California Dreaming: Reading the Ski Film as Cli-Fi

Abstract

California DreamingReading the Ski Film as Cli-Fi Kevin Maier (bio) On a Friday afternoon in October of 1949 Warren Miller packed up his hammer a few minutes early and left a Hollywood construction jobsite to make the thirty-minute drive to a middle school in Pasadena, stopping on the way at the public beach shower to wash off the sawdust and change out of his dungarees into a tweed suit. He set up a reel-to-reel projector he’d bought with a loan from a few surfing buddies, queued up a tape recorder borrowed from his grandmother, and nervously watched as more than eight hundred members of a local ski club shelled out a dollar and took their seats in the stuffy auditorium. The house packed, he took the stage to introduce his film, telling stories about spending the winter living out of a small tear-drop trailer in the parking lot of Idaho’s Sun Valley ski resort, filming his friends with a handheld 8mm camera he’d purchased with his discharge money from the Navy, shooting rabbits for food, and bribing chairlift operators for free rides. Retreating to the back of the auditorium, he continued his narration, cracking jokes and framing what the audience was seeing as the film rolled. Deep and Light was a smash success, launching not just Miller’s sixty-five-year career as a filmmaker but announcing a nascent genre. In a formula Miller and others would refine but change little over the decades, the ski film genre typically includes a series of short segments showcasing the sport’s best athletes on the steep slopes of the world’s best skiing destinations. Released once a year, each film gathers the most exciting footage from the previous season, splicing together segments of action and B-roll that tell stories about individuals, establish the meccas of the sport, and push the [End Page 315] boundaries of athletic performance. The films also typically make a loose argument in favor of moving to the mountains to pursue the ski bum lifestyle. The genre is shaped by post-war California countercultural optimism, but, as we’ll discuss below, the ski film’s seasonal delivery of hope is under threat by our rapidly changing climate regimes. Serving as unofficial historical archives of the sport, ski films capture and shape both athletic progression and the associated off-slope cultures. Sociologists often classify skiing and snowboarding as lifestyle sports, marking their difference from rule-bound, competitive endeavors and noting that within these insider cultures more value is placed on actually “doing it” than on watching. Ski films, then, are directed at an audience of participants and openly aim to shape the worldviews of spectators while also always encouraging them to get out to ski. Values of the American West underlie these messages in the films. Like the siren call of the wild landscapes of the West for harried eastern city dwellers, the playful powder skiing featured in the films is explicitly designed to entice urbanites to mountain towns. Despite regularly featuring shots from around the globe, destinations in the American West get the most attention, especially as places to live. Miller’s films are representative here; he frequently begins a film’s narration with catchphrases like “we’re going on a six-month ski trip, and I’m going to be your guide” and concludes with the exhortation to quit your day job and move to the mountains: “if you don’t do it this year, you’ll be one year older when you do!”1 Figuring mountains as a space for hope and renewal, moreover, the genre taps into the well-established mythology of the West, offering the ski lifestyle as an alternative to city living, where freedom from rigid schedules becomes the ideal. Even as the films have come to focus on increasingly elite-level performance in high-consequence environments, scaling up the athletic feats to a level only a handful of skiers can execute, the laidback, anti–day job posturing is still standard. Such films argue in favor of finding freedom through skiing, translating a midcentury California surfer vibe for the mountains, and shaping a central...