12/28/2023 0 Comments Alex honnold movie![]() ![]() “This climb is really about the process of moving through fear,” said co-director E Chai Vasarhelyi, whose works includes 2015’s Meru, which won an audience award at the Sundance film festival. It’s hard to eat popcorn when you can’t exhale. The suspenseful climax of the film, a close-up view of Honnold unlocking a delicate granite puzzle at 2,000 feet, can best be described as precluding respiration. It seems at any moment – at every moment – that he must slip. ![]() “And the footage is amazing, but I don’t know if it quite gives the full feel of a 2,500-foot drop on all sides around you. “It’s so wild,” Honnold said on the phone, recalling a particular spot near the top. Meanwhile the trees below shrink to dots. Beyond each immediate physical challenge lies another, and then another, stacked to the sky. In dozens of minutes of footage never before seen, Honnold climbs without a rope through awkward and difficult positions on minuscule holds in which one wrong move would mean death. We know how the movie ends, because we read about it in the papers last year: Honnold summits, climbing from bottom to top in one perfect push, 3,000 feet in just under four hours, becoming the first person ever to climb the mountain that way, maybe the only person who will ever climb it that way.īut as we watch the transcendent act unfold on-screen, that knowledge of how the movie ends feels about as useful as the unicorn suit that Honnold encounters en route (true story). “Obviously I don’t want to hose everybody,” the climber replies. Jimmy Chin, a co-director, tells Honnold that it’s OK if he does not want to go through with it. Most of the film plays out in the lead-up to the climb, during which Honnold (whom you might recognize from 60 Minutes he is the most accomplished “free solo” or ropeless rock climber in history) is seriously injured, twice, and the mojo gets wonky. “Because I had been dreaming about soloing El Cap for so many years.” At the time of Honold’s solo in 2011 it was the hardest route every soloed in Yosemite.“I think a big part of the film is showing the long process to get to that point where it wasn’t scary anymore,” said Honnold, 33, in a phone interview from a rooftop during the Toronto film festival, where it picked up the people’s choice award for best documentary. It was first on-sighted by Jerry Moffatt in 1984. The Phoenix was first climbed by Ray Jardine in 1977 using siege tactics and prototype Friends and given the unprecedented grade of 5.13a. The initial tips-laybacking and then flared finger jamming gives way to 80 foot of overhanging thin-hands before the difficult exit right at the top high above the valley floor. Immediately in a no-fall zone, Honnold slowly works his way up the 130 foot crack. Having abseiled in and practiced a few moves, Motimer pulls up Honnold’s harness and abseil rope and Honnold commits. Prior to Free Solo, the award-winning documentary of Alex Honnold’s 2017 epoch-defining free solo of Freerider, little footage of Alex Honnold free-soloing had ever been seen hardly surprising given the seriousness of the routes that Honnold was soloing! However, in footage just released by videographer/filmmaker Peter Mortimer, Honnold is seen free soloing The Phoenix (5.13) high above the Cathedral Falls in Yosemite. In 2011 Alex Honnold free-soloed The Phoenix, the uber classic 5.13 thin-hands crack in Yosemite filmmaker Peter Mortimer shares the back story in newly released footage. Alex Honnold free-soloes The Phoenix (5.13)
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