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ISSN 0010-1338 Themenheft: Beyond the Classical Bergfilm Gastherausgeber: innen: Christian Quendler und Kamaal Haque Christian Quendler und Kamaal Haque: Introduction: Beyond the Classical Bergfilm Kamaal Haque: Joining the Ranks: Arnold Fanck’s Later Films Daniel Winkler und Andreas Ehrenreich: The Primetime Television Series Luftsprünge (1969-70): Luis Trenker and Transnational Bergfernsehen Caroline Schaumann: Reframing the Bergfilm: Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) Christian Quendler: From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley: Imaging the Alps at the Crossroads of the Heimat Genre narr.digital Band 56 Band 56 Heft 4 Harald Höbus ch, Rebeccah Dawson (Hr sg.) C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a t i o n a l e Z e i t s c h r i f t f ü r G e r m a n i s t i k C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a ti o n a l e Z e it s c h r ift f ü r G e r m a n i s ti k Die Zeitschrift erscheint jährlich in 4 Heften von je etwa 96 Seiten. Abonnementpreis pro Jahrgang: € 138,00 (print)/ € 172,00 (print & online)/ € 142,00 (e-only) Vorzugspreis für private Leser € 101,00 (print); Einzelheft € 45,00 (jeweils zuzüglich Versandkosten). Bestellungen nimmt Ihre Buchhandlung oder der Verlag entgegen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, Postfach 25 60, D-72015 Tübingen, Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97 11 · eMail: info@narr.de Aufsätze - in deutscher oder englischer Sprache - bitte einsenden als Anlage zu einer Mail an hhoebu@uky.edu oder bessdawson@uky.edu (Prof. Harald Höbusch oder Prof. Rebeccah Dawson, Division of German Studies, 1055 Patterson Office Tower, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0027, USA). Typoskripte sollten nach den Vorschriften des MLA Style Manual (2008) eingerichtet sein. Sonstige Mitteilungen bitte an hhoebu@uky.edu © 2023 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Alle Rechte vorbehalten/ All Rights Strictly Reserved Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 0010-1338 Die Herausgeber Prof. Dr. Till Dembeck (Université du Luxembourg) Prof. Dr. Rolf Parr (Universität Duisburg-Essen) In der literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Forschung ist das Interesse an Fragen der Mehrsprachigkeit in jüngerer Zeit international gestiegen. Das schließt an einen Trend an, der in der sprachwissenschaftlichen Forschung schon länger zu beobachten ist. Die Grenzen der ehemaligen Nationalphilologien werden unter Stichworten wie Hybridität, Inter- und Transkulturalität zunehmend geöffnet. Zu konstatieren ist dabei auch eine gesteigerte methodische und theoretische Eigenständigkeit philologischer oder kulturphilologischer Ansätze, die sich durch eine besondere Aufmerksamkeit für das Zusammenwirken von unterschiedlichen Formen sprachlicher Varianz in konkreten Texten auszeichnen. Dem damit sich konstituierenden Feld einer literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Mehrsprachigkeitsforschung bietet die Reihe einen Publikationsort. Dies geschieht auch mit dem Ziel, die vielfältige Forschung auf diesem Gebiet an einem Ort sichtbar zu machen und so den weiteren wissenschaftlichen Austausch zu fördern. Ihrem Gegenstand entsprechend umfasst die Reihe die Einzelphilologien, das gesamte Spektrum der Kulturwissenschaften und punktuell auch die Sprachwissenschaften. Neueste Bände: Marion Acker Schreiben im Widerspruch. Nicht-/ Zugehörigkeit bei Herta Müller und Ilma Rakusa, 1. Auflage 2022, 332 Seiten ISBN 978-3-7720-8776-9 [Open Access] Áine McMurtry / Barbara Siller / Sandra Vlasta (Hrsg.) Mehrsprachigkeit in der Literatur. Das probeweise Einführen neuer Spielregeln, 1. Auflage 2023, 370 Seiten ISBN 978-3-7720-8783-7 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0)7071 97 97 0 \ Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97 11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de Literarische Mehrsprachigkeit / Literar y Multilingualism INHALT Heft 1 Themenheft: The Virulent Violence of Football in 20 th and 21 st Century German Cultural Production Introduction: Football and Violence in 20 th and 21 st Century German Literature and Culture Rebeccah Dawson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 1 kanonen kicken köpfen � Fascism’s Violent Victory in Ludwig Harig’s “Das Fußballspiel” Rebeccah Dawson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 5 East Germans Rehearse the Uprising: GDR Football Stadiums as Testing Grounds for the 1989 Revolution in Ernst Cantzler’s … und freitags in die “ Grüne Hölle ” Oliver Knabe � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 27 Mapping Spaces Beyond the Football Pitch: Football Fandom and Coming-of-Age in Philipp Winkler’s novel Hool Bastian Heinsohn � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 51 The Refusal to Sing: Affective Demands on Athletes of Color in German National Football Kate Zambon � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 69 Verzeichnis der Autor: innen � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 91 Heft 2-3 Themenheft: Below Genre: Short Forms and Their Affordances Gastherausgeber: innen: Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn Introduction Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 93 Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius Gabriel Trop � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 111 Mayröcker’s Drama of Association Florian Klinger � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 133 Case and Circumstance: Christian Thomasius and the Poetics of the Casus circa 1700 Jasper Schagerl � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 155 Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism Florian Fuchs � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 179 Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia David Martyn � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 197 Dashing Expectations Jan Mieszkowski � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 223 Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis Erica Weitzman � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 243 Stolen Time: Kafka, Work, and the Potential of Small Literatures Vanessa Barrera � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 261 Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung Jodok Trösch � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 273 “Minutendinger”: Romanphantasie in Rainald Goetz’ Abfall für Alle Arne Höcker � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 295 Verzeichnis der Autor: innen � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 309 II Inhalt Heft 4 Themenheft: Beyond the Classical Bergfilm Gastherausgeber: innen: Christian Quendler und Kamaal Haque Introduction: Beyond the Classical Bergfilm Christian Quendler and Kamaal Haque � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 311 Joining the Ranks: Arnold Fanck’s Later Films Kamaal Haque � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 325 The Primetime Television Series Luftsprünge (1969-70): Luis Trenker and Transnational Bergfernsehen Daniel Winkler and Andreas Ehrenreich � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 341 Reframing the Bergfilm: Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) Caroline Schaumann � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 359 From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley : Imaging the Alps at the Crossroads of the Heimat Genre Christian Quendler � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 379 Verzeichnis der Autor: innen � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 399 Inhalt III BAND 56 • Heft 4 Themenheft: Beyond the Classical Bergfilm Gastherausgeber: innen: Christian Quendler und Kamaal Haque Inhalt Introduction: Beyond the Classical Bergfilm Christian Quendler and Kamaal Haque � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 311 Joining the Ranks: Arnold Fanck’s Later Films Kamaal Haque � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 325 The Primetime Television Series Luftsprünge (1969-70): Luis Trenker and Transnational Bergfernsehen Daniel Winkler and Andreas Ehrenreich � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 341 Reframing the Bergfilm : Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) Caroline Schaumann � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 359 From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley : Imaging the Alps at the Crossroads of the Heimat Genre Christian Quendler � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 379 Verzeichnis der Autor: innen � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 399 Introduction: Beyond the Classical Bergfilm Christian Quendler and Kamaal Haque University of Innsbruck / Dickinson College 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). Reviewing contemporary scholarship on the Bergfilm , one can discern two lines of questioning that, to different degrees, have emphasized either transhistorical and generic questions or historically specific aspects (see esp. Horak). 312 Christian Quendler and Kamaal Haque One line of research focuses on defining the Bergfilm and on its historical continuities and discontinuities with other films and traditions of filmmaking in which mountains play an important role. The other reviews mountain films within different contexts of modernity and considers cinematic movements such as the Weimar cinema and its aftermaths� In this regard the classical German Bergfilm assumes a mildly paradoxical position. On the one hand, it is considered a defining moment for a genre; on the other hand, the Bergfilm has been studied as a film cultural phenomenon, in which different facets of the modern experience, in all its contradictions, manifest themselves. In other words, the Bergfilm has served both as a moment of generic integration and a site of cultural differentiation. Arguably, this ambivalent or paradoxical role of the Bergfilm is reinforced by a limited film canon, which is almost exclusively based on the works of Fanck, Trenker, and Riefenstahl� Although a great variety of approaches to studying the German Bergfilm have developed since Rentschler’s essay from 1990, the range of films and, as a consequence, notions of the classical German Bergfilm have remained surprisingly stable. Thus, in order to move beyond the classical German Bergfilm , it is necessary to revisit the locations and relocations that have shaped our understanding of it� Two constants characterize scholarship on the Bergfilm � A recognition for the cinematic achievements of Fanck, Trenker, and Riefenstahl is nearly always paired with a discussion of the problematic ideologic legacies of the genre� Siegfried Kracauer’s appraisal of the Bergfilm as a harbinger of fascist aesthetics has had a lasting impact on the reception of German mountain films. In his psychological history of the Weimar cinema, From Caligari to Hitler (1947), Kracauer famously interprets the clouds in Fanck’s film Stürme über dem Mont Blanc (1930) as a foreshadowing of Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens (1935), which opens with a shot from an airplane depicting Hitler’s flight to Nuremberg. Kracauer’s ambivalent attitude towards the mountain film is often resolved historically. After initially positive reviews, Kracauer, who was an enthusiastic mountaineer, criticized the mountain film as overly melodramatic and provincial. Rentschler has faulted Kracauer’s criticism as overly teleological. However, the idea that Kracauer completely turned away from the mountain film after incipient euphoria may be subjected to similar criticism� It seems more plausible that Kracauer opposed a particular direction or development of mountain films. The fact that Kracauer himself wrote a scenario for a mountain film lends credence to this reading. More than a hundred years before Felix Mitterer’s Die Piefke-Saga (1990- 1993), Alphonse Daudet’s picaresque novel Tartarin sur les Alpes (1885) turned the touristic and technological saturation of the Alps into satire� Tartarin is the Introduction: Beyond the Classical Bergfilm 313 victim of a tall tale, which claims that the Swiss Alps with their breathtaking scenery of glaciers and waterfalls are in reality artificial constructions operated by huge machines like the ones found in the basement of a Baroque opera house� About fifty years later, in 1933, Kracauer recognized the increased topicality of the novel and wrote a scenario for a film comedy that was meant to appeal to audiences not only because of its attractive mountain shots and spectacular climbing scenes but also because of an international cast (“Ideen-Entwurf zu einer ‘großen Filmkomödie’”; see also Esther 122—52)� Kracauer’s comedy runs obliquely to orthodox notions of the mountain film. Although films by Fanck (e.g., Der heilige Berg [1926]) and Riefenstahl (e.g., Das blaue Licht [1932, directed with G.W. Pabst]) sometimes included critical perspectives of tourism, these are mostly limited to misguided touristic encounters that deviate from ‘genuine’ or ‘proper’ forms of alpinism. By contrast, Kracauer’s scenario, while containing spectacular landscape shots, suggests a more radical critique that - in questioning authentic alpinism altogether - recalls the tradition of Jewish Anti-Heimat Cinema (Ashkenazi)� For Rentschler, Kracauer’s influential verdict is not the only reason why it took so long for film studies to rediscover the German Bergfilm � He also blames this on an auteurist bias in the film studies of the 1980s. According to Rentschler, the mountain film did not fit into the picture of the Weimar cinema that film historians like Thomas Elsaesser propagated� Although Elsaesser and Rentschler seem to concur in their assessment of the Weimar cinema as a highly heterogeneous and transitional period when conventional and commercial lines of demarcations between art and mainstream cinemas were particularly tenuous, Rentschler criticizes Elsaesser for paying little attention to the popular genres in general and to the Bergfilm in particular: The Bergfilm eludes Elsaesser (who does not deal with it), for here we find a cinematic praxis quite self-conscious of its double status as an artistic and a popular endeavor� Its appeal lay in primal nature explored with advanced technology, in pre-modern longings mediated by modern machines� This is a genre where visceral and visual pleasure meet, where the haptic and the optic are of a piece. It reflects all of the romantic motifs, specular obsessions, and narrative peculiarities which Elsaesser views as singular to Weimar film. And yet, it transcends any apparent dichotomy between art cinema and mass spectacle, operating as a genre with its special emphases in tandem with a host of contemporaneous possibilities� (150) When Rentschler quotes Elsaesser’s characterization of the Weimar cinema as one that “has never been particularly popular” and one that “has always been something of a filmmaker’s and scholar’s cinema,” he slightly misrepresents Elsaesser’s point (Rentschler 149; Elsaesser 81)� The heterogeneity of the Weimar 314 Christian Quendler and Kamaal Haque cinema makes it difficult to identify a defining feature: “The specific features of German cinema cannot be understood in terms of some essence, some typical national character or a particular obsession, but as the moment where in retrospect something became apparent” (Elsaesser 81). Ironically, Rentschler’s insertion of mountain films as a historically significant set of films that shed light on Weimar film culture is a case in point of such a retrospective moment. Despite his programmatic affirmation of popular cinema, Rentschler does not expand the canon but sticks largely to the Bergfilm auteurs Fanck, Trenker, and Riefenstahl. Seven years later, Christian Rapp canonized the German mountain film in his monograph Höhenrausch , in which he dedicated three chapters to Fanck, four to Trenker, and one to Riefenstahl. Rapp adopts Rentschler’s idea of the popular mountain film and reinforces it. His frequently quoted assertion that the German mountain film is the third most successful genre of the Weimar cinema is not only based on a narrow corpus but also on a secondhand report of a survey conducted among cinema owners in 1932 (Rapp 11). Once again, the restrictive canon of the mountain films posed severe difficulties in defining the mountain film as a genre. The same problem can also be gleaned from two popular accounts of mountain cinema that were published in the past two decades: Bergfilm: Dramen, Tricks und Abenteuer (2001) by Stefan König et� al� and Action: Let’s Climb! History of Mountaineering and Climbing Film by Roberto Mantovani (2020)� In the richly illustrated volume Bergfilm: Dramen, Tricks und Abenteuer , Stefan König argues for a radical expansion of the definition of mountain film to include all feature and non-fiction films, documentaries, commercials, and music videos in which mountains “play a role” (13, orig. “eine Rolle spielen”). For König, the mountain film is a peculiar genre that not only appeals to millions of people who spend their free time and holidays in the mountains, but also may itself be best understood in mountaineering terms: Der Bergfilm ist ein eigenartiges Genre. Spannend wie das Bergsteigen� Konservativ wie die fortgeschriebene Idee des Alpinismus� Vielseitig wie die Möglichkeiten, die das Gebirge bietet. Und egal, wie deutsch die Wurzeln dieses Genres auch sein mögen - der Bergfilm ist international. (13) In a way, König’s conspicuous affirmation of “the international spirit of the mountain film despite its German roots” encapsulates the dilemma of the genre’s history� While König’s statement bespeaks a post-World War II desire for international liberation, it contradicts the opening chapter on early expedition and travelogue films. Furthermore, the mountaineering standards also stand in contradiction to the programmatic expansion of the genre that goes beyond purely Introduction: Beyond the Classical Bergfilm 315 alpinist concerns. The combination of mountain film and tourism, which is the strength of König’s argument, is also reflected in claims of ‘authenticity’ that are frequently attached to the Bergfilm . However, the programmatic (and equally assertoric) demand for an all-encompassing definition of mountain film (as König puts it, “Der Bergfilm ist alles” [13]) met with little approval from other critics and scholars, who advocated for a more restrictive use of this label to differentiate between supposedly genuine and inauthentic mountain films (see Weinsheimer; Martin)� Even König himself speaks of “‘verlogenen’ Kletterszenen” (13) with regard to Sylvester Stallone’s performance in Cliffhanger (1993). In 2020, Roberto Mantovani presented a different history of mountaineering and climbing films in his book Action: Let’s Climb! Like König, Mantovani skillfully navigates past a narrow definition of genre. For him, “mountain film” is almost an extra-cinematic designation primarily aimed at mountain lovers. Nevertheless, Mantovani’s film history of climbing and mountaineering is very coherent and impresses, above all, with its broad, international spectrum. Notably, the chapter on Fanck, Trenker, and Riefenstahl, entitled “The Long Season of the Bergfilm,” does not seem to fully fit with the rest of the book. Mantovani admits at the end of the chapter that many of the films discussed in it are actually out of the ordinary for mountaineering and climbing history, but that they are well suited to illustrate the special presence of mountains in the cinema of the 1920s and 1930s (Haque). The difficulty to define mountain movies as either a film genre or an alpinist phenomenon can be read as an invitation towards an integrative approach that underscores the importance of mountains in life and on screen� 1 Mountain tourism is one important domain where ecological relations in mountain films are particularly evident. As Seth Peabody has pointed out, mountain films not only mark and reflect the growing tourism and the expansive developments of alpinism, but actively shape alpine environments (“Environmental Fantasies”). Fanck’s early documentaries, produced by his Berg- und Sportfilm GmbH , are illustrative cases in point. Das Wunder des Schneeschuhs (1920) and the visual “alpine symphony” In Sturm und Eis (1921), for which Paul Hindemith wrote the musical score, are programmatic endorsements of modern alpine tourism through images that reconcile modern technological imagination with the romantic nostalgia for pristine nature� Ecocinematic appreciation of mountain films needs to consider a wider spectrum of filmic encounters with mountains and thereby expand the canon of mountain films. Taking our cues from Kracauer’s scenario, they should include films that are critical of classical mountain films and their patriotic celebration of alpinism. Ernst Lubitsch’s satirical and grotesque films Meyer aus Berlin (1919) and, above all, Die Bergkatze (1921) come to mind� Shot in the Bavarian Alps, Die Bergkatze turns classical mountain film aesthetics inside out. The 316 Christian Quendler and Kamaal Haque film’s visually most striking feature is the combination of natural setting and cardboard decorations� Poking fun at the German expressionist fads for painted shadows and backdrops, Lubitsch’s mise-en-scène undercuts the romantic fallacy that presents the environment as a natural expression of human psychological and affective states. Drawing excessively on Art Nouveau and modern graphic design, Lubitsch draws attention to the artificiality and absurdity of such “naturalized” views. The political ramifications of Lubitsch’s intervention are most apparent in his depiction of mountain people as the nation’s internal Other, which could not be more different from the pastoral ideal of an asexual and harmonious highland life� Modelled on an imaginary mountain or “Balkan” state, the mountain Pfiffkaneiro is home to an anarchic band of robbers that are practically run by their chief ’s daughter, Rischka (Pola Negri). As in Meyer aus Berlin , Lubitsch confronts the escapist fantasies of alpinist adventures arising from a lost war and gender crisis� Rischka’s liberation from patronizing romanticism is made at the expense of a devastating caricature of the military� She defeats an entire battalion in a snowball fight. If Lubitsch’s exoticizes the Bavarian Alps as an internal colony, Fritz Lang’s film Die Frau im Mond (1929) takes this escapist and colonialist fantasy to outer space. Often hailed as an early science fiction film, Die Frau im Mond may also be viewed as a delocated Bergfilm that brings out imperialist aspects of mountaineering by transposing the Alps onto the moon. Notably, Lang’s astronauts are equipped with and dressed in contemporary mountaineering gear and his lunar landscape bears a striking resemblance to iconic mountain landscapes such as the Dolomites, which makes the terrain of the moon otherworldly, yet strangely familiar (see Figure 1)� Figure 1: Strangely familiar-looking lunar mountains in Fritz Lang’s Die Frau im Mond (1929) Introduction: Beyond the Classical Bergfilm 317 Die Frau im Mond can be productively compared to Fanck’s Der heilige Berg not only with regard to the ways the films mediate loyal obligations and personal desire melodramatically through a love triangle, but also with regard to their constructions of modernist mythologies� Fanck framed Der heilige Berg with reference to Hölderlin’s Hellenistic vision of a New Germany that defies the increasing specialization and fragmentation of modern life (Quendler)� Although the protagonist’s vision of the mountain as a Greek ice palace remains utopian, the film’s final insert insists that it is a vision worth dying for (see Figure 2). As Peabody points out in a comparison of Fanck’s film with its literary source, Fanck largely drops the novel’s concern with mountain engineering and dam building, but his male protagonists are still introduced as an engineer and a student of medicine respectively (“Image, Environment, Infrastructure”). In Die Frau im Mond , the scientific aspirations and the fatal consequences of exploring the uncanny nature of an (extraterrestrial) mountain are also mythically charged and raise questions about the redeeming qualities of self-sacrifice (see also Baer 296). Upon landing on the moon, the scientist Manfeldt immediately sets out to search the lunar mountains for gold. In a cave, which looks as if it had been adapted by humans, he discovers at the beginning of an enormous gold vein a shiny humanoid figure that somewhat resembles the machine-person in Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Overjoyed Manfeldt touches and kisses the statue, but in an attempt to keep it from his comrade Manfeldt falls into a crevasse, where he dies buried by the golden statue (see Figure 3). According to Lotte Eisner, an earlier version of the script explained that the gold was left behind by an Atlantean colony� 2 Figure 2: Sacrifice in Der heilige Berg Figure 3: Death by statue in Die Frau im Mond In deand recontextualizing the Alps, films like Die Bergkatze and Die Frau im Mond respond to and contest a specific (national) appropriation of moun- 318 Christian Quendler and Kamaal Haque tainscapes� 3 The German Bergfilm of Fanck, Trenker, and Riefenstahl marks a distinctive shift from a transnational to a national outlook on mountains� Their films also offer a more positive depiction of both tourists and locals, who were previously often portrayed as decadent and backward respectively� Paralleling Luis Trenker’s rise as “the king of the mountain,” Leni Riefenstahl’s empowering roles alternate between the Berlin tourist who swiftly masters the art of skiing and the exotic mountain woman with superpowers� A key film that has not yet received attention in the research on German mountain films, but which can illustrate this change, is Nunzio Malasomma’s directorial debut Mister Radio (1924)� 4 Malasomma later collaborated with Luis Trenker on several mountain films such as Der Kampf um das Matterhorn (1928), Der Ruf des Nordens (1929), and Der Sohn der weißen Berge (1930)� Towards the end of his career, he tried himself at another landscape genre. His last film, 15 Scaffolds for a Murderer (1968), is a Spaghetti Western. The star of Mister Radio is Luciano Albertini, an Italian Maciste (or muscleman), who was a gymnast and also worked as a circus acrobat before making a name for himself in a number of Italian epic films such as Spartacus (1915), The Four Musketeers (1919), and Superman (1919)� Mister Radio was Albertini’s first film in Germany after a brief career in the United States, during which he completed the (now lost) film serial The Iron Man. Albertini’s career points to the popular and transnational contexts of the German Bergfilm � Following the French “serial mania” of the mid-1910s, Italian film serials featuring “strong men” ( forzuti ) made an international impact on popular film culture. Bartolomeo Pagano, perhaps the most famous Italian Maciste , who made his appearance as a slave in Cabiria (1914), had a successful career in Germany in the 1920s. Although Albertini’s career in the US was only of a short duration, Italian musclemen serials readily assimilated with their American counterpart and, as Monica Dall’Asta argued, contributed to “the formation of an international popular culture, with its repetitions, imitations, and cross-breedings” (305; see also Reich)� Mister Radio is a great case in point that reminds us that national popular film cultures are best approached in relation to their international circuits. Advertised as a Sensationsfilm , a commercial label applied to a range of popular genres including action, adventure, detective, and exploration movies, the film combined athleticism and acrobatics, eroticism and adventures, spectacular natural sights and technological feats� Albertini plays Gaston, a French engineer of aristocratic descent who lives with his mother on a remote cliff in the mountains, where he is working on an invention that uses radio technology to prevent train crashes. Although the film was shot among the iconic Bastei rocks of the spa town Rathen in the National Introduction: Beyond the Classical Bergfilm 319 Park of the Saxon Switzerland, the setting is framed as an Alpine (Bavarian, Tyrolian or Swiss) resort. The film opens with a touristic performance of the folk dance Schuhplattler at a luxurious hotel� Among the rich and equally bored audience is the banker Joe Swalzen (Magnus Stifter), with his daughter Marion (Evi Eva) and her chaperon Edy Duflos (Anna Gorilowa), a former cabaret dancer. On a climbing trip gone wrong Gaston will later rescue the entire family by virtue of his breathtaking acrobatics, which are effectively set in relief by the jovial yet clumsy local mountain guide (see Figure 4)� Gaston falls in love with Marion, who promises to help him finance his invention, but the deal falls through when it is revealed that Joe Swalzen had condemned Gaston’s father to death through a political intrigue� It was the wish of Gaston’s father that his mother should find exile where Gaston would never find out about his father’s death. This brings Edy Duflos into play again, who in the meantime has befriended Gaston’s mother� Edy wants to perform once more as a dancer in order to connect Gaston with an industrialist who could sponsor his invention� Figure 4: Gaston aka Mister Radio rescuing the Swalzen family The contrived plot of Mister Radio contains a number of elements that we also encounter in the mountain melodramas of Fanck, Riefenstahl, and Trenker, such as the figures of the engineer and the dancer that reinforce the urban and mountainous domains, or the notorious love triangle. However, the values informing the use of these plot patterns are strikingly different. For Gaston and his mother, the mountains are a place of social and political refuge� Gaston’s athletic superiority over the mountain guides also marks his opposition to the decadent alpine tourism of the new rich. Notably, the love triangle in Mister Radio does 320 Christian Quendler and Kamaal Haque not involve two rivaling males but a rejection of romantic love altogether� When the heartbroken Gaston tells his mother that there can only be one love, she simply tells him to forget about Marion and ask Edy to move away with them� By comparison, the mother in Der heilige Berg views the tragic outcome of the young love as the result of the irreconcilable nature of stone and water, which the engineer (Luis Trenker) and