Philippe Petit

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Philippe Petit at the 81st Academy Awards , 2009

Philippe Petit (born August 13, 1949 in Nemours , France ) is a French tightrope artist, turntable , pantomime and street juggler . Petit attracted global attention in 1974 by his illegal wire act on a high wire between the towers of the World Trade Center in New York .

Life

Petit's father Edmond Petit was a writer and a former army aviator. Philippe became interested in magic from an early age. His strong rebellious nature resulted in him leaving five different schools and running away from home at the age of 15. In the late 1960s he learned tightrope acrobatics all by himself. “Within a year,” he later told a reporter, “I taught myself all the things that could be done on a tightrope. I learned the back flip, the forward flip, the unicycle, the two-wheeler, the chair on the wire, the jump through tires. But I thought: what's so difficult about that? It looked almost ugly. So I gave up these tricks and started to reinvent my art. ”Disregarding circuses and their standardized ideas, he started as a street artist in Paris. In the early 1970s, he juggled and worked intermittently on a slack rope in Washington Square Park , New York.

Before his tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Center, he was already balanced between the steeples of Notre Dame (1971) and the spiers of the Sydney Harbor Bridge (1973). These actions were also not announced and were illegal. For 15 years he fought for the approval to cross an approximately 800-meter-long rope stretched from the Palais de Chaillot across the Seine to the second floor of the Eiffel Tower . The approximately one-hour run took place in 1989 and was watched by around 250,000 spectators.

Petit has lived in the USA on a farm near Woodstock not far from New York since the 1980s . He still works as a performance artist and is artist in residence in the New York parish of St. John the Divine .

World Trade Center

On August 7, 1974, he balanced a total of eight times at a height of 417 meters above the ground on a 1- inch wire rope from one roof of the World Trade Center to the other.

The campaign took six years to prepare. The idea came to Petit when he was reading an article in his dentist's waiting room about the New York Twin Towers, which at the time were still in the first phase of construction. For six years he collected every information he could get about the towers. He also trained on the steeples of Notre Dame and the Sydney Harbor Bridge. He pretended to be a journalist and interviewed site manager Guy F. Tozzoli. On the evening of August 6, 1974, he and his group of helpers used a forged ID card to gain access to the unfinished buildings. Their equipment included a balance pole, cords, tools, a 75 meter long steel cable and a bow and arrow.

In order to be able to stretch the heavy steel cable between the buildings, a friend first shot a fishing line with an arrow at the opposite tower, 60 meters away. Gradually stronger and stronger cords and finally the steel cable were pulled onto the other building roof. The steel rope then secured the group of four with two auxiliary ropes. Shortly after 7 a.m. on the morning of August 7th, Petit began his 45-minute tightrope act. Thousands of people in the financial district, many on their way to their offices, stopped and watched the extraordinary spectacle that took place almost half a kilometer above their heads.

After the action, Philippe Petit was arrested and brought to justice. Because of the extensive coverage and worldwide recognition of his work, all charges were dropped. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the owner of the World Trade Center, asked Petit in detail how he had managed to bypass the security precautions. As a thank you, he was later given a season ticket for the viewing platform of the World Trade Center.

Even before the twin towers were destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 , he wrote down the memories of his action: To Reach the Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers was not published until 2002. A film adaptation of the book entitled The Walk was made in 2015 under the direction of Robert Zemeckis with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the lead role, whom he personally taught how to balance on a rope.

After the World Trade Center

On June 12, 1994, Petit performed in Germany and provided a climax at the 1200th anniversary of the city of Frankfurt am Main . On the initiative of the Tigerpalast variety theater , Petit stretched a 300 meter long rope between St. Paul's Church and the cathedral and performed a thirty-minute high wire run on it. At a height of 60 to 70 meters, it represented important events in Frankfurt's history . The performance was accompanied by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra of the Hessian Broadcasting Corporation and broadcast live on ARD.

