Explorers Club Shares Its Adventures With New Yorkers

The setting is the story at the Explorers Club Film Festival, which kicks off its sixth edition on Friday evening at the organization’s New York headquarters with a revival of George Lowe’s classic 1953 adventure documentary “The Conquest of Everest.”Opening with this familiar tale of the world’s highest peak before taking the road less traveled to explore less familiar terrain, the 2008 festival will attempt to balance a roster of straight adventure tales, nuanced examinations and celebrations of technology, and a call to arms about how climate change is damaging the globe. But most of all, this year’s slate of acclaimed titles, which was organized by the longtime explorer and film producer Les Guthman, brings high hopes to a film event about which most New Yorkers are still unaware.“It’s a great year, a mix of films from the past and present, stories from so many different regions,” Mr. Guthman said. “And this year, beyond making these experiences and this information available to New York audiences, I’m going to be taking the film festival to other Explorers Club chapters across the country.”The Explorers Club, which includes more than 30 chapters around the world, is, according to its Web site, “an international multidisciplinary professional society dedicated to the advancement of field research and the ideal that it is vital to preserve the instinct to explore.” For more than 100 years, its members have scaled the world’s highest peaks and plumbed its deepest depths, from the North Pole to the South Pole.Mr. Guthman’s name may not sound familiar, but a good many fans of movies, television, and documentaries have crossed paths with his work. In 2005, when Men’s Journal compiled a list of the “20 Best Adventure DVDs of All Time,” three of the finalists were works produced by Mr. Guthman: “Farther Than the Eye Can See” (2003), about a blind climber ascending Mount Everest; “Into the Thunder Dragon” (2003), about two “extreme unicyclists” trekking across Bhutan, and “Into the Tsangpo Gorge” (2002), which documents the first white-water descent of the “Everest of Rivers,” the 18,000-foot-deep Tsangpo Gorge in Tibet.It’s a résumé worth mentioning, because when Mr. Guthman pauses mid-sentence while describing the schedule for this year’s Explorers Club Film Festival (explorers .org) to deem one work “unprecedented” and another “spectacular,” this is a man who knows what he’s talking about.Mr. Guthman was joined by a handful of other judges in surveying this year’s crop of submissions, and this weekend’s two-day film festival calls attention to the nine award-winners from the 2008 class. Of all the victors, Sean Davison’s “Ice Challenger” (showing Saturday morning) is the title that offers a bit of everything: passion, personality, technological perfection, and stunning imagery brought back from a little-seen corner of the world. It is, in large part, a character study of the adventurer Steve Brooks, who had twice attempted and failed to devise a craft that would be capable of crossing the frozen Bering Strait from Alaska to Russia. In “Ice Challenger,” we see his third, and best, invention: the Snowbird 6, a vehicle that can traverse water, ice, and solid ground, all while operating in a subzero environment.“It’s a very quirky, funny, and beautiful film, an adventure that was almost impossible to film under these conditions,” Mr. Guthman said. “The technology is fascinating, and this man is so interesting, but then to see this footage from one of the most brutal water bodies on earth — this is where ‘Deadliest Catch’ is filmed, where in the wintertime these frozen currents smash these great ice pans together. It’s spectacular.”Not long ago, filming a story like “Ice Challenger” would have been too expensive and cumbersome for most filmmakers to attempt. But thanks to the cost, quality, and versatility of digital equipment, adventure films are now pushing the envelope in terms of what can be filmed, and where.“There was a time when National Geographic was the only production entity, the only organization that had the money to make these sorts of movies,” Mr. Guthman said. “But now, thanks to technology getting so inexpensive, and these high-definition cameras that can be put to use in these new environments, there are very fine adventure and expedition films that can be made for any amount of money that’s viable.”Indeed, digital technology was integral to most of the titles populating this year’s Explorers Club Film Festival, a program that seems to break down into three categories: destinations, dramas, and the environment. Lloyd Fales’s “Return to Penguin City” takes viewers to Antarctica, but also balances the familiar story of the Adélie penguin population with, as Mr. Guthman put it, “the science that was missing from ‘March of the Penguins.'” Elsewhere, Andreas Nickel and Juergen Czwienk’s “The Third Pole” paints the portraits of a real-life Mr. and Mrs. Indiana Jones: Günter and Hettie Dyhrenfurth, who organized private expeditions of the virtually unknown Himalayas in the 1930s.If those films are enthralled by the allure of the unknown, other films focus more squarely on the people behind the adventures. Becky Bristow’s “Dog Gone Addiction” brings to life the personalities — both human and canine — that compete in the grueling Yukon Quest dog sled race. Staffan Julen’s “Prize of the Pole” is perhaps the festival’s darkest entry, about the secret Eskimo wife and family of the polar explorer Robert Peary. And Andrew Gregg’s “Polynesia: The Wayfinders” tells the story of the ancient Wayfinders, who once occupied one-fifth of the planet’s surface and navigated the oceans by the stars. The festival will also take on environmental issues with documentary films about Greenpeace and the effect of man-made pollutants on the planet’s water bodies.“As explorers and scientists and researchers who see these things firsthand, we want to make these experiences and this information available to the New York public,” Mr. Guthman said. “We’re out there and we can see the impact, whether it’s the glaciers of the Himalayas, or Mount Rainier in Washington where you can see the road that used to bend around the glacier, but the glacier’s no longer there. Even in New York, there’s the acid rain in the Adirondacks. It’s something that affects us all.”ssnyder@nysun.comThe Explorers Film Festival runs Friday and Saturday (46 E. 70th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-628-8383).

Explorers Club Shares Its Adventures With New Yorkers

Explorers Club Shares Its Adventures With New Yorkers

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