his beloved dancer Diotima (Leni Riefenstahl) come to embody� Whereas Der heilige Berg concludes with a near-death vision of the mountains as an impenetrable mythical counterworld, Mister Radio turns the mountain into a transnational site for all kinds of cinematic sensations that combine American car chase scenes with Italian Maciste acrobatics and depictions of the decadent cabaret life that has become a trademark of Weimar cinema and is captured best in the pragmatic mésalliance of an exiled aristocrat and a former dancer� Albertini’s circus acrobatics underscore this cinematic self-referentiality and turn Mister Radio into something of a missing link, showing in an insightful and entertaining way how the German mountain film has domesticated and ‘naturalized’ alpine landscapes� The local mountain guide we have come to associate with Luis Trenker is not the beginning of our cinematic fascination with the Alps, but continues a tradition started by foreign acrobats who found the Alps a sufficiently exotic setting. An expanded canon of classical German mountain films can also aid in situating both contemporary and current mountain films. The first contribution to this issue, Kamaal Haque’s “Joining the Ranks: Arnold Fanck’s Later Films” examines the three feature-length films Fanck made after he expanded his filmmaking horizons beyond the Alps� In S.O.S Eisberg (1933), Die Tochter des Samurai (1937), and Ein Robinson (1940), Haque argues, the mountain film becomes more overtly political� Siegfried Kracauer famously declared the genre as possessing “a mentality kindred to the Nazi spirit,” a tendentious view that has colored criticism of the Bergfilm ever since ( From Caligari to Hitler 112)� According to Haque, Fanck focused on more political themes in order to stay relevant during the Third Reich, especially in his final two films. Issues of colonialism, brought into the genre by Lubitsch and Lang, as mentioned above, also come into play as Fanck expands his filming beyond the Alps. Returning to one of the prime movers of the classical Bergfilm , Daniel Winkler and Andreas Ehrenreich examine Luis Trenker’s 13-epsiode television series Luftsprünge in its historical and transnational contexts� In their article “The Primetime Television Series Luftsprünge (1969-1970): Luis Trenker and Transnational Bergfilmfernsehen ,” they illuminate how the setting of the series in a ski resort hotel reflects the new economic reality of postwar West Germany and its changed values. At the same time, they argue that the series is saturated Introduction: Beyond the Classical Bergfilm 321 with continuities from the classical Bergfilm era, most prominently, of course, the media figure Trenker himself. As Winkler and Ehrenreich mention, in the postwar era Heimatfilme came to surpass mountain films in popularity. Indeed, many scholars have noted the roots of the Heimatfilm in the Bergfilm (von Moltke 43—49)� In the third contribution to the volume, Christian Quendler examines the Alpine Heimat by comparing the film adaptions of two novels: Wilhelmine von Hillern’s Die Geier-Wally (1873) and Thomas Willmann’s Das finstere Tal (2010)� Using the concept of Heimat as a delocalized place, Quendler views novels and their adaptations as art forms that can present a Heimat beyond its own borders� In the case of Die Geier-Wally , this means bringing a German context to an Austrian setting� In Das finstere Tal , the context is transatlantic; the film becomes an Alpine Western. Thus, the tradition of transatlantic dialogue that began with Stroheim, Lubitsch, and Wilder remains important in Andreas Prochaska’s film. The final contribution, Caroline Schaumann’s “Reframing the Bergfilm : Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014),” makes the case for a female mountain film. Focusing on time spent walking and living in the mountains, rather than striving to conquer the peak, the protagonists differ substantially from those of classical mountain films. Schaumann elaborates on the role of the Maloja Snake, a rare atmospheric phenomenon that can be observed in Sils Maria and is featured in both The Clouds of Sils Maria and in Arnold Fanck’s work� As such, this cloud formation provides a bridge from the classic mountain film to the present. Furthermore, like Mister Radio , The Clouds of Sils Maria continues the tradition of the international mountain film with a female star and her assistant crossing borders to follow the star’s work� The four contributions help to expand the scholarly focus on mountain films beyond the narrow emphasis of canonical productions, producers, and perspectives and offer alternative views on the genre. By doing so, the authors remind us that mountain films are not a chronological or geographical peculiarity but are present throughout German cinematic history and beyond� 5 Acknowledgments The research for this introduction was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (P32994-G)� 322 Christian Quendler and Kamaal Haque Notes 1 For an outline of such an approach that takes its inspiration from critics of the Cahiers du Cinéma see Klecker and Quendler, “Cinematic Figurations of Mountains�” 2 Our thanks to Johannes Vith for pointing this out to us� Alexei Tolstoy’s novel Aelita (1923) and Yakov Protazanov’s film adaptation may have been Lang’s sources of inspiration for this story line, which he developed more fully in Metropolis � 3 One may complement this group of films with the work of emigrant filmmakers: Erich von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands (1919), Lubitsch’s burlesque musical Eternal Love (1929), and, much later, Billy Wilder’s Emperor Waltz (1948), which negotiate a transatlantic perspective on the Alps. 4 Considered lost for a long time, it appeared in the collection of the Tyrolean distributer Waldmülller Alpenländische Filmzentrale, which the Austrian Film Museum acquired in 1983. In 2015, the film was shown at the Silent Film Festival in Pordenone, and in 2021 the German Film Institute and Film Museum completed a 4K restauration that was based on this print� I would like to thank Heidi Heftberger for drawing my attention to this film (CQ). 5 We would link to thank our anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions and express our gratitude to Anna Kofler, Stefanie Pörnbacher, and Hilde Wolfmeyer for their editorial assistance. Works Cited Ashkenazi, Ofer. Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape � Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2020. Baer, Nicholas. “Natural History: Rethinking the Bergfilm.” “Doch ist das Wirkliche auch vergessen, so ist es darum nicht getilgt”: Beiträge zum Werk Siegfried Kracauers . Ed. Jörn Ahrens, Paul Fleming, Susanne Martin and Ulrike Vedder. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2017. 279—305. Cronin, Paul. Herzog on Herzog . London: Faber and Faber, 2002. Dall’Asta, Monica. “Italian Serial Films and ‘International Popular Culture’.” Trans. Giorgio Bertellini� Film History 12�3 (2000): 300—07� Eisner, Lotte H. Fritz Lang . Trans. Martin Secker. New York: Da Capo Paperback, 1976. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Film History and Visual Pleasure: Weimar Cinema.” Cinematic Histories, Cinematic Practices � Ed� Patricia Mellencamp and Philip Rosen� Los Angeles: University Publications of America, 1984. 47—84. Esther, Leslie. Liquid Crystals : The Science and Art of a Fluid Form. London: Reaktion Books, 2016. Introduction: Beyond the Classical Bergfilm 323 Fisher, Lucy. “Enemies, a Love Story: Von Stroheim, Women, and World War I.” Film History 6�4 (1994): 522—34� Haque, Kamaal. Rev. of Action: Let’s Climb! History of Mountaineering and Climbing Film , by Roberto Mantovani. New Review of Film and Television Studies (Oct� 2022): n� pag� Web� Horak, Jan-Christopher. Berge, Licht und Traum: Dr. Arnold Fanck und der deutsche Bergfilm . München: Bruckmann, 1997. Klecker, Cornelia, and Christian Quendler. “Cinematic Figurations of Mountains.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 21�1 (2023): 1—18� König, Stefan, Hans-Jürgen Panitz, and Michael Wachtler. Bergfilm: Dramen, Trick und Abenteuer . München: Herbig, 2001. Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film � Ed. Leonardo Quaresima. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. ---� “Ideen-Entwurf zu einer ‘großen Filmkomödie’ nach dem berühmten Roman: ‘Tartarin sur les Alpes’ von Alphonse Daudet�” Siegfried Kracauer Werke � Vol� 6�3� Kleine Schriften zum Film . Ed. Inka Mülder-Bach. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004� 518—22� Mantovani, Roberto. Action: Let’s Climb: History of Mountaineering and Climbing Film. Milan: Club Alpino Italiano, 2020. Martin, Silke. Berg und Film: Kultur und Ästhetik von Höhenlandschaft im deutschsprachigen Film der Gegenwart . Marburg: Schüren, 2017. Nenno, Nancy P. “‘Postcards from the Edge’: Education to Tourism in the German Mountain Film�” Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective � Ed� Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2003. 61—84. Peabody, Seth. “Environmental Fantasies: Mountains, Cities, and Heimat in Weimar Cinema.” Dissertation Harvard University, 2015. ---. “Image, Environment, Infrastructure: The Social Ecologies of the Bergfilm �” Humanities 10�1 (2021): 38� Prime, Rebecca. “A Strange and Foreign World: Documentary, Ethnography, and the Mountain Films of Arnold Fanck and Leni Riefenstahl�” Folklore/ Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture � Ed� Sharon R� Sherman and Mikel J� Koven� Logan: Utah State UP, 2007. 54—72. Quendler, Christian. “Holy Mountain Hollywood: Hölderlin, Fanck und Herzog.” Heilige Berge - Berge und das Heilige. Ed� Monika Fink and Thomas Steppan� Regensburg: Schnell + Steiner, 2021. 161—73. Quendler, Christian, and Daniel Winkler. “Ageing, Auteurism and the Bergfilm: Olivier Assayas’s Sils Maria/ Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) and Paolo Sorrentino’s La giovinezza/ Youth (2015).” Journal of Film and Video 72�3/ 4 (2020): 73—89� Rapp, Christian. Höhenrausch: Der Deutsche Bergfilm . Wien: Sonderzahl, 1997. Reich, Jacqueline. The Maciste Films of Italian Silent Cinema . Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2015� Rentschler, Eric. “Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm.” New German Critique 51 (1990): 137—61� 324 Christian Quendler and Kamaal Haque Schaumann, Caroline. “‘In the Alp There Is No Sin’: Passion and Purity in Erich von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands �” Colloquia Germanica 42�3 (2009): 213—28� Schwarzer, Alice. “Leni Riefenstahl: Propagandistin oder Künstlerin? ” Emma 1 Jan� 1999� Web� 28 Sept� 2022� von Moltke, Johannes. No Place like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema � Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Weinsheimer, Stefanie. “Bergfilm.” Reclams Sachlexikon des Films � Ed� Thomas Koebner� Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002. 62—64. Wilke, Sabine. German Culture and the Modern Environmental Imagination: Narrating and Depicting Nature . Leiden: Brill/ Rodopi, 2015. Joining the Ranks: Arnold Fanck’s Later Films Kamaal Haque Dickinson College Abstract: This essay analyzes three later films of Arnold Fanck: S.O.S Eisberg (1933), Die Tochter des Samurai (1937) and Ein Robinson (1940)� Best known for the classical mountain films ( Bergfilme ) which he, along with Leni Riefenstahl and Luis Trenker, pioneered in the 1920s, Fanck continued to direct feature-length films through Ein Robinson . These films have been the subject of far less critical interest than Fanck’s mountain films. While S.O.S Eisberg , Die Tochter des Samurai and Ein Robinson are not classical mountain films, they all contain scenes that would fit in Fanck’s more canonical works. The three films also share a thematic element, namely that of an individual who initially chafes at the restrictions of a group, be it an expedition or a nation. Furthermore, the films show a process of politicization in Fanck’s oeuvre. As the popularity of Fanck’s mountain films declined in the early 1930s, he turned to more political themes in the hope of remaining relevant within the National Socialist film landscape. While S.O.S. Eisberg displays much of the Bergfilm genre transported to the Arctic, Die Tochter des Samurai and Ein Robinson range geographically farther afield and more explicitly take up themes of the individual versus the collective that resonate within National Socialist Germany. Keywords: Arnold Fanck, S.O.S Eisberg , Die Tochter des Samurai , Ein Robinson , National Socialist Film, Politics in Film Arnold Fanck is best known as the originator of the genre of the classical German mountain film ( Bergfilm )� 1 Among Fanck’s best-known works are Der heilige Berg (1926), Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü (1929) and Stürme über dem Mont Blanc (1930). Often working with the actors Luis Trenker and Leni Riefenstahl, both of whom became directors of mountain film themselves, Fanck pioneered a cinema of atmospheric images, on-location action sequences and, quite frankly, melodramatic plots� Fanck’s popularity and acclaim as director were at their height around 1930. Lesser known are the films he made afterwards. This essay 326 Kamaal Haque analyzes three later films directed by Arnold Fanck: S.O.S Eisberg (1933), Die Tochter des Samurai (1937) and Ein Robinson (1940). Although these three films have been the subject of far less critical interest than Fanck’s mountain movies, they provide insights into the genre� In addition to containing scenes that would fit in Fanck’s more canonical works, the three films are also linked by a common theme of an individual who initially chafes at the restrictions of a group, be it an expedition or a nation. Ultimately, that man, for it is always a man, submits to the larger collective. Furthermore, the films show a process of politicization in Fanck’s oeuvre. As the popularity of Fanck’s mountain films declined in the early 1930s, he turned to more political themes in the hope of remaining relevant within the National Socialist film landscape. Broadly speaking, we may say that these films are transitions to other places and other forms. S.O.S Eisberg moves the mountain film out of the Alps to the Arctic, while Die Tochter des Samurai and Ein Robinson take it even farther afield. Die Tochter des Samurai also marks an overt politicization of the genre, while Ein Robinson transitions from the mountain film to the Heimkehrerdrama . I will first discuss how these three films reveal their mountain film lineage, before turning to the thematic issues of politics and the individual versus a collective� Although Fanck’s later films are not mountain films in the narrow sense, S.O.S Eisberg , Die Tochter des Samurai and Ein Robinson all clearly reveal their kinship to Fanck’s earlier work� In her study of Die Tochter des Samurai , Valerie Weinstein noted the film’s “manipulations and inversions of the mountain film genre” (39). This insight is applicable to all three of Fanck’s later films. Indeed, these three films may be seen as showing the progression of the genre in Fanck’s hands� S.O.S. Eisberg removes the mountain film from the Alps and transposes it to the Arctic while retaining the gelid landscape of many of the mountain films, which generally have glaciated Alpine peaks such as Mont Blanc or Piz Palü as settings� In S.O.S. Eisberg , set and filmed on location in Greenland, the high latitude of the Arctic has replaced the high altitude of the Alps� The vertical essence of mountain climbing has been replaced by land and water travel along a horizontal axis. Clambering over ice has, however, remained much the same and scenes of scaling a large iceberg and taking shelter in an ice cave recall motifs popular in Fanck’s earlier films. S.O.S. Eisberg uses standard mountain film shots to present the landscape. For instance, large icebergs are filmed as if they were mountains, with pan shots of their surfaces corresponding to pan shots of mountain ridges in the mountain films. Shots of calving glaciers falling into the sea replace the frequent shots of avalanches in the mountains, as well. Furthermore, the film shares the general interest in technology that characterizes the mountain film in general and Fanck’s works especially. The first shot of the film Joining the Ranks: Arnold Fanck’s Later Films 327 is a telegraph. Airplanes, once again flown by the famous Ernst Udet, this time supplemented by Leni Riefenstahl as an aviator, not only supply cutting-edge shots of the landscape, but also are key plot elements. Thus, the imbrication of modernity amid supposedly timeless landscapes that is so prominent in Stürme über dem Mont Blanc or Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü is present in S.O.S. Eisberg , as well� Beyond the continuity in cinematography and personnel from Fanck’s earlier films, the plot of S.O.S. Eisberg corresponds, generally, to one from the earlier mountain films: a search and rescue mission, this time not of missing climbers but of an unintentionally abandoned scientist left to winter over in Greenland when his expedition companions believed him lost in the arctic wasteland� In place of the local Alpine populace of the mountain film, the Greenland Inuit function in similar ways. After the German team’s rescue, the Inuit celebrate by raising and lowering their paddles in a synchronized display and then they demonstrate kayak rolls as signs of their paddling prowess� To the viewer of the classical mountain film, these shots look strangely familiar. Indeed, they are, mutatis mutandis, to be found in many of Fanck’s films, with skis instead of kayaks. The fleet of kayaks, filmed both as a group and then individually, resembles the scenes of group skiing in other Fanck films, either in races such as in Der heilige Berg or when the rescue party sets off in Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü . The downhill run of the vertically oriented mountain film is replaced by a journey over the water in the horizontally oriented S.O.S. Eisberg � Just as Fanck pioneered filming with a ski-mounted camera to show the dynamism of speed in his films, so too does he adapt this technique to his Greenland film, mounting a camera on a kayak to show the Inuit’s speed across the coastal waters� The kayak rolls parallel the jumps and sharp turns made by skiers that Fanck was so keen on capturing on film. S.O.S. Eisberg may not take place in the Alps, or even in the mountains, but it incorporates many of the conventions of the genre. Die Tochter des Samurai similarly features many elements of the classical mountain film. Indeed, Weinstein has noted the “strong resemblance between The Samurai’s Daughter and Fanck’s earlier films” (36). The film begins, and repeatedly returns to, an extreme long shot of Mt. Fuji rising over the rice fields. More generally, “Fanck introduces stunning shots of the Japanese archipelago, its harsh landscape battered by waves, typhoons, and earthquakes, and crowned by craggy, steaming and snowcapped volcanoes. To anyone familiar with Fanck’s work, his signature is unmistakable” (Weinstein 40—41). Like many mountain films, Die Tochter des Samurai features a romantic triangle, though in a sign of the inversion of the genre to which Weinstein has referred, in this film the triangle consists of one man and two women. Most significantly, mountain climbing plays an important role in the film. There is a 328 Kamaal Haque twenty-minute sequence (Hansen) towards the end of the film when the young woman Mitsuko climbs a volcano to commit suicide because she believes her betrothed Teruo is in love with the German Gerda Storm� After Gerda clears up the misunderstanding, Teruo rushes to the volcano, swims across a lake filled with dead trees from a previous eruption and climbs the peak in his stockinged feet. He reaches Mitsuko in time, and she can then attend to Teruo’s feet, which have become burned from the volcanic rock. When filmed in long shots, Teruo scrambling on rocks does not look much different than many scenes from the classic mountain film, since, after all, the volcano is a mountain. The volcanic setting allows Fanck new plot possibilities, however, that he did not have in his earlier films. Smoke from the crater stands in for the fog and even snow of earlier films and the heat of the rock replaces frostbite and hypothermia. Given a new mountain landscape - there are no volcanos in the Alps and Fanck never filmed on Europe’s Etna or Vesuvius - he adapted his mountain cinematography to the local mountain terrain� Like his earlier films, Die Tochter des Samurai shows an environment that is on the one hand timeless and on the other hand rapidly industrializing� Scenes of a steel forge with “Made in Japan” stamped on the product are highlighted, just as are scenes of rice being cultivated and irrigated in an age-old way with a foot-powered waterwheel. When Gerda arrives in Tokyo, she asks, “Sind wir in Japan oder sind wir in Berlin? ” to which Teruo replies, “Wir haben zwei Gesichter, ein altes und ein junges” (cf. Weinstein 42). Similarly, the clothing worn by Mitsuko is sometimes Western and sometimes traditionally Japanese� Even the title reveals the inherent juxtaposition of modernity and ancient tradition in Japan. Although the samurai were officially abolished in 1876, their descendants were still prominent in the 1920s and beyond (Blackford 122)� This mix of modernity, timeless nature and traditional culture is typical not only for Die Tochter des Samurai but the genre of the mountain film, as well. Ein Robinson: Tagebuch eines Matrosen also features Fanck’s typical mountain cinematography. In fact, Fanck initially planned to film only on the so-called “Robinson Island,” where the shipwrecked Alexander Selkirk served as an inspiration for Daniel Defoe. Having found it overgrown with vegetation, however, Fanck changed the script slightly to require his “Robinson,” a sailor named Carl Ohlsen, to travel through the Tierra del Fuego (Fanck, Er führte Regie 367—68)� This allowed Fanck the opportunity to film iconic mountain scenery including the Cuernos del Paine� Ein Robinson also thematizes the role of technology� For instance, a radio broadcast alerts Ohlsen to the return of his former shipmates to the island of Juna Fernandez, the official name of the Robinson Island. Although he lives an archaic existence, subsiding for years without even fire, once he receives the gift of a radio from a visiting German fisherman, Ohlsen can re- Joining the Ranks: Arnold Fanck’s Later Films 329 connect with the world and eventually leave his hermitage. None of these three later films by Arnold Fanck is a clear example of the mountain film genre since the focus of the films is never on mountaineering. Nevertheless, all three films reveal similarities with the classical mountain films, both in the cinematography of ice and mountains and in the crucial role technology plays in the films. Beyond the presence of mountains - or in the case of S.O.S. Eisberg ice - the three films, S.O.S Eisberg , Die Tochter des Samurai and Ein Robinson are linked thematically by the conflict between the individual and society, with the benefits of the large collective ultimately being extolled. This is different than the classical mountain film where the climbers either are separate or seeking to leave society and if there is a collective, it is either the climbing party or, at most, the climbing community (praised for example in the idea of comradeship among climbers prominent in Der heilige Berg )� This increased focus on the collective corresponds to the political climate in Germany at the time of these later films and reflects an increased politicization of the films. It is, of course, impossible to speak of the classical mountain film without mentioning Siegfried Kracauer’s criticism of the genre. Kracauer has influenced the reception of the mountain film in a way that few critics have done for other genres� His pronouncement in his 1947 book From Caligari to Hitler that the heroism of the mountain film was imbued with “a mentality kindred to the Nazi spirit” (Kracauer 112) has colored the reception of the genre for the past seven decades, even though a reevaluation of this view has been underway since the early 1990s (Rentschler, “Mountains”). With the films under consideration in this essay, however, the question becomes relevant again, because unlike the films Kracauer is criticizing, they were all released during the Third Reich. Fanck himself refused Goebbels’ entreaties to join the NSDAP in 1933, stating “Ich bin immer ein Alleingänger, war nicht einmal in einem Skiclub oder in einem Alpenverein� Habe sogar viele meiner Hochtouren im Alleingang gemacht - ich passe einfach nicht in eine Partei” ( Er führte Regie 317)� Fanck does join the Nazi Party in 1940 after Ein Robinson in the hope of reinvigorating his career, though that attempt is unsuccessful and he never makes another feature film again (Matthias Fanck). Of course, one did not need to be a party member to make pro-National Socialist films. Nazi film policy was quite sophisticated in allowing a variety of films with diverse content to be produced within certain boundaries as many scholars have shown, most prominently Eric Rentschler ( Ministry ). With respect to these three later Fanck films, we can say that the political presence became more pronounced and, specifically, the significance of the collective over the individual became more politically charged from film to film. 330 Kamaal Haque S.O.S. Eisberg , released at the beginning of the Third Reich, is comparatively apolitical. If there is a political message, it lies in the international cooperation that characterizes both the film’s production and plot. The opening credits prominently thank the Danish government for its support in filming in the Danish protectorate of Greenland. More importantly, the film emphasizes international cooperation in the search for the missing explorers� German radio operators are shown asking for help from Wilhelmshaven from “all stations north of 60 degrees latitude.” When contact is finally made between the missing expedition and telegraph operators, Fanck creates a montage of receiving stations from around the Northern Hemisphere relaying the distress call of “S.O.S. Iceberg.” These stations include German, French, Japanese and American receivers� The message here is that the search for this German expedition is an international effort. While the international community may come together to help rescue the expedition party in S.O.S Eisberg , the fact that the party needs rescuing is caused by the actions of one of its members, Prof. Lorenz. Lorenz’s actions are a theme of the film, namely that of the responsibilities of an individual within a larger group� Fanck argues in S.O.S. Eisberg , as he does more strongly in Die Tochter des Samurai and Ein Robinson , that the individual must submit himself to the larger collective� Towards the beginning of S.O.S. Eisberg , the viewer sees an entry from Lorenz’s journal, “Die Strafe ist zu hart.” 2 Shortly thereafter the other members of the expedition are shown at an inquest for Lorenz, whom the expedition members presume has perished. They, however, are presented proof that he is alive. He set out on a different route than agreed upon and therefore the expedition did not search for him in the right location� The expedition hastily returns to Greenland where they find Lorenz, though this time the entire expedition needs rescuing. When the leader of the expedition, Dr. Johannes Krafft, 3 finds Lorenz, the latter returns to the topic of punishment, “Schau, die Strafe war hart.” Krafft replies, “Zu hart, verdammt zu hart.” Lorenz feels he is being punished because he broke the rules of the expedition� He put himself ahead of his fellow expedition members by choosing to abandon the agreed upon route and travelled in another direction to the unexplored Karajak. Dr. Krafft makes it clear at the inquest that, as expedition leader, he is responsible for everything that happens on the expedition. When Krafft confronts Lorenz’s wife about the explorer’s unexpected itinerary, he tells her that Lorenz left “Ohne uns ein Wort zu sagen, ging er damals auf und davon.” He continues, “Von alldem haben wir euch zu Hause nur nie etwas erzählt, weil solche Eigenmächtigkeiten auf einer Expedition einfach unverantwortlich sind�” When Krafft learns from Frau Lorenz that Prof. Lorenz always had the ambition to explore Karajak, Krafft dejectedly declares, “Und ich hab’s bezahlen müssen Joining the Ranks: Arnold Fanck’s Later Films 331 mit meinem Ruf als Kamerad�” Comradeship is one of the principal virtues of the mountain film, a bond not to be broken as is most explicitly made clear at the end of Der heilige Berg . Krafft feels betrayed by his expedition partner and Lorenz feels that he has betrayed him� Fanck may declare himself an “Alleingänger,” but in his earlier movies and in S.O.S. Eisberg he stresses the need of the individual to submit to the group, a topic that has more explicitly political overtones in both Die Tochter des Samurai and Ein Robinson � Die Tochter des Samurai is much more overtly political than S.O.S. Eisberg � The former film was conceived of as a German-Japanese co-production. Its complicated production history has been well described elsewhere, but it is important to note that instead of two more or less identical films for the German and the Japanese/ international market, Fanck and his Japanese counterpart Mansuka Itami disagreed so greatly on the script that two independent films were created (Hansen 13—61). The political overtones of the film cannot be overlooked. By the time he directed Die Tochter des Samurai , Fanck clearly incorporated elements of National Socialist philosophy within the larger context of a Japanese family drama� This is a change from the less obvious ideological leanings of the earlier classical mountain films which, as their enthusiastic reception on both sides of the political spectrum shows, were not simply proto-Fascist vehicles as later film history occasionally makes them out to be (Rentschler, “Mountains” 142—43)� Die Tochter des Samurai was made at a time of increasing German-Japanese cooperation and shared worry over a common foe. In 1936, the same year Fanck is in Japan for filming, the German and Japanese governments sign the Anti-Comintern Pact. This agreement, officially known as the Agreement Against the Communist International, formed a German-Japanese alliance against “Communist subversion.” Since China at this time was not yet Communist, the shared threat was the Soviet Union� Teruo’s adoptive father refers most explicitly to this danger when he tells Gerda, “Es weht ein gefährlicher Sturm über die Erde. Für euch kommt er vom Osten, für uns bläst er vom Westen. Melden Sie Ihrem Lande, dass hier im fernsten Osten ein Volk wachet hier auf seiner felsigen Insel. An deren Mauern wird dieser Sturm sich brechen�” This clear allusion to Communism and to the Japanese belief that Communism will not succeed in Japan is the only direct reference to shared German-Japanese anti-Communist sentiment. Signs of German-Japanese comity, however, occur regularly in the film. Because of the film’s production date, these signs of Germany are signs of the Third Reich. On the ocean liner heading to Japan, Gerda and Teruo lounge in a room festooned with multiple swastika flags as well as multiple Rising Sun Flags of the Japanese Military� 4 Furthermore, when Teruo visits a Buddhist temple, swastikas abound in its decoration, and both the monk and Teruo are framed in 332 Kamaal Haque front of large wooden ones at various points in their discussion. Of course, the swastika’s usage in Buddhism and Hinduism predates National Socialist usage by millennia; nevertheless, for viewers of the film in Germany upon its release the presence of the symbol helps form a bond between the two cultures� Although flags and carvings certainly symbolize at least a tenuous political linkage between Germany and Japan in Die Tochter des Samurai , a deeper level of connection occurs at the level of the “Volk ohne Raum” discourse in the film. When Die Tochter des Samurai was discussed in pre-production in the pages of the Lichtbild-Bühne , the magazine notes, “Fest steht heute schon, daß das Grundthema des Films das Problem ‘Volk ohne Raum’ behandeln wird” (qtd� in Sierek 275 and Weinstein 41)� Although this is not quite accurate - as I will argue below, other issues are at least equally important - the portrayal of the Japanese people as a “Volk ohne Raum” is crucial for the film and a sign for the politicization of Fanck’s moviemaking, since this concept has by the time of Die Tochter des Samurai been in widespread use in Germany for a decade (popularized by Hans Grimm’s 1926 novel of the same name)� Already in the fourth minute of the film, Teruo describes Japan as having “eine harte Natur und so wenig Land für so viele Menschen.” A half-hour later, he is absorbed in his thoughts while staring at a globe� Broken from this revelry by Gerda’s teasing about his desire to return to Europe, Teruo insists, Nein, Gerda, ich bin Japaner und will leben für Japan. Aber schau mal, dieses Land Mandschukuo [Manchuria] ist doppelt so groß wie dein Deutschland oder mein Japan� Da gibt es neue Erde in Hülle und Fülle, die viel mehr Menschen ernähren könnte, wenn sie richtig bebaut würde� Aber dazu muss dort erst einmal Ordnung und Frieden geschaffen werden. Und das ist die Mission des japanischen Volkes. Wir müssen in diesen Ländern eine ungeheuere Aufbauarbeit leisten, und wir werden sie leisten. The visuals that accompany this speech reveal the colonialist and militarist underpinnings of this enterprise. As Teruo speaks of abundant land, we see timeless shots of crops gathered up and horse-drawn ploughs� As soon as he says the word “Ordnung,” the film cuts to images of modernity: a train followed by an airplane. At the word “Mission,” the military aspect becomes explicit: We see a corps of young men lined up in paramilitary uniforms ready to perform the “Aufbauarbeit” that is then shown in the sequence of construction images� Added to the sequence is a Japanese soldier on guard� The message is clear� Without Japanese military might and technical know-how, Manchuria will remain rural and underutilized, but it can flourish with Japanese settlement and development. Certainly, enough of the filmgoing public in Germany would be able to draw the parallels to the desire and alleged necessity to colonize Eastern Europe� Joining the Ranks: Arnold Fanck’s Later Films 333 Teruo will later bring his skills to bear on this newly colonized land� As we learn earlier in the film, Teruo had studied agriculture at a German university 5 and is thus ideally suited to be one of the settlers in Manchuria� Before Teruo leaves Japan for its new colony, his biological father utters a paean to the work of their ancestors. The voiceover states, once again, that Japan does not have enough room for all its people: “Das eine weiß dein alter Vater, dass wir heute zu viele sind für dieses Stückchen Erde. Wir sind zu viele, mein Sohn Teruo.” 