If you’ve heard about SUNSHINE SUPERMAN, it’s likely you’ve seen the word “exhilaration” attached to its many reviews. This is because exhilaration is intractable from a film that dives into the life of aerial cinematographer and BASE jumper Carl Boenish. Set to perfectly placed music, SUNSHINE SUPERMAN steeps the viewer into the fullness of the present moment as it bears witness to Carl and friends running off cliffs and leaping off buildings. They jump charged with excitement, carving through gravity, gliding through the air with grace and ease, then bobbing and sailing down to the ground from the drag and flow of their parachutes. Upon landing, their entire beings are ballooned with such joy that they could pop. This exhilaration extends itself throughout the film, because SUNSHINE SUPERMAN doesn’t just harness that joy, it unfurls it.
Eight years in the making, SUNSHINE SUPERMAN was quite a physical process for first time director Marah Strauch and producer Eric Bruggeman, who hand-cranked through 35 hours of 16mm archival footage. Present for a Q&A after the IFC Center screening, Strauch talked about the film’s conception. “My uncle was a BASE jumper and aerial cinematographer, I basically found a big box of footage and I thought this footage was amazing. I did not have a background in film, and I spent a really long time looking for people who were in these films, and then asking them if I could have more footage.”
On making the film with Strauch, Bruggeman said, “We’re looking at it together being fascinated by this clandestine world of BASE jumping and these beautiful images of these bodies falling through space, so we went on this journey and we didn’t know exactly where it was leading but it seemed like a journey worth taking.”
The footage reveals that aerial cinematography and BASE jumping placed Carl in his element, and the sweet love story between Carl and wife Jean Boenish colored those passions with more wonder and excitement than he could even contain, as if each jump was where he could find his fullest expression. The culmination of interviews in the film makes clear that Carl was on his own wavelength. Climber and author John Long said Carl was “like running into a geyser.” When a reporter asked Carl why he jumped off a building, he said, “Because it was there, and it was fun.” On jumping off high rise buildings in Houston, he remarked, “When buildings are under construction they are really vulnerable to people like us.” This comment is complemented by a scene post-jump of parachute backed men with short shorts, real-deal mustaches, and VCRs on their helmets hailing a cab in the Houston sprawl, as if their get up was an everyday scene.
This, though, is the undercurrent that drives the story, as it was indeed their everyday scene. It’s what Strauch discovered in her quest to understand Carl’s passion and found that it was exactly the thing he wanted to share through his footage. “The camera captures something not only for ourselves but for everyone over time,” Carl says in the film. His excitement was inclusive, and beyond BASE jumping, Carl hoped he could drive people to things that excited them and show that barriers can be broken and limits surpassed. Says an interviewee on screen, “I think he wanted to show the humanity, the freedom—when you are pushing the envelope of what the human spirit can accomplish.”
In 1984 Carl and Jean broke the BASE jumping Guinness World Record on the Norwegian ‘Troll Wall’ mountain range. Days later the tremendous feat was shadowed by tragedy. Jean knew that how she handled Carl’s last jump would set the tone moving forward. Media questions asking how she felt right after Carl’s death speak to the universal expectations society has about a deeply personal process, and Jean responded saying as much. Decades later, she shares more in the film, “Everyone departs. Don’t let death be a hurdle, a wall. Climb the wall and go on. Death doesn’t deserve praise, life does, that’s what we should be paying attention to.”
The exhilaration of SUNSHINE SUPERMAN commands attention and awareness, and as Jean said about BASE jumping, it’s “going beyond what people will say what can or can’t be done.”