Touching the Void | |
---|---|
Directed by | Kevin Macdonald |
Produced by | John Smithson |
Starring | Brendan Mackey Nicholas Aaron Ollie Ryall |
Cinematography | Mike Eley Keith Partridge |
Edited by | Justine Wright |
Music by | Alex Heffes |
Production companies | |
Distributed by | Pathé Distribution |
Release dates |
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Running time | 106 minutes |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Budget | £2 million |
Box office | $13,885,802 |
Touching the Void is a 2003 survival documentary film directed by Kevin Macdonald and starring Brendan Mackey, Nicholas Aaron, and Ollie Ryall. The plot concerns Joe Simpson and Simon Yates' near-fatal descent after making the first successful ascent of the West Face of Siula Grande in the Cordillera Huayhuash in the Peruvian Andes, in 1985. It is based on Simpson's 1988 book of the same name.
Critically acclaimed, Touching the Void was listed in PBS's "100 Greatest Documentaries of All Time". [1] The Guardian described it as "the most successful documentary in British cinema history". [2]
In 1985, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, both experienced mountaineers, successfully ascended the previously unclimbed West Face of Siula Grande in Peru. After leaving the summit their descent by way of the North Ridge proves unexpectedly difficult in, at times, stormy weather conditions. Shortly after the pair leave the summit, Yates falls through a cornice and plummets down the 4,500 ft (1,400 m) face they had just climbed, but his fall is arrested by their climbing ropes. After a bivouac high on the peak, the pair continue their descent the following morning, but then Simpson falls whilst climbing down an ice cliff on the ridge and suffers a badly broken leg during an awkward landing. The pair commence a self-rescue with Yates lowering Simpson with ropes down a steep, 3,000 ft (910 m), snow and ice slope while the weather deteriorates into a fierce storm. The total length of rope the pair have is 300 ft (91 m), so the lowering process has to be undertaken in a series of repeat manoeuvres. The pair had almost reached the relative safety of the glacier when Yates inadvertently lowers Simpson over the edge of a large cliff, leaving him suspended on the rope in mid-air. Yates arrests his partner's fall, but cannot see the predicament he is in, nor hear him over the howling wind.
Unable to pull Simpson back up the cliff and gradually losing traction in the loose snow, Yates realizes, after about an hour and a half, that he is gradually being pulled from his unbelayed stance and will eventually fall in excess of 150 feet to his almost certain death. Yates decides that the only option available to him to avoid being pulled from the cliff is to cut the rope connecting him with Simpson. After surviving a sub-zero and stormy night on the mountain, Yates completed his descent to the surface of the glacier, but cannot find his partner, and concludes that Simpson must have fallen to the large crevasse at the base of the cliff. He inspects the opening of the crevasse the best he can without falling in himself and calls out to try and communicate with Simpson. Receiving no response, Yates concludes Simpson must be dead. He returns to the base camp alone, where he stays to recuperate from his ordeal.
Simpson, however, survived the fall and is now trapped in the large crevasse. He manages to lower himself further into the dark abyss and finds an exit leading to the surface of the glacier. He then spends three days crawling and hopping back to base camp across the glacier and moraines, despite his broken leg, frostbite, and severe dehydration. Exhausted and delirious, Simpson reaches camp only a few hours before Yates and Richard Hawking (a non-climber who was the third member of the expedition) intend to leave and return to civilization.
The main docudrama ends when Simpson reaches base camp to find Yates and Hawking still in residence and his safety is then assured. The DVD contains two additional documentary features. What Happened Next documents what happened after Simpson reached base camp and how he was evacuated to a hospital in Lima by his two companions and his subsequent return to England. Return to Siula Grande documents the making of the film in 2002 and the thoughts and reactions of Simpson, Yates, and Hawking when they return to the scene of their epic adventure.
The film stars Brendan Mackey as Joe Simpson, Nicholas Aaron as Simon Yates, and Ollie Ryall as Richard Hawking, and combines dramatizations together with interviews with Simpson, Yates, and Hawking. Simpson and Yates doubled as their younger selves for long-distance shots of the snow-fluted couloirs of Siula Grande. [3] The film was directed by Kevin Macdonald.
