Man on Wire (a film by James Marsh about Philippe Petit’s 1974 aerial walk between the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers) / in wide distribution / 2008
September 4, 2008
Philippe Petit in Man on Wire. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
By definition, having an obsession means you pursue it at all costs. “You don’t choose it,” as Martha Graham declared about dance. “It chooses you.” Philippe Petit, the French wire walker, funambulist, daredevil (call him what you will), in whom artistic and petty-crime tendencies are equally embedded, belongs to this small chosen breed. Man on Wire, the recently released documentary film directed by James Marsh, tackles Petit’s astounding feat of clandestinely stretching a cable between the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers—then the tallest buildings in the world—on August 7, 1974, and, essentially, dancing on it in for some 45 minutes of back and forth 130-foot crossings, 1,350 feet above the ground. Several people have documented the story before, including Petit himself in his 2002 book, To Reach the Clouds. Marsh emphasizes the illegal operations, climaxing thriller-style, that made the event possible. The poetry of the act speaks for itself.
Born in France in 1949, Petit took up magic and juggling as a child, progressed to wire-walking at 16, and earned his bread as a street entertainer. Though expelled from a handful of schools, he learned equitation, fencing, carpentry, taught himself four languages, and familiarized himself with architecture and engineering, as the film’s press release tells us. A renegade perhaps, a self-invented man certainly, he operated by instinct in acquiring the knowledge he needed.
In 1968, even before the Twin Towers had been constructed, Petit, sitting in his dentist’s waiting room, came across a newspaper article that included the architectural model for them. It was enough to ignite his imagination. He penciled a line between the two buildings and, distracting the other patients, ripped the page from the paper and fled with it.
From then on, Petit assiduously collected information on the projected buildings and traveled to New York several times to observe the construction-in-progress, having the American photographer, Jim Moore, who would become an essential confederate in his preparations, shoot it from a helicopter. Petit’s ultimate plan: to break into the towers and walk through space between them. Illicit, yes, but few crimes have had such potential for ecstasy—for the doer, the witnesses, and those awed and enchanted by the legend after the fact.
The feat was six years in the making. Despite Petit’s extraordinary gifts as a funambulist, the preparation, up until the day of the walk itself, depended largely on ingenuity, hard work, dedication to a patently wild idea, the support of friends, and sheer good luck. As Marsh illustrates, Petit and his collaborators had to design the rigging to support the wire—a braided steel cable less than one inch in diameter—that they’d string between the towers and make false i.d. cards to pass themselves off as contractors for the towers’ roof work. Once, Petit posed as a journalist interviewing the roof crew so he could observe the space closely; other times he just sneaked into the areas he needed to survey. He and his small team copied the clothes of the construction workers and businesspeople frequenting the buildings and made rough timetables of their activities so they could “fit in,” evading discovery of their true motives and ejection by the towers’ guards.
The little group needed to examine and, as far as possible, plan for factors that might cause problems, such as the towers’ sway in the wind. What they failed to consider was coping with colleagues who might renege at the very last moment. But who, after all, can predict the force of the wind at a given time and place or the vagaries of the human heart?
Up until the last minute, the walk threatened not to happen, partly because of the defections, partly through unexpected events that thwarted the loyal adherents’ plans, intensifying the already tight time frame, in which the installation of the wire had to be accomplished at night in order to avoid detection and allow the walk to start in the early morning. All this, Marsh shows us, increased the pressure immeasurably.
The most dramatic moment occurred when the group, two in one tower, two in the other, took the first step in tethering the wire that would stretch along the gap between the towers. Jean-Louis Blondeau, Petit’s friend since their teens, had come up with the ingenious idea of using a crossbow to shoot an arrow carrying a thin fishing line from the tower in which he stood to the opposite one, where Petit was located. The scenario called for Petit to catch it and gradually tie stronger and stronger lines to its tail, until it could support the steel cable. The arrow missed its mark, however, whereupon Petit stripped so he’d feel the filament on his skin as he searched for it in the dark. He discovered it teetering precariously on a ledge at the corner of the roof, capable of being blown away by the slightest breeze. Coolly, he crawled 15 feet down the side of the tower to retrieve it.
