Solo

I continue like this this very short film by Mike Hoover. It's really more of a poetic documentary. It is completely wordless and really makes us feel the joy that this filmmaker gets from mountain climbing. The film incorporates nearly every basic film technique taught in film school and its a great learning tool for beginning film students. I especially like the way Hoover uses time compression so skillfully. We forget that his climb up the mountain actually a series of climbs compressed into about 9 minutes) and his descent (about 30 seconds long) is all created with skillful editing. It's too bad that Pyramid films which owns the rights to this couldn't have struck a new print before transferring this to DVD! The DVD transfer looks really bad. It appears to be simply a copy of a video dup of the original 16mm.