The Holy Mountain (1926)

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Movie
Original title The holy mountain
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1926
length 110 (9 acts, 3024 meters, at 24 fps) minutes
Rod
Director Arnold Fanck
script Arnold Fanck
production Harry R. Sokal for Universum Film AG. UFA
music Edmund Meisel
camera Arnold Fanck
Hans Schneeberger
Sepp Allgeier
Albert Benitz
Helmar Lerski
cut Arnold Fanck
occupation

The holy mountain is a German mountain film that Arnold Fanck made in 1926 with Leni Riefenstahl , Luis Trenker and Ernst Petersen in the leading roles for the cultural department of Universum Film AG ( UFA ) in his company Berg- und Sport-Film GmbH . The script and editing were also in his hands. If you take into account that he was also in front of the camera, one would speak of an author's film by today's standards .

action

Dancer Diotima, who dances at one with nature on the surging sea to the breaking waves, to express her feelings, is drawn to the mountains. Two friends, young Vigo and older Karl, both enthusiastic mountaineers, fall in love with her after attending a performance. Karl is so moved by Diotima's performance that he sets out to be master of his feelings in the mountains. In the meantime, however, Vigo meets with Diotima and can win her over. When Karl becomes aware of her caressing Vigo in a completely natural way, threatening storm clouds gather over the friendship of the two men.

They get into an argument on a climbing tour in the mountains. Vigo falls over a ledge, Karl can just hold on to him, but can no longer pull him up. A snow storm is approaching and the older friend hallucinates as he and Diotima step in front of the altar in an ice palace. He wants to approach her, but in the process actually falls not only his friend, but also himself to his death. The rescue team that Diotima sends out after them is too late.

Production, background, publication

The filming took about a year and a half; the outdoor shots took place in October 1925 in the Swiss Alps (in the Bernese Oberland , on the Aletsch Glacier and in Lenzerheide ); the studio scenes were created in the halls of the Staaken Film Works in Berlin.

It took film architect Leopold Blonder four weeks to build the 16-meter-high “Ice Palace”. When filming was delayed and the temperature rose, it threatened to melt and had to be rebuilt when the weather was cold enough again.

The outdoor shots in the Swiss Alps were photographed by Sepp Allgeier , Albert Benitz , Hans Schneeberger and Fanck, the cameraman for the studio shots in Berlin was Helmar Lerski . The buildings for the film were created by Leopold Blonder .

Fanck, who has a doctorate in geology and ski instructor, is considered to be the founder of the “Freiburg Camera School”, he expanded the ski and mountaineering film to a separate genre of nature films, and especially mountain drama in Germany.

Leni Riefenstahl had already worked as a dancer at the Mary Wigman School in 1925 in the silent documentary Paths to Strength and Beauty ; In Der Heilige Berg she danced as Diotima excerpts from her dance cycle “The Three Dances of Eros” and adapted the choreography for it. According to her memoir, Fanck wrote the concept for the script for her in three nights in mid-1924.

The film was submitted to the film inspection office in Berlin for censorship on October 7, 1926 and found to be “free for young people” under the number B.13831. The German premiere took place on December 17, 1926 in the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin, which at the time was the largest movie theater in the city with 2000 seats. The music for the premiere was composed by Edmund Meisel , who had only recently become known to a wider audience with his film music for the German performance of Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein's Bronenosez Potjomkin .

The holy mountain was rented out by Parufamet GmbH. Berlin throughout Europe in France , Spain , Portugal and Greece , but also overseas, in Japan and the USA , with great success. In America it had on November 28, 1927 in New York under the title The holy Mountain , alternatively The Sacred Mountain premiere; in Brazil it was run as Monte Sagrado , only in Denmark the title of The Modern Eve differed from the original title.

reception

There has been extensive publications about the film, including by:

  • Leopold Blonder: Der Heilige Berg In: Die Filmwoche No. 31 , 1926, p. 736.
  • (oA): La montagne sacrée In: Le Film Complêt du Dimanche №. 476 , March 11, 1928.
  • (oA): Leni Riefenstahl In: Film-Kurier from July 27, 1926.
  • (oA): Leni Riefenstahl - The Holy Mountain In: Filmwoche No. 51 from December 15, 1926, p. 1.
  • (oA): The premiere of the Holy Mountain In: Lichtbildbühne No. 300 from December 17, 1926.
  • John Schikowski: The Film Dance In: Forward December 21, 1926.
  • Riefenstahl, Leni: Tanz zum Heiligen Berg In: Filmwoche No. 53 of December 31, 1926, p. 9.
  • Siegfried Kracauer: Der Heilige Berg In: Frankfurter Zeitung No. 168 of March 4, 1927.

