Man on Wire, Movie Review

aI always enjoy watching a documentary. It makes me to discover a new world. Especially logically well-developed documentaries give me a new stream of thoughts and allows me to discover another way to look at the world. The movie Man on Wire gave me this type of experience, helping me to re-discover the adventurous part of me that I hide deep inside of my soul. Man on Wire is a documentary directed by James March about a Philippe Petit and his journey to walk across in the middle of the World Trade Center on a wire back in 1974. What made me interested in the film in a point of view of student who is freshly leaning elements of film is how the director managed to tell this story without making the audience confused of timeline. Often times in our lives, when we are listening to such a long story like Petit’s journey, we get lost in time frame. On the top of that in the movie, there is no necessarily main stream of story. Different types of footages and films drive the story by putting them together as a unit. However March has used different visual effects and devises to give distinctive feelings for the audience to focus on the story.
This movie shows interviews of Philippe Petit, interviews from Petit’s friends, his girlfriend, Annie Allix, and other people who were involved in the scene. As well as footages from Petit’s own camera, re-directed past sequences, scenes from the news, also animation as transitional device between scenes. The director March has given distinguishable color differences to each types of footage in the order of how currently there were filmed. All of the interviews that were filmed while March was directing the movie are in modern style, high-definition color, which gives an impression of present. In the past sequences, the footages from the news and Petit’s footages during planning how to walk on the WTC are in color film with dimed colors. This gives the distinctive visual effect between the past prior to the construction of WTC.