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This is probably the peak of Bergfilm in the Weimar
period, with the audacious physical cinema of genre market-maker Arnold Fanck
combined with the directorial intensity of G. W. Pabst it’s no surprise that we
get a balance between the epic outdoors and the emotional highs and lows of the
main players. Pabst had the best actor on screen with Gustav Diessl who had
first worked with him in Im Banne der Kralle (1921) and of course, in Pandoras
Box released ten months before White Hell and he is superbly focused
as the mountaineer Dr. Johannes Krafft who is haunted by the loss of his wife
on the mountain he cannot escape.
There are genuinely stunning views of the mountain ranges
and terrifying shots of avalanches which look far to close for comfort to Fanck’s
intrepid camera men, Sepp Allgeier, Richard Angst and Hans Schneeberger. There are
long sequences inside the glaciated nooks and crannies as men with hand-held
torches search for lost climbers, a grim, unreal underworld of fleeting
reflections, dark shadows and compacted unforgiving edges on which bodies would
crack. There are torch-lit rescue parties whose light floods through the
villages growing in intensity as the cause is joined: humanity working together
in service of the injured and possibly still living.
Then there are two thrilling appearances by World War I
pilot Ernst Udet whose bi-plane speeds through the valleys at first performing impressive
loops and dives and then in desperate search for three missing climbers during
which he flies as close to the ledge on which they cling as possible, props again
to those magnificent men with their whirring machines. You climb three thousand
metres, set your tripod close to the edge and then capture a plane buzzing
metres away from a snow-encrusted rock face prone to sudden stoßentladungen.
Of course, we always have to contend with Leni, the elephant
(in the room) but she is not the only one with questions to answer after 1933. Fanck,
Diessl and Pabst all had their own deals to make once their country was under
Nazi rule and yet our slide-rule judgements may now be passed too rigorously after
the facts, even as a new era of enabling complicity cracks the World order and,
influential American broadcaster Tucker Carlson says he cannot understand why the
Second World War was ever fought.
When this film was made the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche
Arbeiterpartei, formed in 1920 after a renaming of the German Worker’s Party, had
seen their share of the national vote reduced from 1924 to 1928 when they got
810,000 votes (2.9%). By the time of the 1930 election, they had jumped to some
6,400,000 following the global financial crash and would more than double that by
1932.
The party and its ideas were rooted in certain strands of thought
which can be seen in Fanck’s work with Bergfilm – a belief in physical heroism and
the natural beauty of the “pure” landscapes versus the bourgeoise cities. But,
you might find similar sentiments in Hollywood films of this era too, not to
mention British in fiction and fact with their determination to climb Everest
and cross the poles. The fascist’s
agenda was broader and could be all things to all men as they tried to lure
followers away from the traditional parties on the right and left. It was initially
an urban phenomena – the party being formed in Munich – but in the countryside
many were sympathetic to the idea of conflating the power of nature with the
power of the mind to paraphrase a warning from the very urban Immanuel Kant in The
Critique of Judgement (1790).
Siegfried Kracauer in From Caligari to Hitler (1947)
claimed the Bergfilm were “rooted in a mentality kindred to the Nazi spirit”
and it is true that Hitler was a fan and also that Fanck remarked to Riefenstahl
during the filming of The Holy Mountain (1926) how much the nationalists
would appreciate her performance: athletic perfection and beauty, daring and a will
to power.
This is something the actor, dancer and director recalled in
The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993) – made when she
was 90 years old – as well as being featured in Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl
(2024). If the former documentary was an attempt to explain her life in broader
terms than the eight years of her collaborations with the Nazis that never
reached a definite conclusion, the latter film, including an interview she gave
aged 100 and with access to her archives, has more focus on the 1930s but
leaves us little the wiser before then. She comes across as incredibly
intelligent but also sly and defensive… it’s a painful watch.
She was found not guilty of war crimes and “de-nazified” by
a French tribunal in 1949: designated a “fellow traveller” of, and sympathiser
with, the regime but not a formal member of the party. She fought the battle
for the rest of her long life a singular totem representing a society and
culture of unresolved conflicts before and after the events.
Once Hitler was in power, Arnold Fanck initially resisted
pressure from Joseph Goebbels to produce propaganda as he also refused to join
the party as many were pressured to do. He had changed his tune by the time of A
German Robinson Crusoe (1940), the story of a man who returns from
self-imposed isolation to a Germany with a “new hope”. Oddly enough, Riefenstahl, despite producing
the major works of propaganda, never joined the party and neither did Gustav
Diessl who appeared in the 1945 propaganda film Kolberg and never stopped
working throughout the period in Germany and Italy. His final film was directed
by Pabst and was The Trial (1948) about antisemitism and he died soon
after of a stroke, aged 49.
As for Pabst, there’s a new novel based on his life by German novelist Daniel Kehlmann, The Director which paints him as a Hollywood failure
who was so desperate to make films that he compromised himself to bits on his
return to Germany in 1939. Sounds sensational… but another version is that he
was caught in Austria visiting his mother when war was declared and had no
choice but to remain and work through it. Kehlmann’s characterisation doesn’t
sound like the director we know and who was once known as “Red Pabst” for his
anti-war films and social commentary such as in The Joyless Street
(1925) with Garbo and Asta Nielsen.
There’s complicity and self-preservation, but I’m not sure a
work of fiction* is the best way of analysing the actions of a real person
especially when dealing with a figure some know so well in creative terms.
