Inspirational women in the road and mountain scene
By Rob Coppolillo
Nicole Hahn began her film career as a petty thief, hawking her brother's camera in the eighth grade to shoot friends during school. Her fly-on-the-wall approach to cinema soon provoked an angry science teacher to demand she erase her in-class footage.
But Hahn's early brush with the heavy hand of censorship didn't derail her budding career. To the contrary, the soft-spoken, Oakland-based videographer rebounded from the stultifying environment of Long Island high school, pursued fine art and video at Alfred University, and premiered her first full-length film, "hardihood", a documentary focused on women's downhill mountain biking, in late April at the Sea Otter bike race in Monterey.
You might imagine the difficulty in securing resources for an all women's downhill flick. But, like the characters in her film-riders like Marla Streb, Elke Brutsaert, Cheri Elliott, Missy Giove, Lisa Sher, Hahn has persevered.
After seeing the film and spending some time with Nicole, the experience from her perspective began to captivate me. I realized that the same obstacles that might deter an independent filmmaker working on a "less marketable" subject-women's athleticism-loosely mirror those thrown up before aspiring female athletes in a male-dominated sport like mountain biking. As convincingly as Hahn presents the hardihood of the women in her film, I drop the label right back on her.
"I was always into people," Hahn declares, describing her first films made long ago in school.
Hahn's attachment to the characters in her world, preserve the human element in her work. It would've been more manageable to simply film another formulaic mountain bike video, with the thrash-metal soundtrack, inane "gnarly-dude" dialogue and the dropout narrator.
Hahn, though, spent two years on the road with the women, filming during competition and down time. Instead of focusing the lens on just the insane mountain biking sequences or the inevitable crashes, Hahn recreates the world of hardihood in a narrator-less film.
"It was a risk, going without a narrator. The animations really carry it," she explains. Indeed, the interspersed artwork by Todd Elliott, which leads the audience through a sort of "week in the life" of the downhillers, helps guide the film through its development.
Hahn offers her definition of hardihood early in the film-"audacity, courage, boldness, the trait of being willing to undertake things that involve risk or danger." Hahn considered other sports like the WNBA but chose the fat tire scene back in 1997.
"I was working for this production company back east...I'd seen extreme sports and we edited some footage and I saw Missy Giove. I thought what they did was nuts."
The impression lingered. Nicole eventually moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, nurturing her love of video
"I was totally into video, it was cheap, you could make a film, the resources are right there," she explains. Instead of limiting herself to the relatively small world of video fine art, though, she decided on documentary with women's sports as her first focus. And mountain biking held a certain allure. Nicole shot her first footage in 1998 at Sea Otter, and fittingly debuted "hardihood" at the Otter this spring.
At press time, the film had just been admitted to the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and Hahn hoped to make other festivals before getting "hardihood" into widespread distribution.
So what about the film itself? Forget the video playing down at the local bike shop with the ear-numbing music and bone-cracking crashes. "hardihood" explores the pathos of women's downhill mountain biking through the characters who are the sport.
Catch a glimpse of "Hardihood" online at www.hardihood.com
Rocky Mountain Sports - June 2001
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