When Athletes Begin to Fly - Brainfarm, Travis Rice, and THE ART OF FLIGHT

“No style points in NFL,” Kyle texted me after our Ravens won an ugly victory over the Texans on Sunday and it’s true. Sure, people with more style may get higher endorsement deals, show up on highlight reels, and perhaps might be able to parley their on-field/court/diamond career into a reality TV show. But a receiver who catches for 10,000 yards over his run, even if every catch was ugly and every yard a painful slogging to watch,  will usually be considered better than one whose numbers fall below that. And there’s that most finite of goals that every football team pursues – the Lombardy trophy, awarded to the team with the most points on the board, regardless of how ugly those points were.

Thus the reason I’ve always been drawn to so-called “extreme sports". In spite of growing up in a city and community as firmly entrenched in mainstream athletic endeavors as any other American suburbia, I’ve always admired the surfers, skaters, skiers and snowboarders, even as classmates made fun of my skateboard and thought I was a stoner because of the long blond hair and the surf club I started in high school.

Action sports are the future of athletics. As we become a society further obsessed with culture and aesthetics, as names like Banksy and Shepard Fairey become the new Warhol and kids with short attention spans find it harder to concentrate on some old dudes scratching and throwing balls at each other, action sports catch the attention of the new generation, act as the link between art and athleticism, between lifestyle and ambition.

And the team pushing this brilliant blend of life and physical prowess, artistry and travel, experience and culture forward, while wrapping it up in the cool, mind-blowing body of the best extreme sports athletes in the world,  is hands down Brain Farm studios and their poster boy, the greatest snowboarder alive today, Travis Rice.

They first really came together in THE COMMUNITY PROJECT, an experiment in showing a year in the life of Travis Rice, fresh on the tail of his historical monster double-cork 1080 over Pyramid Gap  (a good 5 years before “double cork” became an overplayed sound bite during the Vancouver Olympics). THE COMMUNITY PROJECT started with Travis driving through the dreamy town of Jackson to the airport where he was joined by two other boarders on a private jet for New Zealand. It followed him all over the world, from rails in New York city to back country, mean streets and super neon contests in Japan, ending with a private session in Aspen where we see the difference between Travis and mainstream’s “Flying Tomato”. When on standard, perfectly-groomed, expected features White kills it. When in new set-ups, like a tricky step-ups or a backcountry booter, White looked like a mere boy. White straight-airins onto a flat step-up that Rice does a 180 onto and a front flip off of (followed by a back 3 on and a front 3 off).

In THAT’S IT, THAT’S ALL, Brain Farm caught up with Travis, capturing Planet Earth-quality nature shots with some of the most unique snowboarding ever caught on the most cutting edge of cameras. From day-glo NZ (again) to epic heli trips and even a guy crossing a freezing cold lake on a snowmobile, it delved deeper into the life of these intrepid travelers while also capturing their pursuit of the limits of human possibility.

But this year, THE ART OF FLIGHT has taken this to the moon. Know those Red Bull ads you’ve been watching with your mouth open, wondering who the fuck this Travis guy is and what sort of insanity makes him ride down these barren avalanche-prone wastelands? That’s from ART OF FLIGHT.

This movie responds to the promise laid down by such iconic snowboard films as WHISKEY (in which the godfathers of snowboarding blend shots of their radical, though tame by today’s standards, riding with lifestyle footage showing them drinking absurd amounts of whiskey, getting into fights, breaking bottles over their heads, pulling pranks, and various anti-social pre-JACKASS hijinks) that these sports are beautiful not only because of the feats their athletes achieve on the snow but also because of the lives they live, the things they see, and the near-religious transcendence that seems to permeate the sports’ most devoted followers. During the off-season, football players are just rich men who work out a few times a day, as comfortable wearing suits as some Wall Street broker or a talent agent. Snowboarders are snowboarders, whether they’re riding in AK, walking the streets of Chile, or just shooting guns behind their cabin as they wait for the snow to fall. And in fact, they have no off-season. They migrate, like the animals featured so prominently in the film (check out the clip of a grizzly running up a mountain) and this film follows them, Alaska to Canada to Jxn and even as they go to South America in search of snow when it’s summer in our hemisphere. In that way are they athletes evolved, past rules, past borders, past bounds (in fact most of their riding is “out of bounds”), past classifications and even, to a certain, past the sport. Their human essence is everything. These sports are a response to the confinements of playing fields and the spoiled MLB/NFL/NBA pros with their strikes and whines.

Finally, the movie brings up what separates these "sports" from what I consider games: the very real specter of death. There’s a quote, incorrectly attributed to Hemingway, that the only real sports are racing and bullfighting, something of the sort. He may not have said that but he lived it. You’ll never find a Hem story about baseball or football (except for a brief mention of the World Series from Nick Adams). But he’s written volumes about bullfighting, and in both A MOVEABLE FEAST and FAREWELL TO ARMS he mentions his experiences skiing. This is because death is an opponent in these sports and as such all other activities will soon feel like games in comparison. ART OF FLIGHT shows how easy it would be to snap a neck on a bad spill when a man is flying hundreds of feet in the air, pushing the limits; or how quickly an avalanche can appear and wipe a person’s life out (little note: most people who die in avalanches die of being dragged over rocks and cliffs, tree stumps, other blunt force traumas; only a lucky few get to simply suffocate to death). As my wife said, “He’s going to die in those mountains” during Travis’ sequence in his home Tetons. And we both agreed that everybody must die and, as such, if a man can die doing what he loves in such a sacred place, that is a good death. Though that won’t happen for at least another 50 years because, Jesus, that man has a lot more left in him, endless life, overflowing with life, so much life that he’s living for all of us stuck staring at computer screens in suits and ties, commuting down the same roads everyday with the same people to greet us and the same ugly buildings lining our moves.

In a blurb in VANITY FAIR, Kurt Morgan, head cinematographer, producer, and all-around dilettante for Brain Farm said he hopes this movie makes everybody who watches it either want to run out and snowboard immediately or to never try snowboarding, ever.
 

In DOGTOWN AND Z BOYS, the documentary about the punks who more than anybody else in the 70's influenced modern action sports culture, there's one line that sticks out: "Going big only works as long as you look good doing it."

Travis Rice goes big. Travis Rice goes big with style. And Brain Farm takes his big style, makes sure it looks good, and lets you lucky bastards at home watch it without having to spend months waiting for the snow, sitting in baggage claims, and praying you or your friends don't die today.

No matter whether you get in a 100 days a season or think snow sports are for tree-huggers and lunatics, you must watch THE ART OF FLIGHT, if for no other reason than to see where sports entertainment and culture is heading. I’ve predicted it here, let these words ring true in a century. People have become tired with sports that restrict us, that hold us down to the earth with their rules and corners and fines and organizations. It’s time for us to fly.

- Ryan