6 During the voiceover, the viewer sees scenes of traditional rice farming in Japan. As soon as the speech is over, the film cuts to a very different landscape. Instead of flooded rice paddies worked by hand, we see the wheels of a modern plough attached to a tractor driven by Teruo� We next see Mitsuko with a baby in her arms, followed by Teruo once again on the tractor. This time, a Japanese soldier is visible atop a mound of excavated dirt, watching over the newly cultivated land. Teruo descends from the tractor, takes his new infant and lays him in a newly plowed furrow, saying in Japanese, “Become a child of the earth, too.” The final sequences of the film show the Japanese soldier keeping guard, first in a full shot, then, after briefly cutting back to the young family, in a close-up where his half-smile rapidly devolves into a serious expression of surveillance that Sierek has aptly termed a “Kontrollblick” (359)� The treatment of the individual versus the collective is as politically inflected in Die Tochter des Samurai as the national basis of that collective is stressed� The film repeatedly insists on the Japanese people’s need to expand beyond their island borders. Teruo, having spent years in Germany, has developed what he believes is a European sense of individualism� He chafes against his marriage to Mitsuko, expected by familial duty, and more generally speaks to Gerda of the “Verlockungen” that come to Japan from the West� When he visits the monk in a temple, his old teacher speaks to him of the wisdom of Shinto, 7 “Du bist als einzelnes Individuum nicht so sehr wichtig, denn du bist als solches nur ein kleines Glied in der langen Kette deiner Ahnen� Aber jedes noch so kleine Glied ist Träger der ganzen Kette und damit verantwortlich gegenüber dem ganzem, das vor ihm war.” This speech, which includes an appeal to the “Blut des Volkes” of Japan, has the desired effect upon Teruo. Upon its conclusion, the viewer sees him strike the temple bell and the next time he appears he is no longer wearing a Western suit but traditional Japanese attire for the first time in the film. Teruo’s visit to his old teacher, the monk who reminds him of his relative unimportance as an individual, is a turning point in the film, but what at first may be seen as simply the return to a Japanese mindset is much more complicated� First, the teacher praises the West “in ihrem ruhelosen Streben nach vorwärts.” The teacher does not disparage the knowledge Teruo gained in Europe; rather, he wants Teruo to understand that the young man is only a small part of his 334 Kamaal Haque larger society. This message resonates deeply with Teruo, but, the narrative of Die Tochter des Samurai suggests, not just because it comes from the Japanese monk, but because Teruo already accepted a very similar argument made even more strongly by Gerda in a sequence that occurs twenty minutes earlier in the film. Unhappy at the rigid social rules of his society, Teruo bitterly complains about having to marry Mitsuko� When Gerda tells him that he will have to relinquish his personal desires (“auf die persönlichen Wünsche verzichten”) and accept his country’s customs, Teruo is enraged and shouts, “Wie? Auf meine individuelle Freiheit? ” The equation of personal desire with individual freedom is telling. This is, after all, what Teruo has learned in Europe: the autonomy of the individual is paramount. He explicitly states, “Die [individuelle Freiheit] habe ich immer� Gerade das habe ich in eurem Europa gelernt�” Gerda quickly corrects him, “Dann hast du eben Falsches gelernt.” The viewer then hears a bugle call and the sound of marching boots� From the balcony on which Teruo and Gerda are taking tea, they can see a column of Japanese troops march past. Gerda poses two questions that force Teruo to rethink his view on personal freedom: “Hörst du, wie sie alle im gleichen Schritt marschieren? ” “Darauf steht die Macht Japans,” Teruo replies. “Und das sind lauter Individualisten? ” Gerda counters, receiving a shocked and then resigned look from Teruo. As unwilling as he may be at this point, he has begun to understand that the collective is more important than the individual� It is no accident that the military serves as adjunct to the process and that when he finally fulfills his potential, by using his European agricultural knowledge to help cultivate colonized Manchuria, the military power of Japan is reinforced again in the final sequences. Just as Lorenz had to learn in S.O.S. Eisberg , Teruo learns in Die Tochter des Samurai that one must submit to the larger society. Crucially, the larger society is one based on national identity. This is the difference between German and Japanese societies and the threat of Communism that looms in Die Tochter des Samurai: Communism is a collective beyond the national� 8 Similar lessons about the individual and collective will need to be relearned in Fanck’s final feature-length film, Ein Robinson . Sailor Carl Ohlsen may at first leave a chaotic Germany for a hermit’s existence but will later come to understand that service to the state is the greater good, thus continuing the trend of political positioning by Fanck in his later films. Ein Robinson: Tagebuch eines Matrosen was filmed in 1938-39 and released in 1940. The political messaging of the film is unmistakable. The SMS Dresden is the sole surviving ship of a naval battle around the Falkland Islands in World War I� Chased around Cape Horn by the “weit überlegenen” British naval forces, it manages to arrive in Chilean safe harbor. The British “eröffneten gegen jedes internationale Recht das Feuer auf die im neutral stehenden Gewässer Joining the Ranks: Arnold Fanck’s Later Films 335 ankernde Dresden.” The crew flees to shore on the island of Juan Fernandez, the so-called Robinson Island where Alexander Selkirk, the real-life inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, was marooned. Detained by the Chileans, Carl Ohlsen, whose diary entries make up much of the film, notes, “Wir werden von den Chilenen interniert� Sie behandeln uns sehr gut! ” One of the guards also tells the sailors in broken German, “Wir gut Freund Deutschland” as he brings them a newspaper with news of the German victory in the Battle of Jutland� 9 When the crew of the Dresden finally returns home, they are met not with respect but rather scorn; their return on November 8, 1918 is a time when the sailor revolts in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven mark the beginning of the wider November Revolution. The clear anti-British and anti-Communist tenor of these scenes is, of course, not only historically directed at Germany’s enemies from the First World War, but also meant to reinforce that the enemies have remained the same at the time of the film’s production. Ohlsen is unhappy in the new Weimar Republic; fleeing back to the Robinson Island, he lives alone for many years. When the German trader and fisherman Pagels discovers him, Ohlsen naturally wants to know what is happening in Germany� Pagels is not happy with the situation: Blöd tun sie reden, immerzu disktutieren, wie und warum und wie lange sie noch zahlen sollen, wie lange sie noch nachgeben müssen und wie lange sie noch ausliefern müssen. Tja, da dann einer kommt und [es] auf den Tisch liegt und sagt, “Jetzt ist Schluß! Jetzt haben wir genug bezahlt, jetzt haben wir genug ausgeliefert, genug gekostet! ” aber, nee, dat machen sie nicht. Dazu sind die viel zu … Ach, wat, komm. Pagels’ lament about the reparations and his desire that someone should come and say, “Enough! ” is, in the context of the Nazi seizure of power and the terror that went along with it, an apologist and revisionist defense of what will soon happen in Germany� Although displeasure at war reparations and the Treaty of Versailles was widespread in Weimar Germany, Pagels’ speech with its unspoken but clear hint at the cowardice of German politicians is a rhetorical attempt to justify the end of democracy (“reden,” “diskutieren”) and the replacement of it with a strongman (“da dann einer kommt”), who of course in this case is Hitler. This new order is shown at the end of Ein Robinson . Ohlsen, rescued by the crew of the new Dresden , has been brought on board to everyone’s astonishment as a “Deutsche[r] Matrose aus dem Weltkrieg�” When he is brought to the captain, both of them are amazed; the current captain was Ohlsen’s old Fähnrich zur See, Fritz. Fritz informs him that times have changed, “Du wirst Augen machen, wenn du nach Hause kommst. Es ist alles anders … Da steht jeder nüchtern auf seinen zwei Beinen� Jeder steht zum Ganzen�” While he says this, Fritz, in his uniform, walks over to Ohlsen, who is sitting bedraggled and unkempt under a portrait of Hermann Göring� Originally speaking to Ohlsen 336 Kamaal Haque directly, the captain turns his gaze at the beginning of the sentence “Jeder steht zum Ganzen” and addresses the camera frontally. Once again, the political message here of a new Germany cured of its Weimar era decay is delivered without any trace of subtlety. Similarly, the final sequence of Ein Robinson leaves no doubt as to the film’s message. A series of shots of various film sizes show parts of the new Dresden , ending with a long shot where a large flag of the navy of the Third Reich is shown at the ship’s stern. Drewniak’s description of the film as a “Loblied auf die deutsche Kriegsmarine” applies here (314)� While the sequences above are either overtly political or even propagandistic, a further level of discourse in Ein Robinson reinforces the idea of service to the greater good, namely the theme of the individual versus society present in all of Fanck’s later films, as well as the issue of colonization found in Die Tochter des Samurai . As in the former film, Ein Robinson makes it clear that the desired collective is at the national level� Ohlsen is disgusted with Weimar Germany� Before leaving to return to the Robinson Island, he pays a visit to his old midshipman, Fritz who tries to talk him out of his plan, “Bleib hier, Karl! Lass es dir sagen: Wir werden solche Kerle, wie du einer bist, verflucht nötig haben.” When Ohlsen is finally rescued from the island and reunited with Fritz, the new captain threatens - albeit teasingly - the hermit with arrest “wegen versuchter Fahnenflucht,” a charge to which Ohlsen notes in his diary “Fritz hat ganz recht gehabt! Er hat durchgehalten und ist nun Kommandant der neuen ‘Dresden’ geworden! ” Fritz has been promoted and given a position in the new navy� 10 The film rewards not abandoning one’s comrades. Ohlsen expresses a wish to once again be a sailor. With all hands on deck, Fritz as captain makes an announcement to his crew. It is, indeed, not “vorschriftsmässig,” but Ohlsen can join the fellow sailors� He then takes his place among them� This action of joining the ranks sends a symbolic message that a German’s duty is to his society and not himself. Ohlsen realizes the folly of his isolation, even though he had created a successful life on the Robinson Island� He returns to his countrymen to serve his country. As such, Ein Robinson can be classified as one of the Heimkehrerfilme of the time (Rapp 85)� While Ohlsen struggles at first as a hermit, once the trader Pagels brings him fire he begins a colonization of the island’s land. He single-handedly clears a forest both by chopping down trees and then lighting a fire to consume them. After a diary entry states that he has been on the island for eleven years, the viewer sees the farm Ohlsen has built, complete with hut and windmill. He now has alpacas, pigs and geese. He cultivates vegetables that grow to sizes unheard of in Europe. Having started out in a dense jungle, Ohlsen has literally created his “Platz unter der Sonne” that was the German colonial project. In this way, this utopia becomes a sequel to the imagined palace of ice in Der heilige Berg � Like Joining the Ranks: Arnold Fanck’s Later Films 337 that utopia, this one, too, must fail. Ohlsen is lonely and haunted by thoughts of his son back in Germany. When Pagels gives him a radio, the first transmission he hears is a program for missing World War soldiers, “Kamerad, wo bist du? ” At that point he wishes to end his isolated existence. The film thus suggests that a loyal German can succeed as a colonist, but, alas, no man is an island. For the system to work, Ohlsen must work with his fellow countrymen. He must learn to rejoin the ranks. Thus, Ohlsen returns to his ship and country and the film ends very differently than Die Tochter des Samurai where the colonization is state-sanctioned� Confronted with their work during the 1930’s, the directors of the Bergfilm repeatedly insisted on either its strict apoliticality or even its subversive nature� While Kracauer overstated the ideological imprint of the films at the genre’s highpoint, critics have rightly long found Luis Trenker’s and Leni Riefenstahl’s denials of National Socialist tendencies in their works suspect. Fanck has avoided such scrutiny, mostly because his films made during the Third Reich were not as successful as his earlier films - a situation different from those of Trenker and Riefenstahl. Like Riefenstahl, Fanck consistently claimed to have made apolitical films. His statement about not belonging to a ski club, let alone a political party, is often repeated� Yet as my analysis of S.O.S. Eisberg , Die Tochter des Samurai and Ein Robinson shows, Fanck’s films did indeed become increasingly political over the mid-1930s, culminating in 1940’s Ein Robinson with its overtly martial and “Heim ins Reich” propaganda. Like all but the most propagandist National Socialist film productions, however, the ideology in these Fanck films is generally not blatant ( Ein Robinson is the exception). At the same time, these later Fanck films did not represent a break in the mountain film tradition; rather, Fanck reworked his old themes in new settings� By telling stories of men who need to learn to subsume their goals into larger projects, the viewer is shown that it is the collective, not the individual, that counts. Thus Prof. Lorenz suffers the consequences of exploring on his own in S.O.S. Eisberg � Teruo is unhappy with his situation until he accepts the traditional familial and social obligations in Die Tochter des Samurai � Carl Ohlsen leaves his hermit existence and returns to where he belongs, among the ranks of his fellow naval seaman. Fanck and, later, his grandson have always claimed that Ein Robinson is an anomaly in the oeuvre� Fanck was not given free reign over the production and had to make a propagandistic film. Regardless of any restrictions put upon the film’s production, Ein Robinson is simply a continuation of a politization process that began with S.O.S. Eisberg and continued in Die Tochter des Samurai . Indeed, at the end of his life, Fanck considered this film his greatest: “Nach meinem eigenen Urteil war dieser Japanfilm das Schönste, was ich geschaffen habe. Ich wüßte auch keinen deutschen Film, der ein so begeistertes Echo bei der Kritik 338 Kamaal Haque gefunden hätte ( Er führte Regie 363). He is saddened that the film is not shown on television and claims that patriotism is not acceptable in 1970’s Germany� In particular, he mocks television executives for their reaction to the final scenes of Die Tochter des Samurai � Teruo and his new family in the newly ploughed land engender the following thoughts from “unsere[n] Programmdirektoren des Fernsehens: ‘Blut und Boden’! So etwas darf man dem deutschen Publikum nicht zeigen“ ( Er führte Regie 364)� This quote shows that Fanck understands the political context of his film, even if he is unwilling to accept that this context means the film cannot be shown in postwar Germany. Die Tochter des Samurai is not an innocent quest for Japanese authenticity, as Fanck elsewhere suggests, but rather a portrayal of a colonizing family and, by extension, the extolment of one nation over another ( Er führte Regie 341, 343). Fanck may claim to be apolitical, but his later feature films reveal that he, like seaman Ohlsen, not only wishes to join the ranks, but that he does indeed do so. Notes 1 The first draft of this essay was written during the time of closed libraries because of the coronavirus epidemic� While my college’s interlibrary loan department provided many needed sources, I am particularly grateful to my colleagues Alex Bates, Seth Peabody and Valerie Weinstein for providing material I otherwise could not have accessed during this time� 2 The English subtitles incorrectly render this as “The road is too hard,” having confused the handwritten “Strafe” for “Straße�” 3 This name will be familiar to viewers of the mountain film as the protagonist in Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü � 4 This was not the Circle of Sun Flag familiar to us today as the national flag of Japan, which was indeed in 1936 also the official national flag of Japan. The choice to highlight the military, rather than civilian flag, shows a more martial aspect to this film (Yoshida). 5 As Drewniak notes, “[H]ier bot sich die Gelegenheit, die hervorragende Rolle des deutschen Hochschulwesens zu zeigen” (836)� 6 The father’s monologue is in Japanese and is then voiced over in German� An English translation of both the German and Japanese in the film can be found here: https: / / archive�org/ download/ DieTochterDesSamurai1937The- NewEarthENFRSPRUSubtitles/ AtarashikiTsuchi1937.dvdrip.en.srt. 7 Somewhat incongruously, the temple where they meet is Buddhist, not Shinto. 8 I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this article for pointing this out� Joining the Ranks: Arnold Fanck’s Later Films 339 9 Both the English and Germans claimed victory, but the triumph in the Skaggerakschlacht, as it is known in German, became an important event in German post-war memory (cf� Götz)� 10 Ohlsen’s diary makes it clear that the new Dresden is part of the “neuen deutschen Kriegsmarine�” Works Cited Blackford, Mansel G. The Rise of Modern Business: Great Britain, the United States, Germany, Japan, and China . Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2008. Die Tochter des Samurai . Dir. Arnold Fanck. Terra Film, 1937. Film. Drewniak, Bogusław. Der deutsche Film 1938-1945. Ein Gesamtüberblick � Düsseldorf: Droste, 1987. Ein Robinson: Tagebuch eines Matrosen. Dir. Arnold Fanck. Bavaria Filmkunst, 1940. Film� Fanck, Arnold. Er führte Regie mit Gletschern, Stürmen und Lawinen. Ein Filmpionier erzählt . Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1973. Fanck, Matthias. “Vergessener Star: Bergfilmpionier Arnold Fanck.” Der Spiegel 11 Oct� 2015� Web� 10 Aug� 2021� Götz, George. “Remembering the Battle of Jutland in Post-War Wilhelmshaven.” Memorialization in Germany since 1945 . Ed. Bill Niven and Chloe Paver. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 360—68. Hansen, Janine. Arnold Fancks Die Tochter des Samurai: Nationalsozialistische Propaganda und japanische Filmpolitik . Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997. Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film � Ed. Leonardo Quaresima. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Rapp, Christian. “Im Banne der Politik. Der deutsche Bergfilm um 1930.” Bergfilm: Dramen, Trick und Abenteuer . Ed. Stefan König, Hans-Jürgen Panitz and Michael Wachtler. Munich: F.A. Herbig, 2001. 85—87. Rentschler, Eric. Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife � Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. ---. “Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm.” New German Critique 51 (1990): 137—61� Sierek, Karl. Der lange Arm der Ufa: Filmische Bilderwanderung zwischen Deutschland, Japan und China 1923-1949 . Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2018. S.O.S. Eisberg . Dir. Arnold Fanck. Berlin: Deutsche Universal Film AG, 1933. Film. Weinstein, Valerie. “Reflecting Chiral Modernities: The Function of Genre in Arnold Fanck’s Transnational Bergfilm, The Samurai’s Daughter (1936-37)�” Beyond Alterity: German Encounters with Modern East Asia � Ed� Qinna Shen and Martin Rosenstock� New York: Berghahn, 2014. 34—51. Yoshida, Takashi. “Why do Flags Matter? The Case of Japan.” The Conversation 13 July 2015� Web� 10 Aug� 2021� The Primetime Television Series Luftsprünge (1969-70): Luis Trenker and Transnational Bergfernsehen Daniel Winkler and Andreas Ehrenreich University of Heidelberg / Independent Scholar Abstract: Luftsprünge , a 13-episode television series from 1969-70, represents an early color series� The co-production of the Second German Television (ZDF) and the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) not only occupied a prominent broadcasting slot, but also represented a kind of high-quality mainstream program designed to meet the diverse expectations of transnational audiences� Alongside the young Tyrolean ski instructor Toni (Toni Sailer), 77-year-old South Tyrolean Luis Trenker plays the temperamental hotelier and ski school owner Hannes Kogler� In the area of tension between sporting pleasure and tourist work, the light-hearted series strategically brings together atouts from different generations, genres and media sectors. The analysis of Luftsprünge thus explores the question of how television adapts the genre of the mountain film. This adaptation process is closely related to Trenker’s notoriety. Due to his advanced age, he skillfully used the new medium of television from the late 1950s on to change his public image� Luftsprünge is a prime example of this strategy� We argue that the television series takes key elements of the mountain film and remediates the genre according to the advanced age of its protagonist, the affluence achieved in Western Europe, and the changing media landscape. The televisual reappraisal leads to a different mode of representation that deviates from the narrative concerns of the classic mountain film. While earlier mountain films glorified masculinity and self-discipline in the context of conquering pristine mountain peaks, what we call mountain television softens these outdated values by staging the Alps as a site of transnational tourism and tourist labor� Mountain television softens the inherent drama of the mountain film genre, replacing alpine life-and-death struggles with comedy and love stories between the slopes and the hotel� In Luftsprünge , the mountains are no longer conquered, but consumed by relaxed vacationers. Aesthetically, mountain television adopts the conventions of the conventions of the television play� 342 Daniel Winkler and Andreas Ehrenreich Keywords: TV series, “Bergfernsehen”, Tourism, Ski comedy, Heimatfilm, Hotel series, sexploitation The Austrian-German co-production Luftsprünge , a television series of 13 episodes with a duration of 25 minutes each, was broadcast from 1969 to 1970 every Friday evening on two TV stations, reaching an average of 21 million viewers on the West German market alone (Schaffner). A mere two years before shooting began in 1967, the era of color television had been symbolically inaugurated by Vice Chancellor Willy Brandt at the German Broadcasting Exhibition (Hickethier 213)� Since Luftsprünge was a color series at a time when color television was relatively new, the broadcasters decided to package it as premium content. The series, a co-production of the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) and the Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF), not only occupied a prominent time slot, but it also represented a kind of high-quality mainstream program designed to satisfy the diverging expectations of transnational audiences� Set against the backdrop of the socioeconomic prosperity of the 1960s, the series narrates the adventures of the employees and guests in a Kitzbühel winter sports hotel� Alongside the young Tyrolean ski instructor Toni (Toni Sailer), the 77-year-old South Tyrolean Luis Trenker plays the spirited hotelier and ski school owner Hannes Kogler. While negotiating sportive pleasure and touristic work, the lighthearted series strategically brings together stars from different generations, genres, and media industries. Our analysis of Luftsprünge traces the ways in which television remediates the Bergfilm genre� This process of adaptation is closely related to the stardom of veteran performer Trenker, who appeared in many roles in the Bergfilm cycle of Arnold Fanck in the 1920s and personally directed and produced even more alpine feature films in the 1930s, combining the Bergfilm with diverse genres such as the biopic, the historical film, and the Western. Due to his high-profile contributions to the German and Italian cinemas of the Fascist era, Trenker became politically compromised after the Second World War. Moreover, having turned 60 in 1952, his age became a major concern, given that his public image was still associated with athletic and powerful characters. As a result, starting in the late 1950s, he skillfully used the new medium of television to alter his public image and promote himself as a keen mountaineer and storyteller while omitting his complicity with the Third Reich and embracing his advanced age� Most of these mass media productions, often broadcast by Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), try to bring his homeland of (South) Tyrol closer to the (tourist) audience of the late 1960s, a period that was shaped by increasing prosperity and media consumption� The Primetime Television Series Luftsprünge 343 Luftsprünge is a prime example of this strategy� We argue that the TV series perpetuates key elements of the Bergfilm , transfiguring the genre in accordance with the advanced age of its protagonist, the prosperity achieved in Western Europe, and the changed media landscape. The televisual remediation results in a different mode of representation that deviates from the narrative concerns of the classical Bergfilm � Whereas earlier Bergfilme glorified virility and self-discipline associated with conquering pristine mountain peaks, what we call Bergfernsehen attenuates these