The Return of the Bergfilm: Nordwand (2008) and Nanga Parbat (2010)

In the past decades, feature films on mountain climbing have enjoyed a steady if inconsistent popularity. In Hollywood cinema, mountains have served as a convenient backdrop for action films and spy thrillers, from The Mountain (1956) to The Eiger Sanction (1975) to the more recent Cliffhanger (1993) and Vertical Limit (2000). Compared to the multitude of these Hollywood productions, German postwar films featuring mountains and mountain climbers have been sparse. This is perhaps not surprising if one considers the difficult legacy of Germany's once illustrious Bergslm of the 1920s and 1930s, which was hailed for the skillful camerawork of its directors and on-location shooting and condemned for its propagation of Nazi ideals. While the Nazis readily adopted the notion of Alpine Heimat as a pastoral antipode to Berlin, celebrating daring mountain feats, in the late 1940s and 1950s filmmakers struggled with the stigma of the Bergslm. In his documentary Nanga Parbat 1953, for instance, director Hans Ertl portrays the postwar GermanAustrian expedition culminating in Hermann Buhl's first ascent of the 8,126-meter peak as distinctly different from the previous Nazi-sponsored missions on the mountain, yet the film perpetuates the visual language of the Bergslm as well as some of the ideological messages of Ertl's films under the Nazi regime, as Harald Hobusch elucidates.1The postwar Heimatfilm also sought to capitalize on the visual appeal and simplistic morality of the Bergslm. Harald Reinl, who like Ertl learned his craft under Arnold Fanck, incorporated Bergfilm-tlements such as dramatic backlighting and torchlight scenes into Bergkristall (1949), one of the first successful Heimatfilme? Johannes von Moltke's landmark study, No Place Like Home, has shed light on the continuities between the two genres, both in terms of personnel and the anti-modern emphasis that Moltke traces from the Alpine novels of Ludwig Ganghofer to Bergslme and, finally, Heimatfilme, many of them adaptations of Ganghofer novels (see Moltke 37-69). Yet both genres seem firmly anchored in their place and time, losing much of their allure in the politically-charged decades of the 1960s and 1970s.Mourning the loss of Germany's distinct filmic tradition, Werner Herzog, the doyen of German cinema, asked in 1985:Warum beispielsweise gibt es in Deutschland keine Heimatfilme mehr? Warum gibt es keine Bergfilme mehr? Das ist letztlich nicht logisch, nicht eindeutig erklarbar. Trotzdem ist es naturlich schon, das wir in unserem Kulturbereich ein oder zwei spezifische Genres entwickelt haben und die sollten eigentlich nicht wegsterben. (66)Herzog's own efforts to save the Bergfilm, however, were not successful. After his television documentary about Reinhold Messner's and Hans Kammerlander's traversal of two 8,000-meter peaks in the Karakoram, Gasherbrum: Der leuchtende Berg (1984), Herzog continued the collaboration with Messner in the commissioned feature film, Cerro Torre: Schrei aus Stein (1991).3 But with its garbled setup, overdrawn plot, and bad acting, the film failed to interest both the critics and the public. As recently as 2002, Robert von Dassanowsky concluded, "Der Bergfilm ist noch nicht als wichtige Gattung im heutigen amerikanischen oder gar europaischen Film zuruckgekehrt. Nichtsdestoweniger haben zwei beruhmte Hollywood-Filme \_Clijfhanger und VerticalLimit\ eine Art Fortfuhrung dieser Gattung der FanckRiefenstahl Zusammenarbeiten der 1920er signalisiert" (114), finding further Bergfiilm-t lements in James Cameron's Titanic (1997). Though rightly pointing to the gap left in the Bergfilm tradition, Dassanowsky inconspicuously elevates Riefenstahl by writing Luis Trenker out of the Bergfilm tradition and ostensibly looking for a continuation of the so-called Fanck-Riefenstahl tradition.4All the more significant are several recent large-scale mountaineering features that have emerged in Germany. In this article, I focus on Philipp Stolzl's Nordwand (2008) and Joseph Vilsmaier's Nanga Parbat (2010) to suggest that both films hark back to and continue the language of the 1920s Bergfilm, as Stolzl and Vilsmaier strive to revivify this tradition while simultaneously taking distance from its ideological baggage. …