6 Reasons to Watch Jacopo Larcher’s New North Face Film (And 1 Reason Not To)
It’s all fun and games until you start ruining narrative flow.
The post 6 Reasons to Watch Jacopo Larcher’s New North Face Film (And 1 Reason Not To) appeared first on Climbing.
Chapter One of “The Traditionalist,” a three-part series about Italian super-crusher Jacopo Larcher, is all about hard trad climbing in the longtime world epicenter of that exact thing: Yosemite Valley. Here are six reasons why I thought the film was excellent—and one (very long) reason why I was like, “Are you people serious?”
Why to watch The Traditonalist
- It’s full of beautiful shots of Larcher crushing classics like The Phoenix (5.13a) and Separate Reality (5.12a).
- There’s some justifiably repetitive talk about how gosh-darn rad Beth Rodden’s 2008 first ascent of Meltdown was. Rodden herself even talks a bit.
- You get to watch a real-life example of someone (Larcher) realizing on the wall that if he wants to have any sort of consistency on Meltdown’s miserable feet he must swallow all fashion concerns and wear two different types of shoes. (Spoiler alert: it works!)
- Larcher gives us a masterclass in how to deal with desperate gear placements during hard headpoints. Note how he duct-tapes a cam to his leg and, higher on the route, climbs a long pumpy sequence with a nut in his mouth for easy access.
- Larcher does a lot of good-natured cursing in Italian-accented English.
- He almost frickin’ blows it at the top—and Babsi Zangerl’s Austrian-accented response is priceless.
Why it frustrated me
I find it a bit strange—perhaps even a bit absurd—that the filmmaker decided to interrupt their carefully constructed narrative to insert a criminally abridged glossary of climbing terms into the middle of it.
Why?
Well, first, this interjection totally sabotages the narrative flow of the film. I mean, here we are, taking lunch, having managed to forget our overflowing email inboxes long enough to lose ourselves in this hypnotically beautiful short film, when suddenly we’re yanked out of it to be told what a gaston is.
Second, it covers just three terms—laybacking, jamming, and gastoning—while leaving out dozens of other relevant concepts. If we’re going to go through the trouble to educate the non-climbing masses, why not also define nut, cam, and crusher? Why not launch into a carefully apolitical debate about how the Yosemite Decimal System is infinitely cooler and more fun than the French grading system? If you’re going to go there, go there!
Third, and most importantly: Now that rock climbing is (alas!) a multi-billion dollar industry and an Olympic sport, it seems a bit strange to assume that an important enough percentage of the people watching this film—a film about a trad climber published on The North Face’s YouTube channel—would need such simple terms defined for them.
At what point in our demographic devolution from countercultural freakshow to cultural cliche do we climbers get to stop assuming that no one understands what we’re talking about? I mean, skiers don’t do this. I don’t see Cody Townsend* on “The Fifty”** interrupting his programming to tell non-skiers like me that a “skin” allows you to ski up the gosh-dang hill. No. He just assumes that if you care enough about what he’s doing, you’ll do some research into how he does it—and maybe even try the sport.
*Cody Townsend is a pro skier / YouTuber
**The Fifty is a multi-year YouTube series about about Cody Townsend’s (see *) recently aborted attempt to do all 50 classic ski descents in North America as outlined in pro skier Chris Davenport’s 2010 opus Fifty Classic Ski Descents of North America, whose title is a reference to Allen Steck and Steve Roper’s 1979 opus Fifty Classic Climbs of North America, which we incidentally just referenced when publishing an article by Owen Clarke called “Fifty More Classic Climbs of North America,” except Clarke focuses mostly on climbs that are theoretically accessible to climbing’s gym-bred masses. Read it here.
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