outdated values by staging the Alps as the locus of transnational tourism and touristic labor� Bergfernsehen softens the drama inherent to the Bergfilm genre, preferring comedy and love stories over alpine life-or-death struggles� In Luftsprünge , mountains are no longer vanquished but consumed by laid-back vacationers. Aesthetically, Bergfernsehen adopts the conventions of the TV play. Before we dwell on its topical and aesthetic strategies, it is worthwhile to consider the way in which Trenker became a figurehead of the televisual genre� By the time Luftsprünge went into production, the South Tyrolean Luis Trenker, born in 1892, had already built a long and wide-ranging media career, which had taken him from Arnold Fanck’s so-called “Freiburg School” of cinematography to the media metropolises of Berlin, Rome, and Munich. As an actor and filmmaker, novelist and non-fiction writer, and a promoter for a range of products, Trenker had become a household name by the 1920s� He performed with Leni Riefenstahl in some of Fanck’s Bergfilme , such as Der heilige Berg (1926) and Der große Sprung (1927), and he collaborated with other Bergfilm directors of the silent era in features such as Der Kampf ums Matterhorn (1928) and Der Ruf des Nordens (1929)� Going back to early romantic landscape representations and Christian representation conventions, which allegorized the striving for divine knowledge on high, the highly experimental camera technology of the Bergfilm forms a complementary device to the consumer and everyday culture of modern metropolises of the 1920s. Allowing the audience to cultivate sublime, contemplative feelings without having to forego the melodramatic, the Bergfilm stages excursions to high mountain peaks with ice axes and ropes, dangerous falls, avalanches and rescue operations around athletic (savior) figures who strive upwards and conquer previously unexplored peaks (Rentschler, “Mountains and Modernity” 147—51). A few years later, after the wave of success of this silent Bergfilm cycle, Trenker began working on his own, more hybrid sound films, such as Berge in Flammen (1931), Der Rebell (1932), and Der verlorene Sohn (1934), as an actor, (co-)director, and co-screenwriter. Classic Bergfilm scenes, which include long non-narrative ascents and descents and static mountain and cloud panoramas, still played an essential role in his first successful films in the 344 Daniel Winkler and Andreas Ehrenreich 1930s, oscillating between Bergfilm and other genres such as adventure films set in the Alps and historical and war movies� Focusing primarily on mentally and physically virile, determined characters who often make the conquest of space in the age of European colonialism a goal in life, these films continue to aim for a mythical-sacred effect as they stage an allegorical visual language of the transcendental high-altitude landscape� Trenker assumed an important role in the film industry when Germany was rebuilt as a totalitarian state� Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels not only appreciated some of Trenker’s films, such as Der Rebell , but also met with the director to discuss his ideas about film art (Alt 6, 12). The filmmaker was entrusted with high-profile German-Italian state projects such as Condottieri (1937)� Despite his tight relations with the regime, Trenker was not a staunch Nazi but an opportunistic entrepreneur who seized the chance to make more films when he realized that the Nazis were interested in his topics and artistic approach. In the 1930s, Trenker fell out of favor with the regime because of his hesitation about the South Tyrol question and the national and religious ambivalence of some of his films. When his job opportunities diminished, he moved to Rome and sought to gain a foothold in the Italian film industry - a ploy that proved ineffectual and resulted in growing financial difficulties for the filmmaker (cf. Birgel; Daffner). After the end of the Second World War, Trenker struggled to carry out film projects and measure up to the popularity of his earlier work� Through a number of court cases, he became infamous as a forger and plagiarist. Allegedly, the cash-strapped filmmaker had counterfeited the diary of Eva Braun, Hitler’s wife, in order to make some money. The fake diary, which contained intimate details of the couple’s sexual life, was published in France in 1948 (Atze 236—37). After 1945, on top of his association with Fascism and his artistic dishonesty, age became a problem for the Bergfilm star, whose public image depended on his ability to portray vigorous and adventurous characters. Consequently, having made only three fictional feature films in the 1950s, he focused on producing short documentary films instead. Owing to the limited demand for cinema projects, Trenker embraced the opportunity to work for the comparatively new medium of television. In 1959, he began hosting the show Luis Trenker erzählt (1959-1973), which was broadcast by Bayerischer Rundfunk. The format of the show features the filmmaker standing in the snug set of a living room and retrospectively telling, in a seemingly improvised manner, stories about his turbulent life and screen career, which creates a distance between the mature raconteur and the fearless alpinist of the 1920s and 1930s that media audiences had come to associate with his name� Gesticulating animatedly, the host’s verve makes even the most trivial anecdote worth watching. In addition to the show’s 42 episodes, Trenker hosted nature The Primetime Television Series Luftsprünge 345 documentaries, such as the 10-episode series Berge und Geschichten (1972-1973), and appeared in numerous other TV series (Panitz 186—87)� In an attempt to consolidate his status as a darling of the public across different media formats, Trenker also published a number of best-selling books and records about the alpine region� For Trenker, the new medium represented a convenient means to assume a public presence more suitable for his age, reach audiences from different age groups, and actively revise his tarnished reputation. While the earlier film roles emphasized the actor’s attractiveness and physical performance, his TV persona refrained from the habitus of virility and adventure. The filmmaker’s televisual activities allowed him to disburden his public image and address older spectators who were familiar with his cinematic work of the interwar period as well as younger audiences who were oblivious to his previous career and became acquainted with the politically ‘purified’ Trenker. In the late 1960s, when the ZDF and the ORF decided to produce the series Luftsprünge , Trenker had already gone out of his way to reinvent his media persona. By casting the filmmaker as the ski school owner Hannes, the series’ producers sought to capitalize on his sustained popularity with TV audiences� Trenker had directed his last theatrically released film, Sein bester Freund , in 1962, and throughout the 1960s, his stardom depended largely on his appearances in non-fiction TV content and not, as in the previous decades, on fictional film roles, but these older Bergfilm roles were still an integral part of the veteran performer’s public image. Therefore, casting Trenker was a clear reference to the Bergfilm genre� As Trenker’s movies of the interwar period had attracted large audiences, the broadcasting companies speculated that Bergfernsehen , an updated televisual entry into the genre, might become a similar success. In order to gain a more nuanced understanding of Bergfernsehen , it is useful to see Luftsprünge as a remediation of the Bergfilm � Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have proposed the notion of remediation as a means to understand the interdependence between old and new media� Instead of conceptualizing media history as a diachronic succession, the authors propose that old media coexist with new ones� Each new medium adopts some aesthetic elements of available media and neglects others: “[N]ew media are doing exactly what their predecessors have done: presenting themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media” (Bolter and Grusin 14—15). In contrast, old media react to the challenges posed by the new competition� Bolter and Grusin point out that remediation is an ambivalent phenomenon, as it unites opposing drives: “Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation” (5). The underlying strategies that define every process of remediation are immediacy and hypermediacy� While the former 346 Daniel Winkler and Andreas Ehrenreich term refers to a media aesthetic that seeks to immerse the spectator, rendering the medium itself indiscernible, hypermediacy draws the spectator’s attention to the medium itself� Luftsprünge oscillates between these opposing movements� Before dwelling on its adaptation of Bergfilm elements, it is worthwhile to explore the mode in which the TV series remediates theater and film aesthetics. Again, these formal qualities depend on contemporary production practices. A significant part of Luftsprünge ’s narrative is set in the Sporthotel Alpenhof� Fusing theatrical and televisual qualities, the indoor sequences of Luftsprünge conform to the conventions of the TV play, a genre of literature and theater adaptations that emerged in the late 1950s. In its early phase, TV plays depended on extended rehearsals and accurate choreography� As it was impossible to record them, the performances were broadcast live until the early 1960s. Despite eventually resolving this technical limitation, the TV play maintained an aura of restraint and inanimateness all the same so that by the end of the decade the genre was considered outdated (Pollach 31)� Taking up traditions such as the TV play and folk and improvisation theater, Luftsprünge is typical contemporary television entertainment, but it does not quite harmonize with the liberal post- 68 zeitgeist � The fact that a high-quality co-production such as Luftsprünge relies on antiquated aesthetics betrays the public service broadcasters’ fundamental uncertainty in developing appealing up-to-date content� Instead of relying on outdoor action sequences, Luftsprünge allows Trenker to perform freely within the confines of the hotel while limiting narration. At times, his appearances give the impression that he is extemporizing, which is evocative of the way he hosted Luis Trenker erzählt � Most scenes take place in two emblematic locations, the ski slopes and the hotel, which is located in a valley. The indoor sequences, mostly set in the hotel lobby and the bar, exhibit theater aesthetics. Besides Trenker’s theatrical performance, this effect derives from the mise-en-scène, the cinematography, and the recording technique. The actors tend to enter the setting from the left or the right as if they were on a stage. Employing mainly proscenium shots, the camerawork is rather stationery and refrains from exploring the depth of the space. By means of studio lighting, which produces peculiar shadows and shiny reflections, the interior sequences appear flat and stylized. Moreover, there is a striking aesthetic disparity between the outdoor scenes shot on film and the indoor scenes shot on video, which originates from the formats’ different material properties and color palettes. Through the alternation of film and video sequences, the static character of the hotel setting stands out and makes it discernible as a studio stage� Given its conflict between immediacy and hypermediacy, Luftsprünge is a typical product of television (Bolter and Grusin 185)� Trenker’s seemingly improvised acting style gives the impression of liveness, of directly attending an The Primetime Television Series Luftsprünge 347 intense performance. In contrast to this kind of acting-related immediacy, the alternation of theater and film aesthetics constantly remind the spectator that the TV series is a hypermediated spectacle. In addition to stylistic remediation, Luftsprünge ’s other major concern is reworking the Bergfilm genre to achieve a shift in content and tone� Bergfernsehen approaches scenes of mountaineering and skiing, a central attraction of the Bergfilm cycle, in a completely different manner. While citations of the dynamic Bergfilm style remain an attraction in some ‘light’ comedies of the 1930s, such as Liebesbriefe aus dem Engadin (1938), thus reflecting sublime alpine representation conventions and the heroic-patriarchal thinking of the time, they can hardly be conveyed in a TV series of the ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ such as Luftsprünge . In each 25-minute episode, there is in the literal and figurative sense no time or room for mountain climbing as an essential, rewarding challenge in itself� Rescue scenes no longer depend on the physical exertion of skilled alpinists. For example, in episode 3, when the Scandinavian princess and hotel regular Britta has an accident, she is rescued by Hannes and Toni with the support of a helicopter� Skiing and mountaineering are not depicted as exhaustive exercises but as comfortable, elegant leisure activities which are facilitated by technological means such as ski lifts and aircraft� This narrative concern aligned the series with the topical conventions of the popular media of the 1950s and 1960s, in which mountain climbing and sublime representations of alpine environments were rarely major film topics. The new media landscape was much more concerned with confirming the social values prevalent during the ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ era (Haque 605—06)� Like the Bergfilm, Bergfernsehen idealizes natural landscapes as an antithesis to the ‘decadent’ urban space. However, the TV genre attenuates the classical film genre’s penchant for intense drama. The individual conflicts of certain figures on high-altitude crests are replaced by a charming, yet harmless, alpine world that revolves around social conflicts within the collective, which are negotiated in the valleys� Whereas the Bergfilm of the interwar period focused on spiritually and physically resolute men striving towards a peak, Bergfernsehen abandons this interest. Instead, it narrates the seemingly peaceful coexistence between hotel workers and the guests who explore the Alps as a tourist territory (see Nenno). Bergfernsehen displaces the Bergfilm ’s vertical morality with a horizontal spatial logic in tune with the post-war TV era� Ideals of virility are replaced by desacralized, politically unobtrusive forms of content, i.e., everyday life and work within a tourism context in the valley� The remediation of the Bergfilm is clearly associated with Luftsprünge ’s character Toni, who is played by the Kitzbühel-based professional skier and threetime Olympic champion Toni Sailer. Since the late 1950s, Sailer had branched 348 Daniel Winkler and Andreas Ehrenreich out in the media industry as an actor and singer� While Trenker and the interior sequences emphasize the theatrical quality of the series, Sailer dominates the exterior shots and provides much of the narrative’s skiing action. Crucially, this action is measured, illustrating Luftsprünge ’s televisual domestication of the much more dynamic Bergfilm genre: Toni explores hills, not mountains. His downhills are relatively short, relaxed excursions at moderate heights. For a couple of hours, Toni and his students consume the alpine landscape at a leisurely pace before returning to the cozy hotel in the valley� What remains of the Bergfilm are merely the mountains as a narrative space that facilitates short-lived touristic pleasures, such as Britta’s awkward ski lessons. Even Toni’s group lessons for talented skiers do not lead to actual alpine adventures but rather culminate in tame, beautifully choreographed descents of skiers wearing brightly colored suits� By renouncing the drama of ascents and downhill racing, Bergfernsehen dispenses with a significant narrative device that accounted for much of the spectator’s pleasure in the Bergfilm . Instead, Luftsprünge relies on the representation of amorous relationships. Flaunting its attractive actors, the series devotes much attention to the depiction of its characters’ sexual interests� This is an essential attraction of Bergfernsehen that is supposed to compensate for the lack of summit cult drama, suspense, and adventure. The remediation of the Bergfilm in the valley goes hand in hand with the pronounced staging of erotic desire� Therefore, the TV series has an affinity with the sex film cycle that enjoyed immense popularity in Austrian and West German cinemas starting in the late 1960s (see Steinwender and Zahlten). This connection is made evident by Franz Muxeneder, a comedic mainstay of many sexploitation movies who starred in Luftsprünge as the hotel’s concierge Alois� Muxeneder’s casting demonstrates that the ORF and the ZDF attempted to profit from the ongoing sex film boom. Through innocuous anecdotes from a winter sports resort, the TV stations also catered to a male audience familiar with more adult-oriented film content. Incessantly contriving situations in which straight twosomes are caught in intimate bodily and emotional proximity, Luftsprünge resembles a sex film that, as a concession to its design as family-friendly entertainment, is always forced to dissolve erotic tension in a non-sexual manner� The TV series’ complex remediation pacifies and conceals the politically ambivalent history of the Bergfilm � Detached from the dimension of adventure in alpine heights, Bergfernsehen now fully emphasizes light entertainment, which is intended to reach the broadest possible cross-border audience through various forms of co-production and genre hybridization� Freed from energetic-patriotic echoes, socioeconomic prosperity and touristic mass entertainment are at the narrative center of TV productions such as Luftsprünge � The valley and the The Primetime Television Series Luftsprünge 349 skiing hills are populated with economically beneficial activities and facilities such as hotels and ski lifts for the tourist masses. Influenced by the period’s economic expansion, which was propelled by locals and foreigners alike (see Anderson; Groß), Bergfernsehen opens up a transnational dimension that becomes its central topical concern� The transnational remediation of the Bergfilm in Luftsprünge is closely connected to the format of the hotel series. Ever since the advent of cinema, the hotel has represented the paradigmatic locus of transnationalism in audiovisual media� The series’ small permanent constellation of actors is supplemented by changing national and international guests� In the fashion of hotel series such as Das alte Hotel (1963), Luftsprünge strings together relatively similar episodes. Within that spectrum, the guests of the Sporthotel Alpenhof offer some variation as each episode focuses on a vacationer or a couple of tourists whose behavior and personality stand out� Well-known media stars such as Jane Tilden, Hans von Borsody and Dietmar Schönherr, as well as Vivi Bach and Rudolf Schock, both of whom appear in more than one episode, serve more as additional attractions for the viewing audience than as catalysts that advance the plot. In this sense, transnationality is in Luftsprünge above all a symbol for the thriving consumer culture of the 1960s, represented by media stars from diverse film and media formats. By providing temporary lodging for money, the hospitality industry lives on guests from distant regions. Thus, transnationality lies at the core of the business, in terms of tourists and the workers who maintain the touristic experience. Whereas the tourists are often foreign or, at least, from other Austrian regions outside Tyrol, the workforce is mostly Tyrolian with the exception of the West German citizen Steffi (Petra Mood). A number of scenes, such as Alois speaking broken French and Italian on the telephone for comedic effect (episodes 2, 11) and Steffi teaching skiing to children in English and French (episode 5), suggest that the hotel also has a more international clientele, but this kind of transnationalism is not explored in detail� The only recurring character who does not have an Austrian or German background is the Scandinavian Britta� On the whole, the transnational exchange that takes place at the Sporthotel Alpenhof occurs mostly between Austrians and Germans� Mette Hjort’s concept of “affinitive transnationalism” describes such interactions� Hjort speaks particularly of “‘the tendency to communicate with those similar to us,’ with similarity typically being understood in terms of ethnicity, partially overlapping or mutually intelligible languages, and a history of interaction giving rise to shared core values, common practices, and comparable institutions” (17)� The series uses a domesticated Bergfilm setting to stage a process of cross-cultural self-understanding that attaches importance to the 350 Daniel Winkler and Andreas Ehrenreich amicable collaboration of Austrians and Germans in consuming alpine nature� Much of this communication about similarities and differences depends on the dialogue between the characters or, more exactly, their divergent dialects. It is idioms that nuance the notion of national belonging� The series does not only identify the characters as Austrian or German; rather, these national categories are split up by region� The spectator recognizes a character’s regional identity through its corresponding dialect. For instance, German audiences immediately grasp that Jette (Ilse Pagé), the fashion photographer’s assistant, is from Berlin (episode 5), and recognize the Viennese accent of vacationer Elisabeth, played by Burgtheater actress Jane Tilden (episode 10). In order to guarantee intelligibility, speakers often have to code switch. Transitioning effortlessly from his regional dialect to standard German, Hannes is a particularly flexible communicator who can quickly accommodate his interlocutors. His linguistic adaptiveness connotes experience and sophistication� But it is not only the Tyrolian tourism professionals who adjust their manner of speaking; occasionally, the vacationers try to fit in too. After Toni manages to persuade the German guest Bernd (Helmut Schmid) to fly a helicopter in order to rescue Britta, the pilot exclaims enthusiastically “Na schön, probier mas! ” and gives Toni a thump on the shoulder (episode 3), signaling approval and excitement about the unexpected challenge. These language exercises, which are usually portrayed for comedic effect, represent fundamental vocal performances of affinitive transnationalism. Besides the continuous arrival, presence, and departure of nondescript tourists who stay in Hannes’ hotel, Bergfernsehen is populated by characters who, in addition to the affinitive transnationalism between Austria and West Germany, evoke a different idea of transnational relations. A number of minor characters live outside these German-speaking countries or have jobs that require frequent traveling. Axel (Karl-Heinz Hess) and Bernd, two guests from northern West Germany, work as pilots (episode 2). Despite being on vacation, Bernd is forced to stand in for a helicopter pilot who has broken his arm during a search operation for the missing Britta (episode 3)� The series also introduces a male Tyrolian expat: Ulli (Dietmar Schönherr), a talented ski racer and former instructor in Hannes’ ski school who runs his own ski school in a U�S� mountain resort� While claiming to look for his friend Rudolf Schock, Ulli has actually come to poach Toni and take him to America (episode 13). Playing a fictionalized version of himself, Schock appears as a renowned opera singer from Duisburg who performs on the world’s major stages and spends his winter holidays in Austria or the United States (episodes 6, 13). In a similar way, the Berlin fashion photographer Benno (Peer Schmidt) and his models seek out exotic and visually impressive locales across the globe in order to advertise their customers’ The Primetime Television Series Luftsprünge 351 trendy clothes (episode 5)� For the solidly middleand upper-class customers that frequent the Sporthotel, crossing borders is an ordinary job requirement or a lifestyle choice� This could be termed jet-set transnationalism� By combining affinitive and jet-set transnationalism, the narrative fuses divergent modes of transnational discourse� Only one episode of Luftsprünge puts on display transnational movement on a diegetic level, i.e., the crossing of borders as a material act. In Episode 2, the U.S. based stewardess Kathrin (Hannelore Auer), Toni’s love interest, takes advantage of a stay in Munich in order to see Toni in Kitzbühel for only one day. To catch her plane back to New York, she has to return to the Munich airport that same evening� The series stages Kathrin’s car ride to the mountains as a suspenseful endeavor that endangers her romantic meeting with the ski instructor� Her arrival is delayed by a long passport inspection line at the border between Bavaria and Tyrol� When at last she shows her passport to the border agent, he barely looks at it and waves her through. In a narrative that celebrates the easygoing consumption of mountainous landscapes and other tourist treats, the act of crossing national borders stands out due to its association with slackness and displeasure� Kathrin is stressed because she is deprived of Toni’s company and the clear mountain air� In this scene, transnationalism is visualized as uncomfortable precisely because the dead time spent at the border post defies any kind of consumption. In other words, even the material expansion of space does not break through the basic construction principle of Luftsprünge , namely the remediation of the vertical logics of the Bergfilm into a Bergfernsehen that stages a ‘flat’ transnationality that is thoroughly interwoven with the hospitality industry in the form of the tourism of the Tyrolean ski valleys� Kathrin and Britta, both women with a transnational background who are attracted to Toni, personify different forms of touristic labor. Whereas Kathrin excites the ski instructor by making herself scarce, Britta repels him because she is so readily available and evidently willing. The Nordic vacationer repeatedly fumes at Toni’s rejection and seeks his attention in odd ways. For instance, during their ski lessons Britta deliberately abandons him out of anger� Her subsequent accident on a closed slope is caused as much by her lack of talent as by her desire to be looked after by Toni� A search-and-rescue operation by helicopter ensues� Saving Britta from the consequences of her whims is as much a moderate action sequence as it is an illustration of touristic work� In rescuing her from the forbidden slope, Hannes and Toni do not perform a virile deed, as they would have done if they were Bergfilm protagonists; they simply maintain the physical integrity of a guest to ensure she can continue her holidays and her consumption of tourist services� 352 Daniel Winkler and Andreas Ehrenreich Luftsprünge is surprisingly concerned with the representation of transnational tourism as a form of labor� In depicting the increasing social relevance of tourism, the series explores its hotel setting not only as a space of leisure but as a place of employment that can appear unpleasant at times� As oppositional notions, leisure and physical chore are intimately entangled. An extensive stay at the Sporthotel Alpenhof not only requires adequate financial means on the part of the guests but also a number of attractive employees who create and maintain the tourist experience� Closely connected with the narrative emphasis on amorous adventures and petty conflicts, the TV series depicts mass tourism as a vivid representation of wage work in the transnational hospitality sector� Despite the effort put into drawing a positive picture of the trade, a job in the tourist sector strikes the spectator as a rather arduous enterprise. No matter the time of the day, Hannes and his team are always busy satisfying their guests’ every desire� For the hotel owner and his employees, work and leisure merge constantly. It seems that when they are not occupying the front desk, teaching skiers or meeting guests at the station, they remain on the hotel premises, mostly drinking wine or dancing at the bar� As a bustling entrepreneur who reached retirement age a while back, Hannes embodies the extent to which private and professional spheres conflate in his business. Following Gilles Deleuze, we might call this kind of occupation gaseous, as it intrudes into every compartment of human existence� In Luftsprünge , labor is everywhere all the time. It permeates the lives of the hotel staff, making impossible the distinction between personal and corporate affairs. In contrast to the disciplinary institutions that governed Western culture until the Second World War, the society of control is marked by individual self-control and the continuous deferral of desires� The mode of work congruent with control societies is autonomous (everybody monitors his or her efficiency) and expansive (the tasks can never be finished). The infinite postponement of leisure time that the series’ wage earners endure serves as a motivation for more assiduity. Instead of the factory, the staff toil in the seemingly personal environment of the company. Hannes, the owner, is the moody soul of his enterprise, and all his employees struggle hard to live up to his volatile expectations� As a savvy businessman, Hannes himself plods incessantly, and he has internalized the paramount importance of marketing, another distinguishing feature of control societies (Deleuze). When Toni refuses to teach Britta in Episode 1, Hannes is astonished: “Unser prominentester Gast, und du willst nicht rausgehen. Stell dir vor, die Reklame für uns! ” As the advertising power of Britta’s patronage cannot be allowed to go to waste, Toni is coerced into submitting to the princess and suffering her overt sexual advances. The Primetime Television Series Luftsprünge 353 The dispute between Hannes, Toni and Britta is one of many workplace conflicts that shape the experience of laboring in the Sporthotel. The staff is permanently concerned with the difficulty of disagreeing with their transnational guests. Often, their discontent can only be expressed confidentially in the company of colleagues. The workers’ subordinate position results in different behavior patterns: Concierge Alois is usually servile but has contempt for guests whom he suspects to be in some way substandard� Despite showing his will to revolt to Hannes, Toni continues to teach Britta and is forced to