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. 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