Storms over Mont Blanc
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Storms over Mont Blanc |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1930 |
| length | 2964 m, 108 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Arnold Fanck |
| script | Arnold Fanck , Carl Mayer |
| production | Althoff-Amboss-Film AG |
| music | Paul Dessau |
| camera | Hans Schneeberger , Richard Angst , Sepp Allgeier |
| cut | Arnold Fanck |
| occupation | |
also
| |
Storms over Mont Blanc is the first sound film by director Arnold Fanck with Leni Riefenstahl in the female lead. The film, for whose screenplay director Fanck and author Carl Mayer drew, was initially shot as a silent film and only later dubbed in the studio.
action
The meteorologist Hannes, who works at a weather station 4400 m above sea level on Mont Blanc , only has radio contact with the outside world. He transmits his weather reports to the astronomer Armstrong and his daughter Hella by Morse code. On the radio he listens to the broadcast from Berlin, which brings the music of his friend, the organist Walter Petersen, to his hut.
During a “ fox hunt ” on skis, the pilot rescues Udet Hella from her pursuers and flies with her over the Mont-Blanc massif. She sends Hannes a message announcing her visit. In this one, Hannes and Hella fall in love. During a subsequent excursion into the mountains, Hella's father remains alone in the hut. When he leaves to study the area, he falls and dies. Hella and Hannes witness the accident.
Before Hella brings her father's corpse into the valley, Hannes asks her to visit and look after his sick friend Petersen. In his loneliness, he misunderstood care as affection and sends his friend Hannes a message in which he announces that he wants to marry Hella. Hannes, disappointed and bitter, then decides not to come down to him in the valley as planned, but to stay at the station for another season.
A storm is approaching. Hannes loses his gloves while reading the instruments, so that his hands freeze to death before he can reach his hut. But this is badly damaged by the storm and hardly offers any protection from the cold. Hannes stacks tables in front of the doorway to lock the hut, but the storm keeps knocking it over. He presses the Morse code key with his elbow to call out for help.
When Hella found out about Hannes' predicament over the radio, she started a rescue operation with the mountain guides. But the men get no further in the storm. So Hella finally notifies the pilot Udet. Despite the thunderstorm, it flies up to Hannes through lightning and thunder, lands and fights its way into the hut, which is stiff with snow and ice, where the weather warden is freezing. Udet makes a fire in the stove and warms it up. Then happy Hella arrives with him with the mountain guides. She gently caresses his frozen hands. Now she wants to stay with him forever.
background
The film was a production by Aafa-Film GmbH Berlin, which was directed by the Jewish film salesman Gabriel Levy . Production manager was Harry R. Sokal , the recordings were directed by Karl Buchholz.
Shooting took place in the Babelsberg observatory, in Arosa , on the Bernina Pass and on Mont Blanc. The recordings were made by cameramen from Fanck's Freiburg camera school: Hans Schneeberger , Richard Angst and Sepp Allgeier . Claus von Suchotzky steered the machine from which the flight scenes were photographed.
The film architect was Leopold Blonder , who also assisted the director. Emil Specht made the sound recordings with Hans Grimm and Erich Lange . Alwin Elling did the sound editing . Phonetic advice came from Herbert Kuchenbuch . Paul Dessau composed the film music with Otto Sirl and Edmund Meisel . Otto Sirl wrote the lyrics. The Lewis Ruth band performed the music, the Welte organ played WA armor.
The film was submitted to the Reich Film Censorship on December 24, 1930 . It was premiered on December 25, 1930 in the Priness Theater in Dresden and at the same time in Frankfurt am Main in the UFA Theater "Im Schwan". It ran in the UFA-Palast am Zoo in Berlin on February 2, 1931.
Movie review
The well-known alpine writer Walther Flaig (in DAZ 1930, p. 388), in his “inner-alpine perception”, disliked the film as “the mere addition of ski film, fictional film and high mountain Montblanc film”, so that he criticized: “The closed one is missing Whole."
A friendly review of the film in the “ Rote Fahne ” praised “the unleashed power of nature”.
- Lexicon of the international film : "The urgency of the natural panoramas transfigured the insignificant plot of the mountain drama, which, because of its heroic pathos, was particularly suited to the intentions of Nazi cultural policy."
