X-DANCE FILM FESTIVAL
The suitcase that I was dragging behind me at the airport made a steady, rhythmic sound as the wheels clicked in the seams of tile that were laid many years ago. As a piece of trivia: the wheels for the suitcases of today would not be possible if the plastic skateboard wheel had not been invented. So, next time you get upset at a skateboarder, thank him instead because you don’t have to carry your overweight suitcases around airports anymore.
I was on my way to Lake Tahoe from Seattle to attend the X-Dance Film Festival. This is its tenth year since Brian Wimmer designed it as a platform for young film makers to showcase their extreme action sports films. When I started in 1950 I was the only extreme sports film maker. Now there are hundreds of very talented young film makers trying to get their work seen and somehow be paid for their long hours of hard work, danger, financial investment and creativity.
Some of the films I saw were truly spectacular. One called “Fiberglass and Megapixels” struck a nerve based on my early years of surfing. I started in 1937 on my first paddleboard which I built in junior high school. The film dealt with the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii during November and December when the waves are huge and the crowds even bigger. It concerned the lives of the many different surf photographers and the dangers and rewards that they encounter every day in the surf with their waterproof equipment or on the beach with very long telephoto lenses. The photographers, some wearing crash helmets, get right in the center of the action as someone does a bottom turn on a way-over-their-head wave at the Pipeline, and the man with the camera is right there getting close-ups and hoping that he doesn’t get hit by a ten pound surfboard ridden by a 180 pound surfer as it misses him by inches. They all want to get the best and most spectacular photos of the big waves of winter so they can make a living selling them to the surf magazines and advertisers.
The second or third year of my surfing, there were as many as 300 surfboard owners and riders in all of Southern California. Today, it is a multibillion dollar worldwide business because of the light surfboard and the wet suit.
If you get a chance, be sure and see this film wherever it is shown. With luck, Brian and his X-Dance Film Festival will provide an entry into the commercial market for the creators of this film.
The winner of this year’s X-Dance Film Festival in January 2010 was “Mount St. Elias,” the amazing film record of climbing and skiing down this 18,000 vertical foot Alaskan Mountain. If you have ever skied Sun Valley’s Baldy Mountain, imagine six Baldys stacked one above the other and you have to first climb to the top of it in sub-zero temperatures and 75 MPH winds, then ski down on some of the worst snow and ice I have ever seen. Ice so hard and smooth, it would be as though you were trying to walk in a grease-covered bowling alley that was tilted 65 degrees.
The cameraman and his assistant had to climb and ski right along with the three adventurers in the film. This is a lot more than a ski movie. It is high adventure with your-life-on-the-line every moment of the ascent and the descent. The music was great and the men who climbed Mt. St. Elias told the story like it was. I am glad that skiers did not have the equipment or the ability to do things such as this when I was doing all of my photography in the 1950’s and 60’s.
After all of the films were shown in Lake Tahoe, I was honored with a lifetime achievement award by Brian Wimmer and his X-Dance staff. Asked to say a few words I commented,
“The films are all great, but I have never understood why the photographers’ names in the movie credits are always down near the end. They come after the wardrobe mistress and the makeup people, and yet without the camera man there would be no movie. I think filmmakers should reconsider and put the photographer at the top of the credits when they credit all of the people that created the movie and their degree of importance in the production.” And then I honored those filmmakers who were represented.
All put together the X-Dance Film Festival will be hitting the road and with luck, it will visit your town. In the meantime, be sure and catch these two very well done, extreme action movies. No artificial explosions that were done in the computer, no drugs, sex, murder or terrorism. Instead, these films document the search for freedom for the people in the movies, as they stretch the boundaries of freedom for themselves and all the people that will follow their pioneering path.
Don’t miss the X-Dance Film Festival when it comes to your town, and I’ll continue to find my own freedom dragging my suitcase with skateboard wheels from one airport to the next.
For great gifts for skiing friends and family plus further info about Warren’s wanderings go to warrenmiller.net or visit him on his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller. To learn about the works of his Foundation, please visit the Warren Miller Freedom Foundation, www.warrenmiller.org.