tolerate her forthright sexual advances. Steffi, Hannes’ niece who helps out her uncle due to a staff shortage, is in a similar position. She cannot openly repel the ever-present aggressive men that happen to stay at the Sporthotel� Invasive sexual behavior represents a key workplace conflict negotiated in the series� Toni usually gets along with Hannes; in Episode 10 they even go touring together on a Sunday. But sometimes, even the owner and his prime ski instructor fall out due to business-related problems� Princess Britta is one such recurring issue. To uphold the good reputation of his hotel, Hannes demands that Toni meet her every desire� Britta takes sexual services for granted and is frustrated when the object of her desire does not comply. In Episode 4, she tries to force Toni to teach her after he cancels their lesson in order to see Kathrin� The angry princess reminds him of her superior social status: “Du vergisst, wer du bist und wer ich bin. […] Und wir sind verträglich [sic] miteinander verbunden.” When the annoyed instructor goes away, the princess announces that he will have to face the consequences of his insubordinate behavior� Toni’s sexual availability is not only part of an unspoken agreement between the hotel owner and the prestigious guest but also the reason Britta returns every year. The fact that the erotic component, in line with the conventions of family-friendly television, is never fulfilled as expected adds to the entertainment� The heteronormative notion of gender is reversed: the woman is the one who is sexually aggressive and rejected by the reluctant man. Also, the disappointment of an attractive woman who, in reality, would likely rarely struggle to fulfil her sexual desires provides comic relief in the fictional narrative. For Toni, contact with Britta is a constant problem, especially when she tries to force intimacy between them. The ski instructor has to find a way to satisfy the demands of Hannes and Britta as well as those of his love interest� For the sake of consumer satisfaction, Hannes suggests time and again that Toni let the spoiled princess have her way. In Episode 1, after observing his employee’s unwillingness to comply, the hotelier warns him about the serious consequences that could arise from his refusal: “Du bist nicht der erste Schilehrer, mit dem ich Schlitten gefahren bin, verstanden? ” Hannes calls attention to Toni’s replaceability and implies that the instructor will be fired if he does not play along. This 354 Daniel Winkler and Andreas Ehrenreich is not an idle threat: in Episode 4 the manager casually mentions that he had to dismiss one of Toni’s colleagues without explaining the reasons� While the relationships of dependency prevalent in the hospitality industry influence Toni and Britta’s relationship, the hierarchical and transnational frictions between them are also fueled by divergent national ideas of appropriate behavior for men and women� Toni is startled by Britta’s assertiveness and the unequivocal articulation of her sexual desires� The kind of assertiveness embodied by Britta underscores stereotyped differences between German notions of womanhood and Nordic ones. Britta and Steffi are both emancipated to some degree - in fact, Britta is regularly outspoken about her sexuality. German women, by contrast, do not verbally communicate their erotic needs. In the series, transnationalism frequently results in sexual tension. Bridging the vague ideas of Berliner-ness and Austrian-ness, Jette and Alois are fascinated by their different origins, dialects, and environments. But the nexus of transnationalism and erotic attraction is most pronounced in the pairing of Steffi and expat Ulli, who rapidly move from mutual antipathy to teasing and affection, to marrying each other at the end of the series (episode 13)� While he admires her principled German character, she is intrigued by his blend of Tyrolian stubbornness and flamboyant American self-confidence. It is the attractive Otherness inherent to affinitive and jet-set transnationalism that sparks their relationship. The relation between Otherness and attraction is key in Bergfernsehen � In the Bergfilm genre, mountain peaks that have never, or rarely, been climbed are symbolic of the alien aspect of nature and appear to elicit a feeling of quasi-sexual attraction� Reaching the summit is a sign of one’s own physical and spiritual vitality, which is often allegorized as a service to the regional or national community (e.g., Trenker’s 1931 film Berge in Flammen , set on the Austrian-Italian border during the First World War). Here, interpersonal sexual dynamics play at best a supporting role� In Bergfernsehen , as evidenced by Luftsprünge , economically interwoven networks of quotidian relationships in the valley replace this vertical spatial logic. At the same time, relationships of dependency within a touristic and professional setting are connected to linguistic and cultural foreignness and demands of sexual availability. Thus, sexuality is omnipresent in the Tyrolean sports hotel as a kind of desire for Otherness; however, the dramaturgy of Luftsprünge as a hotel series requires that the unbound spatial and physical development of the individual be domesticated for Bergfernsehen � The hegemony of the hospitality industry’s economic principles sets clear limits to dynamics linked to sexuality and Otherness and, outside of marital constellations, only allows episodic pleasures that are intended to serve as light entertainment for a mass media audience� The Primetime Television Series Luftsprünge 355 Accordingly, the final episode of Luftsprünge , entitled “Die Abwerbung,” domesticates this desire for Otherness in the form of the Christian wedding of Ulli and Steffi, framed by the Alps. The episode, which flaunts an excess of celebrities by bringing together the recurring actors Trenker, Sailer, and Mood and the guest stars Bach, Schönherr, and Schock, ties the series to Heimatfilm morals: Rudolf Schock’s song about the pain of having once left home, a Norbert Schultze aria originally adapted for Hans Quest’s 1955 Heimatfilm Der fröhliche Wanderer , sounds from the gallery and is accompanied by a children’s choir, emphasizing homecoming and forgiveness� 1 Thus, the dramaturgy of Bergfernsehen is clearly characterized by symbols of alpine traditions that depict economically lucrative tourist fantasies and genre conventions. In other words, if the episodes of Luftsprünge are about entertainment and leisure, which reflects the spirit of the time, the dramaturgy of the series is dominated by the staging of the petit bourgeois happiness available only in the Tyrolean homeland� The genre logic of the Heimatfilm thus reflects the central political concern of the post-war period: restoring community in a peaceful and faithful, that means, above all, in a patriarchally structured and economically successful way� As a televisual remediation of the Bergfilm cycle, Luftsprünge deviates significantly from its genre origins� By distancing itself from the melodramatic dramaturgy of the Bergfilm , the TV series domesticates the ambivalent political history of the older film cycle and its protagonist Luis Trenker at the same time. Luftsprünge ’s Bergfernsehen represents lighthearted serial entertainment that is intended to reach Austrian and German audiences through various forms of genre crossing, remediating the classic Bergfilm and also more recent formats such as the TV play and the sexploitation cycle� The series opens up a transnational dimension on the levels of production and representation� The mountain setting remains the pivotal space of the narrative, but its imposing and awe-inspiring character is not relevant anymore� Mountains are no longer vanquished or associated with lonesome virile heroes and a vertical landscape but consumed by wealthy vacationers from different regions and nations� In Bergfernsehen , the alpine space is thus represented as a horizontal and commercialized environment that, owing to the imperative of transnational tourism and labor in the tourist industry, has to be accessible to winter sport tourists of different age groups and proficiency levels. The Alps serve as an accessible leisure park that is dominated by the dogma of purchasability� Personal well-being, sexual desires, and sportive achievements are subordinated to this principle� 356 Daniel Winkler and Andreas Ehrenreich Simultaneously probing tourist and worker characters, Luftsprünge devotes significant attention to the everyday labor that sustains the hospitality sector. Overall, the series betrays a rather conservative ideological stance which cherishes hard work and steadfast loyalty to the employer. Still, its perspective on touristic labor is critical, stressing workplace conflicts and sexual harassment in a transnational setting� Submitted to the powerful economic rationale of the hospitality sector, even the locals themselves become a tourist commodity. The series emphasizes the fact that the Alps are not the only physical entities subject to commercialization; people are too� Although we do not know how Luftsprünge was received by general TV audiences, there is record of one particular reaction to the series that originated in Austria’s literary avantgarde movement. In a collage from 1970, author Elfriede Jelinek referred to Luftsprünge as an example of everything that was wrong about state broadcasting� Her experimental piece wir stecken einander unter der haut denounces popular TV as an oppressive ideological instrument that helps to preserve existing power relations and gender imbalances: “ mit luftsprüngen sollen uns im 14 tage rütmus luis trenker der einen hotelbesitzer und schischulleiter spielt vivi bach als pikantes prinzesschen toni sailer als trenkers paradeschilehrer und franz muxeneder als hotelportier und aushilfsschilehrer kurz als hans moser auf den skiern erfreuen ” ( Jelinek; italics in the original)� Drawing on the rhetoric of movie trailers, Jelinek’s mocking of Luftsprünge attacks the intentional depiction of Austria as a harmless, winter sports-obsessed country where politics seem to be irrelevant. Invariably, the principal performers were strongly associated with escapist entertainment and signaled Luftsprünge to be one more iteration of a dishonest national self-perception� In particular, the decision to feature Luis Trenker and Hans Moser was enough to give away the series’ reactionary stance seeing as these artists managed to continue their careers during the National Socialist regime. Trenker’s and Moser’s names are redolent of the nation’s dubious past and indicate the undeniable continuities of Nazi cinema in popular television of the post-war era. The text vents the author’s anger about Trenker’s seemingly infinite media presence some twenty-five years after the defeat of National Socialism. In the overall composition of Jelinek’s collage, Luftsprünge figures as a side note. Still, this exemplifies the immense range of influence and social impact that public television enjoyed� The series’ passing mention demonstrates that the left-wing intelligentsia regarded such TV content with great suspicion� Trenker’s diligent remediation of his own public persona by means of television might have been successful with some audience members, but his involvement in the Nazi film industry still resonated with many when the series was broadcast between 1969 and 1970. However, the star’s persistent high profile The Primetime Television Series Luftsprünge 357 on cinema and TV screens eventually came to an end� Luftsprünge constituted his last major role although he did not retire immediately� From the 1920s to the 1980s, Luis Trenker accomplished the feat of maintaining his career in the infamously volatile media industries� He remained visible and active during democratic and totalitarian periods� The transition from Bergfilm to Bergfernsehen enabled him to continue his work despite his old age� By sustaining his screen presence for seven decades, Trenker’s stardom projects a sense of transhistorical continuity. Overall, Bergfernsehen was instrumental in familiarizing a new generation of media consumers with the tropes of the historical Bergfilm � Notes 1 In addition, Ulli’s return home also remediates the ending of Trenker’s Der verlorene Sohn (1934)� Like Trenker’s international success about a South Tyrolean emigrant, falling into poverty in New York, and finally returning home to find happiness, the series’ ending delivers an implicit anti-American message: Rather than praising U.S. capitalism, whose values had been previously embodied by Ulli in his attempt to poach Toni for his larger and more lucrative ski school in the States, the finale’s happy ending celebrates the values of homeland, family, and religion (see Rentschler, “No Place Like Home”)� Acknowlegdments We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Kamaal Haque, Christian Quendler, Cora Rok, and Camila Torres for their support and suggestions. Works Cited Alt, Dirk. “The Dictator as Spectator: Feature Film Screenings before Adolf Hitler, 1933-39�” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 35�3 (2015): 420—37� Anderson, Ben. “Alpine Agency: Locals, Mountaineers and Tourism in the Eastern Alps, c. 1860-1914.” Rural History 27�1 (2016): 61—78� Atze, Marcel. “Unser Hitler”: Der Hitler-Mythos im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen Literatur nach 1945 . Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003. Birgel, Franz A. “Luis Trenker: A Rebel in the Third Reich? Der Rebell , Der verlorene Sohn , Der Kaiser von Kalifornien , Condottieri , and Der Feuerteufel �” Cultural History through a National Socialist Lens: Essays on the Cinema of the Third Reich � Ed� Robert Reimer. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. 37—64. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media � Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. 358 Daniel Winkler and Andreas Ehrenreich Daffner, Carola. “August 1936: Luis Trenker Tries but Fails to Sidestep Nazi Filmpolitik �” A New History of German Cinema � Ed� Jennifer M� Kapczynski and Michael D� Richardson. Rochester: Camden House, 2012. 268—74. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3—7� Groß, Robert. Die Beschleunigung der Berge: Eine Umweltgeschichte des Wintertourismus in Vorarlberg/ Österreich (1920-2010) . Wien: Böhlau, 2019. Haque, Kamaal. “‘Damals gingen die Schnulzen eben gut’: Luis Trenker and the Heimatfilm.” Monatshefte 107�4 (2015): 604—21� Hickethier, Knut. Geschichte des deutschen Fernsehens . Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998. Hjort, Mette. “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism.” World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives . Ed. Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman. New York: Routledge, 2010. 12—33. Jelinek, Elfriede. “ wir stecken einander unter der haut� konzept einer television des inneren raums�” Pop seit 1964 � Ed� Kerstin Gleba and Eckhard Schumacher� Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2007. 74—80. Luftsprünge. Dir. Hermann Leitner and Ernst Schmucker. Perf. Luis Trenker, Toni Sailer, Franz Muxeneder, Petra Mood, Peter Brand, and Vivi Bach. 1969-70. Pidax, 2016� DVD� Nenno, Nancy. “‘Postcards from the Edge’: Education to Tourism in the German Mountain Film�” Light Motives: German Popular Cinema � Ed� Margaret McCarthy and Randall Halle. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2003. 61—83. Panitz, Hans-Jürgen. Luis Trenker ungeschminkt: Bilder, Stationen, Begegnungen � Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 2009. Pollach, Andrea. “Close-up. Das österreichische Fernsehspiel von 1955 bis 1967.” Spiele und Wirklichkeiten: Rund um 50 Jahre Fernsehspiel und Fernsehfilm in Österreich � Ed� Sylvia Szely. Wien: Filmarchiv Austria, 2005. 15—32. Rentschler, Eric. “Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the ‘Bergfilm’.” New German Critique 51 (1990): 137—61� ---. “There’s No Place Like Home: Luis Trenker’s The Prodigal Son (1934)�” New German Critique 60 (1993): 33—56� Schaffner, Hans. “Anekdoten zu der beliebten Fernsehserie Luftsprünge �” Luftsprünge DVD booklet. Riegelsberg: Pidax, 2016. Steinwender, Harald, and Alexander Zahlten. “Sexploitation Film from West Germany.” A Companion to German Cinema � Ed� Terri Ginsberg and Andrea Mensch� Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 287—317. Reframing the Bergfilm: Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) 359 Reframing the Bergfilm: Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) Caroline Schaumann Emory University Abstract: This essay looks at Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) both as a female mountain film and a revision of the genre altogether� Like the German Bergfilm , Sils Maria is framed by a tension between modernity and mountains, where protagonists escape to an isolated and privileged space high up to find meaning and face death. Unlike their heroic masculine counterparts in the mountain film, however, the two women encounter no climbing dangers and conquer no peaks� Yet they too are guided and changed by an imposing and dynamic landscape while wandering among the Swiss Alps and skinny-dipping in icy mountain lakes� Like in the German Bergfilm , the protagonists’ (homoerotic) relationship is developed, tested, and strained in the mountains where desire, jealousy, and loneliness come to the fore, with the important difference that characters navigate different languages, nationalities, age groups, and social status as they act, mirror, and switch roles for the play within the film, The Maloja Snake � Instead of the summit position as the ultimate goal of mountaineering, the film thus outlines a mountain position less determined by gender, physique, and nationality� In the symbol of the rare and unexplained cloud formation likewise called the Maloja Snake (captured in time-lapse photography by both Arnold Fanck and Assayas), Clouds of Sils Maria offers a contemplation on deep time, timelessness, and the passage of time, and opens a space for a contemporary mountain film. Keywords: Maloja Snake, aging actress, Kristen Stewart, Juliette Binoche, Arnold Fanck Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) begins on a train, the celebrated symbol of modernity and fundamental vehicle of Alpine development� During the celebrated “railway mania” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen- 360 Caroline Schaumann tury, railway serpentine lines and increasingly tunnels, such as the Brenner Railway (1867), the Mont Cenis Tunnel (1857-1871), the Gotthard Railway (1872-1882), and the Simplon Railway (1906), offered new passages through the Alps, linking valleys and providing access to touristic mountain destinations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy. Responding to the touristic desire for exclusive recreation, the railway routes became symbols of technological innovation, wealth, and national ambition. In Sils Maria , the train likewise functions as a vehicle of modernity, transporting the celebrated actress Maria Enders ( Juliette Binoche) and her personal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart) to the Swiss Alps while at the same time pulling viewers into the plot unfolding on screen, and signaling that the film we are about to see represents yet another engagement with the land, its cultures, peoples, and histories of representation. By way of mirroring the nineteenth-century journeys of wealthy Britons to the Alps, the film also draws attention to the fact that we encounter two affluent (albeit different in terms of social status) female protagonists aboard a modern compartment train, heading to a prominent gala event in Zurich in honor of the famous director Wilhelm Melchior� 1 In the twenty-first century, the Alpine landscape has been trodden, marketed, and mediated to the point that both Maria and Val remain oblivious to the mountain panorama on advertisement posters inside the train and the views unfolding outside its windows� Yet the transitional and transnational space of the train, the setting of the first ten minutes of the film, sets the stage for the protagonists’ transformations in the mountains and the various appropriations and new perspectives on the mountain film that the film playfully rehearses. Scholarship on The Clouds of Sils Maria has been sparse. Aside from film reviews and various interviews, the few analytical essays that have appeared importantly place Assayas’s work in context, vis-a-vis his previous work (such as Irma Vep [1996] or Summer Hours [2008]) or other films focused on the struggles of an (aging) female protagonist (especially Joseph Mankiewickz’s All About Eve [1950], Ingmar Bergman’s Persona [1966], Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant [1972], and John Cassavetes’s Opening Night [1977])� Many critics have also mentioned the direct references to Arnold Fanck’s Das Wolkenphänomen von Maloja (1924), excerpted in a film within the film, though a closer inspection of the importance of Sils Maria ’s setting and its links to the Bergfilm genre have been largely unexplored (with the exception of Christian Quendler and Daniel Winkler’s work)� Rather than focusing on Assayas as an auteur or concentrating foremost on the notion of an actress’s aging, my essay looks at The Clouds of Sils Maria both as a female mountain film and a revision of the genre altogether� Like the German Bergfilm , Sils Maria is framed by a tension between modernity and mountains, where protagonists es- Reframing the Bergfilm : Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) 361 cape to a secluded and privileged space up high to find meaning and face death. Unlike their heroic masculine counterparts in the mountain films, however, the two female protagonists encounter no climbing dangers and conquer no peaks� Yet they too are guided and changed by an imposing and dynamic landscape while wandering among the Swiss Alps and skinny-dipping in icy mountain lakes� While mountains are no longer objects to be surmounted and an action-driven plot remains missing, the film nevertheless relies on atmospheric settings with respect to both the landscapes and the characters’ moods and roles� Like in the German Bergfilm , the protagonists’ (homoerotic) relationship is developed, tested, and strained in the mountains where desire, jealousy, and loneliness come to the fore, with the important difference that the characters navigate different languages, nationalities, age groups, and social status as they act, mirror, and switch roles for Maloja Snake , a theatrical play within the film. Instead of a summit position as the penultimate goal of mountaineering, Sils Maria outlines a transformative mountain experience that is not determined by gender, physique, or nationality, but lastingly shapes individual attitudes as well as relationships� The prologue on the train from Paris to Zurich introduces the film’s main protagonists, themes, and plots: We learn about Maria’s divorce proceedings, film shooting plans, and interview schedules, and see her personal assistant Val rushing through the train corridors while juggling multiple calls on multiple phones� Their hectic work and life routine is severely thwarted as Val struggles to retain her footing on the moving ground, with the loud and constant railroad noise drowning out communication and bad or lost cell phone signals interrupting phone conversations. Val mutters, visibly frustrated, “We’re in the Alps - there is a ton of mountains and tunnels,” but the mountains visible on advertisements of Switzerland on posters in the background and in the land rushing by behind the windows remain unseen by both Maria and Val, and are merely an obstacle to modern life� These glimpses into Maria’s and Val’s busy professional lives stand in stark contrast to the expressed purpose of the trip, namely the honoring of Wilhelm Melchior, a Swiss playwright that launched Maria’s career as an eighteen-year-old by staging her as Sigrid in his play and film Maloja Snake and is now living in “peace and quiet” as a recluse above the village of Sils� Everything changes when Maria, during a call, reads the note Val just received from yet another call, “Wilhelm has died.” In silence, the shot fades to black, then for the first time the camera opens with a foregrounded mountain panorama, before panning onto Maria’s face in full light and close up, gazing at the mountains through the window while she contemplates whether to turn around or what to do� A following thirty-second interlude opens directly in the 362 Caroline Schaumann mountains to show the police’s recovery of Wilhelm’s body amidst the snowy peaks - presumably he died of a heart attack while on a hike, but as we learn later it was a suicide due to terminal illness. Strangely, this scene remains unrelated to the plot, and is not seen by any character in the film, thus privy only to the viewers� The location of the recovery will assume more importance later in the film, however, and the wide-angle shots of a lifeless body being lifted on a stretcher in the snow ring eerily similar to many mountain films that begin or end with disaster� The two establishing shots of a mountain panorama roughly seven and ten minutes into the film (though markedly missing at the film’s beginning) and the body recovery scene mark the film as a mountain film, but also emphasize difference since this is not a typical mountain accident. Instead, the film establishes and develops themes more unusual for the genre, such as the passage of time, aging and death, fame and its pressures, technology and (mediated) nature, gender, vulnerability, passion, and play. In keeping with the mountain film tradition, Sils Maria poses the modern and the mountain world as strictly separated realms. After the prologue on the train, the entire plot of Part One takes place in Zurich, in fancy hotels over elaborate dinners and the memorial celebration for Wilhelm Melchior� It is here where jealousy, animosity, insecurities, and love affairs come to the fore, as the protagonists pose, act, play out, and confess their desires and their nightmares. Maria confidently models for the camera in a black Chanel dress, 2 but then tells her hopeful director, Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger), that she is “alone,” “vulnerable,” and “in the middle of a divorce,” in order to reject the role of the older lover Helena in his proposed remake of Maloja Snake . In the play - that is, what we come to know about it second-hand 3 - the young and seductive assistant Sigrid enters an affair, then breaks up with her company boss Helena, quite possibly driving her to suicide. While at first rejecting the role of Helena over twenty years after she played Sigrid, Maria begins to toy with the idea. Even though she bitterly complains about the role throughout the entire film, Sils Maria concludes with Maria playing Helena at the play’s opening night� There are other conflicts and inconsistencies: Maria repeatedly tells Val about her expressed dislike of Henryk Wald (Hanns Zischler), a former co-star and sore lover, and rejects a private nightcap after dinner but decides to hand him her room number upon saying goodbye. Back in her hotel room, Maria considers calling Henryk but then chooses hard alcohol from the minibar instead, the scene fading out while she stares at Googled images of her presumed future co-star Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz) playing Sigrid� Assayas himself admitted that his tense melodrama invoking (though never exposing) 4 an intergenerational co-dependent lesbian relationship among other Reframing the Bergfilm : Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) 363 emotionally intense relationships was a “condensed, brutalized version” of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1972) (Whitney n. pag.). In a more playful referencing of film history, he added (in another interview) that the theme and character of Wilhelm Melchior are a tribute to Ingmar Bergman: “I knew I wanted to make a movie about an actress and her assistant� I knew that I was in Bergman territory� But Bergman himself isn’t all that far from the figure of Wilhelm Melchior [the character], so I was kind of quoting him in a sense” (Lukenbill n� pag�)� Reviewers and scholars alike have pointed to the not-so-thinly veiled references to other films and directors. Howard Hampton and especially William Mooney elucidate the references to Joseph Mankiewicz’s Oscar-winning All About Eve (1950) centering around an aging Broadway star� Mooney goes so far as to interpret All About Eve “as a template for Clouds of Sils Maria , even as Assayas adapts the aging-actress paradigm for a changed society and an era of accelerated media convergence” (Mooney n� pag�)� Reading Maria’s character solely as an older woman confronted with the aging roles she is forced to take on, however, easily misses the important emphases on play, performance, and production that Assayas skillfully creates. In fact, Assayas repeatedly rejected the idea that his film is primarily concerned with the “aging actress” trope: “No, it’s not and I don’t think that the film deals at all with the issue of decline� It’s not All About Eve , where it’s youth against age, or a young actress against an older actress” (Lukenbill n. pag.). While the film stages generational conflicts, age expectations, and unstable or unequal relationships, as we learn in the course of the film, both Maria and Val are precisely not tied to particular scripted roles, but - after time spent in the mountains - come away with freedom to change. Here too the film poses a different understanding of time and temporality, since positionality and relationality come to be the main drivers of change rather than one consequential event which would be more typical for the mountain film. The various love triangles that are beginning to form - Maria, Val, and Jo- Ann; Maria, Val, and Henryk; Maria, Rosa Melchior (Angela Winkler), and Wilhelm; Val, Maria, and the photographer Berndt (Benoit Peverelli); and Jo-Ann, Maria, and Klaus - are likewise markers of the German Bergfilm � In both of Fanck’s most renowned mountain films, Der heilige Berg (1926) and Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü (1929), desire and jealousy build to a climactic love-triangle conflict that is dramatically and tragically played out in the mountains. Der heilige Berg pits Diotima’s (Leni Riefenstahl) naïve craving for attention and companionship against two friends and rivals vying for her love but ultimately succumbing to