In the film Painting The Mountains, there’s plenty of exceptional steep skiing. The upshot is that you’ll learn about Matthew Tufts’ creative process along the way.
We’re here for a film review. Over the weekend, I watched Painting The Mountains a few times. The film, for those new to it, in part, documents Aurel Lardy, Vivian Bruchez, and Jules Socié and their second descent of the Whillans-Cochrane Ramp on Aguja Poincenot in 2023.
For readers of The High Route who come for the ski mountaineering, I think you’ll find this film rewarding. The skiing is very steep and exposed. The Patagonian backdrop plays a main character that many will find inspiring and unsettling.
Matthew Tufts is the primary photographer who takes us along for the ride. Tufts is also the film’s narrator, and through his eyes and camera lens, we get to follow along on a rather intimate ski mountaineering journey. The journey is well worth it.
I had heard a bit about the film. A friend had gone to an opening in Chamonix last fall. I recall him explaining he was a bit perplexed that the film, in many ways, highlights Tufts’ thoughts throughout. I knew that with such renowned skiers as the French trio noted up top, there would be plenty of highwire skiing with ropes, axes, and crampons to make it all seem more real. This, it turns out, is true. And yes, in some ways, the film is about Tufts, too. But rather than thinking I wanted less of the journalist Tufts, and more skiing, I wanted to know more about Tufts and his process.
I appreciate a curious mind and someone who puts others before the lens to tell their story. Painting The Mountains, the title of this excellent film, is a direct reference to Tufts, using words and photos to describe his and others’ mountain adventures over the years. Like any artist in the mountains, Tufts uses his preferred medium to paint a scene that may or may not, in some cases, resonate with audiences. My take here is that Tufts’ work resonates. It is not self-indulgent.
Painting The Mountains finds balance in a physical Patagonian world that seems out of balance. By that, I mean the verticality of the mountains there seem otherworldly. (It is a place I’ve never visited.) Early, the narrative arc introduces Max Odell, perhaps the original El Chaltén ski guide. Through his words, we are grounded in a local vibe that should resonate with those keen on high-exertion skiing—thankfully, there are no chairlifts there. Odell states about this Patagonian region, “If you want to walk a lot, and you have good luck with the weather, there are tons of lines.”
We’ll leave an exploration of these “tons of lines” for another time. The line prominently featured in the film, the Whillans-Cochrane Ramp, first skied by Andreas Fransson in 2012, remains nothing other than audacious. Through a sequence of headcam and modern-day video and photography tech, we get a near front-row view of the descent. You’ll have to decide whether that ski scene is your personal highlight. Sure, I cannot get enough of the smoothness of Lardy and Bruchez in the steeps. (I’m definitely doing something wrong when it comes to my own skiing.) But, I rather enjoyed learning more about Tufts and his commitment to documenting ski culture. Rightfully, the focus is most often on the skiers or riders or alpinists in outdoor adventure films, as it should be. But a good dose of information about who’s behind the lens, Tufts in this case, makes for a compelling watch.
And the fact that the mountainscape features a serrated Patagonia skyline doesn’t hurt. We don’t do “Rotten Tomatoes” here at THR. But maybe we should develop a film rating system. If anything, if we ran across Tufts on a trail somewhere, we’d give him a solid fist-bump. Painting The Mountains is fine work.
Interesting Jason. I would somewhat disagree with your impression on Tufts’ prominence, though I very much agree that this movie deserves primacy in anyone’s ski movie list. It’s definitely novel to almost any ski movie I’ve ever seen, and the unique primacy of the filmmaker helps accomplish the goal of telling the emotional story as it’s happening without showing the movie’s hand about how it ends up. In a funny way maybe it works because it takes the pressure off the athletes to do the dreaded post-hoc talking head segments that intersperse the skiing footage.
But I almost find it a violation of the core tenant or storytelling, showing rather than telling. Stories about stories are tough to pull off. Maybe its just that I personally don’t like writers who like to talk about the writing process because I think that practice often covers for work otherwise lacking in substance. But the irony here is that this movie is packed with substance. These boys are, at least to the english-speaking world, some tough walnuts and Tufts manages to make them vulnerable to each other, maybe through his extensive historical contextualization of Max (talk about an inscrutable character for a ski movie, his presence is well-edited) or maybe just because he was lucky enough to be around when they were scared for once.
I hem and haw about ski movies. It feels challenging for them to transcend their natural schema as basically pornography. I never know what sort of artistic standard to judge them by. Some are quite evocative and beautiful in often surprising ways. Others, I feel like Maude’s description in the Big Lebowski of a fake porno called Log Jammin’ is apt: “the plot is ludicrous.”
Ultimately, this is a unique ski movie that succeeds with both porn and plot. Tufts’ photography is beautiful and the steep skiing is remarkably three dimensional. It’s a shame he only holds on his stills for a few seconds; I would have preferred minutes. The quality of the porn demonstrates that Tufts means what he says about his connection to El Chalten (which makes the talking extensively about it all the more puzzling to me). The structure works a sleight of hand too cunning for the ski industry by far, and maybe Tufts’ talking head segments didn’t quite click for me because I don’t like the postmodern trend of showing how the sausage gets made (or because I spend too much time talking about the sausage with you!). Perhaps then it’s an even higher compliment that I was unreservedly captured by this movie.
Thanks for highlighting it.