A Drinking Song of Earth's Misery
The Holy Mountain (1926)
directed by Arnold Fanck
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Carnegie Library
With that late October snowstorm seven days of blue skies behind me, it was time to remind myself what I’m in for come January with this most famous example of the German “mountain” genre. Fanck loved the outdoors and films Leni Riefenstahl as if she is equal to nature’s geologic wonders: the surge of ocean and strut of peaks. Each morning she dances, careless and full of emotion, and each night she performs at a place in the city. A visiting engineer from the hills falls in love with her, and she with him. He gives her a flower and owns a plain white cottage in a vale.
I am always amazed by the modernity of these silent Teutonic tragedies. Too bad the director and star became Nazis in the end. The affair evolves to include the puppy love of a young outdoorsman, and this, it seems, is first an excuse to film men on skis, careening through meadows and leaping over cliffs. But it opens the door to jealousy, better suited to winter winds. Fanck makes alpine competition a wonder of fresh air even as he suggests that the race, taken at speed, robs the mountains of their mysteries. In that sense, the engineer is his stand-in, wandering out alone for days.
It all ends badly when the male protagonist hauls his cohort up the north face of a particularly dangerous ascent and realizes, too late, that murder wasn’t really what he had in mind. Freezing to death on the noble end of a rope with a corpse at the other gives him time to dream of a palace made of ice where he and Diotima could be happy. When the sun finally rises, it seems so lovely that he steps off into thin air to greet it. The movie mistakenly suggests his last act shares qualities of loyalty with the resolute and unyielding mountain, when petty jealousy got a good man killed. In German film as in American foreign policy, no retroactive justification for bad decisions!
directed by Arnold Fanck
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Carnegie Library
With that late October snowstorm seven days of blue skies behind me, it was time to remind myself what I’m in for come January with this most famous example of the German “mountain” genre. Fanck loved the outdoors and films Leni Riefenstahl as if she is equal to nature’s geologic wonders: the surge of ocean and strut of peaks. Each morning she dances, careless and full of emotion, and each night she performs at a place in the city. A visiting engineer from the hills falls in love with her, and she with him. He gives her a flower and owns a plain white cottage in a vale.
I am always amazed by the modernity of these silent Teutonic tragedies. Too bad the director and star became Nazis in the end. The affair evolves to include the puppy love of a young outdoorsman, and this, it seems, is first an excuse to film men on skis, careening through meadows and leaping over cliffs. But it opens the door to jealousy, better suited to winter winds. Fanck makes alpine competition a wonder of fresh air even as he suggests that the race, taken at speed, robs the mountains of their mysteries. In that sense, the engineer is his stand-in, wandering out alone for days.
It all ends badly when the male protagonist hauls his cohort up the north face of a particularly dangerous ascent and realizes, too late, that murder wasn’t really what he had in mind. Freezing to death on the noble end of a rope with a corpse at the other gives him time to dream of a palace made of ice where he and Diotima could be happy. When the sun finally rises, it seems so lovely that he steps off into thin air to greet it. The movie mistakenly suggests his last act shares qualities of loyalty with the resolute and unyielding mountain, when petty jealousy got a good man killed. In German film as in American foreign policy, no retroactive justification for bad decisions!
posted by NPK at 7:35 AM
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