the mountains when both tragically perish in an accident� In Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü , Riefenstahl is yet again caught between the desires of two men: her new husband Hans Brandt, who seeks to take her on the coveted 364 Caroline Schaumann ascent of Piz Palu, and the taciturn mountaineer Johannes Krafft they meet, who gives Brandt his jacket in order to save him but freezes to death himself� Significantly, both Brandt’s wife and Krafft’s former wife, who perished in a crevasse long ago, are also named Maria, like the titular character in Sils Maria � Along with the Biblical feminine-coded name Maria, the German Bergfilm has typically employed many other allegorical and symbolic layers, structuring the cinematic world into dichotomies of light and shadow, struggle and redemption, man and woman, mountain and sea. 5 Sils Maria , too, rehearses some of these tropes by imbuing the mountain world with greater metaphorical meaning, separated from the characters’ life of modern convenience and luxury in hotels in the cities. As in many mountain films, the female characters become prized possessions in a world where men are ultimately in charge, whether they are being photographed for advertisement (by Berndt), directed on stage or for the camera (by Wilhelm and Klaus), exploited for money (Maria’s former husband), or harassed by older men (Henryk). Yet the women in Sils Maria are neither victims nor mere objects of desire. Instead, the film emphasizes the nature of play, as there are no fixed or predetermined roles in the various love triangles, and desires, control, jealousies, and insecurities are not static but continue to shift� This is also evident by the switching of roles both in the play and in the film: in Wilhelm’s play, Maria used to play the role of Sigrid, a young and cunning seductress, but she reluctantly switches to the role of the older and more fragile Helena under Klaus’s direction� Yet Klaus may be correct when he asserts that Sigrid and Helena are “one and the same person” that is both free, unpredictable, destructive, and vulnerable. Though it seems to go unrealized by Maria and the other protagonists, his assertion is shown to come true when we see Maria easily shrugging off Henryk’s advances despite her previous confession to Val that he used to have such abusive power over her� Conversely, Jo-Ann, the new actress of Sigrid, haughtily and over-confidently rejects Maria’s advice on the role but turns into an emotionally desperate stalker of her former boyfriend on leaked Youtube videos� While Sils Maria does not reverse gender roles by showing women in positions of power (both within the film’s diegesis and at the level of production), the film highlights the freedom inherent in the switching of roles, past and future possibilities, fluid identities, and playfulness� Assayas’s casting likewise reveals some suggestive playfulness: Binoche plays a protagonist in her forties, yet is already in her fifties, thus upending a Hollywood tradition that consistently chooses younger actresses for older character roles. The film refuses to make her aging body an issue, and indeed Assayas emphasized he has no problem casting an actress for a character that is supposed to be ten years younger� The staging of Angela Winkler as Wilhelm’s wife Rosa Reframing the Bergfilm : Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) 365 is another not-so-subtle indication of role-switching and play� Winkler’s distinct face is very familiar to German audiences, as she starred in many well-known New German Cinema films such as Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (1975) and Deutschland im Herbst (1978). While these politically charged films of Germany’s auteur-cinema dealing with German leftist terrorism and its aftermath at first sight seem far removed from Assayas’s melodrama in the mountains, Quendler has emphasized precisely the important context of Assayas and the Autorenkino . What is more, Winkler’s most famous role, that of Agnes in Volker Schlöndorff’s Academy Award-winning adaptation of Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (1979), stages one of the most recognized love triangles in German literature consisting of Oskar’s three parents, his beloved mother Agnes and his two fathers, the German Alfred Matzerath and the Polish Jan Bronski. To an audience familiar with New German Cinema, seeing Winkler act in Sils Maria is a quite jarring departure from what she is known for, but emphasizes a fluidity of roles and identities that becomes quite characteristic for the film. The triangular relationship between aging, performance, and play is further underscored by the film’s attention to screens, images, and frames. Whether the Swiss mountains on advertisement posters, television news on political tensions between South Korea and the U.S. under President Obama, 6 the Googled photographs of Jo-Ann on the iPad, or the various films within the film, the ever-present screens and framings remind us that we live in a mediated world� Assayas creates a collage of familiar mountain images, contemporary news, and fictional Google pages, setting the stage for the drama unfolding in the mountains in Part Two, while at the same time drawing attention to the medium of representation in itself, both reproducing and disrupting mimetic cinematic patterns� Though not mentioning the Bergfilm tradition, Howard Hampton fittingly observes: “By a hundred little cuts, upendings, elisions, and reversals, the schema is dismantled, reevaluated from multiple angles, and/ or thrown into seriocomic uncertainty” (41) After about thirty minutes into the film, a rather abrupt cut to an intertitle announcing Part Two on black background, set to the majestic “Largo from Xerxes” (1738) by George Friedrich Handel, indicates a drastic change. Part Two opens to three high angle establishing shots of the Valley of Sils and its surrounding mountains from above, followed by Val’s and Maria’s arrival in Sils for the practice and rehearsal of the Maloja Snake remake� Maria now sports a markedly different short haircut, and rather than staying at the fancy hotels as they did previously, they reside at Wilhelm and Rosa’s mountain chalet. Led by Rosa to the overlook above Lake Sils where Wilhelm killed himself, Maria learns about the Maloja Snake cloud formation, asking “Why a snake? In the 366 Caroline Schaumann play, it’s … it’s ambiguous,” while the film, still using the same non-diegetic Handel piece as a sound bridge, cuts to Arnold Fanck’s short documentary Das Wolkenphänomen von Maloja (1924)� In this most direct evocation of the classical German Bergfilm , Fanck’s nine-minute documentary (in its original but lost form presumably fourteen minutes) is condensed to roughly one minute, recut, and overlaid with baroque music by G� F� Handel� While Rosa and Maria fail to witness this cloud phenomenon at the meadow outlook, they watch it (along with Val) in Fanck’s film on television in Rosa’s living room, now conversing about Wilhelm. Assayas thus changes the setting, context, and message of the Bergfilm . Fanck’s film opened with a male mountaineer perched up high on a cliff and watching the clouds while smoking a pipe - here, two middle-aged women sit in a meadow, see the clouds over the Maloja Pass, and then watch Fanck’s film. The inherent gendering of the Bergfilm becomes even more obvious when Rosa plainly explains: “The Maloja Snake� It’s a cloud formation� Fairly rare, partially unexplained. It’s a sign of bad weather. And the clouds there are coming from the Italian lakes over the pass and winding through the valleys like a serpent. Therefore, it’s a snake, they call it a snake,” without attaching (gendered) values or properties. In Fanck’s film, conversely, the male protagonists (two mountaineers and two boatmen) witness with dread as a personified and feminized Maloja snake and “ihre Vorboten” engulf peaks, passes, and valleys in thick clouds - “tagelang wälzt sich die ‘Malojaschlange’ über den Pass” - seizing the land and shutting out the sunlight to force the mountaineers back down and the boatmen back ashore. Capitalizing on Christian mythology, the serpent here symbolizes uncontrollable danger and deceit� In the change from Fanck’s Das Wolkenphänomen von Maloja to Wilhelm Melchior’s The Maloja Snake to Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria , the material becomes appropriated and reframed. Assayas omits not only the gendered language of Fanck’s film, but in his recut film within the film also excludes Fanck’s low angle shots that make the clouds appear at once powerful and sinister. Instead, he uses high angle shots that he later reproduces in his own film, setting the protagonists and their point of view above the clouds� Figure 1: Hut before clouds� Left: Fanck’s Das Wolkenphänomen von Maloja (1924, 40: 09), right: Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014, 1: 41: 10) Reframing the Bergfilm : Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) 367 Figure 2: Clouds streaming down the pass� Upper left: Fanck’s Das Wolkenphänomen von Maloja (1924, 40: 28), upper right: Val’s point of view after her night out in Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014, 1: 05: 29), lower left: Maria’s point of view after Val’s departure in Sils Maria (1: 41: 41) Assayas’s female protagonists (and the viewers) are not threatened by the looming clouds but rather witnesses captivated by the spectacle unfolding below their eyes. If Rosa acknowledges, “it [Fanck’s film] comes from very far away, that is the beauty of it,” Assayas chooses to set Fanck’s century-old black and white silent film to an orchestrated and popularized version of Handel’s 1738 “Largo from Xerces,” creating even further distance by such media reflexivity. There are more layers of mediation, as viewers see Fanck’s film in Rosa and Wilhelm’s living room, accompanied by Rosa’s comments, which in turn reiterate the late Wilhelm’s opinions. According to Rosa, “Wilhelm was fascinated by this film. He used to marvel at the fact that the true nature of the landscape revealed itself in these images,” to which Maria replies, “but the black and white creates a distance.” As Quendler and Winkler have pointed out, this thinly veiled reference to Jean Epstein’s notion of photogénie delineates the potential of cinema under an auteur who can galvanize nature’s essence with the help of a camera (79). Indeed, both Fanck and Assayas make use of film technology in order to animate the mountainscape, capturing in time-lapse clouds streaming over peaks and passes� Both directors use this dynamic and ephemeral movement of clouds to draw a contrast to the massive mountains as reminders of deep time and a geological past, albeit to different ends. 7 As Sils Maria emphasizes that mountains and mountain films are not timeless, but become agents of change, Assayas subtly shifts these symbolic meanings to emphasize change and to open a space for a new, contemporary mountain film. In Assayas’s reframing of Fanck’s Das Wolkenphänomen von Maloja , weather conditions are not a menac- 368 Caroline Schaumann ing byproduct of mountains that man has to confront and battle, but an integral part of the mountain landscape� The second time viewers detect the Maloja cloud formation is in the early morning hours when a dazed and confused Val returns from a nightly party with Berndt, eagerly awaited by Maria. On her dizzying drive back up the mountain, shot in double exposure to the blasting hit song “Kowalski” (1997) by the Scottish electronic rock band Primal Scream, Val vomits, then lights a cigarette as the camera cuts to mountain scenes and the Maloja clouds, documenting in color exactly the same rocks and viewpoints that were used in Fanck’s film. Juxtaposed with Val’s wild ride and the deafening music, the serene scenery of rocks, cliffs, and clouds becomes once more reconfigured, as it is only visible to Val� Figure 3: Two rocks with clouds� Upper left: Fanck’s Das Wolkenphänomen von Maloja (1924, 40: 12), upper right: Val’s point of view in Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014, 1: 05: 32), lower left: Maria’s point of view in Sils Maria (1: 41: 14) The third witnessing of the Maloja clouds is at once a carefully planned event and unexpected turning point in the film. Upon recommendation of a valet in town the night before, Val and Maria set out at daybreak hopeful to catch a glimpse of the Maloja cloud formation� As they hike up the mountain slope in drizzling snow, visibly tired and grumpy, they get into a familiar argument about Maria’s dislike of Helena. This time, it is Val reminding Maria that the role is “pretty ambiguous,” with an uncertain ending as to whether she kills herself or not. Without noticing it, Maria returns to precisely the same spot where Rosa had led her previously, talking about Helena’s rather than Wilhelm’s death only to experience yet another loss� Reframing the Bergfilm : Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) 369 Figure 4: Grassy incline� Left: Rosa and Maria in Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014, 38: 34), right: Maria in Sils Maria (1: 39: 15) As Maria observes the clouds streaming over the pass and slowly begins to realize that she is indeed witnessing the infamous Maloja Snake, Val has disappeared. Maria’s excited, then desperate screams are not a dialogue but a monologue, and she turns back around from the view to search for Val. The camera, however, does not follow her but lingers at the scene, affording viewers alone the full glory of the mesmerizing cloud movement unfolding, in exactly the same spot where we previously watched Wilhelm’s body recovery, and Rosa and Maria’s revealing conversation� Figure 5: Overlook above Lake Sils� Upper left: Wilhelm’s recovery in Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014, 10: 40), upper right: Rosa and Maria in Sils Maria (38: 46), lower left: Maria pointing to the cloud formation in Sils Maria (1: 39: 35) This time, the scene is not set to Handel music but another Baroque piece, Johann Pachelbel’s easily recognizable “Canon and Gigue in D Major” (1680), which is used prolifically as a sound bridge in the remainder of the film and the final credits. Used commonly at both weddings and funerals, the music underscores the overall ambivalence of the scene signifying at once Val’s departure and the ending of their relationship and a new beginning for Maria. By using, 370 Caroline Schaumann as a kind of déjà vu, the same camera positions and perspectives from a previous point in the film but with different characters and music, Assayas invites viewers to ponder what has changed and what remains, and what messages, if any, can be drawn from a (mediated) mountain world. Rather than charging nature with any one singular meaning, as Fanck did with the at once beautiful and menacing Maloja snake, the clouds here remain true to their ephemeral status by acquiring different meanings for different protagonists (and viewers) at different times. If the German Bergfilm carried distinct patriotic if not nationalistic undertones, as a French-German-Swiss co-production, Sils Maria dispenses with any national affiliation and instead highlights the transnational character of protagonists and locations. The international film star Maria Enders is French but works in London, her assistant Val an American working for her in Europe, Jo-Ann a rising American actress involved in an affair in London with Christopher Giles ( Johnny Flynn), a famous British writer who is in turn married to a German painter, Dorothea von Duisburg. Henryk, Klaus (whose children live with his divorced wife in Italy), and Rosa are easily recognizable as Germans due to their German accents and renown as German actors - reportedly, Assayas wanted to stage Bruno Ganz as Henryk and Daniel Brühl as Klaus which would have buttressed this connection. With the exception of Wilhelm, none of the characters seem to be tied to a particular place or home country but continually cross borders, nations, and languages. In keeping with his international cast, Assayas used shooting locations in different countries: The train as setting for the first ten minutes of the film travelled from Paris to Zurich, but the depicted Zurich train station is actually the train station in Leipzig, Germany. Interior scenes were shot in Leipzig and Berlin, with the mountain scenes filmed on location in Sils, Engadin, but also in South Tyrol, Italy, which boasts an entirely different scenery� With his multinational shooting locations and characters who like the clouds themselves seamlessly pass through national borders, Assayas decidedly did not follow the Bergfilm ’s commitment to on-location shooting� In his melodramatic conclusion to Der heilige Berg , Fanck had pitted the sea and the mountain as two eternally different elements that “can never be wed,” in order to explicate Diotima’s innate connection with water and her fundamental unsuitability in the world of rock and ice� 8 For the women in Sils Maria , there is no such conflict: none of the protagonists show any desire to conquer peaks, but they venture on hikes, become lost in the mountainscape, and immerse themselves in the land by swimming in lakes and observing the views� If their semi-erotic skinny-dipping (as many reviewers have made sure to point out, Val keeps on her underwear) underscores the link between women and Reframing the Bergfilm : Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) 371 water, 9 Maria and Val are equally engaged in their frequent hikes above timberline� Assayas thus abandons the gendered verticality prevalent in the emergent nineteenth-century mountaineering that also structured the Bergfilm of the twentieth century and continues to be rehearsed in recent productions such as Nordwand or Nanga Parbat (Schaumann). Significantly, in Sils Maria mountain summits do not figure at all, as they are neither mentioned nor attained nor become objects of desire. As different protagonists draw a multiplicity of meanings from their time spent in the mountains, the film stages a kind of transformative being in the mountains as opposed to climbing the mountains, and the former has no correlation to gender, age, and physical fitness. Sils Maria does not elevate heroic male mountaineers and their feats but makes room for a different yet equally intensive relationship with mountains� In other ways, however, Sils Maria reproduces some of the binaries familiar from the Bergfilm . The film’s protagonists come from a highly privileged background and can afford to escape the hustle and bustle of their professional lives in order to recreate and practice their lines up high in the mountains (for Val, notably, this is a job, but presumably well compensated). Money, time, or everyday worries are never mentioned as the protagonists dine over elaborate meals, stay in lavish hotel suites, gamble in casinos, and come and go in luxury cars and taxis� In his scathing review of Sils Maria in the New Yorker , Richard Brody griped: “The movie is an advertisement for the artistic life - or, rather, the artistic life style - as a devotion of calm and comfortable leisure� The artists tool around in luxury through Europe’s lavish, high-end touristic landscape, staying in fancy hotels and plush villas on someone else’s dime, with no prying boss or insistent producer or determined director on hand to oversee the work” (Brody n� pag�)� Brody is correct but fails to acknowledge the long history and context of mountain recreation built on privilege and exclusion� As with many Bergfilme , the plot of Sils Maria unfolds in a (temporary) respite up high for the select few, shielded from the masses and urban challenges, and removed from those who actually make a living in the mountains� Ben Anderson has shown that such exclusivity did not arrive as a one-way process but was aided and produced by local actors (largely unseen and only present in the film as hotel clerks, restaurant servers, and mountain rescuers) creating a landscape for touristic consumption� 10 In this secluded and exclusive space, Val and Maria rehearse the roles of Sigrid and Helena and come to play out desires and insecurities� Maria jealously watches over Valentine’s love life, then attempts to cancel her engagement as Helena, while Val toys with Maria through flirtation but also battles demons of her own. Throughout their rehearsal, Maria gradually accepts and takes on the role of a rejected and mournful older lover, begging Valentine, “What do I need 372 Caroline Schaumann to do to make you admire me? ” Like Sigrid in the play, Val becomes uneasy, embarrassed, and (self-) destructive, until she leaves Maria for good during their early morning hike to observe the Maloja cloud formation� William Mooney affirms: “Maria gradually takes on the character of the older woman as she rehearses the role of Helena with her assistant Valentine; by the time of the play’s performance in London, Maria feels herself pushed aside, in life as on stage, by the young actor cast as Sigrid, social-media celebrity Jo-Ann Ellis” (Mooney n. pag.). This is true, but I’d like to add that the dynamic also works the other way around, in that Maria, during the rehearsal process, realizes that the role of an older woman who is lonely, insecure, and weak is merely a performance she is free to act out or leave. Therefore, the entangled relationships of the characters with their larger implications when it comes to notions of aging and gender are plots and scripts, put on stage designed to model and mirror human action. Quite fitting with the Baroque film music, this harkens back to the concept of theatrum mundi during the “Age of Theater” in the Baroque, when, thanks to remarkable advances in stage design, entertainment proliferated in France and other countries. Once again, it is the perceptive character of Val who captures this notion when saying: “It’s theater� It’s an interpretation of life� It can be truer than life itself�” In a mode akin to breaking the fourth wall, Assayas deliberately plays with his viewers, sometimes leaving them in the dark as to whether Maria and Valentine are rehearsing their lines and roles of the play or indeed conversing with each other. In his commentary “Anatomy of a Scene,” he confirms: “So when the dialogue starts, when they are hiking, it’s very difficult to know exactly on which side of the mirror we are … if they are rehearsing or if they are actually arguing” ( The New York Times )� Both Maria and Val freely mix role-playing and real life to the point that it becomes unclear which is which, and the lines between reality and play are blurred. Quendler and Winkler add that the different acting styles that Maria and Val assume add to this ambiguity: “The meta-cinematic implications of this psychodrama are brought out superbly through the different acting styles that Maria and Val assume when rehearsing the play, which in different ways blur the lines between theatrical and non-theatrical spaces” (80). In another scene, one of their more emotional exchanges, Val affirms, “I think I need to leave,” to which Maria replies “Stay, please stay. I need you.” With the roles in the play and the roles in the film becoming conflated, the tragic slides into the comedic and back into tragic� But since viewers know that in every instance, they are watching actresses performing, Assayas makes sure to emphasize that the distinction between play and film is moot in the first place. In an interview, he maintained, “It’s a movie where you ultimately never forget that you’re watching those actresses. It’s part of what the film’s Reframing the Bergfilm : Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) 373 about” (Hastie 53). There is another tongue-in-cheek significance in that Maria returns to perform in the Maloja Snake written by Wilhelm Melchior who made her famous, and Assayas conversely launched Binoche’s career with the film Rendez-vous (1985), for which he co-wrote the script. Assayas further taunts viewers when, in the “Anatomy of a Scene,” he adds with a chuckle, “sorry to spoil the magic, but this was not shot actually in Switzerland, it was shot somewhere else, it was shot in South Tyrol.” He then elaborates on the difficulties of outdoor shooting because of the constantly changing conditions such as the sunlight� These thoughts simultaneously draw attention to and subvert the Bergfilm, whose most distinguishing feature at the time was on-location shooting. As Arnold Fanck, Luis Trenker, and Leni Riefenstahl all insist, German mountain films were shot on location in the Alps, with actors as athletes performing actual climbing feats under harrowing conditions� Prefacing his “Drama Poem” Der heilige Berg , Fanck asserts: “The well-known sportsmen who participated in the making of ‘The Holy Mountain’ ask the audience not to mistake their performance for trick photography� All shots taken outdoors were actually made in the mountains, in the most beautiful parts of the Alps, over the course of one and a half years�” Assayas is likewise shooting in the Alps (among other locations) but fools his viewers into believing his locations are authentic - only to “spoil the magic” in his commentary. In a similar vein, both directors draw attention to the “performance” of their actors: Fanck to stress his allegiance to authenticity, Assayas precisely to question any form of authenticity. In a second film within the film, Val and Maria, wearing 3-D glasses, watch the (fictitious) science fiction movie “Time Shift” starring Jo-Ann at a local theater in town. After winning a round of Roulette, Maria laughs off the deeper meaning of a modern sci-fi film over her beer while Val maintains, similar to her previous assertion, “there is no less truth than in a more supposedly serious film.” Her words can be taken as an assessment of Sils Maria versus the Bergfilm genre in general, since the former chooses a playfulness, lightness, and switching of roles to subtly mock the drama of the traditional Bergfilm � Mountains in Sils Maria are not objects against which one can measure their power, but a space of freedom, fear, and exploration. And the mountain retreat remains no isolated space untouched by signs of civilization but a place where Maria Googles video clips of her co-star and rival Jo-Ann, an abode that Val flees with her overnight stand at Berndt’s at Lake Como, and from where Maria and Val go to town in order to watch a movie, gamble, and drink. In this way, Assayas stresses the processes of (re)invention, play, and staging, implying that his character roles are anything but fixed. 374 Caroline Schaumann The film’s epilogue, set in London five weeks after the Alpine sojourn, offers new characters and developments that yet again mock previous assumptions and interpretations. Maria’s divorce proceedings are now final; she is no longer emotionally drained from their aftermath and no longer reluctant about her role as Helena� A new personal assistant has replaced Val but her profound absence hovers over the remaining plot. Onstage rehearsal for the play has begun, and Klaus has discovered some mysterious new pages and scenes in Melchior’s play that the latter apparently wrote at a later time, though viewers are never privy as to their content� Yet these promising developments are turned topsy-turvy yet again when Klaus learns that Dorothea von Duisburg, the famous German painter, has attempted to commit suicide, presumably because of her husband’s affair with Jo-Ann. The news throws Maria’s meeting with Klaus into disarray and diverts his attention as he invites Jo-Ann to their dinner, who conversely invites her not-so-secret lover. Despite the grim themes, the scenes have a distinct comic flair, as the four dine and then flee the restaurant in panic, each on their phones, with missed calls and messages that call to mind the film’s beginning. Jo-Ann not only steals the spotlight from the anticipated press attention on Maria, but exposes her sleek malice when she flatly rejects Maria’s acting advice, sneering: “Well, no one really gives a fuck about Helena at that point, do they? I’m sorry, but I mean it’s pretty clear to me this poor woman’s all washed up. I mean your character, right, not you.” If the conversation leaves Maria momentarily dumbfounded and speechless, it is she who gets the last laugh, as she consults with a young director about a new film project right before the play’s premiere, with planned location shooting in Ukraine. Piers Roaldson is insistent in giving the lead role to Maria, who protests on the basis of her age, suggesting Jo-Ann instead. But Piers refuses, expressing no affinity for Jo-Ann and remarking instead that his character “has no age. Or else, she is every age at once, like all of us. […] She is outside of time.” In his science fiction film set in the twenty-third century, his main character is a genetic hybrid with a soul, a kind of mutant that seems awfully close to Jo-Ann’s role back in “Time Shift�” Has Maria changed her point of view and taken in the previous opinions of Val? We are left in the dark, as it remains unclear whether Maria will accept the role or not, but cannot help but recall Val’s last words back on their hike, right before she was leaving: “The text is like an object� It’s gonna change perspective based on where you are standing.” Val here reminds us that different viewers read the same text differently, so that there is no fixed meaning or interpretation to any text. At the same time, this fluidity extends to different times as well, so that even the same interpreter may come to change her opinion� Amelie Hastie recognizes in “The Vulnerable Spectator”: “But the textual object also has the potential to change in its consumption over time by the same viewer, suggesting a Reframing the Bergfilm : Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) 375 duality not just in characters within the text or the character of the text but also within the spectator of the film” (Hastie 53). Sils Maria therefore redefines aging in spatialized terms as shifting perspectives and new exploration of the same texts and mountains that we continue to engage with� This also seems evident in the Maloja Snake ’s new scenes, written by Wilhelm in later age that Klaus characterizes: “His texts have become bolder and bolder, more enigmatic.” As the music rises once more with Pachelbel’s “Canon,” these scenes will unfold on stage. The curtain has opened, the play has begun, the actors have roles to play. Notes 1 However, as fittingly pointed out in the “Trivia” section of the online version of the film, it is a goof that Maria and Valentine appear to be traveling in a second-class car rather than first class, which would have been more appropriate� 2 For this free advertisement, the French fashion house Chanel in turn supplied the actresses’ clothing and accessories and provided additional funds for Assayas that allowed him to shoot the film in 35 mm rather than digitally, another resemblance to the classical German Bergfilm � 3 We as viewers of the film never see the play or parts of it performed (aside from its opening), and thus rely entirely on the lines rehearsed by Maria and Val, and their differing interpretations of them. 4 The fact that the film toys with queerness but has Maria declare “I’ve always been straight” has been criticized in the media. See Shannon Keating, “Highbrow No Homo: The Art of Queer Representation in Clouds of Sils Maria ,” for instance. 