White Noise is a 20-minute big-mountain snowboard film from 2012 starring French freerider Xavier de Le Rue, produced by Timeline Missions and released free online in November 2012. Billed as a window into Xavier’s head, it mixes steep, icy descents with his own account of his fears, motivations and long-term plans in the mountains.
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Who is Xavier de Le Rue?
Born on 1 July 1979, Xavier de Le Rue is one of the most decorated big-mountain snowboarders of his generation. He represented France at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, and he took silver at the 2009 FIS Snowboarding World Championships.
His bigger reputation came from freeride. He won the Freeride World Tour three years in a row, with the third title in 2010. That same year he won the Xtreme in Verbier with a new line that included a cliff no competitor had jumped before in the event, and Snowboarder Magazine named him its Big Mountain Rider of the Year.
White Noise: the film and its crew
White Noise was the second film from Timeline Missions, following This Is My Winter (2011), and the team’s first fully planned feature. Guido Perrini was the filmer and Tero Repo the photographer.
The idea was to show what keeps Xavier motivated to ride and why it matters to him. The answer comes through steep lines in Europe and Alaska, including ice faces where a fall is not an option, interleaved with his reflections on risk and ambition.
Xavier is joined by guest riders Victor de Le Rue, Samuel Anthamatten and Johan Jonsson, which gives the film its sense of a small crew working through a season together.
Explore more: a wider history of snowboarding; another mountain film balancing landscape and action.
How to watch a big-mountain film
Films like White Noise are best watched with the terrain in mind. Notice how much of each sequence is spent looking at the face before the drop-in: on steep, icy slopes, line choice, snow conditions and the exit matter as much as the riding itself. Lines like these demand years of mountain experience and careful preparation, and that preparation is part of the story the film tells.
Related reading
- Chilean Andes Snowboarding: Funner Filete
- We Ride: The People and Culture of Snowboarding
- Colorado Snowboarding with Hofgaard, Bittner, Botner and Helgason
- Don’t Panic: A Snowboard Film Excerpt
- The Balance of Powder: A Sherpas Cinema Film
- This Is Skiing!
- Bon and Montant’s Wing-Assisted Eiger Descent
- The Khumbu Icefall through Theodore Fairhurst’s Helmet Camera
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