Sunshine Superman

There’s a saying (or maybe more appropriately, a koan) traditionally attributed to Elvis Costello: Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Though music critics often take the sentiment way too personally, it’s more about preserving the experience of art than it is pointing out the futility of any kind of art criticism: When we try to capture something engrossing (like listening to music, or reading a book, or watching a film) through means distanced from the experience itself, an essence of that art is bound to get lost. Something that isn’t meant to be adulterated is. By reading a description of music rather than listening to it, you are doing a disservice both to the art and to yourself, robbing your brain’s pleasure nodes of the experience as it was intended. Apparently.
Which is why Sunshine Superman can be such a problematic film to love. A thorough, intimate and often beautiful documentary about Carl Boenish and the BASE jumping movement that practically sprang singlemindedly from the endless font of his surreal enthusiasm, Sunshine Superman still can’t grasp the full splendor at the heart of the person and the extreme sport that serve as the film’s most plangent concern. And that isn’t necessarily the film’s fault—there is only so much excitement that can be conveyed regarding the freezing of a full-body rush into a small, albeit panoramic and easily gorgeous, picture—but it is something the film can’t get over.
First-time filmmaker Marah Strauch spent years crafting something of a perfect eulogy to Carl Boenish—and her dedication to investigating his outsized life is palpable. It’s no real spoiler he dies, because although you don’t discover the details of Carl’s fate until the film’s final 20-minute stretch, his absence is heavy. His ghost is present everywhere else, though—in home recordings, in reel to reel recordings and even in answering machine messages, Boenish’s ebullient voice lives on righteously throughout the film.
He considered himself as much of a filmmaker as a skydiver, or a jumper, or whatever it is you’d call someone who compulsively defied gravity for the sake of seeking the sublime, and so his trailblazing work with BASE (Buildings, Antennas, Spans and Earth) jumping is breathtakingly chronicled through the cameras he insisted festoon every jumper’s helmet. From his first experiments leaping from El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, to his illegal forays into parachuting from the tops of nascent skyscrapers in LA, Boenish left us with a wealth of mindboggling footage, and Strauch allows us access to it all. The way in which she is able to weave the choicest moments from Boenish’s films into a larger narrative that neither betrays the freedom of what he was doing nor feels too formless speaks to a film that seems well-crafted beyond its years.
It can’t be stressed enough how purely stirring—and practically disturbing—Boenish’s footage can be, laced like amphetamines throughout the blood of Sunshine Superman. But therein is the film’s nearly fatal flaw: To watch this on anything but a giant screen is to neuter the exhilaration of what it was that Boenish so adored about the sport that eventually killed him. Yet, that’s Strauch’s burden, as it is the burden of any critic, or of any storyteller for that matter. How does one translate the purely visceral?