A Worthy Watch: Painting The Mountains

Response

1. Spencer Dillon

   February 16, 2025

   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.

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