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From the vault: 1926

The Holy Mountain

Starring: Leni Riefenstahl,  Luis Trenker,  Ernst Petersen

Director: Arnold Fanck

The film: During the 1920s and 1930s, the German  bergfilme - or mountain film - was as popular and well established a movie genre as the western.  Its disappearance seems to have been mainly for political reasons, with one popular post-war critic saying  in 1947 that such films were 'rooted in a mentality kindred to Nazi spirit ... the idolatry of glaciers and rocks was symptomatic of an anti-rationalism on which the Nazis could capitalise'.

Recently, however,  the better mountain films have been  praised for their pioneering  camerawork and  technical advances.

Arnold Fanck's The Holy Mountain is one of the best examples of the genre, and is notable because it was the first film role of  Leni Riefenstahl,  whose links to Nazism were far more substantial and sinister (see The extras below). Shot  in the Swiss and German Alps, its token love-triangle plot seems mostly an excuse for  Fanck to hit the slopes with his intrepid cast and crew, by whom he was broadly disliked for his unreasonable demands and cavalier attitude towards safety.

Reaching speeds in excess of 120km/h, skiing was, in the 1920s, the fastest means of travel, besides flying (which wasn't much faster at the time), and audiences would have found the point-of-view shots in these films  thrilling. Today,  they seem less so, but for anyone with an interest in skiing or  climbing they remain fascinating and skilfully crafted documents of the early days of such pursuits.

The extras: There's just one  extra feature with this DVD package,  but it's a generous one. The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl follows the misadventures of perhaps Germany's most controversial woman,  from her days as a dancer through to her 90s, which she spent shooting underwater films.

Her life started to come apart when she directed Triumph of the Will - a propaganda film about the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg.  Her follow-up, the official film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Olympia, was similarly controversial.  After the war she went on trial  on charges of collaborating with Hitler  but was released due to  lack of evidence. She tried to make films after the war, but each attempt was met with resistance. She was the object of much hatred until her death in 2003, aged 101.  We see Riefenstahl frequently losing her temper as the director probes some of the more unsavoury chapters in her life.  This documentary may well be of more interest to  viewers than The Holy Mountain.

FROM THE VAULT: 1926



The Holy Mountain