Ski to the Max

Bogner crowned his creative career with the last goal that he could set for himself as a cinematographer. He treated himself to the luxury and the challenge of the IMAX format. In the end, it doesn’t matter much that a lot of this film’s sequences are just rehashes of previously executed feats (slow-motion powder runs and a bobsled run), because the completely new format and its guaranteed dimension bring sufficient updating and enhancement of the proven attractions. In terms of the screenplay, Ski to the Max shows Bogner at his most unrestrained. The narrative is even more elementary than in White Magic. Specifically, the individual music-video-style sequences comprising money shots of adrenaline sports are connected by a storyline in which a nameless athlete is stuck in a car at an intersection, waiting for the light to change, his mind drifting freely into various fantasies spurred by the vague details around him. This overarching premise could be labelled as a mere crutch or a sort of additional vague connective tissue. But the same, almost Dadaistically unhinged and anti-conventionally random logic is also exhibited in the individual music-video-style action sequences, which were obviously developed precisely according to where Bogner let his thoughts wander when layering the individual ideas. Indeed, the narrative does not aspire to any conventionally causal framework, thus leaving room for absolute randomness, where the spectacle of the sequence is given priority over everything else. Therefore, a BASE-jumper can just jump into the intersection out of nowhere, just like in the fantasy of two motorcycle jumpers in the desert hitching a ride in a souped-up Audi driven by Pink, who takes them to the snow-capped mountain peaks. In the end, it’s all the more regrettable that the only limitation on Bogner’s imagination is the default IMAX format, or rather the size and inoperability of the IMAX camera. On the other hand, Bogner had already reached his peaks anyway, so there is nothing wrong with the fact that he conceived his final work as a purely technological vanity project. So what are the absolute highlights of Bogner’s filmography? White Magic is his most breathtaking achievement (both in terms of the challenges of execution and the breakneck action sequences and individual sporting feats); Fire, Ice and Dynamite is the most entertaining symbiosis of conventional narrative and Bogner’s vulgar cinema of attractions. Stehaufmädchen is the most playful, spontaneous and rebellious middle finger raised to all contemporary norms and the rest of Bogner’s later works. (27/12/2022)