Item #: 9043DVD Category: SILENT Format: DVD MPAA Rating: U

Woolly Rating: 5/10 (42 votes)

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KEVIN RAYBURN

Oct 2, 2003 @ 11:24:35

Monumentalism, Nazism and More
This is not the Alejandro Jodorowsky film, but a 1926 silent drama starring Leni Riefenstahl and directed by Dr. Arnold Fanck, the “father” of a genre unique to German cinema known as the “mountain film.” First, this Kino DVD derives from a superb restored print. It is very easy to watch and the tints are all beautiful and the images sharp. The only other mountain film I’d seen before was the 1929 “White Hell of Pitz Palu,” also starring Riefenstahl and directed by Fanck. On balance, “The Holy Mountain,” the first of these films, is the better movie. In his famous analyis of German cinema, “From Caligari to Hitler,” Siegfried Kracauer writes much about the significance of the mountain film and how these lyrical adventure epics embodied many of the ideals of Nazism, including a pseudo-religious mysticism related to nature, especially its monumental aspects as symbolized by the Alps. This sort of thing is piled on quite thick in “the Holy Mountain,” and in the film we get some revealing evidence that Riefenstahl was very much a part of pushing a philosophy that she was clever at denying in her later life. We also see many of the techniques she would hone in the films she directed in the 1930s: “The Blue Light,” “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia.” Slow-motion, a novelty at the time, is used in the opening shots of “Holy Mountain,” as Riefenstahl cavorts about on rocks amid the spray from crashing ocean waves in Isadora-Duncan like Dionysian fashion. This poetic sequence is one of several visually stunning moments throughout the film. This child of the sea, we later learn, is a professional dancer longing to find her dream man, who she sees in visions as standing atop an “imposing pinnacle of the highest mountain.” There’s much in the film for Freudians to savor as the inevitable tragic love triangle develops. But this love match is doomed, as we find out from a prophetic old woman: “the sea and the stone can never be wed.” Perfectly nonsensical Wagnerian mythological hooey that Germans apparently ate up. The film is full of lovely visions and images: icicles dangling from pine needles, skiers backlighting snow-covered trees with torches and trailing smoke at night, yawning chasms, flower haired Alpine maidens and children, mists covering Alpine crags and good special effects from the masters at the UFA studio – including an impressive ice cathedral fantasy. The central portion of the film is an excitingly shot and edited cross-country ski race down the mountain. Again, we can see some of the inspiration for the sporting scenes in Riefenstahl’s “Olympia.” There’s even a huge olympic torch in the ice church fantasy scene, which proceeds to explode – prophetic in terms of the story, but even more ironically forward looking to the destruction of Nazism (and the famous explosion of the giant Nuremburg swastika). In the end, there’s an exciting mountain rescue attempt in which Riefenstahl beseeches the skiers (“Who among you…?”) to join the common cause to save the stranded mountain climbers. It sounds like an appeal to the national German will. By the end, we are told by Leni’s character that: “Among us, the greatest attribute is loyalty.” She’s talking about the mountain people, but at right-wing UFA studios, the reference is meant to stir the German people as a whole. I was prepared to be bored by “The Holy Mountain,” and instead found myself completely immersed in its images and action. This was a pleasant surprise, with many historical and political fascinations as a bonus. ***THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1926) review c. 2003 by Kevin Rayburn

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