The Alpinist (2021)

A documentary by Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen

Available to buy/rent on several streaming services

I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. (I wrote about it here.) And I’m proud that I did. But I’m not a mountain climber. I’m not even much of a hiker. When K asks me if I want to accompany her on one of her daily hour-long treks along the beach, I tell her, “No thank you. I’ve achieved my quota of walking for life.”

So why did I decide to watch The Alpinist the other night? It’s not as if I didn’t realize I would be anxious throughout the film. I’d sweated through Free Solo, the award-winning documentary about another climber – rock climber Alex Honnold – when it came out a few years ago.

The Alpinist is a documentary about Marc-André Leclerc, an unassuming and, for most of his life, relatively anonymous mountain climber that may have broken more climbing records than any climber to date.

In contrast to Honnold, who did his most famous solo ascents alongside a camera crew, Leclerc did most of his climbing on his own, in obscurity. With no ropes, no media attention, and no mountain he wouldn’t try to scale, the story of Marc-André Leclerc – despite its angst-inducing aspects – is worth watching.

What I Liked About It 

* The humility and audacity of Leclerc

* His graceful athleticism when climbing

* The majestic beauty of the mountains

* The awe-inspiring ascents

I also appreciated the approach taken by the filmmakers, Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen, both veteran climbers who’ve spent 20 years documenting the sport. As noted in a review of the film on the Roger Ebert website: “They make no pretense of impartiality, whether stressing that they spent two years filming Leclerc or expressing their anxieties about the fact that he could have fallen to his death at any moment.”

Critical Reception  

* “[The Alpinist is] an intriguing insight into a particular kind of obsessive drive, and a portrait of a man who, as one of his contemporaries remarked, feels almost too comfortable on the side of a mountain.” (Wendy Ide, Observer [UK])

* “The film is too pedestrian to really share Leclerc’s spirt – but it captures some of his ascents in scenes both hypnotic and terrifying, and in those you sense you glimpse the essence of him, wholly in the now.” (Danny Leigh, Financial Times)

* “The film-makers’ enthusiasm for his clarity of purpose is all well and good, but it does leave the film prone to hyperbole.” (Leslie Felperin, Guardian)

Interesting Facts About Alpinism (Mountain Climbing) 

From the MountainHomies website:

* Everest is the highest open grave in the world. As of January 2021, 305 people had died on the mountain, and an estimated 200 bodies were still there.

* Annapurna is the world’s deadliest mountain, with a fatality-to-summit rate of 32%.

* The Matterhorn is dangerous, not because it is especially difficult to climb, but because of its popularity. Due to the sheer number of people trekking up and down the mountain, it has a high injury rate.

* You enter the “death zone” at 8,000 meters (approx. 26,000 feet). Above that elevation, there is only about one-third of the oxygen that you find at sea level – not sufficient for humans to breathe.