- Siegfried Kracauer : “This film once again showed the horrors and beauties of the high mountains, this time with a special accentuation of sublime cloud formations. Similar masses of clouds enveloped Hitler's plane on the journey to Nuremberg in the first series of images of the National Socialist documentary TRIUMPH DES WILLENS - 1936 - from which one can see the final merging of two cults, the high mountain cult and the Führer cult. "
- Karlheinz Wendtland commented on this comparison: “ What do high mountain films have to do with Nazi tendencies? How do Nazi clouds differ from - shall we say - communist clouds? What are such creeds supposed to 'prove'? "
“'Storms over Montblanc' captivates with - as always with Fanck - expressive landscape and nature photographs. Notorious are, among other things, the scenes in which Leni Riefenstahl balances on a ladder over a crevasse, as well as the acrobatic flight performances of Ernst Udo. Rapid cuts during the fox hunt, impressive and avant-garde cloud shots and, last but not least, the unique aerial shots make the film a lasting experience. The game scenes, however, break the style of the film a little, as they often appear very artificial and bumpy. ”(SN at Private Homepage Helmut Schmidt)
The film is not only a homage to the mountain world and winter sports, but also to the “most modern news media of the time, the radio ”. It not only connects the three protagonists Hannes, Walter and Hella over great distances, it ultimately also helps to save the weather warden's life.
literature
- Undine Beier, Dirk Förstner: Storms over Montblanc - Reconstruction of the short version. With ill. “Cinema notice for the showing of the film 'Stürme über dem Montblanc' in the Astoria Tonfilmtheater” (source: BArch FILMSG 1/16641) and Press booklet
- A. Fanck: Film work on the Montblanc. (Source: BArch FILMSG 1/16641), online at the Federal Archives ( Memento from March 16, 2016 in the web archive archive.today )
- Oksana Bulgakowa, Filmmuseum Potsdam (ed.): Leni Riefenstahl. Henschel Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-89487-319-1 , pp. 32, 37, 222.
- Margarethe R. Eirenschmalz: Dreiecksverhaeltnisse Im Schnee: The Socio-cultural Evolution of the Mountain Film Genre as Illustrated by Analysis of Gender-nature Relations in Three Films by Fanck, Riefenstahl, and Trenker. Master thesis. University of Nevada, Reno. Dept. Foreign Languages and Literatures. ProQuest Publisher, Ann Arbor MI 2008, ISBN 978-0-549-69613-1 , pp. 15-42.
- Matthias Franck: Arnold Fanck: white hell, white intoxication. Mountain films and mountain pictures 1909–1939. (= Series of mountain documents ). AS Verlag, 2009, ISBN 978-3-909111-66-4 , pp. 6, 84-85.
- Jürg Frischknecht, Thomas Kramer, Werner Schweizer: Film landscape: Engadin, Bergell, Puschlav, Münstertal. Publishing house Bündner Monatsblatt, 2003.
- Manuela Gerlof: soundtracks. Memories of the Holocaust in the radio play of the GDR (1945–1989) (= Media and Cultural Memory / Media and cultural memory. Volume 12). Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 2010, ISBN 978-3-11-022590-7 .
- Daniel Gilfillan: Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio (= Media studies - communications ). Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8166-4771-2 .
- Dagmar Günther: Alpine crossways: cultural history of bourgeois alpinism (1870–1930). (= Campus Historical Studies. Volume 23). Campus Verlag, 1998, ISBN 3-593-36100-0 , pp. 133-134, 136-137, 146-149.
- Illustrated film courier. No. 1509, 12th year 1930.
- Stefan König, Hans-Jürgen Panitz, Michael Wachtler: 100 Years of Mountain Film: Drama, Trick and Adventure. Book for the exhibition of Lokschuppen GmbH, Rosenheim. Verlag Herbig, 2001, pp. 40, 43, 125.
- Christian Rapp: Höhenrausch: the German mountain film. Verlag Sonderzahl, 1997, ISBN 3-85449-108-5 , pp. 16, 118, 130.
- Eric Rentschler (Ed.): The Films of GW Pabst. An extraterritorial cinema. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick 1990
Web links
- Storms over the Mont Blanc in theInternet Movie Database(English)
- Storms over Mont Blanc at filmportal.de
- Storms over Mont Blanc on Private Homepage ( Memento from December 20, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Helmut Schmidt
Individual evidence
- ↑ The Pfrontner folk song "Zwoa Brettln a gführiger Schnee" is used as a leitmotif, cf. ingeb.org
- ↑ Dresden Princess Theater. In: Kinowiki. Retrieved November 17, 2019 .
- ↑ cf. Frankfurt Metro in a swan. In: Kinowiki. Retrieved November 17, 2019 . and Metro in the swan. In: allekinos.com. Retrieved November 17, 2019 . as well as: private homepage Helmut Schmidt
- ↑ cit. after Günther p. 137 note 69
- ↑ cf. Günther p. 134, after Rentschler 1990, p. 143.
- ↑ Storms over Mont Blanc. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ From Caligari to Hitler . Hamburg 1958, p. 168.
- ^ Karlheinz Wendtland: Beloved Kintopp. Born in 1929 and 1930. 2nd edition. 1990, p. 173.
- ↑ similar to Konrad Wolf's radio play “ SOS… rao rao… Foyn ” from 1929 about the airship disaster of the Italian captain Umberto Nobile , radio technology not only plays a role in connecting people, but also in a life-saving role; see. the author's preliminary remark (quoted in Gerlof p. 108 and Gilfillan p. 188)
- ↑ cover page shown. at currents.com