5 Expanding on such mythical meanings, Quendler recently used Friedrich Hölderlin’s aesthetic framework to delineate the unexpected continuities between Der heilige Berg and Werner Herzog’s Schrei aus Stein (1991) with respect to character setup, melodramatic themes, and mise-en-scène. 6 On August 3, 2013, President Obama overturned a ruling by the U.S. International Trade Commission that banned a range of Apple iPad devices from being imported into the U.S. since they had infringed a Samsung patent, a move that drew complaints of protectionism. Ironically, both Maria and Val are seen using their iPads numerous times in the film (see Bartz and Rascoe)� 7 See also Kay Kirchmann’s discussion of time-lapse photography in Fanck in order to capture on film dynamic cloud formations: “Hier zeigt die Natur ein dynamisches Gesicht, hier nimmt sie Gestalt an und legt sie schließlich wieder ab, was sich jedoch erst in der filmischen Wiedergabe, genauer: 376 Caroline Schaumann in der filmischen Konstruktion von Zeitverdichtung per Zeitraffereinsatz unserer Wahrnehmung vollends erschließt” (125)� 8 However, in his special effect shot of a mountainscape superimposed onto a coastline, Fanck precisely “weds” ocean and mountains, cinematically manipulating the natural landscape in order to make it available for touristic consumption, as Seth Peabody has suggested. 9 As Susan Schrepfer has pointed out for the North American context, many mountain lakes were named after women in contrast to peaks named after men (see Schrepfer 15—37)� 10 The author wishes to thank the anonymous reader for this salient point� Works Cited Anderson, Ben. “Alpine Agency: Locals, Mountaineers and Tourism in the Eastern Alps, c. 1860-1914.” Rural History 27�1 (2016): 61—78� Bartz, Diane, and Ayesha Rascoe. “Obama administration overturns ban on some iPad, iPhones�” Reuters 3 Aug� 2013� Web� 14 Apr� 2021� Brody, Richard. “The Enemy of Youth.” New Yorker 16 Apr� 2015� Web� 14 Apr� 2021� Clouds of Sils Maria . 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Lukenbill, Mark. “Interview: Olivier Assayas on Clouds of Sils Maria , Kristen Stewart, and More�” Slant 1 Apr� 2015� Web� 14 Apr� 2021� Mooney, William. “From All about Eve (1950) to Clouds of Sils Maria (2014): Adapting a Classic Paradigm�” Literature Film Quarterly 45�3 (2017): n� pag� Web� 14 Apr� 2021� Peabody, Seth. “Image, Environment, Infrastructure: The Social Ecologies of the Bergfilm �” Humanities 10�1 (2021): n� pag� Web� 18 Sept� 2021� Prigge, Matt. “Interview: Olivier Assayas Talks ‘Clouds of Sils Maria’ and Kristen Stewart�” Metro 6 Apr� 2015� Web� 14 Apr� 2021� Quendler, Christian. “Holy Mountain Hollywood: Hölderlin, Fanck und Herzog,” Heilige Berge - Berge und das Heilige � Ed� Thomas Steppan and Monika Fink� Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2021. 161—73. Reframing the Bergfilm : Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) 377 Quendler, Christian, and Daniel Winkler. “Aging, Auteurism, and the Bergfilm : Olivier Assayas’s Sils Maria / Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) and Paolo Sorrentino’s La giovinezza / Youth (2015)�” Journal of Film and Video 72�3-4 (2020): 73—89� Schaumann, Caroline. “The Return of the Bergfilm: Nordwand (2008) and Nanga Parbat (2010)�” German Quarterly 87 (2014): 416—39� Schrepfer, Susan. Nature’s Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism � Lawrence: U of Kansas P, 2005. The New York Times. “‘Clouds of Sils Maria.’ Anatomy of a Scene w/ Director Olivier Assayas�” YouTube 13 Apr� 2015� Web� 14 Apr� 2021� Whitney, Oliver. “Kristen Stewart Addresses the Irony of Clouds of Sils Maria �” Huffpost 9 Oct� 2014� Web� 14 Apr� 2021� From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley: Imaging the Alps at the Crossroads of the Heimat Genre3 7 9 From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley: Imaging the Alps at the Crossroads of the Heimat Genre Christian Quendler University of Innsbruck Abstract: The German notion of Heimat is a form of place attachment that is simultaneously shaped by senses of longing and belonging� Heimat not only accommodates the unhomely in the homely, it also blends foreign perspectives with stylized forms of self-exoticization� To the extent that Heimat responds to a desire for rediscovering the (trans)national in the local, the urban in the provincial, the modern in the anti-modern, and so on, it may be described as a delocalized place. This article examines changing national, gendered, and generic transpositions of Alpine imaginaries by analyzing film adaptations of two novels that prefigure and refigure Heimat art respectively: Wilhelmine von Hillern’s Die Geier-Wally (The Vulture Wally), which appeared in 1873 and became the source of many film and TV adaptations, and Thomas Willmann’s Alpine Western Das finstere Tal (The Dark Valley), published in 2010 and adapted to a motion picture by Andreas Prochaska in 2014� Keywords: Heimat, Western, Dorfroman, adaptation, Geierwally , Das finstere Tal It is a misleading cliché that the Heimat genre in literature and film is so exclusive that it remains utterly incomprehensible to people outside German-speaking countries� Although the very resistance of the term ‘ Heimat ’ to translation seems to underscore this claim, this linguistic singularity is better understood as a Heimat effect that accommodates foreign perspectives through acts of self-exoticization� Heimat may be thought of as the inverse case to the German neologism ‘Wellness,’ which sounds foreign but is really home-made. Heimat refers to home, but is often constructed from afar. While Heimat typically refers to non-urban and peripheral localities, it is intricately linked to projections of urban centers, national and transnational networks. A case in point are nine- 380 Christian Quendler teenth-century folktales about rural areas that were compiled and frequently fabricated by the members of the academic urban elite to satisfy the national demands for an organically grown repository of narratives (Schenda 32)� In the Heimat genre, longing and belonging complement senses of national and cultural identities� Place attachment and cultural identity seem to form an ideal unity. In response to the melodramatic search for a home, Heimat art often rediscovers home as a place one has always belonged to� It is a place that can be appreciated all the more after a detour through foreign and unfamiliar terrains� This recurring plot pattern of returning to one’s Heimat narratives literally drives this point home: “Wer nie fortgeht, kommt nie heim” (“Who doesn’t leave, can’t come home”), says Tonio Feuersinger in Luis Trenker’s film Der verlorene Sohn ( The Prodigal Son, 1934) (see also von Moltke, “Convertible Provincialism”)� Although it seems that Heimat can never be truly appreciated from an outsider’s or a foreigner’s perspective, it remains a place of imaginary projections� Heimat [is] A German Dream that imagines A Nation of Provincials , to draw on the titles of Elisabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman’s as well as Celia Applegate’s studies on the Heimat movement� The prodigal son’s return to Heimat , and the reader’s or viewer’s arrival at or vacation in this idyll, are complementary movements that shape the image of Heimat � The consumers’ discovery of a shared fantasy echoes the protagonist’s recognition that there is no place like Heimat. Heimat may thus be understood as a dialogic image, which not only includes the unhomely in the homely (or what is sometimes referred to as the darker side of the Heimat genre) (von Moltke , No Place like Home 44) but blends foreign perspectives with stylized forms of self-exoticization� As a source of inland exoticism that can serve as a contrast to both urban and lower-lying country life, high-alpine areas often play a special role in this dialogic remediation� To the extent that Heimat responds to a desire for rediscovering the (trans)national in the local, the urban in the provincial, the modern in the anti-modern, and so on, it may be described as a delocalized place� This article examines changing national, gendered, and generic transpositions of Alpine imaginaries by analyzing film adaptations of two novels that prefigure and refigure Heimat art respectively. The first novel is Wilhelmine von Hillern’s Die Geier-Wally ( The Vulture Wally ), which appeared in 1873 in serialized form in Julius Rodenberg’s Deutscher Rundschau � 1 Hillern’s Dorfgeschichte was published shortly before the rise of Heimat literature in the 1890s� It has had a lasting impact on the Heimat film. With at least six feature-length films and TV adaptations to date, it has been repeatedly referred to as the “evergreen” of the Heimat film genre (Berg-Ganschow 24; von Moltke, “Evergreens: The Heimat Genre”)� 2 The second novel is Thomas Willmann’s Alpine Western From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley 381 Das finstere Tal ( The Dark Valley ), published in 2010. In his acknowledgment, Willmann credits Ludwig Ganghofer and Sergio Leone as the lodestars of his work� 3 The curious double patronship also bespeaks an aesthetic feature of the Dorfgeschichte, which in its current revival marks a historical ebbing and flowing of the Heimat genre (Nell 55). Berthold Auerbach’s Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten can be credited with having set the model for the genre in the 1840s� Based on the urban/ rural dichotomy, Dorfgeschichten typically reimagine provincial life for an urban middle-class readership� A (realistic) depiction of a rural community is examined as a microcosm that reflects larger social and geopolitical processes of nation-building, industrialization, urbanization, or bureaucratization (Baur 1978). Central aesthetic strategies of the genre are the appropriation of mythical patterns and reflexive uses of world-literary themes (e.g., Gottfried Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe [1875])� The high degree of intertextuality not only underscores the artistic aspirations of the genre but also mediates between the literary construction of an experiential reality and its wider sociological analysis or claims� While the critical reception of the Dorfgeschichte during the (first half of the) twentieth century was largely marred by its association with trivial forms of Heimat novels and films, it has generated a new critical interest in recent decades (Twellmann 2019). Werner Nell (57—58) sees in the genre’s amalgamation of historical, anthropological, and literary discourses an interdisciplinary appeal that accounts for the renewed popularity of the Dorfgeschichte as a transmedial form that also lends itself to addressing global and ecological concerns (Zemanek)� Comparing The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley sheds light on the stakes involved in shifting images of Alpine Heimat from a national to a global scale� While The Vulture Wally projects an image of Heimat by juxtaposing mythic, historical, and pseudoor proto-ethnographical accounts, it also presents its eponymous heroine as an image searching for cultural, spiritual, and gender identity. Similarly, Andreas Prochaska’s film adaptation of The Dark Valley begins with the image of a woman symbolizing a Heimat that awaits to be (re) discovered. In this case, however, the imagistic circuits extend to global and metahistorical dimensions. As I will show, The Dark Valley not only revisits the mythical imagination of the nineteenth century and reimagines Alpine Heimat through the generic frame of the revisionist US Western of the 1970s, but the film is itself part of a globalized cultural history of the Alps. The nostalgic search for a (lost) home is a deep-seated motif that sustains both the Heimat and Western genres. If the former is strongly rooted in the domestic sphere, the latter has been traditionally seen as a programmatic escape from domestic realms and 382 Christian Quendler genres (Tompkins)� This also raises the question of how a Western delocation of Alpine Heimat affects gendered subjectivities. Before discussing narrative acts of delocation in The Vulture Wally and The Dark Valley , I should point to the setting and plot patterns that link the two narratives� Both stories take place in the late nineteenth century and draw on the same tourist fantasy of a wild and unexplored Alpine landscape� The story of The Vulture Wally is set in and around the Rofenhöfe of the Öztal Alps, near the mountain pass Hochjoch, which connects North and South Tyrol. Andreas Prochaska’s film adaptation of The Dark Valley (which in the novel is somewhere between Bavaria and Tyrol) was shot at Marchegghof in the Schnalstal located south of the Hochjoch (see figure 1). Both Wally and Sam Greider, the protagonist of The Dark Valley (2014), have lost their mothers� Wally’s mother died at her birth� We can only assume that Greider’s mother died sometime after she emigrated to America� Greider returns to his mother’s Heimat valley to take vengeance on the patriarch Brenner, who, with the help of his sons, raped Greider’s mother on her wedding night. By revisiting Brenner’s valley, Greider relives and seeks to bring closure to his traumatic family history. Paradoxically, Willmann’s detour via America takes us back to the delocated beginnings of the genre: the appropriation of the Dorfgeschichte as a Heimat narrative� Hillern’s novel The Vulture Wally may be an ‘evergreen’ of the Heimat film, but it does not belong to this genre� Its seeds were planted elsewhere� This makes The Vulture Wally a particularly insightful example of a dialogic imaging of Heimat as a form of domesticated exoticism� Given the iconic role The Vulture Wally assumes in developing and revising images of Alpine Heimat , I will begin with a brief discussion of the way this dialogic image is constructed in Hillern’s novel before focusing on the film adaptations of The Vulture Wally and The Dark Valley � In Hillern’s novel the domestic exoticism of the eponymous heroine is underscored by the intertextual construction of her character, the staged encounter of foreign and local perspectives as well as the interpretive effect of reading a mythically coded narrative against the real-life account of Anna Stainer-Knittel� Urban legends maintain that Tyrolian painter Stainer-Knittel told her story to Hillern or that Hillern was directly inspired by Stainer-Knittel’s monumental self-portrait that depicts her emptying an eagle’s nest� 4 However, as Katja Mellmann has pointed out in great detail, Hillern fabricated her story mostly on the basis of Ludwig Steub’s exaggerated newspaper account and heavily relied on his travel narratives Drei Sommer in Tirol (1846). Thus, not only was the novel written with a German urban middle-class readership in mind, its main source is itself informed by a German tourist perspective� From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley 383 Mellmann suggests that Hillern may even have given a nod to her principal source in the figure of the tourist, who at the very beginning of the novel hikes through the valley accompanied by a local guide. Although the reader’s first encounter with Wally is focalized through the tourist and the guide’s introduction, the novel begins with a view from the mountain top (approximating Wally’s point of view) before alternating between the travelers’ mountain view and Wally’s outlook over the valley� Both parties are but tiny spots in the mountainous landscape; they are too far apart from one another to understand each other’s words or gestures. Their encounter remains largely imaginary, driven by the wanderer’s curiosity and prejudice, on the one hand, and Wally’s longing for belonging, on the other. Wally, who in this chapter is compared to an Alpine rose, is framed by the stranger’s exotic curiosity and the guide’s dismissive identification of her as a tomboy. But she is also an image that itself beholds an unchanging and guiding mental image� She looks for its external counterpart in every distant wanderer that passes through the valley, even if they appear “no bigger than a moving image in a peepshow”: Es war ein Bild, das sich immer gleichblieb, sie mochte es sehen in grauer Morgendämmerung oder in goldener Mittagsglut, im Abendrot oder im bleichen Mondlicht, und es ging mit ihr seit einem Jahr überall, wo sie ging und stand, hinab ins Tal und hinauf auf die Berge, und wenn sie so allein draußen war, […] dann suchten sie den, welchem das Bild glich, und wenn dann und wann ein Wanderer da unten winzig klein vorüberglitt, so dachte sie, das könnte er sein, und eine seltsame Freude kam über sie bei dem Gedanken, daß sie ihn gesehen, wenn sie auch nichts erkennen konnte als eine menschliche Gestalt, nicht größer als ein bewegliches Figürchen im Guckkasten. ( Die Geier-Wally 7—8) This initial exchange of gazes prompts the guide’s account of how Wally received her nickname Vulture Wally� At the age of fourteen she saved a farmer’s lambs by rappelling down a cliff to kill the ferocious vulture with a knife and bring back its chick, which she raised as a pet. This vignette, which synthesizes the mythical model of Kriemhild’s falcon and the historical model of Stainer-Knittel’s eagle (Mellmann 150), undergoes interesting changes in the first three film adaptations of the novel. While Ewald André Dupont’s Vulture Wally of 1921 retains the gazes that are exchanged among the Vulture Wally, the tourist, and his guide as a framing device for the vulture story, The Vulture Wally (dir. Hans Steinhoff, 1940) produced during the Nazi era excises any foreign perspective. The vulture episode is no longer part of a prehistory that introduces the protagonist to a tourist but becomes the very event that propels the narrative� Wally’s act of bravery comes as a wake-up call to a group of young men that have grown soft and would not meddle with the 384 Christian Quendler vulture and its offspring. Wally’s seizing of the vulture’s chick literally disrupts the pastoral idyll, symbolized by a boyish goatherd who, upon seeing this act, gets up from his repose and runs to inform the farmer� 5 In Frantisek Cáp’s postwar adaptation of 1956, the vulture episode moves even deeper into the story, where it marks a tragic highlight. In this version, Wally captures the vulture after her father has thrown her out of the house and forced her to stay in a cabin up on the Murzoll glaciers until she agrees to marry the man he has chosen for her. In contrast to the previous adaptations, the vulture does not represent a given feature of or a determining moment in Wally’s life but expresses what she has become, symbolizing both her abjection and longing. In the course of these adaptations, the vulture story changes from a story intended to frame the stranger/ reader’s relationship to the character to an initiating and ultimately an existential event. In this sense, the tableau that introduces Wally at the beginnings of the novel and the first adaptation is only gradually developed throughout the entire film adaptation from 1956 (see figures 2 and 3). One could even say that the recreations of this iconic image generated by the adaptations parallel - on a cultural level - the protagonist’s search for someone who resembles the image she carries within her� The character’s longing for a matching image mirrors the reception history performed by the film adaptations� Figure 1: Opening sequence of Dupont’s The Vulture Wally (1921) starring Henny Porten� Figure 2: Final Sequence of Cap’s The Vulture Wally (1956) starring Barbara Rütting� The search for a preexisting, original, or eternal image encapsulates the poetics of the Dorfgeschichte and its ‘discovery’ of literary themes of world literature in provincial settings� It is also programmatic of the novel’s trajectory and the plot’s alignment with the telos of a Christian Heilsgeschichte (Mellmann 143— 54) . Having been raised without a mother, Wally’s life is marked by a series of From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley 385 displacements of father figures and a continued search for the one (almighty) father� Hillern draws on local folkloristic myths such as white fairy-like virgins that live in the eternal snow of the personified mountain, named Father Murzoll, who gives her a home after she was thrown out by her heartless biological father. In the pure element of ice, Wally experiences freedom and peace. The sublime mountains lift her spirits above the common sense of the people in the valley� The overarching myth that sustains the narrative of The Vulture Wally is the legendary Norse heroine Brunhild of The Song of the Nibelungs. Hillern originally intended to title the novel “Die Dorfbrunhild” (“The Village Brunhild”)� The many references to folk mythology and Germanic paganism underscore Wally’s bond with the forces of nature, which will eventually be reconciled with and refined by Catholicism. 6 In the final chapter, this synthesis is expressed twice, on the level of narrative fiction and in a comment of the extradiegetic narrator. The last chapter returns to the tableau with which the novel began� Wally is sitting at the top of the mountain all by herself� This time she is not only an image that returns the tourist’s and the guide’s gazes and yelling (or yodeling), but one that remembers the distant encounter with the tourist and the guide and all the misfortunes she has endured ever since ( Die Geier-Wally 251—52)� Joseph, the Bear Slayer, has finally come to propose to Wally and bring her back home. For Wally, leaving the high mountains is a moment of conversion, a return from paganism to Christianity that allows for a (Catholic) degree of coexistence� She bids her Father Murzoll farewell and thanks him for giving her a home ( Heimat ) when she was homeless ( heimatlos )� When Joseph mocks Murzoll with the yodel of a triumphant wooer, Wally first shushes him and warns him not to taunt the evil spirits but immediately corrects herself by stating that there are no ghosts, there is only God. Christianity and paganism are also reconciled in the concluding tableau of the novel. A crucifix at a mountaintop commemorates the short lives of Wally and Joseph. Beneath the cross, Joseph’s sister Aphra and Wally’s farmhand Benedikt are often seen praying� Further down in the canyon, “white foggy figures” warn the hikers of Murzoll’s daughters: Von dem Kreuz herab weht es ihn an wie eine Klage aus längstverklungenen Heldensagen, daß auch das Gewaltige wie das Schwache dahinsinkt und vergehen muß - doch der Gedanke mag ihn trösten: das Gewaltige kann sterben, aber nicht aussterben. Sei es im Strahlenpanzer Siegfrieds und Brunhilds oder im schlichten Bauernkittel eines Bären-Joseph und einer Geier-Wally - immer finden wir es wieder! ( Die Geier-Wally 268) 386 Christian Quendler The pagan spirit and folkloristic traditions are not only a means of spiritualizing nature; they may also help to invigorate religion� They endow the text with what may be described as a sense of mythical authenticity, an effect that results from combining the familiar mythical intertexts of The Song of the Nibelungs and the Murzoll legend with referential claims and detailed descriptions of local color� Wally’s character is far from being psychologically sound or round� She is a rather incongruous mix of supernatural power and unswerving passion paired with low self-esteem and submissiveness. As Nina Stainer points out, feminist interpretations of the novel result from a productive confusion that equates the rather contrary personalities of the fictional character Vulture Wally and the self-determined woman artist Anna Stainer-Knittel (Stainer 207—08)� 7 Similarly, mythologizing Steub’s travel writings reinforces the historical and cultural othering of the Alps by equating geographical distance from urban centers with historical remoteness� Isolated and disconnected from social progress, the Alps represent a bygone world and a site of projection for all kinds of cultural fantasies. Vulture Wally’s description as a half-boy, who is incredibly strong and equally impulsive, offers an empowering story for urban middle-class women of the late nineteenth century (Scharnowski)� Visiting Vulture Wally in the mountains becomes a trip to a supposedly anti-modern space, a time travel fantasy that is at the same time escapist and empowering, an exotic spectacle of touristic self-discovery� Mythical authenticity is symptomatic of internal and external efforts that construct notions of Heimat at national and international scales; it is also a characteristic feature of Prochaska’s film The Dark Valley , where it takes on a transatlantic dimension, which distinguishes it from both the German and Austrian Heimat film as well as concurrent anti- Heimat movies� If The Dark Valley is authentic, as its director repeatedly suggests (Prochaska and Fuchs), then only in the sense that it adheres to a mythical image that stirred the imagination of urban readers and moviegoers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries� The Dark Valley is a case of Austrian self-exoticization that has more in common with the dark exoticism encountered in the genre’s prehistory than with the heroic vitalism for which the Heimat film became known during the Third Reich� A comparison with Trenker’s The Prodigal Son , which like Prochaska’s film contains a biblical reference in its title, can illustrate this difference in mood and perspective� 8 Tonio, a South Tyrolian farmer, tries his luck in New York City only to find out that life is best at home. This is already alluded to in the opening song, which claims that “lumberjacks are the most cheerful people in the world” as we see farmhands working, singing and courting with springlike virility� The Dark Valley also features a logging scene, which, although directly inspired by Trenker’s film, was shot in stark contrast to The Prodigal Son � From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley 387 It is winter and no joyful song sets the rhythm of the work� Chopping proceeds in silent gestures. Instead of the prospect of romance, the scene in The Dark Valley reveals the first victim of Greider’s revenge: the patriarch’s son, Edi Brenner. Although The Dark Valley has moments of comic relief, it differs greatly from the satirical and grotesque traditions of the Austrian anti- Heimat film that emerged in the 1970s such as Werner Pircher’s Der Untergang des Alpenlandes (1974), the TV mini-series based on Felix Mitterer’s Die Piefke-Saga (1990s), or, more recently, the film adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel Die Kinder der Toten ( The Children of the Dead, 2019) by Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska. Nor does The Dark Valley connect with the Jewish legacy of anti- Heimat films of the 1920s that existed concurrently with the German Bergfilm (Ashkenazi) and excelled in Ernst Lubitsch’s satirical and grotesque films such as Meyer aus Berlin ( Meyer from Berlin , 1919) and Die Bergkatze ( The Wildcat , 1921). Instead, I propose to view this in the context of a larger historical renegotiation of alpine culture by arguing that this sense of wilderness is characteristic of North American mountain culture or, more specifically, a North American appropriation of the romantic Alpine idyll� The Dark Valley (2014) does not simply retreat to a time before the Heimat genre but takes a detour through the Wild West and brings a sense of wilderness to the Alps. In order to fully understand an Alpine Western, it is important to trace this notion of wilderness across the Atlantic. Watching the film, one gets the impression that The Dark Valley is reigned over by a war lord, an autonomous tribe, whose existence in the lowlands - which the film describes as “nothing but a half-forgotten legend” (“eine halbvergessene Legende”) - is echoing the kind of rhetoric of mythical authenticity that I quoted from the ending of The Vulture Valley � This stark archaic image is corroborated by appropriating the medieval myth of the so-called droit du seigneur , which supposedly allowed feudal lords to have sex with subordinate women on their wedding nights� While this myth has been dismissed by historians, it received a great deal of attention during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Boureau). In particular, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’ comedy La Folle journée (1778) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera adaptation Le Nozze di Figaro (1786) fueled the popular imagination that has kept this myth alive. Thus, rather than depicting nineteenth-century Alpine culture, The Dark Valley excessively projects a fantasy that was popular in the nineteenth century� The remarkable stability of Alpine cultures and their social and economic structures throughout the early modern period certainly contributed to this medieval image of the Alps. As Werner Bätzing puts it, in the Alpine countryside the Middle Ages lasted until 1848� But this does not mean that the mountain 388 Christian Quendler people were cut off from non-Alpine civilization. The Alps were well connected through dense transportation and migration networks that can be traced back to the Middle Ages. By the early nineteenth century, more than three hundred transit routes crossed the Alps and economically invigorated their valleys, which today are being rediscovered as hiking trails (Bätzing, Die Alpen 65, 77). If already in the nineteenth century the medieval portrayal of Alpine culture was a fantastic projection, what motivates this ‘bewildered’ representation of the Alps today? Throughout the modern period (from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century) the Alps, akin to mass media today, globalized mountainous perception� Imperialist and touristic gazes have left us with Alps around the world. On a cultural and commercial level, we can see the lasting impact all the way through the first decades of the twentieth century in scenic films and travelogues that present North American mountains by comparing them to the European Alps (Peterson)� The romantic appreciation of mountains as a source of secularized forms of spirituality, which in the late eighteenth century manifested itself in literary pilgrimages and the reevaluation of pagan elements, had important ramifications for the cultural perception of mountainous landscapes in North America (Mathieu 165). The nineteenth-century fad of erecting crucifixes on mountain summits, which was especially widespread in Catholic Austria, can illustrate this point� Setting up crosses on mountain tops can be seen as a powerfully symbolic act that conveniently turns mountains into altars or even cathedrals, but it also bears the risk of bringing back the animistic specters of paganism� The controversy surrounding Caspar David Friedrich’s famous altar piece The Cross in the Mountains (1809) spells this out. In part, the irritation resulted from the fact that pantheistic paganism is not represented in a coded symbolic or allegorical form but prevails atmospherically and through allusions� Instead of personifying wilderness, natural forces are evoked emotionally. 