Jürgen Dietrich stated on June 24, 2006: “'The holy mountain' is a drama about love and friendship, a huge spectacle about cloud towers, crevasses, shadowy figures and sea cliffs. In order to 'throw the human gaze' deep into 'the immense world of monsters' (Béla Balázs, 1931), the film was shot with the latest camera technology at original locations in the midst of ice and snow. With their atmospheric backlit shots, idiosyncratic montage and the acrobatic performances of the actors and athletes, Arnold Fanck's films serve the cinema audience's need for entertainment as well as the desire to look and shudder. The mountain films were one of the most popular genres in Weimar cinema. "

Oskar Kalbus writes on p. 91, 92 in the first part of his work On Becoming German Cinematic Art: The Silent Film : “Christmas 1926 surprised Fanck experts and cinema fans with the film The Holy Mountain . Nature is no longer all alone in the center of all events. Something new again: nature is only the starting point, only the backdrop and material for a romantic drama that takes place in it. Fanck has surpassed himself with this style. The male actors in this film are not film stars by profession, but men of the mountains and of life, mountaineers who still practice their art without powder or make-up: the rough Luis Trenker, the bold Hannes Schneider, the boyish Ernst Petersen and the brilliant ones Cameramen Hans Schneeberger and Sepp Allgeier. Between these wonderful men stands a woman new to the big screen: the young dancer Leni Riefenstahl, an almost unbelievably delicate creature, animated by the finest rhythms, by no means just a dancer, but also an actress who brings a lot of natural inwardness ... "

"The unusual exertions and strains, the high demands on physical performance, the constant dangers, the long journeys and the predominant outdoor shots, which always depended on external circumstances that cannot be influenced, the enormous responsibility towards his employees and the time-consuming care Fanck shot and cut his films required working hours of one to two years per film. ”(cf. Zglinicki p. 602)

“In the period after the First World War, the mountain film genre established itself, which brought 'home, the stylized aesthetics and the beauty of people' to the fore. The films corresponded to 'the zeitgeist of the interwar period, which consisted of many psychological facets' […] ”('Marco', August 9, 2009).

Ines Walk explained in her work Arnold Fanck - Revolutionary of the Mountain Film : “Located in the field of tension between modernity and romanticism, the German mountain film is considered by many critics to be pre-fascist, as the forerunner of the 'blood and soil films' of the Third Reich, as' primordial -German'. Even the criticism at the time criticized the 'intrusive propaganda for high altitude people and noble blondes' ... "

Siegfried Kracauer found in the Frankfurter Zeitung , No. 168 of March 4, 1927: “This one from Dr. Arnold Fanck's film, created in a year and a half, is a gigantic composition of body culture fantasies, sun idleness and cosmic swell. Even the hardened old hand, who is no longer touched by the daily emotional frenzy, finds himself unbalanced here. Perhaps there are small groups of young people here and there in Germany who try to counter what they call mechanization through a run-down nature indulgence, through a panic-like escape into the fog brew of vague sentimentality. As an expression of their way of not existing, the film is a top performance. "

The journal Die Lichtbild-Bühne , No. 13, wrote on January 15, 1927 about Edmund Meisel's music for the film Der Heilige Berg , which was then perceived as avant-garde : “After repeated listening to the music, its value and its originality come ever more clearly to the fore . The means of instrumentation, which are not always immediately understandable for conservative souls, are here, as is the case with every artistically valuable work, identical to the melodic means, but even these latter must not be assessed with the standard of comfort. "

The cultural channel Arte beamed the film on 24 November 2006 at midnight on German television in one of a viragierten copy in the Federal Film Archive Berlin and a black and white of the Fondazione Cineteca Italiana, Milan in collaboration with the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation again manufactured version.

