You have probably read the glowing reviews for the new documentary Man on Wire. It truly is a spellbinding portrait of the Philippe Petit, the man who "danced" between the Twin Towers, 1350 feet above Manhattan, on August 7, 1974. Director James March is consumed by the process, constructing his documentary as an elaborate heist film.

We experience almost minute by minute how Petit and his band of crazed conspirators planned and executed his death-defying feat, from surreptitiously entering the World Trade Center to avoiding law enforcement throughout the building. The meticulous preparation recalls the daring of Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair; artistry of any kind is always in the details. We also see plenty of footage of the younger Petit practicing the art of tight rope walking in rural France, with dreams of conquering the emptiness between the world's then two largest structures. Sir Edmund Hillary was obsessed with climbing the 29,029 feet of Mount Everest; for six years Petit focused on the 140 feet between the Tower One and Two.

You would think that the big payoff to this "artistic crime of the 20th century" would be stunning video from all angles of the forty-five minutes that Petit floated between the Towers. Here is the spoiler that few have noticed: there is little motion picture footage of Petit in glorious mid-air. Still cameras captured Petit thrillingly suspended above the city, but we don't see him move in space. The time is 1974, just before the videocassette revolution, which ushered in a new consciousness of media documentation.  Below spectators just watched, having no idea in a few years that they would be generating their own video, first with VHS tape and then with digital cell phones. Electronic news gathering (ENG), with its instantaneous microwave coverage, was in its infancy with many local stations still using the much more cumbersome newsfilm technology.  And, Petit himself, unlike other performance artist of the time, was not insistent on recording his amazing feat for auxiliary markets; for this Frenchman it was a "mythological journey."

But yet the still photographs are more awe-inspiring than any cinematic montage or CGI recreation. Petit is our flesh-and-blood superhero, a Spiderman levitating 110 stories above our mortal condition. His odyssey was a series of moments, where "1/2 millimeter mistake or 1/4 second of distraction" would lead to a gruesome plunge. Marsh underscores Petit's aerial skill with the minimalist strands of Erik Satie, making his achievement feel for the ages. Petit aspired to "the miracle of beauty that talks not so much to our senses, but to our inner heart." In this documentary our senses are not distracted by quick cuts and tracking shots; we contemplate the deeper meanings in the stillness of the image, an exhilarating confirmation of modernism's maxim Less is More. Take a look at the documentary's trailer, frenzied like all promotion, until you get to the resonant pictures. Will the solitary photograph ever speak so eloquently again to us in this media saturated world?