Although mountains have featured prominently in the history of cinema from its very beginnings to the present, the advent of
the mountain film is often associated with the Weimar cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. Arnold Fanck is typically credited with
having pioneered the genre and with having initiated the acting and directing careers of two important mountain film auteurs,
Leni Riefenstahl and Luis Trenker. Exploring the Alps from Mont Blanc in the East to the Limestone Alps of the West, from
Bavaria in the North to the Dolomites in the South, this small group of filmmakers has branded what is commonly referred to as
the German Bergfilm.
Seminal for the current reception of the German Bergfilm was Eric Rentschler's essay Mountains and Modernity, which
decried the sparse and predominantly negative reception of the Bergfilm and outlined a number of productive research
perspectives. Since then, the German Bergfilm has been explored in a variety of contexts and disciplines, including art history,
gender studies, transnational film studies, and ecocriticism. The mountain film was found to not only stage central modernist
oppositions such as nature and technology or science and religion, but also to invigorate debates about modernism by drawing
attention to different facets of vernacular modernism that sat uncomfortably with scholarship that focused on the avant-garde
and auteurism (Baer). In art historical terms, the Bergfilm opened a new field of cinepoetic experimentation that combined
nineteenth-century iconography with constructivist aesthetics and brought together documentary and ethnographic impulses of
field cinematography with the affective landscape of melodramatic narratives (Prime). Frequently discussed in the context of
World War I, the mountain films offered an opportune setting to respond to the crisis of masculinity and renegotiate gender
roles (Schwarzer; Fisher; Schaumann). Finally, the popularity of mountain films reflects a growing tourism industry and
expansive developments of alpinism (Nenno; Rapp).

Quendler, Christian, and Kamaal Haque. Introduction: Beyond the Classical Bergfilm. Colloquia Germanica, eds. Kamaal Haque and Christian Quendler, 56, no. 4 (2023): 311 - 324.

Kamaal Haque is a professor of German at Dickinson College.

For more information on the published version, visit University of Kentucky's Website. https://mcl.as.uky.edu/colloquia-germanica

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