On April 18, 2014 a massive avalanche hit the Khumbu Icefall on the lower reaches of the world’s tallest mountain, killing sixteen Nepali mountain workers. One year and one week later, another avalanche triggered by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake ripped through Everest Base Camp at 290 km/h and claimed another nineteen souls. At the time of writing, a one-fingered man is making his way towards the summit alone. His “solo” attempt – the first since the quake – is supported by a small army of sherpas fixing a route through the Icefall and setting up camps high on the mountain.
Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth. Its gravity is such that the spectrum of human folly – absurdity, greed, ego, senseless tragedy, manly triumph – is drawn to these steep slopes, at any cost. This is the context in which we find two major studio releases conceived and born into the public imagination.
Everest and Sherpa have more in common than each being titled after the most popular words used to describe Nepal. Both films are feature-length and visually stunning. They are both the property of Universal Studios. And they were both under production at Everest Base Camp at the time of the 2014 avalanche, which scuttled the climbing season and production plans for the films.
Director Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest is a reconstruction of the events that unfolded high on the mountain in May 1996, when eight foreign guides and clients lost their lives – events immortalized in Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air, and picked to pieces on talk shows and popular media thereafter. The film boasts a quiver of high-powered actors, mostly male and entirely white, all perfectly rugged in period clothing. It takes a few liberties with the facts to make the story more compelling – but these slightly-too-filthy scenes of Kathmandu, strangely sudden storms, and gratuitous avalanche cutaways are forgivable. The dialogue-driven plot and very special CGI effects serve to draw us out onto the windy ridges and brutal cold, and hold us there.
Instead, what is more interesting about Everest is that it is a feature film about mountains that questions the conventional mountain-hero narrative and the unavoidable metaphors that come with such fruitless pursuits. There are no motivational moments, where climbing – and dying – on Mt. Everest becomes some noble pursuit. Instead, the camera holds steady upon the characters, all greedy and skewed, as they march towards death and dismemberment.
The film also takes deliberate steps to keep the Nepali characters firmly in the background. With the exception of Captain Vijay Lama (no helmet, no oxygen, perfect hair) swooping in behind the stick of a Nepal Army helicopter to save the mangled Beck Weathers, there are only a handful of lines of dialogue spoken (or stammered) by Nepalis. This seems inequitable, but can be forgiven seeing as in 1996, Western guides were still the ones fixing all of the ropes and doing most of the dying.
Fast forward eighteen years. The memorial cairns to Scott Fischer and Rob Hall are already a part of the weathered landscape of the Khumbu. Commercial expeditions now saturate the mountain, making the crowding scenes in Everest seem downright low key. Local climber Phurba Tashi Sherpa is preparing for his record-breaking twenty-second summit. This is the setting for the impressive documentary film Sherpa – Trouble on Everest.
Sherpa, directed by Jennifer Peedom, follows Phurba Tashi and his family as he prepares to lead yet another group of clients to the summit, while ensuring the camps have ample books and flat-screen TVs along the way. When tragedy strikes early in the season, the film keeps the cameras rolling and an even more compelling story unfolds.
The movie engages the viewer without becoming trite or reductionist. Instead of being transported via CGI to the stone-and-snow ridges of the southwest face, we are brought to the cold and heavy couloirs of the Khumbu Icefall, and share the burdens of the men who traverse them.
The film presents the lives of the Sherpa people and their connection to the mountain they know as Chomolungma – both gracious and cruel – in a sensitive, human and real way. Using multiple interviews and historical footage, we travel from the epic triumph of Tenzing Norgay to the cold incompetence of the Minister of Tourism and Civil Aviation (clad in some sort of bear hat and on oxygen) as he tries to convince workers to return to the mountain. We are brought into Phurba Tashi’s home and run with his children through the streets of Khumjung. The film makes the mountain human – depicting both the tragedy and the greed that drives climbs, the need for survival, and the persistent itch to be the highest, the most, the greatest alive.
In one scene, after the avalanche, granite-jawed expedition leader Russell Bryce is having a conversation with his team of climbing sherpas about whether or not to continue the climbing season. Bryce is under tremendous pressure from clients to press on, but he seeks confirmation from his team. The scene is painfully long as the camera rolls despite the awkward silence in the tent. The sherpas are unwilling to speak; they look away. People familiar with Nepal may read this scene entirely differently than most foreigners will – they will note the deference of the team as a form of communication in itself. Others may see Bryce as the hero, ultimately talking himself into cancelling the season on their behalf. Sherpa toes the line between these two interpretations – assigning no heroes and making few statements. Instead the film rides on the energy between the two, nudging closer to the truth which, as is often the case, lies in the spaces between.
Sherpa also has its moments of slight sensationalism. The relative (yet earned) financial success of the Sherpa people in the Khumbu is often undermined by the patronizing attitude of characters like Bryce who come across as sahib-gods who alone hold the survival of the Khumbu in their hands. The cameras pan quickly across signs of wealth (the Macbook on the table in Khumjung, the beautiful Tibetan trunks and intricate altars) and focus again on the dirty cheeks of the eldery and the infirm. But this, too, is understandable. It helps to tell the story and to demonstrate all that the Sherpas have overcome and all they stand to lose.
Of the two films, Sherpa is perhaps the more important. Into Thin Air had already been released as a feature film, and the 1996 tragedy, with its rugged characters and controversy, may well be a story that gets told again. However, the story of the sixteen workers lost in the Khumbu Icefall may not have ever been told had director Jennifer Peedom cancelled the production.
George Mallory’s oft-abused quote “Because it’s there” is only spoken once during Everest, and even then with a sense of irony. Sherpa presents its characters at work – serving tea, setting up tents – but it consciously trades the “smiling servant” image for one of men working as professional climbers: strong, real and relatable. It is significant that both films have eschewed the traditional narratives around Everest. Both films are tragedies, and they are both about the same thing: the true human cost of reaching the world’s highest point. These are both films about death in the cold, in the thin air, for little reason except pride or wealth or foolishness. This may well be the new metaphor for the mountain.
As Nobukazu Kuriki makes his way back up towards the summit, he will cross all of the famous landmarks on the southern side of the mountain, the places we all know. The Khumbu Icefall. The Western Cwm. Camp I. Camp II. The Lhotse Face. The South Col. The Hillary Step. He will pass alongside the bodies of Rob Hall and Scott Fischer and dozens more, unrecovered and unknown. He will ascend amidst their ghosts and the spirits of the mountain. If he doesn’t make the summit, this will be the first year without a human standing on the top of the world since 1974 – twenty-two years before Rob Hall’s last climb. Forty years before Asman Tamang, Ngima Tenzing Sherpa, and fourteen others. Forty-one years before the earthquake.
Rest In Peace.