A film by the Chilean director, actor and author Alejandro Jodorowsky was made in 1973 under the same title The Holy Mountain - Montana Sacra . Its mysticism , however, has little in common with that of Fanck.

literature

  • Herbert Birett: Silent film music . Material collection. Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin 1970.
  • Matthias Fanck: Arnold Fanck - Mountain Films and Mountain Pictures 1909–1939: Weisse Hölle - Weisser Rausch . With a foreword by Kurt Diemberger. as-Verlag, Duoton, ISBN 978-3-909111-66-4 .
  • Heinrich Fraenkel: Immortal Film. The great chronicle. From the magic lantern to the sound film . Part of the picture by Wilhelm Winckel. Kindler, Munich 1956, p. 425.
  • Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.): Mountains, light and dream. Dr. Arnold Fanck and the German mountain film. With the collaboration of Gisela Pichler. Bruckmann, Munich 1998.
  • Elisabeth Huber: The “New Bavarian Homeland Film” in the 21st century: Depicted in the cinematic work of Marcus H. Rosenmüller . GRIN Verlag, 2012, ISBN 978-3-656-10163-5 .
  • Oskar Kalbus: On becoming German film art. Part 1: The silent film. Cigaretten Bilderdienst Altona-Bahrenfeld, Hamburg 1935, pp. 91–92.
  • Silvia Kornberger: The leader's eye - Leni Riefenstahl. Attempt to characterize her first directorial work “Das Blaue Licht” as an example. Thesis . GRIN Verlag, 2013, ISBN 978-3-640-49045-5 .
  • Siegfried Kracauer: Works . Volume 6. Small writings on film. Edited by Inka Mülder-Bach. With the collaboration of Mirjam Wenzel and Sabine Biebl. 3 volumes. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004.
  • Johannes Von Moltke: No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (= Volume 36 of Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism Series; Volume 36 of Weimar and now, ISSN  1549-1870 ). University of California Press, 2005, ISBN 0-520-93859-3 , pp. 44-45, 49-50, 252, 295.
  • Helma Türk: Filmland Tyrol! A journey through Tyrol's film history. Self-published, 2007.
  • Friedrich v. Zglinicki: The way of the film. The history of cinematography and its predecessors. Rembrandt Verlag, Berlin 1956, pp. 448, 602-605.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Berliner Film-Ateliers Staaken at cinegraph.de
  2. ↑ Cf. Der Heilige Berg (1926) Walk, 'Torturen für die Film People', Trivia at IMDb
  3. ↑ Cf. Zglinicki p. 604: “The pioneering cameramen Sepp Allgaier, Hans Schneeberger, Richard Angst, Albert Benitz, Kurt Neubert, Walter Riml, Hans Ertl and others emerged from the Freiburg camera school”, Kornberger p. 8 f., Huber P. 22 f., Türk p. 18.
  4. ↑ See Zglinicki p. 448.
  5. ^ Peter Dubrow: Pathetic Camera In: Zeit Online, March 22, 1974.
  6. ^ L. Riefenstahl: Memoirs . Cologne: Taschen, 2000, pp. 73–95.
  7. ↑ See Birett p. 138 on B 13 831 - VIII 765 (Tl)
  8. ↑ See Zglinicki pp. 441-448.
  9. ↑ in December 1925 by the production companies Paramount, Ufa and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer jointly founded and based in Berlin film distributor, cf. Parufamet at CineWiki (English); Press booklet archive at deutsche-kinemathek.de; Zglinicki pp. 417-419.
  10. ↑ Cf. Der Heilige Berg (1926) Release Info at IMDb
  11. ↑ Information from Luc Deneulin, PhD - brussels, in / at Leni Riefenstahl Bibliography Part 2 at skynet.be
  12. ↑ Stephan Graf v.Bothmer: Silent Film Concerts The Holy Mountain Glossary at stummfilmkonzerte.de
  13. ↑ See the holy mountain at molodezhnaja.ch
  14. ↑ The holy mountain quot. from filmportal.de
  15. ↑ The holy mountain quot. from filmportal.de
  16. ↑ Cf. Der Heilige Berg ( memento of the original from January 10, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Silent film on arte.tv @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.arte.tv
  17. ^ "This film gives the omniscient view of what social engineering caused by greed has done to the modern world, but shows us how to live and not give in to a material world.", Cf. Montana Sacra - The Holy Mountain (1973) in the IMDb