Werner Herzog
1985
45 minutes
This is a Werner Herzog documentary about a pair of mountain climbers who are attempting to do some difficult mountain climbing task. You have very little context about the difficulty or remarkability of this task outside the fact that Werner Herzog is making a documentary about it. Apparently it is difficult. There are scenes in which the men are climbing a mountain. It looks like something you wouldn't do.
When you lived in the southwest, you found it surprising and a bit depressing how quickly you normalized the beautiful scenery around you. The mountains there are utterly breathtaking the first time you see them, and you were lucky enough to have a view of them through the upper windows in your place in Santa Fe. They loomed in the background every time you went somewhere to the south in town and then drove north along the main road back to your apartment in the northern downtown section of town. Santa Fe had the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the blood of Christ, due to their reddish tint. The same range as seen from a slightly lower perch in Albuquerque were called the Sandias, after the word for watermelon, because of their pinkish tone.
You would occasionally go hiking on the weekends and ascend to a point where they were no longer visible. It was like the story of Guy de Maupassant, who allegedly liked to dine at the base of the Eiffel Tower because he hated the design and it was one of the few places in Paris that it wasn't visible.
There's no beauty quite like a beauty squandered or scorned.
Time to choose something different: