How Real Should Reel Rock Be?
I. The Coincidence
On July 23, 2022, a remarkable coincidence occurred on the snowy summit of Jirishanca, a notoriously difficult 6,125-meter mountain in Peru’s Cordillera Huayhuash.
It happened like this. After three continuous days on the mountain (plus one day beforehand spent freeing and then fixing rope on the first 10 pitches), American alpinist Josh Wharton kicked up a final pitch of 70-degree snow and became the first person to reach Jirishanca’s striking summit cone since 2003. Wharton whacked in a snow picket, chopped himself a seat, and began belaying up his partner, Vince Anderson. Meanwhile, a drone piloted by Cheyne Lempe and Drew Smith, videographers on assignment with Patagonia Films and Reel Rock, hovered overhead.
Yet when Anderson was still well below the summit, Wharton saw movement off to his right. Snow tumbling down the slope. An ice ax swinging for purchase. A moment later, Alik Berg, wearing an orange helmet and a blue parka with black shoulders, climbed into sight 10 meters away.
“Oh, hey, Alik!” Wharton said.
He knew Berg and his partner, Quentin Roberts, both Canadian, had started up Jirishanca on the same day as Anderson and Wharton—but what were the odds that a mountain that had seen three summits from the south in 65 years would get its fourth and fifth in the same 10-minute period by independent teams climbing hard independent lines? And mixed in with Wharton’s delight at the coincidence was relief: Whereas his route of ascent, Suerte Integral, was extremely high in technical difficulty yet relatively low in objective danger, Berg and Roberts’s route (for which they later won a Piolet d’Or, alpinism’s greatest formal honor) had quested off through wild-looking snow-mushroom terrain on the mountain’s previously unattempted southeast spur—a type of climbing that Wharton, who is famously understated, “would not describe as safe.”
“I was very excited that they survived their way up the thing,” he told me later. “I was psyched to see them—psyched that they were doing well.”
While Lempe and Smith watched on a screen in basecamp, Berg joined Wharton on the summit, dug himself a seat two feet away, and began belaying Roberts up.
A few minutes later, Anderson, breathing heavily, joined Wharton and Berg. Anderson whooped a few times. He and Wharton recorded some short videos. Roberts, still out of sight, swam carefully toward them through steep, three-dimensional snow. The drone collected fabulous footage of this moment: Berg, Wharton, and Anderson huddling on the flank of a near-vertical snow cone under a stony sky. I used one of those images in a 2022 news story about Wharton and Anderson’s ascent. Another appeared in a feature essay by Roberts that was published in this magazine’s 2024 issue of Ascent.
Wharton and Anderson didn’t tarry long on the summit. It was late in the day, they were thousands of feet above their bivy gear, and nights above 6,000 meters in the Cordillera Huayhuash are dangerously cold. So they began their descent having spent no moment alone together on the summit.
But when Lempe and Smith’s footage appears in the climactic summit scene in “Jirishanca,” a climbing documentary directed and produced by longtime climbing-film legends Josh Lowell and Peter Mortimer that premiered in Reel Rock 18 and is now available on Patagonia’s YouTube channel, Berg is nowhere to be seen.
Neither is his rope. Neither are his footprints.
The coincidence had been edited out of the story.
II. Reel Rock’s Jirishanca
If story-driven climbing films exist on a spectrum, with uncut send footage and bulletproof pieces of documentary journalism on the one side and shamelessly synthetic or even falsified stories on the other, I think that “Jirishanca” exists somewhere in the aesthetically successful middle.
The core of the story is relatively simple and undeniably true: Two American alpine veterans, Josh Wharton and Vince Anderson, attempt Jirishanca… and succeed. The climb is meaningful to them on several levels. Both men are famously bold alpinists; Anderson won a Piolet d’Or with Steve House on an arguably suicidal 2005 ascent of Nanga Parbat’s Rupal Face; Wharton has for decades been one of America’s greatest all-arounders, pioneering cutting-edge alpine climbs in Patagonia and Pakistan, trad climbing 5.14, winning international ice climbing competitions, and nearly flashing Free Rider on El Cap. In attempting Jirishanca, both men are trying to remain true to these hard-driving pasts while simultaneously honoring the survival imperatives impressed upon them by fatherhood. In 2019, during Wharton’s third attempt of the mountain and Anderson’s first, they bailed a couple hundred meters below the summit, worried that pushing on through “bad sugary snow” late in the day might subject them to a dangerous unplanned bivy. Now, in 2022, they’re back to recreate that summit-push opportunity—and to do so without exposing themselves to too much risk.
The narrative problem faced by the filmmakers here is pretty obvious: they’ve got compelling characters, but their film has very little intrinsic tension. On the mountain, Wharton and Anderson do not push the risk envelope; instead, they leverage their combined 50-plus years of alpine experience to avoid subjecting themselves to any anguished indecision about whether or not to “risk it.” Sure the climbing is incredibly hard (their route, Suerte Integral, involves dirty sport climbing up to 5.13a, loose mixed climbing up to M7, and dramatic WI6 ice, plus the objective hazards and logistical complexities inherent to most big mountain objectives), but since Wharton and Anderson got so close to the summit three years earlier, they—and the viewer—know that the climb is well within their technical abilities.
To offset these tension-numbing facts, the filmmakers (who, to their credit, do not invent drama where none exists) chose to ornament the climbing story with little human subplots—engines that, like beautiful sentences in a literary novel, keep the viewer invested despite the relatively low-stakes plot.
One of these subplots unfolds in Wharton’s on-camera banter with Peter Mortimer, Reel Rock’s founder and director of dozens of seminal feature-length climbing films, including Alone on the Wall, Return to Sender, and The Alpinist. In those scenes, which are interspersed throughout the film, Wharton explains why he has “dissed on” (Mortimer’s words) Reel Rock in the past for its tendency towards hyperbolic and sensationalized storytelling. “Hyperbole in climbing film and climbing media,” Wharton says, “puts people on pedestals in ways that really aren’t real.”
By including these exchanges, Reel Rock’s editors set up a clever change-over-time story for Wharton’s character: If, as legendary alpinist Steve House tells us early in the film, “You’re never going to get an ounce of hyperbole out of Josh Wharton,” and if Josh Wharton himself explains that his anti-hyperbole stance is a well-considered philosophical position rather than some basic schoolboy shyness, then if Wharton ever admits that his ascent of Jirishanca is meaningful or impressive, it will further underscore the climb’s significance to the viewer, and allow us to feel that Wharton has accomplished something he can feel proud of—which makes us happy.
And that’s how the film ends. While Wharton and Anderson celebrate on top of the world, we hear Pete Mortimer say, “Just to set the record straight. How badass is it?” And then we cut to Wharton, who looks only a little pained as he replies, “To be honest, for me it is super proud. …” As intended by Reel Rock’s experienced heartstring-tuggers, this ends up feeling somewhat moving.
But here’s the delightful irony: Wharton’s admission comes just seconds after we cut away from that spectacular—and highly edited—drone shot of two men alone on a mountaintop, looking singular, exceptional, spectacular… which feels a bit strange, a bit disingenuous, to any viewer aware of the fact that another man has been removed from their company, and that this missing man had arrived at that same destination via an inarguably more dangerous and committing route.
Which begs the question: Is “Jirishanca,” despite its subplot about hyperbole, a perfect example of problematic hyperbole in climbing film?
III. “We Can and Should Do Better”
On November 26, 2024, seven months after Reel Rock premiered in Boulder, Colorado, Alik Berg posted a pair of photos on Instagram: one of him on the summit of Jirishanca with Wharton and Anderson, and one of him edited out.
Berg then explained that he’d been reluctant to post these images “since the athletes and videographers we shared the mountain with are all friends… and to my knowledge had very limited input in the creative direction of the film. … Besides, we are talking about a few seconds of footage in an otherwise great film.”
But he added that, while he did not feel personally slighted by the edit, he did think this was a good moment to express his concern with “integrity in the climbing media world.”
