Disobey Gravity

Life On Hold is finally out (download, with the DVD coming soon).

And yes, it lives up to the promise of the trailer.

I think it was niqaeli who described climbing as "ballet meets geology", and this is ballet/geology porn.

Two years of bouldering in the UK, focusing on the Peak district, Yorkshire and Northumberland scenes, and encompassing the new trend of doing short trad routes as super-highballs/solos over mats, often ground up.

And it's really, really gorgeous, shot in luscious high def with a grand eye for the details of rock and setting (and no, I don't think they used an orange filter on some shots -- the Burbage valley honestly does turn to gold like that when the sun hits the right angle). The film doesn't just have cutting-edge ascents, it communicates a sense of place and of the climbing as rooted in the landscape.

There's minimal interviewing; this is not a film that delves into complex individual motivations, it's about the scene and the places. Which is a disappointment if you'd like to know more in depth about some of the people involved, but basically it's a film that does what it says on the tin: climbing and time-lapse shots of the weather. The film does catch a scattering of telling little moments that give a sense of personality, whether it's Michele Caminati's chirp of "Nice!" regarding almost any problem, Chris Webb-Parsons forcing his broken foot into a climbing shoe, or Ned Feehally accidentally wandering into someone else's shot, realizing, flailing, and running for cover. And there's real emotional engagement as people struggle, falter or fall on desperately hard, committing problems.

My one big quibble is that women get under-represented in the film; with the female firepower available (Mina Leslie-Wujastyk, Katy Whittaker, Shauna Coxsey and Alex Puccio all feature in the film), they deserve to get more than one problem each. The cutting-edge of women's bouldering in the UK is being pushed very hard right now, with women doing some uber-powerful problems, and it'd be nice to get more attention being paid to that.

In conclusion: preeeeeeetty.

"Deep play" is philosopher Jeremy Bentham's term for any gamble or wager in which "the stakes are so high that ... it is irrational for anyone to engage in it at all, since the marginal utility of what you stand to win is grossly outweighed by the disutility of what you stand to lose."

It's also the title of Paul Pritchard's first book, in which he chronicled his growth from a semi-feral child throwing petrol bombs down at the climbers in the local quarry to becoming one of the brightest and boldest British climbers of the '80s and '90s generation: the "dole climbers" who scrounged gear and food while creating ever-more-daring new routes, most famously in the slate quarries near Llanberis and on the sea cliffs of Anglesey.

Pritchard's a sharp, pawky writer, and the book's fragmented and lyrical and jagged, dodging around moments of self-revelation, from his impulsive decision to throw himself down a four-storey stairwell at school to his near-fatal fall (from a route named "Games Climbers Play" -- this story has too many ironies to count) at Gogarth.

( Cut for length )