9 Friedrich’s paintings are also great examples of the Romantic celebration of wilderness as a quasi-religious experience, which had a great impact on North America (Wilke; Keck)� American Romantics and transcendentalists not only adopted this sacralized view of mountains, but surpassed it in ways that would lead to an emancipation from the European model of mountain culture� European mountains may be cathedrals and majestic domes, but American mountains are pure wilderness� Wild nature was a place where one could experience God’s divinity and, perhaps more importantly, experience oneself as a part of it. This idea of a transcendental natural wilderness also led to an appreciation of landscapes beyond the picturesque ideal of mountains with trees and a lake (and perhaps a dilapidated castle) and embraced in particular stark and rugged desert landscapes as unique forms of American wilderness� From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley 389 When the frontier movement was drawing to a close at the end of the nineteenth century, wilderness underwent a nostalgic reevaluation that is captured in the genre of the Western� Conquering the wilderness has invigorating and regenerating effects that could serve as antidote to all kinds of diseases that came with civilization. In this respect, the Heimat and Western genres perform a similar vitalizing function. Yet, the Heimat film operates in a culturally domesticated sphere and deals mostly with private or personal dramas that are projected onto nature. By contrast, the Western’s programmatic preoccupation with transforming wilderness into public order can be seen as a historical response to “a female-dominated tradition of popular culture” that eclipses “everything domestic from its worldview” (Tompkins 132)� The Dark Valley represents an interesting mix in this regard� The Brenner family constitutes a totalitarian regime that literally exerts and maintains its power by inseminating itself in the most private and intimate spheres� While there is a public showdown at the end of the film, at first revenge is carried out in secrecy. American wilderness also generated its own form of tourism, and it is through this economic circuit that the American wilderness has found its way back to the European Alps. Yellowstone National Park in the Rocky Mountains, founded in 1872, was the first park of its kind worldwide. By 1940, there were about twenty national parks in the US. In the second half of the twentieth century, national parks became a global trend. The first Austrian National Park was founded in 1981� It is around this time that the notion of wilderness was introduced to the Alps in ecological and touristic discourses� We can also see this in a recent hiking trend that moves away from summiting towards long trails� While the Appalachian Trail was created in the 1850s as an effort to develop an economic infrastructure, long transalpine hiking trails in Europe rediscover medieval transportation paths to promote eco-friendly tourism in one of the densest tourist infrastructures worldwide (see Bätzing, Zwischen Wildnis und Freizeitpark )� The result is a set of contradictions that can only be glossed over by the rhetoric of advertising, as this promotion of transalpine hiking illustrates: The Alps region is both Europe’s largest wilderness area and home to almost 14 million people with abundant traditions of cultural exchange� The Via Alpina traveler has hundreds of opportunities to not just appreciate natural wilderness but also to dine on local delicacies in civilization like famous Swiss fondue, French delicacies, and German pilsners� (“Spectacular Alps Hiking”) Prochaska’s The Dark Valley plays with this trajectory� In contrast to earlier European attempts to emulate the US Western, such as the German Winnetou 390 Christian Quendler movies or the Italian Spaghetti Westerns, The Dark Valley does not reimagine the Alps as a North American landscape but reviews the Alps through a North American frame of wildness� It also exploits the sense of entitlement and superiority that is often cast as the result of the frontier’s civilizing encounter with wild nature. While there is a long tradition of American films that showcase superior Americans in the European Alps, Prochaska’s immediate model can be found in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), which reimagines European history as a Western movie� 10 If history followed the logic of Hollywood cinema, then Hitler would have been killed off by some renegade cowboys, whose superiority results from their wild, uncultured savageness. The opening scene shows a farm in what is meant to depict German-occupied France, where the Nazi standard leader Peter Landa searches for Jews. The scene is accompanied by the song that Ennio Morricone wrote for the Italo-Western La resa dei conti ( The Big Gundown , 1966) . And it ends with a visual allusion to John Ford’s Western The Searchers (1956) - a shot from inside a cabin that shows how a young woman escapes the Nazi search troops. Perhaps the most interesting of Tarantino’s tweaking of genres occurs in the figure of Fredrick Zoller, a Nazi sniper who became famous for killing 250 soldiers from a church tower and as a reward got to play himself in a propaganda movie. Zoller is modelled on the decorated fighter pilot Ernst Udet. A so-called flying ace in WWI, Udet became a camera pilot and pilot actor in mountain movies after the war� He is featured in The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929), Storm over Mont Blanc (1930) and S.O.S. Eisberg (1933). Turning a fighter pilot into a sniper neatly facilitates a genre switch from modern war drama to the Western� Tarantino’s film not only rewrites history, it also uses cinema as an explosive agent of his creative historiography. The screening of Fredrick Zoller’s film, which Hitler and high-ranking Nazis attended, takes place in the cinema that belongs to Shosanna Dreyfus, the woman that fled from the SS-Standard Leader at the beginning of the film. Her cinema serves as the fatal trap in which the entire Nazi leadership burns to death while Shosanna’s pre-recorded message is projected on the screen. This reflexive twist, in which film fabricates history according to the generic and stylistic conventions of cinema, is also characteristic of the The Dark Valley � The pre-title sequence of The Dark Valley frames the film as a memory image. We see a woman in a wedding dress who is forcefully taken away� The scene fades into a photograph of a woman that, as we will find out later, belongs to her son, the American Greider. As the film gradually resolves the mystery of the opening scene, we can compare watching the film to the act of remembering a traumatic past� We are guided in this act of remembering by two kinds of narration. One is mediated by Greider, who has come to the dark valley to avenge From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley 391 his mother. Like all newlyweds in the valley, she was raped and impregnated by the patriarch Brenner. But unlike others, she managed to escape the valley. Greider functions as a focalizing character; he is the outsider who introduces us into the valley. Through him or rather near him, we experience the events of the film. By seeking revenge, he reenacts the past, hoping that it will give him a sense of closure. The film also uses voice-over narration, which frames the narrative as the story of Luzi, a young woman of the village, who is about to get married� If Greider’s mother marks the beginning of an end brought about by Greider’s revenge, then Luzi signals a hopeful new beginning. Her first words as narrator address the traumatic past of the valley: “Es gibt Sachen, über die darf man nicht reden, Sachen, die früher passiert sind, vor langer Zeit. Aber dass man nicht darüber reden darf, das heißt nicht, dass man das je vergessen kann.” The film presents itself as an answer to this paradox, showing us what otherwise cannot be said. An experience, which in its unforgettable nature feels forever present yet inexpressible, is turned into a manageable past that can be recounted and accounted for. From the very start, the recounting of the past (embodied by Luzi) and the reenactment of the past (embodied by Greider) are presented as the gendered perspectives of an insider and an outsider� The fusion of the present and past in the memory image thus sets up a model for negotiating local and emigrant perspectives and blends the respective genres of the Western and the Dorfgeschichte . Whether the film succeeds in this is not only a question of fusing styles and genres and the self-conscious exploration of filmic narration; it also depends on the gendered implications of its narrative mediation� The focalization through Greider and the voice-over by Luzi renegotiate or complicate the trope of a superior American visitor� The ambivalence of the perspective is illustrated early in the film when we see Greider riding into the valley from a near point-of-view shot of one of the Brenner brothers looking down on him. Instead of approximating the mediating gaze of the tourist, as we saw in the opening scene of The Vulture Wally , we are given the local view on an arriving foreigner� 392 Christian Quendler Figure 3: The Brenner brothers wearing Western hats� The sequence of Greider’s arrival in the valley also establishes Prochaska’s sense of authenticity, which may be described as a performance of stereotypes that do not immediately register as clichés� Prochaska prides himself on not showing a Tyrolian hat in The Dark Valley (see Prochaska and Fuchs). Instead, his costume designer Natascha Curtius-Noss created an ‘authentic’ mix that combines historical urban and country fashion of the area with American elements. Throughout the film both Greider and the Brenner brothers are seen wearing different models of Western hats (see figure 4). On a musical level this is echoed in the orchestration of a wedding polka that combines an Alpine accordion with Western violins. In other cases, generic blends are created by simply relocating typical Western elements such as the hero’s arrival in a new hostile Alpine environment. An obligatory saloon fight takes place in the village’s grocery store that functions as an equivalent social hub� Authenticity is not a question of historicity but a question of generic innovation and production value� In The Dark Valley , mediating the past is tied to transatlantic cultural mediations� The physical media of remembering play a key role in both the novel and the film adaptation. In the novel, Greider is a painter who eventually turns out to be a rather gifted sniper. Painting and gunning are first linked by the similarity of cases in which Greider keeps his canvas and his Winchester� The connection between memory and revenge is modeled on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Greider’s successive killing of the Brenner brothers is paralleled by the gradual completion of their family portrait. By contrast, the Greider of the film is a photographer. His camera and repeating firearm are both advanced technologies unknown to the mountain people� While the camera is introduced early on as a curiosity that the patriarch calls a mirror with a memory, the Winchester gun is saved for the dramatic twist in the final showdown. Camera and gun form, of course, a deep and longstanding bond in film cultures. Metaphoric conceptions of cinema as a gun can be found in Hollywood, auteur, From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley 393 and revolutionary cinemas� 11 Guns are widely used as metaphors for the camera and as metonyms of cinematic attractions - of which the Western is perhaps the most prominent instance� Although Prochaska’s references to generic conventions of the Western avoid parody, he is less subtle in his stylistic allusions to Western movies and filmmakers. The film is particularly invested in the revisionist Western of the 1970s with its gruesome and stylized depictions of violence that have also inspired Tarantino’s work� Slow-motion shoot-out sequences that are set to music by the Austrian space-rock band Steaming Satellites are a much-debated case in point, which can be seen as a nod to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), which used Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” for the final shoot-out. The self-conscious repurposing of the New Hollywood of the 1960s and 70s and the affinities to the new auteurism of the 1990s and 2000s draw attention to the cultural capital that is at stake in comparing German and Austrian mountain movies to US Westerns� The metaphor of the Alpine Western is typically understood in terms of disanalogies� Both landscape genres are considered characteristic of their cultures. Yet, while the Western is described as horizontal, the mountain film is described as vertical. Whereas the mountain film focuses on private affairs, the Western is all about a new public order. If The Dark Valley blends these opposites, it does so with a keen sense of participating in the cultural prestige and cinematic vision of post-classical Hollywood cinema� This does not mean that the film uncritically adopts the trope of American superiority, which - as in Billy Wilder’s The Emperor Waltz (1948) - is associated with the mechanical arts� In contrast to the gramophone in The Emperor Waltz , photography in The Dark Valley is not linked to democratic values, but to an ethos of revenge that is much closer to the spirit of Inglourious Basterds . Yet, unlike Tarantino’s film, The Dark Valley does not find redemption in vindicative fantasies. Greider’s revenge brings him neither glory nor restoration, but merely the painful understanding that he is part of an inhumane totalitarian system� Greider’s destruction of the Brenner clan is hardly met with enthusiasm� The departing tracking shot shows Greider exiting the village in a path lined primarily with women who have lost their husbands and some men who have lost their fathers� The highly charged end-of-war iconography of the scene signals towards the traumatic past for which the Heimat film has offered a suture. It highlights a German and Austrian perspective concerned with the difficulty of beginning anew in a world that is haunted by medieval ghosts that only thinly mask the terrors of war� Although the film refrains from a black-and-white depiction - the American is not an unequivocal hero but a liberator who remains caught up in a history of 394 Christian Quendler violence - The Dark Valley remains within a male purview of a revenge narrative. Despite the fact that Luzi figures as a keeper of memory, the story remains focused on the action of men� The rows of grieving wives and sons reiterate an all-too-familiar scene in which the women merely orchestrate the tragic burden of the male hero. This is reinforced in the subsequent scene, which aims to lift the desolate ending of the film. Luzi and her mother are seen nursing Greider’s wounds� The image encapsulates Luzi’s role as a narrator whose prospective motherhood announces a change for the better� This is a rather disappointing aspect in Prochaska’s otherwise innovative contribution to the Alpine Western� If Hillern’s Vulture Wally was not intended as a feminist narrative but became one in the course of its reception and adaptations, Prochaska’s reframing of the story through Luzi’s narration does little to add a feminist perspective� It rather seems a convenient narratorial solution for adapting the novel� Prochaska’s The Dark Valley represents almost the inverse case of Hillern’s Vulture Wally � Wally is presented as an object of domestication whose subjectification follows the model Shakespeare laid out in The Taming of the Shrew and develops (in the absence of her mother) vis-à-vis a series of father figures. By contrast, Luzi takes on the role of a domesticating subject. She serves as a surrogate mother in Greider’s reenactment and remains committed to her station throughout old and new forms of patriarchal violence� Luzi’s commitment to a precarious domestic sphere is in line with Western plot patterns (Halverson 5—7), where domestic enclosures are often set in stark contrast to the celebrated freedom of an open landscape (Comer 27), and women remain committed to housekeeping despite hardship and abuse (Tompkins 39—40)� Although The Dark Valley capitalizes on this incongruity, it remains within an ideological rhetoric that nurtures and sutures it� As a story that - like The Vulture Wally - revolves around an absent mother, Prochaska’s Dark Valley misses the opportunity of giving credible voices to the mothers and daughters of the dark valley� Constructions of Heimat are interfaces of self and other, the local and the foreign, male and female. This becomes particularly evident in the national endeavors of the folklore movements and touristic forms of self-representation� As I have argued with reference to Hillern’s The Vulture Wally and its lasting impact on the Heimat film, it can also be traced back to genres and forms of writing outside the Heimat art movement� Given the dialogic construction of Heimat and its constitutive integration of an outside perspective, it is important to complement regional views on Heimat with foreign perspectives� If Hillern’s novel can be seen as programmatic in illustrating an Austrian image of Heimat in exchange with its German neighbor, The Dark Valley reveals how the dialogic image of Heimat fares in a transatlantic exchange between Austria and North America� This exchange puts into relief the escapist aspect frequently ascribed From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley 395 to the Heimat film. The Heimat film not only serves as a means to deflect the traumas of war, but it also provides a means of reflecting upon them in an indirect manner� As a recent response to the Heimat genre, The Dark Valley reiterates the intertextual poetics of the Dorfgeschichte � It posits a critical response to American takes on the Alps while adopting American conceptions of wilderness and the Western as two influential landmarks of mountain culture. Notes 1 The adaptations and translations of Die Geier-Wally have generated a variety of titles and spellings� Vulture Wally is the most common English translation for the film adaptations. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to Hillern’s novel and its adaptations as The Vulture Wally � 2 The first film adaptation in 1921 by Ewald André Dupont is not a classical Heimat film, but rather part of a fading cinematic interest in alpine spectacles� 3 “Und schließlich ziehe ich wahlweise den Tiroler- oder Cowboyhut vor jenen beiden, denen dieses Buch als (etwas seltsames Paar von) Schutzheiligen anempfohlen sei: Ludwig Ganghofer und Sergio Leone” (Willmann, Das finstere Tal 318)� 4 On Stainer-Knittel’s career as a painter and her self-portraits see Nina Stainer� 5 While the 1940 version of The Vulture Wally is sometimes considered one that empowers Wally’s character (see Berg-Ganschow), it is at the same time highly paternalistic. In this version, Wally does not kill the vulture herself, but is rescued by Joseph the Bear Slayer, who shoots the vulture from afar. Also, Joseph’s secret sister, who arouses Wally’s jealousy, is introduced as his secret daughter� 6 See especially chapter eight “Hartes Holz,” in which a priest draws on the metaphor of carving wood to elaborate on material-spiritual relations in building character� 7 A case has been made that Rodenberg’s intervention to change the original ending of the novel, which concludes with Wally’s suicide to a rather ‘forced’ happy ending that takes its inspiration from The Taming of the Shrew undermined the novel’s feminist critique (see Walshe 157—59; Scharnowski 43; for an argument against authorial feminist intentions of the novel see Mellmann 159)� 8 The reference is made to Psalm 23: “Auch wenn ich gehe im finsteren Tal” (Einheitsübersetzung), which is rendered in the King James Bible as “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death�” 396 Christian Quendler 9 The Cross in the Mountains attracted hostile responses that criticized Friedrich for arousing “pathological emotion” (“pathologische Rührung”)� Friedrich’s defense to this was that it is imperative of art to have a “soulful effect” (quoted in Bätschmann 65)� 10 Erich von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands (1918) and Billy Wilder’s The Emperor Waltz (1948) are two classical examples that revisit the European Alps from an American perspective and in the wake of World War I and II, respectively. 11 Originally attributed to D.W. Griffith, Jean-Luc Godard became famous for saying that all moviegoers want are “a girl and a gun�” The camera-gun analogy was central to the revolutionary cinema of Dziga Vertov and programmatic for Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino’s ‘Third Cinema�’ Acknowledgments The research for this article was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (P32994-G)� Works Cited Applegate, Celia. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat � Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Ashkenazi, Ofer. Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape � Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2020. Bätschmann, Oskar. “Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869): Physician, Naturalist, Painter, and Theoretician of Landscape Painting�” Nine Letters on Landscape Painting: Written in the Years 1815-1824; with a Letter from Goethe by Way of Introduction � By Carl Gustav Carus. Trans. David Britt. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2002. 1—73. Baur, Uwe. Dorfgeschichte: Zur Entstehung und gesellschaftlichen Funktion einer literarischen Gattung im Vormärz . München: Fink, 1978. Bätzing, Werner. Die Alpen. Geschichte und Zukunft einer europäischen Kulturlandschaft . München: C. H. Beck, 2005. ---� Zwischen Wildnis und Freizeitpark: Eine Streitschrift zur Zukunft der Alpen . Zürich: Rotpunktverlag, 2015. Berg-Ganschow, Uta. “Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung.” Frauen und Film 35 (1983): 24—28� Boa, Elizabeth, and Rachel Palfreyman. Heimat - A German Dream: Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture 1890-1990 . Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Boureau, Alain. The Lord’s First Night: The Myth of the Droit de Cuissage � Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Comer, Krista. Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing . Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 1999. From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley 397 Halverson, Cathryn. Playing House in the American West: Western Women’s Life Narratives, 1839-1987 . Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2013. Keck, Michaela. “‘Kindred Spirits’ in Romantic Walks: Durand’s ‘Kindred Spirits’ Compared to Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer’.” American Studies 52�1 (2007): 35—46� Ludewig, Alexandra. Screening Nostalgia: 100 Years of German Heimat Film. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Mathieu, Jon. The Third Dimension: A Comparative History of Mountains in the Modern Era . Trans. Katherine Brun. Cambridge, UK: White Horse Press, 2011. Mellmann, Katja. “Wilhelmine von Hillerns Quellen für die Rundschau -Novelle Die Geier-Wally (1875)�” Jahrbuch Franz-Michael-Felder-Archiv 19 � Ed� Jürgen Thaler� Graz-Feldkirch: Neugebauer, 2018. 122—59. Nell, Werner. “Literaturwissenschaft.” Dorf: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Ed� Werner Nell and Marc Weiland. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2019. 55—61. Peterson, Jennifer Lynn. Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film . Durham: Duke UP, 2013. 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West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns . New York/ Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Twellmann, Marcus. Dorfgeschichten: Wie die Welt zur Literatur kommt � Göttingen: Wallstein, 2019. von Hillern, Wilhelmine. Die Geier-Wally: Eine Geschichte aus den Tiroler Alpen. Berlin: Gebrüder Paetel, 1883. von Moltke, Johannes. “Convertible Provincialism: Heimat and Mobility in the 1950s.” The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present . Ed. Stefan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007� 39—57� ---� “Evergreens: The Heimat Genre�” The German Cinema Book . Ed. Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter and Deniz Göktürk. London: British Film Institute, 2002. 18—28. --- . No Place like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema � Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Walshe, Maire Josephine. “The Life and Works of Wilhelmine von Hillern, 1836-1916.” Diss. State University of New York at Buffalo, 1988. Wilke, Sabine. “How German Is the American West? The Legacy of Caspar David Friedrich’s Visual Poetics in American Landscape Painting�” Observation Points: The Visual Poetics of National Parks . Ed. Thomas Patin. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012� 100—18� Willmann, Thomas. Das finstere Tal . München: Liebeskind Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2010. Zemanek, Evi. “Pour une écologie littéraire: Changements environnementaux, innovations (éco)poetiques et transformations des genres: le cas du nouveau récit de village (Dorfgeschichte)�” Révue d'Allemagne et des pays de langue allemande 55�2 (2019): 343—56� 398 Christian Quendler Verzeichnis der Autor: innen Kamaal Haque Dickinson College Department of German P� O� Box 1773 Carlisle, PA 17013 USA haquek@dickinson�edu Christian Quendler University of Innsbruck Department of American Studies Innrain 52d 6020 Innsbruck Austria christian�quendler@uibk�ac�at Caroline Schaumann Emory University German Studies Department Modern Languages Building 532 Kilgo Circle Atlanta, GA 30322 USA cschaum@emory�edu Daniel Winkler Universität Heidelberg Romanisches Seminar Seminarstrasse 3 69117 Heidelberg Germany daniel�winkler@rose�uni-heidelberg�de Andreas Ehrenreich Postfach 0001 5580 Tamsweg Austria ehrenreich9@protonmail�com Die Zeitschrift erscheint jährlich in 4 Heften von je etwa 96 Seiten. 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KG Alle Rechte vorbehalten/ All Rights Strictly Reserved Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 0010-1338 Die Herausgeber Prof. Dr. Till Dembeck (Université du Luxembourg) Prof. Dr. Rolf Parr (Universität Duisburg-Essen) In der literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Forschung ist das Interesse an Fragen der Mehrsprachigkeit in jüngerer Zeit international gestiegen. Das schließt an einen Trend an, der in der sprachwissenschaftlichen Forschung schon länger zu beobachten ist. Die Grenzen der ehemaligen Nationalphilologien werden unter Stichworten wie Hybridität, Inter- und Transkulturalität zunehmend geöffnet. Zu konstatieren ist dabei auch eine gesteigerte methodische und theoretische Eigenständigkeit philologischer oder kulturphilologischer Ansätze, die sich durch eine besondere Aufmerksamkeit für das Zusammenwirken von unterschiedlichen Formen sprachlicher Varianz in konkreten Texten auszeichnen. Dem damit sich konstituierenden Feld einer literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Mehrsprachigkeitsforschung bietet die Reihe einen Publikationsort. Dies geschieht auch mit dem Ziel, die vielfältige Forschung auf diesem Gebiet an einem Ort sichtbar zu machen und so den weiteren wissenschaftlichen Austausch zu fördern. Ihrem Gegenstand entsprechend umfasst die Reihe die Einzelphilologien, das gesamte Spektrum der Kulturwissenschaften und punktuell auch die Sprachwissenschaften. Neueste Bände: Marion Acker Schreiben im Widerspruch. Nicht-/ Zugehörigkeit bei Herta Müller und Ilma Rakusa, 1. Auflage 2022, 332 Seiten ISBN 978-3-7720-8776-9 [Open Access] Áine McMurtry / Barbara Siller / Sandra Vlasta (Hrsg.) Mehrsprachigkeit in der Literatur. Das probeweise Einführen neuer Spielregeln, 1. Auflage 2023, 370 Seiten ISBN 978-3-7720-8783-7 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0)7071 97 97 0 \ Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97 11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de Literarische Mehrsprachigkeit / Literar y Multilingualism ISSN 0010-1338 Themenheft: Beyond the Classical Bergfilm Gastherausgeber: innen: Christian Quendler und Kamaal Haque Christian Quendler und Kamaal Haque: Introduction: Beyond the Classical Bergfilm Kamaal Haque: Joining the Ranks: Arnold Fanck’s Later Films Daniel Winkler und Andreas Ehrenreich: The Primetime Television Series Luftsprünge (1969-70): Luis Trenker and Transnational Bergfernsehen Caroline Schaumann: Reframing the Bergfilm: Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) Christian Quendler: From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley: Imaging the Alps at the Crossroads of the Heimat Genre narr.digital Band 56 Band 56 Heft 4 Harald Höbus ch, Rebeccah Dawson (Hr sg.) C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a t i o n a l e Z e i t s c h r i f t f ü r G e r m a n i s t i k C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a ti o n a l e Z e it s c h r ift f ü r G e r m a n i s ti k