Another near-disaster occurred once the cable was strung between the buildings: Petit accidentally released too much of the cable-end he held with Jean-François Heckel, another loyal follower, and its whole mid-section fell into the void between the buildings, seemingly presaging Petit’s own possible—indeed, likely—fate. After Herculean efforts from Petit and Heckel on one roof and Blondeau finally alone on the other (his partner having given up and walked away), the 450-pound cable was dragged from the abyss and properly anchored between the buildings, secured with guy lines to diminish the excessive swaying that can easily send a funambulist to his death.
The moment Petit stepped out on the wire, however, the situation changed radically. The teamwork had been completed. Now he was on his own in space, his athletic genius, gargantuan courage, and ardent vision allowing him to experience a freedom few human beings ever know.
His antics on the wire seemed to be all playfulness and grace. He danced, ran, bounced so that his feet left their sole support, sat on the wire resting his 25-foot balancing pole on his lap, stood on one leg, lay lazily supine, “chatted” with a gull that circled his head, performed a kneeling salute, smiled and laughed. His poise in the air was so perfect, he even dared to look down.
After three-quarters of an hour, the police clustering on the roof threatened to pluck Petit off the wire from a helicopter. Knowing that the gusts stirred up by the aircraft might make him fall and that he had accomplished his goal, he surrendered to them. Once they grabbed him, he was roughly handled: pushed down the stairs, handcuffed, fingerprinted, arraigned, and submitted to a psychiatric examination. Fortunately, he was brought before a judge with some insight into the event, who dropped all formal charges, simply “punishing” him by requiring him to walk a wire (not too high) above Belvedere Lake in Central Park for the entertainment of the city’s children. I did witness this display, duly accompanied by three youngsters, and recorded it in an essay for Dance magazine. Called Walking on Air, it is posted on my Seeing Things site at ArtsJournal
http://www.artsjournal.com/tobias/2008/09/walking_on_air.html.
Of course the adventure of the Twin Towers, its preface—a walk between the towers of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, and the numerous related events Petit subsequently devised—a few clandestine as well, others theatrical, celebratory, or charitable—made him world-famous. This, in turn, inevitably changed his relationships with his near and dear, including Annie Allix, another friend since adolescent days and his lover until after “Le Coup,” as the participants aptly called the Twin Towers event. Marsh records Blondeau weeping as he describes the phenomenal beauty of Petit’s feat and the fact that it ended an essential aspect of the tie between them.
Marsh knew what he was doing in choosing to emphasize the thriller aspect of the preparation for the walk (portions of it handsomely shot film-noir style), since mounting tension and excitement are surefire ingredients of movies and because Petit’s transcendent experience out on the wire is probably impossible to capture in this genre, if at all. He was also wise to choose Petit—self-dramatizing and utterly charming—as his narrator.
Is it a problem that chunks of the film are reenacted? Well, yes, a little. What one really wants is to have been there when the events the movie recounts were happening—especially the walk itself. One wants to have been standing on the sidewalk below, neck craned, slack-jawed, eyes wide in amazement as the gathering crowd absorbs a sight the brain disbelieves. Of course, what one really, really wants (and this accounts for the ongoing power of the legend) is to be the man on the wire oneself.
The movie—rightly, I think—makes no reference to the 9/11 tragedy at the Twin Towers. But the image of the WTC victims’ facing no choice but death, holding hands as they plunge into space from the buildings’ windows, will inevitably resonate in the minds of the film’s viewers as they watch Petit choosing to tease death from that same easily-fatal height. The two incidents, a quarter-century apart, are now bound together forever and serve as an argument, if a fragile one, for art as consolation.
Click here to read Tobi Tobias’s eyewitness essay on Philippe Petit’s “punishment” for his unauthorized walk between the Twin Towers. For his transgression, Petit was arrested and sentenced to perform a less life-threatening wire walk over Belvedere Lake for the children of New York City. Tobias’s essay originally appeared in the November 1974 issue of Dance magazine. She has reprinted it on her Seeing Things site at ArtsJournal as a complement to her review of Man on Wire.
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