“The online information landscape has become increasingly unreliable,” he wrote, “and I think that in the climbing community we can and should do better. The producers had some tough decisions to make in editing the otherwise spectacular summit shots, and I can respect that. To me, though, altering the footage to this degree seems disingenuous to the viewer, since the film is presented as a documentary. Besides, it was just a really cool part of the story!”
Berg’s post ignited what you might call a respectful hullabaloo in the comments section, where dozens of notable climbers, filmmakers, and articulate pundits discussed the role of truth in climbing media and the extent to which athletes and filmmakers ought to subordinate stories to facts or facts to stories. While it was an astonishingly civil dialogue compared to most discourse found on the modern internet, commenters were nonetheless largely critical of Reel Rock’s decision—and the wider climbing film industry as a whole.
American alpinist Colin Haley, for instance, argued that there was “a general problem in the climbing world… where ethics and integrity and accuracy seem not to matter if [you’re] making a movie. Tactics and behaviors that the community would judge poorly in normal circumstances are somehow accepted” when athletes are working with filmmakers. To make matters worse, “in most climbing films depicting ascents that I have personal knowledge of, I find many inaccuracies, often done intentionally in order to make the ascent seem more exceptional than it is.” He thus concludes that Reel Rock chose to omit Berg from the story because it “makes a more impressive movie.”
Meanwhile, Chris Kalous, the host of the Enormocast, honed in on storytelling—criticizing the media’s convenience-store relationship to facts (grab what you need, leave the rest behind) and simpler-is-better storytelling ethos, and arguing that Reel Rock’s summit omission is less some malevolent plot out to scrub Berg and Roberts from history than it is sheer artistic “laziness and wanting to deliver the same old story because brands don’t need/want complicat[ion].”
But another commenter, Colum Kelly (@columk1), replied to Kalous pointing out that Reel Rock’s decision to edit Berg out of the shot was not an “omission”; it was an alteration. “There are clear guidelines for ethical documentary film-making,” he wrote. “Not cutting dialogue mid-sentence to change its meaning, using footage out of context, using cuts/juxtaposition to falsely imply simultaneity or the perception of cause and effect, selective omission to change the narrative etc.” To Kelly, if Reel Rock had omitted Berg by refusing to use that particular summit shot, they’d have been in an ethical gray zone, something he might not agree with but could understand. However, “deciding to use the footage anyway but remove the climbers is a bit different. That’s not editorial anymore, that’s completely removing the guarantee that the audience is viewing real footage. … Altering images brings everything into question. Was anything else justifiably altered to look more badass? Were anchors edited out? Were cameramen edited out? … There’s no guarantee that any of it is real.”
However, this wouldn’t be the 2020s without some healthy cynicism. Guidebook author Vitaliy Musiyenko wrote that “including other climbers, especially those sponsored by a different clothing brand, is not in the interest of the brand that paid for the production of the movie (commercial). … These films aren’t created because the brand wants you to be stoked on climbing, they are created as a more genuine way to advertise gear. Adding more to the story would likely require… shots of other climbers who are wearing clothing from a different brand.”
But Josh Lowell, commenting on behalf of the Reel Rock team, was quick to note that this was not Reel Rock’s intention. The decision to remove Berg from the summit shot, he said, was purely a matter of storytelling. One of the film’s early edits did include the unaltered footage, but its viewers found it “very distracting to suddenly see another person on the summit, who was visible from some angles and not others.” Realizing that they had the option of either altering the shot or dropping “a lot of explanation at the very end of the movie when it’s too late for new info,” the Reel Rock team “made the decision to avoid showing Alik.”
“I can understand how some people might find that choice debatable or objectionable,” Lowell added. “But it wasn’t about making the climb seem more impressive. And it had absolutely nothing to do with protecting a sponsor’s interest.”
Missing from the conversation were both Anderson (who simply didn’t comment) and Wharton (who does not have Instagram). So I called Wharton up to ask him about the edit and Berg’s post.
