completely and definitively unrepeatable, its just air, negative space up there now, but the thought of it (or how the thought of it was edited in this documentary) still kind of gave me goosebumps/ butterflies in my stomach.
what do you guys think?
was this meant for another class?
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