Ed Andrews: Better on the Big Screen
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“You can't download a fifty-stop world-wide premiere tour,†says Absinthe Films co-founder Patrick 'Brusti' Armbruster just before the screening of their new snow film, Twe12ve, at the Prince Charles Cinema, London, this September. “It's not a promo tour any more. In fact, the tour is slowly helping fund our productions and will become even more important in the future.â€
Thanks to broadband, Google and the late Steve Jobs, the world has changed a lot since Absinthe Films put out their first film, Tribal, in 2000. Back then, snowboarders had to mail-order videos from the back of magazines or head down to their local shred store and put down some hard-earned cash to see what the best snowboarders in the world were up to. Today, millions of hours of footage are readily available on YouTube, and the latest films are just an illegal download away. If you want to watch snowboarding these days, you can be chin-deep in your own digital pow heaven at the click of a button.
But for all the benefits the internet has brought, I can't help feeling that something intangible is being lost. Whenever something becomes abundant and readily available, its perceived value plummets. It seems that, despite all the toil that goes into making them, snowboard films are no longer valued commodities. We’re constantly bombarded with endless teasers, outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage, which only seem to dilute the quality of full-length feature films. Instead of savouring the moment when a movie is finally released, we’re all too busy getting a quick shred fix through our laptop and headphones before clicking 'like' and 'share', then forgetting all about it.
But maybe this change is not all bad. For one thing, the download age means filmmakers like Absinthe are hitting the road harder than ever, in order to scrape a living from the films they so obviously love to make. And that’s a good thing for audiences who still want to see riders face-to-face.
That night, when Gigi Rüf hits the giant screen for his opening section, dropping pillow lines to the booming sound of Supertramp's 'The Logical Song’, Twe12ve immediately becomes something more than just a movie; it’s an event - a collective, immersive experience. The two-hundred-plus crowd shares in the same gasps, cheers and applause for Dan Brisse's frightening jibbing, Wolfgang Nyvelt's laid-back, surfy noboarding and Romain de Marchi's big-mountain charging. Perhaps it’s thanks to the internet age, but these events seem to bring people together more than ever before.
Sure, you can get a pixelated, web-stream of the latest films from the comfort of your desk, but isn’t it better to put your hand in your pocket, watch it on the big screen, and share in the energy and awe of other people’s sense of stoke? As Brusti says, “I always hear that people start liking our films more each time they watch them. This is usually not the case with the web edits.â€
Technology and the virtual world we live in may be changing at a rapid pace, but one thing is for certain: quality, and community, will never go out of style.
If you do want to relive the  live experience though, you can download Twe12ve from iTunes.
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Better on the Big Screen (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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