The beauty of brown snow

I used to be a regular Warren Miller ski film attendee but have long given up going as each new year presented what was starting to feel like recuts of the same material. Big mountain, helicopter, famous skiers gushing vomitously how blessed they are to have the opportunity to jump out of said helicopter onto said mountain, then rinse and repeat in a thousand locations around the globe. But luckily I relented in this case. In a five-minute segment of a longer film I haven’t watched called All.I.Can, JP Auclair takes to the streets of Rossland, British Columbia, on his skis.

Gone are the gleaming snowdrifts and brightly coloured trees and ski jackets of most skiing films. Instead, brown snow drips away in the rain, a nickel smelter coats the landscape with grey, and Auclair’s skis spark as they crunch across gravel. LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Dance Yrself Clean’ provides the perfect gradual build as at first we only see glimpses of the skier as he whizzes past the corner of a frame here and there. Finally, though, it does have the one thing that no skiing film can get away from - some pretty amazing skiing.

The filmmakers were apparently trying to make a more environmentally connected skiing film. Having not yet seen the whole thing I can’t comment on that, but I am tempted to break my skiing film ban based on this segment, and check it out.