What was he thinking? In the 40 seconds prior to his
jump?
This short newsreel by Pathé captures Franz Reichelt’s
attempt to fly with his self-constructed parachute: introduces this adamant man, shows him standing on the edge of the guardrail of the first deck of the Eiffel Tower (
notice the stool and the table ), his fall, his body being removed, and
measurement of the hollow created by the impact.
Look at it with the sound off, please.
This short newsreel is essential cinema, I think. Drama captured in one minute and 36 seconds. The introduction of our hero, preparing for the action, the action, aftermath.
When I first saw the film I thought of Samuel Beckett’s famous words : Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
But no, this isn’t Buster Keaton and his inventor’s humour.
This film really shows a suicide. He was probably
praying, cursing his life ( full of failures? ), thinking about his loved ones,
praying again, for the angels to lift
him up to heaven, like in a painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, in those 40 seconds. Bystanders
said he smiled, just before he jumped.
But God had mercy on his soul, An autopsy concluded that Reichelt had died
of a heart attack during his fall.
Franz Reichelt, an Austrian-born French tailor, announced
to the press in early February 1912 that he had finally received permission and
would shortly conduct an experiment from the Eiffel Tower to prove the value of
his invention.
On Sunday, 4 February, at 7:00 a.m., he arrived at the
tower by car with two friends. He was already wearing his parachute suit. The
news footage of his jump shows him modelling his invention in its folded form,
which Le Gaulois described as "... only a little more voluminous than
ordinary clothing ..." ("... un peu plus volumineuse qu’un vêtement
ordinaire ..."). The suit did not
restrict the wearer's movements when the parachute was packed, and Le Petit
Parisien described the method of deploying the parachute as being as simple as
extending the arms out to form a cross with the body. Once extended, the outfit
resembled "a sort of cloak fitted with a vast hood of silk"
("une sorte de manteau, muni d'un très vaste capuchon de soie")
according to Le Temps. L'Action Française reported that Reichelt stated the
surface area of the final design to be 30 square metres (320 sq ft) with a
canopy height of 5 metres (16 ft), while Le Figaro judged the surface area
might have reached 32 square metres (340 sq ft). La Croix claimed that the suit
may have weighed as little as 9 kilograms (20 lb). The weather was cold, with
temperatures below 0 °C (32 °F), and there was a stiff breeze blowing across
the Champ de Mars.
There were some police officers present to maintain
order, as the Parisian Prefecture of Police had given Reichelt permission to
proceed. After Reichelt's death, Louis Lépine who, as the Prefect of Police
(Préfet de Police), was ultimately responsible for the permission being
granted, issued a statement making it clear that while the police routinely
gave permission for experiments to be performed from the Eiffel Tower, it was
understood in these cases that dummies would be used. They had given permission
in Reichelt's case only on the basis that he would be conducting dummy drops,
and that under no circumstances would they have allowed him to proceed if they
had known he would be making the jump himself. Lépine assured La Croix that he
had never signed an order that allowed a live jump. From his arrival at the
tower, however, Reichelt made it clear that he intended to jump himself.
According to a later interview with one of the friends who accompanied him up
the tower, this was a surprise to everybody, as Reichelt had concealed his
intention until the last moment. His friends tried to persuade him to use
dummies in the experiment, assuring him that he would have other opportunities
to make the jump himself. When this failed to make an impression on him, they
pointed to the strength of the wind and said he should call off the test on
safety grounds, or at least delay until the wind dropped. They were unable to
shake his resolve; seemingly undeterred by the failure of his previous tests,
he told journalists from Le Petit Journal that he was totally convinced that
his apparatus would work, and work well. When questioned as to whether he
planned to take any additional precautions, such as using a safety rope, he
replied that he would not, since he intended to trust his life entirely to his
parachute:
I want to try the experiment myself and without trickery,
as I intend to prove the worth of my invention. (Je
veux tenter l’expérience moi-même et sans chiqué [sic], car je tiens à bien
prouver la valeur de mon invention.)
Hervieu, who was present to witness the demonstration, also
attempted to dissuade him from making the jump. He was concerned that the
parachute needed longer to fully open than the few seconds the drop from the
first platform would allow, and he also presented other technical objections to
which Reichelt could not provide a satisfactory response. Reichelt finally
replied that:
You are going to see how my seventy-two kilos and my
parachute will give your arguments the most decisive of denials. (Vous allez voir comment mes soixante-douze kilos et mon parachute vont
donner à vos arguments le plus décisif des démentis.)
Ropes had been suspended between the legs of the tower by
the police at Reichelt's request to prevent the crowds from spilling onto the
landing zone, and he spent some time discussing the arrangements with the
marshals and ensuring that there was sufficient space for his landing before
going to the stairs to climb to the first platform.
