Courtesy of Channel Four Television

For those who argue that the documentary format is better suited to the cosy confines of television, Touching the Void offers a convincing rebuke. This is expansive, spectacular filmmaking, which borrows as much from the Hollywood action movie as it does from its more austere small-screen relatives. Its considerable box-office success represents another pinnacle in the recent surge of popularity enjoyed by the cinematic documentary, led by Michael Moore's bombastic agit-prop films on Columbine and the war in Iraq, but also extending to more intimate pieces such as Spellbound (US, 2002) and Être et Avoir (France, 2002). British cinema has a long history of vital and provocative documentarists, so it is encouraging that director Kevin Macdonald is now able to fund his well-crafted films through bodies like Film Four and the Film Council. Fittingly, in 2004 the British academy judged Macdonald's film not just the best documentary made within these shores, but the best film overall.

Touching the Void fits the pattern of what has traditionally been called a 'docu-drama', in that Macdonald fuses elements from both fiction and non-fiction filmmaking. His dramatic reconstruction of an infamous mountaineering disaster is anchored within a set of 'talking heads' style interviews from the real people involved. This is a risky strategy, which could have served to defuse any real narrative tension: we know right from the start that Joe Simpson, author of the best-selling book which proceeded the film, lived to tell the tale. But the film invokes the conventions of filmic storytelling so strongly, particularly in its build up of suspense, that the interview format eventually works to authenticate the drama and deepen the audience's involvement in Joe's traumatic and painful ordeal.

During the later stages of Joe's struggle for survival the style of the reconstruction becomes increasingly delirious and expressionistic. This technique climaxes with the sequence where Joe, near to death, aurally hallucinates the jolly Boney M hit Brown Girl in the Ring, which bursts incongruously onto the film's soundtrack to darkly comic effect. Here, interesting questions of memory and narrative authenticity are raised, as Joe admits that he is incapable of remembering much of what happened until his rescue. There is a glimpse of the possibility that perhaps, for Joe the raconteur, the story has become so well-established that it has replaced his own recollection. In this sense, Joe's truth and the film's fiction are finally inseparable.

James Caterer

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