Climbing films worth watching

Climbing films are oddly good at converting people. You sit a friend down who has never touched a hold, press play, and an hour later they are asking where the nearest gym is. Something about watching a person inch up impossible rock cuts past the usual scepticism. Here are the ones worth your evening, and worth showing the curious.

The films that broke through

A handful of climbing documentaries have reached well beyond the climbing world, and for good reason.

Free Solo is the obvious starting point. It follows Alex Honnold's ropeless ascent of El Capitan's Freerider in Yosemite, and even people who could not name a single grade come away rattled by it. What makes it more than a stunt reel is the way it sits with the discomfort of the people around him, the partner and friends who have to hold the knowledge of what he is attempting. It is a film about risk and the cost of obsession as much as about climbing.

The Dawn Wall tells a slower, rope-bound story on the same wall: Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson's years-long effort to free climb the hardest route on El Capitan. It is the better film for showing what most climbing actually is. Falling, working a section over and over, the grind of returning to a single hard move. The drama is in persistence rather than danger, which is closer to the truth of the sport.

If you want the lineage behind both, Valley Uprising is a rowdy history of Yosemite climbing across the decades, full of the characters and feuds that built the place. It explains why El Cap looms so large in the climbing imagination.

Beyond the big rocks

Not every great climbing film is set on a thousand-metre wall.

Reel Rock is less a film than an annual tour, a touring collection of short pieces that has become a fixture in gyms and cinemas. The quality varies, as anthologies do, but it has captured an enormous range of climbing over the years, from gritstone to alpine choss to bouldering in the woods. If you want a sense of the breadth of the sport, this is the place to graze.

For something quieter, the older Patagonia and outdoor-brand short films are worth digging out. They tend to dwell on landscape and character rather than the hardest possible objective, and they age well precisely because they are not chasing a record.

Older heads will point you towards the climbing films of decades past, the grainy gritstone footage and the early big-wall expeditions. They look dated now, but they carry a flavour of the era and a reminder that the sport did not begin with sticky rubber and crash pads.

Watching well

A few thoughts before you queue these up.

• Show The Dawn Wall before Free Solo to anyone new. It gives them an honest picture of the work involved before the rope-free spectacle reframes climbing as death-defying.
• Take the danger on screen with some perspective. The vast majority of climbing is roped, padded and far less precarious than a free solo. Films naturally gravitate to the extreme because it is cinematic, not because it is normal.
• Resist the urge to compare yourself. These are the strongest climbers alive working at the edge of what is possible. The point is to be moved, not measured.

What these films do best is convey the feeling rather than the numbers: the focus, the fear, the absurd joy of moving over stone. That is the thing that hooks people, and it is the thing that keeps the rest of us coming back long after the novelty should have worn off. Watch a couple, and you will probably find yourself itching to get on the wall before the credits finish. When you do, it is worth keeping a record of the climbs that lit the same spark in you.