According to Le Petit Parisien, Reichelt's initial
attempt to ascend to the first stage of the tower was blocked by a guard named
Gassion, who had witnessed previous unsuccessful dummy drops and feared that
Reichelt's attempt would end in disaster, though Le Figaro reported that he had
merely not received a copy of the order and had to wait for telephone
confirmation from his superiors. Despite the guard's resistance, by 8:00 a.m.
the matter had been resolved: Reichelt, who was visibly shaken by his argument
with the guard, was allowed to mount the tower with his two friends and a
cinematographer (another was stationed near the foot of the tower to record the
jump from below). As he climbed the stairs he paused, turned back to the crowd,
raised his hand and wished them a cheery "À bientôt". (See you soon).
His friends continued to try to talk him out of the jump, but Reichelt was
quite determined. At 8:22 a.m., observed by a crowd of about 30 journalists and
curious onlookers, he readied himself – facing towards the Seine – on a stool
placed on a restaurant table next to the interior guardrail of the tower's
first deck, a little more than 57 metres (187 ft) above the ground. After
adjusting his apparatus with the assistance of his friends and checking the
wind direction by throwing a piece of paper taken from a small book, he placed
one foot on the guardrail, hesitated for about 40 seconds, then leapt outwards.
According to Le Figaro, he was calm and smiling just before he jumped. His
parachute, which had seemed to be only half-open, folded around him almost
immediately and he fell for a few seconds before striking the frozen soil at
the foot of the tower.
Le Petit Parisien reported that his right leg and arm
were crushed, his skull and spine broken, and that he was bleeding from his
mouth, nose and ears. Le Figaro noted that his eyes were wide open and dilated.
He was already dead by the time the onlookers rushed to his body, but he was
taken to the Necker hospital where he was officially pronounced dead, and then
on to a police station in the rue Amelie before being returned to his home in
rue Gaillon.
The next day's newspapers were full of the story of
Reichelt's "tragic experiment" ("expérience tragique")
complete with photographs; at least four newspapers, Le Petit Parisien,
L'Humanité, Le Matin and La Croix, showed images of the fatal jump. Film of the
attempt, including footage of Reichelt's body being removed and the onlookers
measuring the depth of the hole created by his impact (15 centimetres; 59 in),
was distributed by news organizations. Initial reports speculated on Reichelt's
state of mind: none assumed he had been suicidal, but many called him reckless
or foolish. A journalist in Le Gaulois suggested that only half the term
"mad genius" applied to Reichelt – although the same report included
an interview with one of Reichelt's friends, who claimed that the tailor had
felt pressured into giving a dramatic demonstration to attract sponsors,
without whom he could not expect to make a profit before any patent expired.
Reichelt's death was the first to result from a parachuting accident since
Charles Leroux died giving a demonstration in Tallinn in 1889. In fact, on 2 February 1912 – two days prior
to Reichelt's fatal jump – an American steeplejack, Frederick R. Law, had
successfully parachuted from the viewing platform of the torch of the Statue of
Liberty (223 feet (68 m) above sea level and 151 feet (46 m) from the base of
the statue), seemingly on a whim. On 6 February, La Croix added a footnote to
the report on Reichelt's death: another parachuting experiment was to take
place on 18 or 25 February at Juvisy-sur-Orge, in which the aviator Camille
Guillaume planned to leap from his Blériot monoplane at a height of 300 metres
(980 ft) to test a parachute design (the plane would be allowed to crash).
After Reichelt's death, the authorities were wary of
granting permission for experiments from the Eiffel Tower. Though they
continued to grant permissions for parachute dummy drops, some hopeful inventors – such as a man named
Damblanc, who wished to try his "helicopter parachute" from the
second platform – were refused permission to conduct tests, and even
applications for aviation experiments not involving the tower came under
renewed scrutiny. More recently, the tower has been the scene of a number of
illicit base jumps. A Norwegian man died in 2005 after losing his canopy while
attempting a promotional jump for a clothing firm – the first parachuting death
at the tower since Reichelt. A sanctioned stunt jump for the 1985 James Bond
film A View to a Kill was successful.
Reichelt came momentarily to prominence again in the
1940s in the United States, when his likeness was claimed as the model for one
of the figures that were "strangely un-American in expression and
garb" in the WPA-funded mural at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. In an
incident reminiscent of the 1933 controversy over Diego Rivera's Man at the
Crossroads mural at the Rockefeller Center in New York City, a furore erupted
over an image depicting two minor leftist aviators, supposedly flanking a
central portrait of Joseph Stalin. The WPA already had an unwanted reputation
as sympathetic to the left, and despite the artist August Henkel's
"glib" explanation of the "accidental" inclusion of a
Soviet red star and his claim that the image identified as Stalin was actually
of Reichelt, the murals were taken down and three of the four panels burned.
The story of Reichelt's misadventure was also the subject of a 1993 French
short, Le Tailleur Autrichien, written and directed by Pablo Lopez Paredes and
starring Bruce Myers in the title role.
Although there were no viable parachuting solutions for
use in aeroplanes when Reichelt began developing his suit, by the time of his
death a successful parachute jump from a plane using a non-fixed canopy had
already taken place in the United States, and a patent for a packable parachute
had been applied for by Gleb Kotelnikov.
No comments:
Post a Comment