15 July 2024, Monday
Der heilige Berg, Director: Arnold Fanck, Weimar Republic, 1926, 106 min., silent film, German and Lithuanian subtitles
Dr Arnold Fanck is virtually unknown today, even in his native Germany, and is rarely mentioned in textbooks on film history. Yet he is one of the most colourful figures of early German cinema. In the interwar period, when German cinema was known for its expressionist works, Fanck created and popularised a unique film genre, the so-called mountain films, and thus initiated one of the first movements of realism in cinema.
One of his most famous works, “The Holy Mountain”, tells the story of Diotima (Leni Riefenstahl, who made her film debut here), a charming dancer who searches for the man of her dreams in a small mountain village. There she meets a reclusive mountaineer and his friend, the skier, who pursue their own ideals amidst the breathtaking beauty and treacherous dangers of the Alps. Soon the men begin to compete for Diotima’s attention, and clouds of tragedy loom over the majestic mountain peaks.
In the film “The Holy Mountain”, Fanck introduced a female character into the world of his previously exclusively male-dominated films for the first time and symbolically juxtaposed the masculine and the feminine by visually linking them to the mountains and the sea respectively. Without realising it, he was also laying the foundations for a visual aesthetic in cinema that would later be eagerly taken up by the National Socialist ideology that was still maturing at the time.
With live scoring by Viktoras Orestas Vagusevičius.