When they collaborated on the making of the film in 2002, Simpson and Yates had hardly seen one another for 10 years. [4] [5]
During the making of the film, the director and producers invited Yates and Simpson to return to Siula Grande in 2002 for the first time since the events of 1985. Simpson, despite finding the return emotionally difficult and experiencing post-traumatic stress syndrome on his return, eventually said that he was happy with the film and its portrayal of the events. Yates, on the other hand, reported having no unresolved issues relating to his and Simpson's adventure in 1985 nor to returning to Siula Grande to make the film. Yates decided to have nothing further to do with the production of the film once he had returned to England. [6]
According to the film's end notes, Yates received criticism from some members of the mountaineering community in Britain for cutting the rope on his partner during the descent. However, according to interviews with Yates, the climbing community (including Simpson) has largely always sided with him on that matter, and he accused the film of being selectively edited and one-sided. [7] Simpson has stated that his initial motivation in commencing the writing of the book was to set out the facts of the adventure in response to what he saw as unfair criticism of Yates.
The film received largely positive reviews, with 94% of critics' reviews being positive on Rotten Tomatoes.
Touching the Void won Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film at the 57th British Academy Film Awards. [8]
Peter Knegt at Indiewire called it one of the "10 incredible documentaries that weren't nominated for an Oscar". [9]
The BBC1's Film 2011 included Brendan Mackey's performance as Joe Simpson in their "Top Five Actors" who "Should Have Won an Oscar", along with Ingrid Bergman (for Casablanca ), Anthony Perkins (for Psycho ), Ralph Fiennes (for Schindler's List ) and Jeff Bridges (for The Big Lebowski ). [10]
The film was released in theaters on 23 January 2004 and grossed $96,973 in the opening weekend. It went on to gross $4,593,598 in America and $9,292,204 from foreign markets for a worldwide total of $13,885,802 after 20 weeks. [11]
Original music for the film was scored by Alex Heffes. The climbers reach the summit to the climax of Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium . During one of Simpson's many deliriums, he experiences a very strong reminiscence of a Boney M song he hated thoroughly, "Brown Girl in the Ring"; at one point thinking "Bloody hell, I'm going to die to Boney M".
Jim Wickwire is the first American to summit K2, the second highest mountain in the world. Wickwire is also known for surviving an overnight solo bivouac on K2 at an elevation above 27,000 ft or 8,200 m; considered "one of the most notorious bivouacs in mountaineering history".
A glissade is a climbing technique mostly used in mountaineering and alpine climbing where a climber starts a controlled slide down a snow and/or ice slope to speed up their descent. Glissading is ideally done later in the day when the snow is softer.
The Eiger is a 3,967-metre (13,015 ft) mountain of the Bernese Alps, overlooking Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland, just north of the main watershed and border with Valais. It is the easternmost peak of a ridge crest that extends across the Mönch to the Jungfrau at 4,158 m (13,642 ft), constituting one of the most emblematic sights of the Swiss Alps. While the northern side of the mountain rises more than 3,000 m (10,000 ft) above the two valleys of Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen, the southern side faces the large glaciers of the Jungfrau-Aletsch area, the most glaciated region in the Alps. The most notable feature of the Eiger is its nearly 1,800-metre-high (5,900 ft) north face of rock and ice, named Eiger-Nordwand, Eigerwand or just Nordwand, which is the biggest north face in the Alps. This substantial face towers over the resort of Kleine Scheidegg at its base, on the eponymous pass connecting the two valleys.
Touching the Void is a 1988 book by Joe Simpson, recounting his and Simon Yates's near fatal descent after climbing the 6,344-metre (20,814 ft) peak Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. Approximately 15% of the book is written by Yates. It has sold over a million copies and has been translated into over 20 languages.
Joe Simpson is a British mountaineer, author, and motivational speaker. While climbing in Peru in 1985, he suffered severe injuries and was assumed dead by his climbing companion Simon Yates after falling into a crevasse, but he survived and managed to crawl back to his base camp. He described the ordeal in his 1988 book Touching the Void, which has been adapted into a 2003 documentary film and a 2018 stage play, both of the same name.
Simon Yates is an English mountaineer. He has described himself as 'an adventurer'. Yates is most well known as being one of two British mountaineers that conquered the previously unclimbed West Face of Siula Grande in the Huayhuash mountain range in the Peruvian Andes in 1985. He and Joe Simpson completed the difficult climb, at times enduring extreme weather conditions. They subsequently survived a dramatic series of events on the descent. Simpson recounted the story in the book Touching the Void, which was later adapted into a film.
Siula Grande is a mountain in the Huayhuash mountain range in the Peruvian Andes. It is 6,344 metres (20,814 ft) high and has a subpeak, Siula Chico, 6,260 m (20,540 ft) high.
Huayhuash is a mountain range within the Andes of Peru, in the boundaries of the regions of Ancash, Lima and Huánuco. Since 2002 it is protected within the Cordillera Huayhuash Reserved Zone.
Kevin Glyn Buchanan Macdonald is a Scottish film director. His films include One Day in September (1999), a documentary about the 1972 murder of 11 Israeli athletes, which won him the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, the climbing documentary Touching the Void (2003), the drama The Last King of Scotland (2006), the political thriller State of Play (2009), the Bob Marley documentary Marley (2012), the post-apocalyptic drama How I Live Now (2013), the thriller Black Sea (2014), the Whitney Houston documentary Whitney (2018), and the legal drama film The Mauritanian (2021).
Vertical Limit is a 2000 American survival thriller film directed by Martin Campbell, written by Robert King, and starring Chris O'Donnell, Bill Paxton, Robin Tunney, and Scott Glenn. The film was released on December 8, 2000, in the United States by Columbia Pictures, receiving mixed reviews and grossed $215 million at the box office.
Mount Hood climbing accidents are incidents related to mountain climbing or hiking on Oregon's Mount Hood. As of 2007, about 10,000 people attempt to climb the mountain each year. As of May 2002, more than 130 people are known to have died climbing Mount Hood since records have been kept. One of the worst climbing accidents occurred in 1986, when seven high school students and two teachers froze to death while attempting to retreat from a storm.
The 1953 American Karakoram expedition was a mountaineering expedition to K2, at 8,611 metres the second highest mountain on Earth. It was the fifth expedition to attempt K2, and the first since the Second World War. Led by Charles Houston, a mainly American team attempted the mountain's South-East Spur in a style which was unusually lightweight for the time. The team reached a high point of 7750 m, but were trapped by a storm in their high camp, where a team member, Art Gilkey, became seriously ill. A desperate retreat down the mountain followed, during which all but one of the climbers were nearly killed in a fall arrested by Pete Schoening, and Gilkey later died in an apparent avalanche. The expedition has been widely praised for the courage shown by the climbers in their attempt to save Gilkey, and for the team spirit and the bonds of friendship it fostered.
The third man factor or third man syndrome refers to the reported situations where an unseen presence, such as a spirit, provides comfort or support during traumatic experiences.
John Smithson is a British film and television producer.
Scaife Glacier is located on Axel Heiberg Island in the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Nunavut in the Canadian High Arctic.
The 1975 British Mount Everest Southwest Face expedition was the first to successfully climb Mount Everest by ascending one of its faces. In the post-monsoon season Chris Bonington led the expedition that used rock climbing techniques to put fixed ropes up the face from the Western Cwm to just below the South Summit. A key aspect of the success of the climb was the scaling of the cliffs of the Rock Band at about 8,200 metres (27,000 ft) by Nick Estcourt and Tut Braithwaite.
Alpine climbing is a type of mountaineering that involves using any of a broad range of advanced climbing skills, including rock climbing, ice climbing, and/or mixed climbing, to summit typically large routes in an alpine environment. While alpine climbing began in the European Alps, it is used to refer to climbing in any remote mountainous area, including in the Himalayas and in Patagonia. The derived term alpine style refers to the fashion of alpine climbing to be in small lightly-equipped teams who carry their own equipment, and do all of the climbing.
The Tour Ronde is a mountain in the Mont Blanc massif of the Alps, situated on the border between France and Italy. It is a prominent mountain, some 3.5 km north-east of Mont Blanc, but is effectively part of a continuation of the south eastern spur of Mont Maudit which forms a frontier ridge between the two countries. It is easily accessible to mountaineers and provides not only a very good viewpoint from its summit of the Brenva face and the major peaks on the southern side of Mont Blanc, but it also offers a popular introduction to alpine climbing of all grades, including a north face ascent.
Touching the Void is a play written by David Greig, based on the book of the same name by Joe Simpson. It made its world premiere at the Bristol Old Vic in September 2018, before embarking on a short UK and international tour. The play centres on the true story of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, climb of the 6,344-metre west face of the Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes in 1985.
The 1970 British Annapurna South Face expedition was a Himalayan climb that was the first to take a deliberately difficult route up the face of an 8,000-metre mountain. At the time that the expedition set out, in March 1970, the only 8000ers which had been ascended more than once were Everest, Cho Oyu and Nanga Parbat; only Everest and Nanga Parbat had been climbed by a route different from that used on the first ascent.
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