Coming to NYC’s Stranger Than Fiction series tomorrow, Tuesday, May 19 and to theatres this Friday, May 22: SUNSHINE SUPERMAN
Marah Strauch’s portrait of a pioneering extreme sports figure took off at Toronto last Fall. It went on to screen at the New York Film Festival, Martha’s Vineyard, Sarasota, Montclair, Atlanta, Cleveland, Vancouver, and Florida, among several others.
Strauch’s subject is Carl Boenish, an energetic engineer who gave up his career to devote himself to the activity he termed BASE jumping – an awkward acronym denoting the fixed point from which the jump would originate: Building, Antenna, Span (bridges), and Earth (cliffs). Notably, and to the film’s great benefit, Boenish also became obsessed with filming his activities, rigging small cameras to the helmets of jumpers to create nonfiction adventure shorts that Strauch draws from extensively, and which in turn draw in the viewer into an immersive experience of the thrill-seeking sport. This footage, while sometimes crude, most successfully conveys Boenish’s extroverted personality, and the lengths he goes to challenge himself, sneaking into construction sites and making retrospectively ridiculous deals with park rangers to allow him to cultivate his passion. Present-day interviews with old colleagues and especially his widow, Jean, who became as enamored with BASE jumping as her much more excitable spouse, are far more conventional, while re-enactments add slickness to the proceeding but not much else, and instead diminish the impact of Boenish’s own footage and existing archival records. Strauch understandably structures her narrative to build up to Boenish’s strange 1984 death, where, just one day after he set a record, he appeared to attempt a reckless jump from a mountain peak that had explicitly been deemed far too dangerous, and did so without telling anyone, leading to armchair psychologizing and speculations about suicide. Despite its protagonist’s demise, and the the inherent danger of the activity he popularized, however, somehow the film manages to maintain a feeling of celebration and exploration.
what (not) to doc 