From a distance the North Face of Everest can look like a surface on which a climber’s progress will be easy to see. Everest: The Other Side gives that impression time to collapse. The route is large enough to swallow a person’s movement into a single patch of color, and the documentary can bring the camera close enough to make an individual turn consequential again. That oscillation is one of the chief pleasures of expedition filmmaking. The effort required to acquire the image is part of what the image can ask an audience to think about.
Hilaree Nelson and Jim Morrison give the expedition a history that a clean map of the route could never provide. The shared ambition of climbing and skiing the mountain matters because each person already has a life in which another objective is possible. The documentary’s treatment of their partnership can put pressure on the simple account of a mountain as something a climber has always been destined to do. A plan can be a means of spending time with somebody and a way of discovering how much of a shared life two people are willing to put at hazard.
The directors, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, have a history with the problem of rendering extreme physical commitment intelligible to an audience. In Free Solo, proximity to the person undertaking the climb made the filmmakers’ own presence an uncomfortable part of the film. Here that proximity is again more interesting than the cleanest scenic view. An image can testify to a climber’s concentration and raise the question of how many other people have had to agree to remain close to it. The landscape looks enormous. The relationships that make it possible to see a person in it are necessarily intimate.
The footage is particularly good at restoring the ordinary meaning of distance. Snow that looks smooth in a wide view can have a consistency the person on it has to interpret with every movement. Getting close enough to see that interpretation makes the expedition a series of acts of judgment. A film that keeps an audience waiting for the top can make the work of getting down seem like the fulfillment of a promise. The footage gives the descent a far more uncomfortable independence. A climber has to start making decisions at the point when a conventional story is ready to declare an objective reached.
Loss gives the undertaking a different meaning to the people who survive it. There is a moving account here of how somebody can retain a way of understanding a partner through the work they planned to do together. The documentary’s inspirational instincts occasionally put too much pressure on that meaning. A route can be worth attempting to the person who attempts it and remain hard for other people to live with. The mountain footage is clear enough about what has to be risked that a concluding emphasis on achievement can feel less honest than the material it is there to organize.
Nelson’s death on Manaslu changes the project before the climb at its center can take place. It gives the archive of the pair together an unusually difficult job. These are images made while a shared future could still be planned, which now arrive inside a film that knows part of that future has been lost. The pressure to make the footage lead to a single meaningful accomplishment is easy to understand. Some of its most moving value lies outside that structure. The couple can be interesting to watch when they are making a life from things that never needed to become part of a tribute.
One of the productive questions the film leaves open concerns everybody required to make a private ambition visible. The climber in the yellow jacket is a useful point of attention. The camera that keeps finding that person belongs to an effort with more people in it. A little more room for that work would make the film’s sense of dependence as precise as its sense of scale. What the images already do well is to give the human figure a location and then show how provisional that location is.
