Getting Banffed?

The Banff Film Festival: Has It Become A Reflection Of Our Own Excess?

By Matt Colon, 2-16-06

By Matt Colón

Not too long ago the Banff Mountain Film Festival came through Bozeman. It happens every year. Our local Nordic ski foundation hosts the festival as a major fundraiser, and the proceeds provide significant support for community athletes. It’s a feel-good event.

Each year when the intro reel begins to roll the auditorium erupts into enthusiastic applause and you feel like you’re part of something heady. A look around the audience in our part of the country reveals a collection of the kind of weathered faces that come from spending a lot of time outside playing in the surrounding mountains. And indeed, the film festival bills itself as a robust celebration of “mountain culture.� Mountain culture, it turns out, is a pretty loose notion.

This year, mountain culture included everything from facing the challenges of providing basic healthcare and education (and in another film, high altitude hockey) to the people of Ladakh, to paragliding over the Grand Canyon, and riding mountain bikes, skis and snowboards off of cliffs.

The film festival is usually a pretty entertaining romp, with enough in the way of meditative content to leave you feeling that the use of the word “culture� to describe what you’ve just witnessed isn’t entirely off the mark. Even so, over the past few years I’ve come to see the Banff Festival and our collective response to it as somehow emblematic of a larger trend that may not reflect so well on our own mountain culture.

The Banff Festival is a visual feast. It is thought provoking. But to judge from the catcalls and yeehaws that erupt throughout the evening, it’s hard not to conclude that, at least for a significant portion of the audience, it’s the “extreme� adrenaline clips that tend to attract the sellout crowds.

Folks come to the festival to be titillated, to witness people hanging it out there and dancing at the edge of human potential; they come be to be inspired. All of which seems harmless enough–hell, better than harmless. Inspiration is good. But each year as the adrenaline shots get more and more titillating, and the hairball stunts get nuttier and nuttier, one gets the sense that those of us who applaud what we witness in the Banff Festival are participating in a kind of feeding frenzy that will ultimately consume the best of what we love about the mountain culture we’ve come to celebrate.

At some point it makes sense to wonder if there might be some connection between our infinite appetite for increasingly thrilling footage of helicopter-supported plunges into otherwise pristine backcountry areas, and our appetite for, say, twenty acres just outside of town. The common denominator, I suppose, is a basic lack of self-restraint. On the one hand there is popular support for banning snowmobiles in Yellowstone and limiting motorized use in the backcountry; on the other hand, heli-skiing is pretty cool.

Sprawl is the bane of small western towns trying to deal productively with growth, but golly, that sweet little ranchette does have killer mountain views, end-of-the-road privacy, and exclusive access to really good fishing. Somehow, we just can’t seem to help ourselves.

I think it’s reasonable to suggest that our ideals and our actions are often at cross-purposes. We want unspoiled, beautiful places to function as backdrops for our lives, but our relationship to those places pose a constant and growing threat to the very qualities that we most cherish about them. And if we can’t stem our appetite for increasingly extreme images of backcountry high jinks, then we probably shouldn’t be surprised when those images begin to dominate, and finally come to define what we think of as “mountain culture.� Nor should we be surprised when the popular vocabulary for describing these extraordinary places devolves into the adrenaline junkie’s version of realtor-speak. In many ways the problem isn’t all that different today than it has been all along. If gold, silver and copper contributed to the first waves of westward migration, we now seem to be mining the west for something less tangible – and perhaps less attainable.

We come to these places convinced that they hold the promise of a lifestyle less defined by the grind of the workaday world, less bound by convention, and abundantly punctuated with surges of adrenaline that remind us of what it feels like to be unmistakably alive. And in many ways these places do offer us these things, but only as snapshots. The raw, edgy feel that attracts so many of us to these small mountain towns is a surprisingly fragile quality that tends to buckle in the face of growth.

We’re often eager for other people to practice a little self-restraint (for God’s sake!), but reluctant to really think about how we participate in shaping the trends we bemoan. If we’re so eager to be radical, to hang it out there and bump up against the limits of human potential, then maybe we should think about exploring the limits of self-restraint? How about entertaining the radical notion that “backcountry� skiers ought to earn their turns without the aid of snowmobiles or helicopters? How about considering the revolutionary idea that ripping across a fragile desert ecosystem on a mountain bike might not be so great for the desert? Or how about embracing the seditious possibility that filming, packaging and selling haunting images of dwindling cultures struggling to hang on in exotic, far off places, might actually do more harm than good?

It’s been almost a decade since I first attended the Banff Mountain Film Festival. Over the years there have been some spectacular films. There have been extraordinary chronicles of human endurance and suffering, beautiful natural history films, and hilarious human-interest pieces as well. But that’s only part of the picture. There has also been some truly baffling chunder. When I think about it, the best of the Banff Mountain Film Festival has been characterized by an absence of the kind of full frontal cupidity that so often characterizes the festival at its worst.

Those films that are most responsive to our desires for something more extreme, more radical and more outrageous are thrilling to behold. They do provide compelling examples of people exploring the limits of human potential. But of course those films are only snapshots. Next year, or the year after that, the thirty-foot drop will turn into the fifty-foot drop, and the fifty-foot drop will become the hundred-and-fifty-foot drop, and the things that used to move us and make us feel alive will cease to hold our interest.

Each year it seems like the Banff Mountain Film Festival ups the ante in terms of what constitutes the outer edges of “extreme.� And each year this little town becomes a little more congested, a little less congenial, and a little less little. Meanwhile, those of us who move here continue to lament how rapidly things are changing from something we thought we had found into something we thought we had left behind. We may point to the absurd presence of shiny new Hummers (and the knuckleheads who drive them) as more emblematic of this depressing transformation than the Banff Mountain Film Festival, but I’ve come to the uncomfortable conclusion that they are not unrelated. Somehow it all has to do with a fundamental refusal to examine our desires within the context of our ideals.

What used to be considered “radical� footage of mountain culture has become so predictably extreme that it has become conventional. It turns out that a truly radical vision for mountain culture requires more than epic drops and gnarly stunts. A truly radical vision for mountain culture will require developing a more durable set of aspirations and ideals around which to build the notion of what it means to be unmistakably alive. Given the present climate that seems like a distant hope. So, in the meantime, the old imagery of a lone cowboy astride his pony is being replaced by the image of a lone snowboarder dropping into a “sick chute.� Welcome to the New West, dude.

Matt Colón lives with his wife and kids in Bozeman, Montana.

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