“I actually generally agree that it was sort of lame that they were edited out,” he said, noting that he’d had a good conversation with Berg before the post went up. “But by the same token, I understand why Sender [Films/Reel Rock] and Josh Lowell decided to do that—just to keep things simple and easy at the end. We like simple, easy endings. I think that’s a pretty common thing in movies.”
Then Wharton laughed, and I sensed a bit of weary dismay in it.
“And also,” he added, “thinking of climbing films as straight documentaries is a little naive. They are not, and never have been.”
IV. A Brief History of Climbing Films
Climbing films can, historically, be roughly categorized according to two competing impulses: vibes on the one hand, stories on the other.
In the early days of climbing media—before smartphones, GoPros, Instagram, and YouTube—most core climbing films tended, like skiing or skateboarding movies, to follow the vibes impulse. They were flashy anthologies of more or less independent climbing feats set to music and flavored by edgy, for-the-camera antics. (Think of Ben Moon and Jerry Moffet racing their BMWs in The Real Thing, released in 1996, or Jason Kehl fondling his dolls in Dosage Volume 1, released in 2002). These films, distributed by VHS and DVD, were designed for a core climbing audience who profoundly identified with the vibey expressions of the climbing lifestyle and, in the days before Instagram and YouTube, were easily wowed by grainy glimpses of pro climbers doing cutting edge things. We didn’t demand that our films tell traditional stories: that was the province of magazines.
But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a wave of filmmakers—including Lowell and Mortimer—began experimenting with another kind of narrative. Dosage Volume 1 contains two utterly classic Chris Sharma shorts—“Unfinished Business” and “Realization”—that use interviews, voiceovers, and confessions of frustration to tell the story of Sharma’s multi-season struggle to establish Biographie (5.15a), which was then called Realization.
When I started climbing in 2004, DVDs of Dosage 1 were still on sale at Eastern Mountain Sports, and all the young sport climbers I knew not only owned a copy but watched it constantly. We were obsessed by the humanness of Sharma’s journey—the way he moves from overconfidence (Sharma had never not sent a climb he’d invested in) through failure and doubt (“Unfinished Business” ends with him leaving Céüse empty handed) to historic triumph (Realization was the first climb that everyone in the climbing world seemed to agree was 5.15). And we went out of our way to replicate that same arc in our climbing lives, idealizing the emotionally intense multi-year project as the main point of our sport.
I’m not sure if Reel Rock’s filmmakers explicitly saw “Realization” as a formula to follow forever after, but I suspect that they did realize that, by telling human stories with relatable characters, they could essentially make any viewer, regardless of how closely they already identified with climbing culture, care about the film. And so, over the course of the aughts, we began to see more and more films emphasize a relatively simple story structure: Introduce the viewer to a hero who has an emotional investment in a certain climb (the higher the stakes, the better) and then show them struggle with it—trusting the fact that the viewer will lend their own emotions to the climber’s success.
Yet sometimes these stories have felt forced and cheesy; we sense that we’re being told a thing because the filmmakers hope it’ll help us invest in the story’s outcome, not because the characters (real people, after all) actually think of their lives in such a way. I’d put Jonathan Griffin’s The Soloist VR, a virtual reality film about Alex Honnold soloing in the Dolomites and the French Alps, into this category. Despite excellent cinematography and insane climbing feats, it’s kind of a bad film, a boring film, a film with unconvincing dialogue (the characters are literally acting) and overly familiar narratives.
But while The Soloist VR is just boring, there are some instances in which I’d actually consider bad storytelling immoral. For example, in an intensely manipulative few seconds of “Will Power”—episode nine of Jimmy Chin’s NatGeo series The Edge of the Unknown—the filmmakers put an extreme amount of effort into making the viewer believe that it’s dangerous for Will Gadd to take a perfectly safe fall onto a bolt. Why? Because they want to keep the audience from changing channels during an ensuing commercial break. Of course, the film, though made by climbers, isn’t for a primarily climbing audience—but I don’t think that’s a good excuse to lie. Indeed, I think that makes it even more problematic. Because in so blatantly prioritizing storytelling over truth, ad slots over authenticity, Chin is essentially passing off a fictional danger as non-fictional one—which simultaneously gives non-climbers an inaccurate vision of our sport and threatens to undermine the authenticity of the real near-death experience that Gadd relates later in the same episode.