Literary reception

The Irish writer Colum McCann received Aktion Petits on August 7, 1974 in his New York novel The Big World by incorporating it into a fictional plot and using it as a compositional structure. The preparations are summarized in small chapters. Various protagonists observe and comment on the balancing act live or they hear about it from the media and interpret it from the ground perspective of social misery as a sign of hope. In judge Soderberg's indictment, the author contrasts the spectacular publicity event (acquittal of the tightrope walker) with the routine case of prostitute Tillie Henderson (eight months in prison for stealing a wallet), in keeping with the motto at the end of the novel: “The big world is turning. We stumble there. "

Filmography

  • 1994: Historical high wire run from St. Paul's Church to the Imperial Cathedral with Philippe Petit. Production: Hessischer Rundfunk / Tigerpalast, Director: Götz Balonier,

Jünger, Offenbach 1994, ISBN 3-89467-254-4

  • 2005: The Man Who Walked Between The Towers. Animated film, USA 2005, 10 min., Director: Michael Sporn , production: Michael Sporn Animation, Weston Woods Studio
  • 2008: Man on Wire . Documentary, UK / USA 2008, 88 min., Director: James Marsh , music: Michael Nyman
    The film received an Oscar in 2009 in the category “Best Documentary”. Director James Marsh won two awards at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival , the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize in the “World Cinema - Documentary” category. In the “Best Documentary” category, the film also won elections by the critics' associations from Boston, New York, Los Angeles and Washington and the National Board of Review .
  • 2009: “Man On Wire” - Philippe Petit's incredible tightrope act. Documentation, Germany 2009, 64.5 min., Script and direction: Peter Gerhardt, production: Hessischer Rundfunk, first broadcast: January 4, 2009
  • 2015: The Walk Biography , Production: Robert Zemeckis, USA 2015

literature

  • Philippe Petit: Trois Coups. Herscher, Paris 1983, ISBN 2-7335-0062-7
  • Philippe Petit: To reach the Clouds - my high wire walk between the Twin Towers. North Point Press, New York 2002, ISBN 0-86547-651-9
  • Philippe Petit: The open sky above me. Scenes from the life of a high wire artist. Urachhaus, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-8251-7209-0
  • Angeli Janhsen : Philippe Petit , in: New Art as a catalyst , Reimer Verlag, Berlin 2012, pp. 47–49. ISBN 978-3-496-01459-1
  • Mordicai Gerstein: The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. Roaring Brook Press, Brookfield, Connecticut 2003, ISBN 0-7613-1791-0 : (New edition: Macmillan 2007, ISBN 978-0-312-36878-4 ) Children's book and 2004 Caldecott Medal winner . The book served as an animated cartoon of the same name as template.
  • Paul Auster : On the tightrope. In: The Art of Hunger. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-499-22719-3
  • Colum McCann : Let The Great World Spin. Bloomsbury, London 2009, ISBN 978-0-7475-9722-3
  • Philippe Petit in: People between heaven and earth. From the life of famous high wire artists. published by Gisela and Dietmar Winkler, Henschelverlag, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-362-00260-9

Web links

Commons : Philippe Petit  - collection of images, videos and audio files

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Calvin Tomkins: "The Man Who Walks on Air", New Yorker Magazine 1999, excerpted in Life Stories by David Remnick, Modern Library 2001
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Marcus Jauer: Will be fine, right? Why trust is so important at a time when everything is based on knowledge and control. In: Die Zeit , No. 23 of May 28, 2020, pp. 13–15, here p. 15.
  3. ^ Christian Röthlisberger: man on wire: philippe petit. In: henusode blog , October 30, 2008, accessed June 5, 2013.
  4. ↑ Thomas Wolff : Anarchist on a tightrope. ( Memento from June 17, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) In: in Frankfurter Rundschau , January 22, 2009.
  5. ↑ Joseph Gordon-Levitt: For 'The Walk' he became a tightrope walker . VIP.de. September 29, 2015. Accessed on October 28, 2015.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as broken. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.vip.de  
  6. ↑ Joseph Gordon-Levitt becomes a tightrope walker . fan-lexikon.de. October 27, 2015. Retrieved October 28, 2015.
  7. ^ "The Walk": tightrope act between the "Twin Towers" . Westdeutsche Zeitung GmbH & Co. KG, wz-newsline.de. October 15, 2015. Retrieved October 28, 2015.
  8. ↑ McCann, Colum: The great world . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2009. Translation by McCann, Colum: Let the Great World Spin . New York 2009.
  9. ↑ s. McCann, 2009. Let the big world go round . P. 205ff.
  10. ↑ s. McCann, 2009. The swinging trail of change . P. 371ff.
  11. ↑ s. McCann, 2009. Miró, Miró on the wall . P. 119ff.
  12. ↑ s. McCann, 2009. A cog in the gears . P. 383ff.
  13. ↑ s. McCann, 2009. p. 536.
  14. ↑ a b Official website of the film The Man Who Walked Between The Towers
  15. ^ Official website of the film Man on Wire ( Memento from October 7, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Petit, Philippe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French tightrope artist who did an (illegal) tightrope act between the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1974
DATE OF BIRTH August 13, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Nemours , France