A sunny day in the Mountains - Dr. Johannes Krafft is out mountaineering with his lovely wife and a mountain guide. In his youthful exuberance, he looks up at the mountain that stand before him and laughs.
And like a furious and vengeful Greek God, the mountain strikes him and his life down. As his wife is standing next to a crevasse, peering down into it, an avalanche begins. In the ensuing chaos, the rope which connects her to safety is cut, she falls into the terrible deep, and Johannes clutches the end of the rope with force.
This is a film of primal, operatic power. The plot is threadbare - the entire story could be summarized quickly, with little loss of important events, but the plot is hardly the point of the film. What Pabst and Franck accomplished in their two hour mountain epic was to create a poem of beautiful horror. To combine the elements of wind and water, moving from Winter into Spring, and to express to us, the audience, what a mountain truly means, and to place us firmly in the shoes of those victimized by its terrible beauty. Terrible beauty: a dead man lies sprawled over an ice bridge. As searchers approach, the light shines through the ice, but not through the man's body, crisply showing us the fact of his death in combination with the grace of the piece of ice upon which he rests.
Some of the cinematography present is as beautiful and stirring as anything in cinema itself. The film takes a few moments just to show us the textures of things, cinematically interesting surfaces and movements. There are images, many of them having to do with clouds, that have nothing really to do with the matter of the plot, and yet no single frame ought to be taken away, for they support our experience of entering the world completely and wholely. There is some 'filler', sure. But the film can hardly faulted for not constantly hitting the giddy heights it occasionally reaches. Fanck and Pabst take us to a high realm of cinema, and if they slip a few times, they can hardly be faulted. As this film shows us, climbing is a dangerous occupation.
It's best to forget that Leni Riefenstahl is the female lead, in order to enjoy the film more purely. And then, afterwards, remember that she must have surely seen the film, and been inspired by it, to some degree.
And like a furious and vengeful Greek God, the mountain strikes him and his life down. As his wife is standing next to a crevasse, peering down into it, an avalanche begins. In the ensuing chaos, the rope which connects her to safety is cut, she falls into the terrible deep, and Johannes clutches the end of the rope with force.
This is a film of primal, operatic power. The plot is threadbare - the entire story could be summarized quickly, with little loss of important events, but the plot is hardly the point of the film. What Pabst and Franck accomplished in their two hour mountain epic was to create a poem of beautiful horror. To combine the elements of wind and water, moving from Winter into Spring, and to express to us, the audience, what a mountain truly means, and to place us firmly in the shoes of those victimized by its terrible beauty. Terrible beauty: a dead man lies sprawled over an ice bridge. As searchers approach, the light shines through the ice, but not through the man's body, crisply showing us the fact of his death in combination with the grace of the piece of ice upon which he rests.
Some of the cinematography present is as beautiful and stirring as anything in cinema itself. The film takes a few moments just to show us the textures of things, cinematically interesting surfaces and movements. There are images, many of them having to do with clouds, that have nothing really to do with the matter of the plot, and yet no single frame ought to be taken away, for they support our experience of entering the world completely and wholely. There is some 'filler', sure. But the film can hardly faulted for not constantly hitting the giddy heights it occasionally reaches. Fanck and Pabst take us to a high realm of cinema, and if they slip a few times, they can hardly be faulted. As this film shows us, climbing is a dangerous occupation.
It's best to forget that Leni Riefenstahl is the female lead, in order to enjoy the film more purely. And then, afterwards, remember that she must have surely seen the film, and been inspired by it, to some degree.