In that case, the “story” is being propelled by a lie, which undermines its own authenticity.
V. Can Some Lies Tell the Truth?
So, yeah, omission can clearly be problematic—but it isn’t always. Indeed, as Kalous implied in his comment on Berg’s post, making films—like making any story (including this essay)—involves accreting disparate details into a cohesive this-then-that order while leaving ancillary and unnecessary details out.
And we do want some stuff omitted.
We’re fine not watching Wharton (who had some tummy troubles on Jirishanca) pause his ascent to do his business. And we’re fine having 99% of the climbing omitted and instead letting a few impressive minutes give us an impressionistic understanding of an ascent that, in reality, took three full days. What we want is to feel like we’re being told a truthful story without feeling like we’ve wasted our time. And if the filmmakers deem “the story” too broad—too bulky for our attention or their time slot—they might choose to tell a part of that story rather than the whole thing.
Which brings us to a foundational (if somewhat counterintuitive) fact of documentary filmmaking: Simply shooting an event and publishing it unedited might actually tell us less about that event than a highly edited representational film, which shows very little of that event itself but gives us the information necessary to contextualize the story and its meaning. Uncut send footage of a boulder problem might, for instance, serve as proof that the ascent actually happened, but the footage doesn’t tell the viewer much about the climb, the climber, what that climb meant to them, and what their process on it was like. We don’t get a sense of the holds or the hours of failure that enabled the successful ascent. We might hear a yell of triumph, but we don’t have the data to interpret that triumph ourselves—to feel some simulacrum of what the climber might be feeling. That’s why many climber-filmmakers take the time to make edits of their sends, splicing in failed efforts, interviews, music that captures a certain mood, time lapses that capture the commute or the serenity of the climbing area. They want to help their viewer form a particular understanding of the climber, the climb, and their relationship to each other.
“Jirishanca” is simply a high-budget, big-picture version of this. Anderson and Wharton spent three days on the wall, plus months preparing for the trip, but instead of giving us “977 hours of uncut mountaineering footy” (as Chris Schulte, one of Instagram’s more insightful climbing trolls, facetiously requested), the filmmakers compressed that large story into 31 tightly edited minutes, most of which is character backstory, not actual climbing footage.
In their quest to give us these emotionally powerful representational films, filmmakers often rely on fabrication. For instance, that close-up shot of Chris Sharma’s fingers nestling into a tiny hold while sending some heinous, historic climb almost definitely wasn’t captured while Sharma was sending. (Capturing that moment in real time would require the filmmakers to have a shooter dedicated to getting that single shot during a send attempt.) Instead, it was captured before or after the send and then spliced into the relevant place during the send attempt in order to give the viewer a deeper and more realistic understanding of what that attempt actually entails. It’s a fabrication—but it’s in the service of a truth.
This “in service of truth” idea more or less governs every aspect of commercial film editing. Take sound design. When I spoke to Jonathan Griffin about The Soloist VR, he noted that birdsong, wind, breath, the rustle of fingers nestling into a hold, the clinking of gear—all of this was tinkered with, added in, removed, in order to give the viewer the puckering experience of being there on the wall beside a ropeless Honnold. Griffin even spliced heartbeats into crux sections—something that, of course, only Honnold himself would be able to hear—in order to trick the viewer’s nervous system into putting themselves in Honnold’s place. It’s a documentary in the sense that Honnold did actually free solo the climbs that he’s shown free soloing. But the film is attempting to convey an experience, not document that experience journalistically.
Even straight up altering footage is similarly commonplace in commercial climbing films. When I spoke to Reel Rock’s Nick Rosen about the “Jirishanca” edit, he told me that if Adam Ondra decides to send some magnificent 5.15 with a cameraman visible in one of the shots or a gumby (like me) falling on a 5.12d in the background, it’s more or less standard practice in commercial films and photo shoots to edit that person out. Sure, it’s a manipulation, he said, but that hangdogger/cameraman is not impacting the action, and removing them changes none of the facts; it just allows the viewer to focus on the facts that we have come to this movie to see. (This, of course, was one of Rosen’s main arguments in defense of cutting the footage: Berg and Roberts had done a different route on a mountain that had already seen plenty of summits. Their climb was a story—and a story that was worth telling—but it was a different story than the one that Reel Rock was telling, and introducing them into Anderson and Wharton’s tale amounted to an unnecessary distraction.)