Pabst made two films under the Nazis, both historical dramas, The Comedians
(1941) and Paracelsus (1943) and a third which was abandoned. After the
war, he made the above film in an attempt to show solidarity with the Jewish
cause and he also made The Last Ten Days (1955) about the end of Hitler’s
regime, Duel with Death (1949) about the Austrian resistance to the Nazi’s
and It Happened on 20 July (1955) about the attempt to assassinate the
Fuhrer.
We’ll never truly know where any of these people’s
sympathies actually lay but they are all a lesson in how people cope with
authoritarian regimes and opting out of your earning capacity is a simple
enough equation after the event but – let’s say it’s early 1933 right now – who’s
doing good work and who has got their heads down?
Anyway… back in 1929 it was definitely heads up for the
location shoot in in the Bernina Range in Graubünden, Switzerland as our
directors and their players climbed up to act out this tale of peril against
the stunning backdrops of those forbidding mountains. I enjoy Fanck’s films,
not just for the scenery but also the sense of actual adventure and the bravery
of the leads taking on the actual crags and scrambles. There were no stunt
people, the actors had to make the climbs and cower for safety as explosions
were used to trigger avalanches.
It was his foundational Der Berg Des Schicksals (Mountain
of Destiny) (1924), that inspired 21-year-old dancer Leni Riefenstahl to
get in touch with its pioneering director, who then featured her in The Holy
Mountain (1926) and The Great Leap (1927) in which his lens sees her
climb and dance her way up the mountains in a celebration of vitality and
spirit. In The White Hell of Pitz Palü she is called upon to act a lot more
and Pabst brings out her best work in this respect although it certainly helps
to have better actors to react to than the granite-faces Luis Trenker star of
so many Fanck films (and who dodged the interventions of Goebbels by moving to
Italy in 1940).
The story begins with Dr. Johannes on the north face of Piz
Palü with his new wife Maria (Mizzi Götzel) along with their friend, Bergführer
Spring (Swiss mountain guide Christian Klucker who does a good job on the
acting front). Diessl’s vibrancy conveys the confidence of well-seasoned
climbers yet fear soon overtakes them as an avalanche sparked by the regions
vicious föhn winds, leads to Maria falling as the rope Johannes so confidently
grasped, snaps and she is lost to the frozen caverns below.
Time passes and another young couple, Maria Maioni (Riefenstahl)
and her fiancé Hans Brandt (Ernst Petersen), arrive at the Diavolezza-Hütte
overlooking the mountain range with Pitz Palü, elevation 3,899 m (12,792 ft)
imposing in the centre. The Hutte is still there and has been expanded from the
basics of 1929 but still comfort enough for Maria and Hans. Their pilot pal Udet
flies his biplane overhead to celebrate their engagement holiday and drops a
bottle of champagne via parachute.
They are joined by an almost wordless Johannes who has spent
the last four years searching for Maria’s body on the mountain. Maria is drawn
to him, sensing his pain, and he finally melts and tells all as she holds his
hands in the hut. Bergführer Spring arrives and tells them that a group of
students will be attempting to climb the north face the next day, Johanne
resolves to try again to beat them to it and, after hearing that this is no
climb to attempt on your own, Hans agrees to join him. As they set off, Maria
joins them following on skis, not wanting to miss out on the adventure.
At first things go to plan but then, needing to prove
himself in the face of Maria’s wandering gaze, Hans insists on leading only to
be swept away by a sudden avalanche. Johannes rescues him a great cost,
breaking his leg as the three become stranded on an icy ledge. The students are
less fortunate as all are consumed by the mass of snow and fall to their doom
in the glacier.
Bergführer Spring finds the note made in the hut’s climbing
log and sets off to find them as well as the missing students and after being
forced back by a blizzard created by those föhn winds, he calls the village out
to help in the search and thus begins Fanck’s epic depiction of the night time
mobilisation of the search and rescue team. The mountain is huge and the
conditions get worse, finding anyone alive over this vast area is going to be
unlikely and yet Johannes and Maria cling to life even as Hans goes mad with
the strain. It’s a race against time and the limits of human endurance: mind
over mountain?
There’s a vast difference between making Triumph of the
Will thereby playing a major part in creating, not just promoting the Nazi
visual aesthetic and continuing to work in a cinema industry under Goebbels’
control. There’s also a difference in working conditions once the war had
started and the madness truly set in. To paraphrase Naomi Klein**, you don’t
have to wait for the genocidal endgame to call out fascistic behaviours as they
develop and in terms of enabling the regime Leni has a lot more to answer for
than her three main collaborators on this film.
For The White Hell of Pitz Palü, the adventure was surely
less political than philosophical and certainly more commercial than both. You
also start wondering how John Ford or DeMille would have been viewed had they
been making films in Weimar Germany at this time or how their films would be
viewed had post-Depression America gone bad. But sure, ignore History at your
peril.
*A different perspective on Pabst is offered by the documentary Pandora’s Legacy (2024) made with contributions from the director’s
family and focusing also on his wife Trude. A new biography is also in the
works again with the family’s co-operation. And yes, I am reading The
Director which has Pabst’s two sons merged into a third fictitious
character who joins the Hitler Youth… judgement reserved till completion though…
but it’s not looking good.
Pandora’s Legacy is available through the True Story website
– link here.
It describes Pabst as the founder of realism in German
cinema and he certainly deserves more credit than he’s getting.
**Naomi Klein’s new book written with Astra Taylor, End
Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World is out now and available
from all good bookshops and the very best are independent!!
The Diavolezza-Hütte still overlooks Pitz Palü...
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