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 . Dir. Olivier Assayas. Germany, France, Switzerland, 2014. Film. Das Wolkenphänomen von Maloja . Dir. Arnold Fanck. Germany: Berg- und Sportfilm, 1924� Film� Der heilige Berg . Dir. Arnold Fanck. Berlin: Ufa, 1926. Film. Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü � Dir� Arnold Fanck and Georg Wilhelm Pabst� Germany: Sokal Films, 1929. Film. Hampton, Howard. “Transformer.” Filmcomment 51�2 (2015): 40—43� Hastie, Amelie. “The Vulnerable Spectator: In The Clouds.” Film Quarterly 69�1 (2015): 52—59� Kirchmann, Kay. “Szenen eines Kampfes. Die Wolkenbilder des Dr. Fanck.” Wolken: Archiv für Mediengeschichte . Vol. 5. Ed. Lorenz Engell, Bernhard Siegert and Joseph Vogl. Weimar: Verlag der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, 2005. 117—29. 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