![]() Regarding the genre as a whole, the polarized responses are most famously articulated by Béla Balázs and Siegfried Kracauer. A review by Fritz Rosenfeld in the Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung likewise praises the film as a “great tragic symphony” of nature images, then adds that this symphony “also has a plot unfortunately” ( Rosenfeld 1997, p. Siegfried Kracauer’s review of the film praises the film’s images but describes them as being overtaken by the “malevolent spirit of the story” ( der Ungeist der Handlung) ( Kracauer 2004, p. One reviewer describes the film’s images as being among the most beautiful that had ever been created, but laments that this beauty is “destroyed” and “trivialized” by the plot ( Eggebrecht 1997, p. With regards to Der heilige Berg, one of the two films analyzed below, this was certainly the case. From the beginning, reviewers and commentators tended to “praise the mountain film’s images and scoff at its scenarios” ( Rentschler 1990, p. How were the mountains changing during the era in which the mountain films flourished? What role did the films play in these changes?Īrnold Fanck was the leading director of the genre through the Weimar years. This oversight is worth addressing, given that the mountains themselves, not only the film industry and the social-political context, were changing rapidly. Critics have repeated claims that the mountain emerges as a main character or actor in the films, but unlike for any other actor in the genre, the history of the mountain beyond the scope of the film has been unworthy of interest. In all of these discussions, the genre’s eponymous “Berg” has remained remarkably flat and static. More recently, they have been analyzed as complex and contradictory works within the intellectual, social, and cinematic history of Weimar Germany. They have been celebrated as pathbreaking works of nature documentary that set timeless nature into motion and made it accessible for a mass audience. 2 The films have been lambasted for displaying proto-fascist sentiments and for serving as the starting point for Leni Riefenstahl, several of her favored camera-operators, and possibly the aesthetic approach that would define the most prominent works of filmic propaganda in Nazi Germany. The German mountain film or Bergfilm 1 has been a “case” for debate since director Arnold Fanck pioneered the genre in the 1920s. While some ecocinema scholars have argued that environmental films teach viewers new ideas or change modes of behavior, this analysis suggests that film aesthetics are most effective at accelerating processes of environmental change that are already underway. Through an analysis of Arnold Fanck’s films Der heilige Berg and Der große Sprung, which are compared with Gustav Renker’s novel Heilige Berge and set into the context of the environmental history of the Alpine regions where the films were shot, the author argues that film aesthetics serve as a creative catalyst for environmental change and infrastructure development. The argument builds on Verena Winiwarter and Martin Knoll’s model of social-ecological interaction, Adrian Ivakhiv’s theoretical framework for the environmental implications of film, and Laura Frahm’s theories of filmic space. This article considers the Bergfilm within the long history of depictions of the Alps and the growth of Alpine tourism in order to ask how the role of media in environmental change shifts with the advent of film. ![]() ![]() The German mountain film ( Bergfilm) has received extensive critical attention for its political, social, and aesthetic implications, but has received remarkably little attention for its role in the environmental history of the Alps.
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