But there are climbing films where omission, even if it does not involve alteration, is clearly problematic—and not just because (as with the Edge of the Unknown example above) it’s tricking non-climbers into believing something inaccurate about our sport. Sometimes, omission in film can lead to some climbers seeming to get credit for things that other people did first.
An excellent example of this, as Colin Haley notes in one of his Instagram comments, occurs in Renan Ozturk’s lamentable new NatGeo film, The Devil’s Climb, which follows Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell’s bicycle journey to Alaska and subsequent ascent of The Diablo Traverse on the Devil’s Thumb. In addition to being a straight-up meh movie (the “plot” is about as artificial as it gets; and Honnold and Caldwell more often deliver information by reading scripts than divulging information in candid interviews; and the whole endeavor feels utterly synthetic and unnecessary), The Devil’s Climb carefully avoids mentioning a very important contextual truth: That Honnold and Caldwell did not forge off into the unknown and conduct some magnificent first ascent when they linked all the towers in the Devil’s Thumb massif; instead, they were repeating a route that was established in 2010 by Colin Haley and Mikey Shaefer after being extensively scouted by Jon Walsh and Andre Ike in 2004. The only new thing was that they did it in a single day—and though they never overtly claim to be doing the traverse first, the film is carefully edited to imply that they are. Indeed, you could watch The Devil’s Climb and believe that no one had ever summited the Devil’s Thumb before—that the mountain, not its still-unclimbed Northwest Face, is what Honnold and Caldwell are referring to when they bandy around bogus phrases like “the last great problem in North America.”
You could argue—as its producers no doubt will—that this was an innocent case of sensationalization. The omission wasn’t designed to slight anyone. It was intended to simplify the story for the non-climber viewer and corroborate the film’s emotional narrative, which is that Caldwell, after a slew of injuries, still has what it takes to do badass things. But that, of course, makes The Devil’s Climb a perfect example of what Wharton is talking about in his interviews in “Jirishanca”: it’s hyperbole. And that hyperbole, in addition to simply making things feel stupid and fake, also puts Honnold and Caldwell (both of them legends I very much admire) on yet another pedestal that no other climbing duo is capable of reaching. Which is inaccurate. It’s lying by omission and implication. It’s actively appropriating the accomplishments of the climbers that stood on that pedestal before them.
So is Reel Rock doing the same thing in “Jirishanca”? Are they lying by omitting Alik Berg?
In the strictest sense, yes. Reel Rock shows Wharton and Anderson alone on that astonishing summit, two men having arrived in a location that no others are capable of reaching… except Alik Berg was there, too.
But in other ways, I think you could argue that Reel Rock’s edit is far less problematic than the divisively hyperbolic storytelling ethos on display in The Devil’s Climb, because—and this is crucial—Wharton and Anderson did a very different thing than Berg and Roberts. Neither team’s accomplishment is at all altered by any celebration of the other team’s. Reel Rock’s decision to edit Berg out of a film about Suerte Integral does not give Anderson and Wharton credit for establishing Reino Hongo. Editing them out of the shot is, at its core, more like editing out a hangdogger on an adjacent route.
But here’s a question: If, as Lowell says, Reel Rock’s edit had nothing to do with sponsor interests; and if, as I argued above, Reel Rock wasn’t being overtly appropriative when omitting Reino Hongo from a story about Suerte Integral; and if (though this is still debatable), we decide that climbing filmmakers are ethically permitted to edit ancillary or distracting details out of films so long as those details did not alter the events portrayed in the film—if all of that is true, is there still an argument that Reel Rock’s decision not to include Berg was nonetheless lazy? Should Reel Rock’s producers have taken a solid look at what happened and decided to tell a different story than the one they’d gone to the mountain to tell?
