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One August morning in 1974, French wirewalker Philippe Petit stepped out onto a 3/4″ steel cable strung a half mile above the earth between the World Trade Center towers in New York City and began to walk. He stayed suspended up there for 45 minutes, crossing the space between the skyscrapers eight times and covering a distance of a quarter mile, all the while kneeling, dancing, reclining on his back, and conversing with a curious seagull who kept him company. Prior to this, Petit had conquered in similar fashion the space between the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and between the pylons of Australia's Sydney Harbor Bridge. Asked why he did it, his reply was simple: “When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk.” For Petit, standing in the space between is as natural as breathing — as essential to life and just as impossible to resist.
There is a quote by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, repeated every year on the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur, a day meant to encourage reflection on the past, the present, one's inner truth, and the nature of reality: “All the world is just a narrow bridge; the most important thing is not to be afraid.” We are reminded annually that life is all about how we negotiate the space between one thing and another: between life and death, between thought and action, between mental states, between subjectivities in relationships, between one moment and the next. The list could go on and on. That is what makes this film so riveting. Poised on a wire anchored on both ends by monumental and interchangeable structures that shift from city to city, Petit plays with the potential of the space between things, lounging, daring to linger there, making it his own. Perched above the beckoning abyss, he relaxes. He appropriates the in-between, and does with it what we do in a psychoanalytic situation: he creates something thinkable and useable where it did not exist before.
Petit referred to his triumphant act between the Twin Towers as