VI. What None of Us Are Thinking About
Before starting this essay, I sketched out a scenario that, I thought, might have allowed Reel Rock to keep Berg in the shot while increasing the film’s stakes and without interrupting the flow of the narrative. Here’s what I wrote:
They could have introduced Berg and Roberts early in the film (perhaps playing hacky sack at basecamp or packing up their gear) and then had Wharton, in a 10-second interview or voiceover, note (a) how special and unusual it was to be at Jirishanca’s southeast basecamp with another party, since the mountain is so rarely climbed, and (b) how he, a dad, was a bit nervous seeing these young guns heading up a line that clearly had a high level of objective risk. He could even explain how he’d given Berg and Roberts a ton of beta about the descent, since, if they made the summit, they intended to descend via Suerte Integral.
None of that, surely, would have severely disrupted the plot. Indeed, it would have added some tension. “What about Berg and Roberts?” we’d be wondering while Anderson dodged falling ice and Wharton climbed over fabulous ice roofs. And then, when Wharton is on the summit, we could get a drone shot of Berg appearing around the corner, which would augment rather than confuse the emotional climax of the film: Not only did our veterans achieve their dreams—the young guns lived! And everyone summited at the same time! What a happy ending!
But when I summarized this for Rosen and asked why his team didn’t take such an approach, he reminded me that film is not like writing. “I’m not sure there would have been a way to do that,” he said, “given the footage we had.”
He explained that no member of Reel Rock’s core management team was present in Peru for the shoot, so they weren’t even aware that Roberts and Berg were on the mountain until they saw the drone’s summit shot after everyone was back in town. So they quite simply did not have the footage they’d have needed to work the young climbers into the film. (“Maybe there is one shot of them, like, hiking up or something,” he said, “but I don’t remember seeing it.”) Working them into the film, he said, would therefore have involved either collecting footage retrospectively, which was not really an option on a mountain so remote as Jirishanca, or using still images with voiceovers.
“There was no natural way of back-filling them in the story,” he said. “So if we had been forced to change it, I think we would have just had this kind of awkward moment in the end. … I can picture it: You would just stop the action right there at the top, when all the emotion is crescendoing, and this partnership between these two guys has reached its apotheosis—you’d bring the story to a screeching halt and explain why they’re not on the summit alone.”
What about simply cutting their losses and not using the summit shot—omitting Berg rather than editing him out and instead relying on GoPro summit footage shot by Wharton and Anderson?
He replied that they could have—but it would have been hard since they didn’t have much alternate footage. Originally, a camera operator—Drew Smith—was supposed to climb Jirishanca with Anderson and Wharton, capturing film on the wall. But Smith got sick just before their attempt, which meant that the only on-the-wall footage they had was captured by Wharton and Anderson with their GoPros. “If we actually had someone up on the wall as we planned to,” said Rosen, “maybe we could have sacrificed that [summit] shot. ”
Still, Rosen, like everyone, acknowledged that editing Berg out was a grey area: “Not every filmmaker would have handled it in the same way. But I think I stand by our decision because, for the sake of the veracity of that one shot, we would have made the film a lot worse. And we have a commitment to our audience and to the quality of our films. We have to have an overwhelming reason to mess with the quality of the story we’re telling. And we felt like it would have made virtually no sense to the audience to reveal [Berg] at the end or try to backfill some story about the other team. The story just wasn’t about that. Storytelling, both written and documentary, is a process of omission. Essentially, you’re following a thread, but you’re also trying to cast aside unnecessary details. If people want the comprehensive history, they should read the American Alpine Journal.”
Hearing all this, I still can’t help but feel that Rosen is wrong—probably because part of me stubbornly believes that my sketch above could (somehow!) have worked. But another part of me recognizes that—as Berg himself pointed out—we’re talking about a four-second edit in an otherwise great film. A film that I legitimately enjoyed. So maybe there is no right or wrong here. And perhaps, as Rosen suggests, it’s time to subscribe to the American Alpine Journal.
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