Part 3 of 4
7. Ascending and Descending
Storm over Mont Blanc divides neatly into three acts. (more…)
Part 3 of 4
7. Ascending and Descending
Storm over Mont Blanc divides neatly into three acts. (more…)
Part 2 of 4
3. Above the Clouds
Storm over Mont Blanc opens, appropriately, with shots of the mountain itself and of Hannes’s cabin, situated high above the clouds. (Fanck’s working title for the film was Über den Wolken, Above the Clouds.) (more…)
Part 1 of 4
1. Introduction
Stürme über dem Mont Blanc (1930; literally, Storms over Mont Blanc) is my favorite of the Arnold Fanck mountain films. (more…)
Part 2 of 2
“It was only a narrow crevasse in the Palü Glacier,” Johannes Krafft says, “but it reached far down into the darkness.” In a flashback, we see Maria Krafft at the bottom of the crevasse. Is she unconscious, or dead? “There — an urgent cry for help came out from the icy depths — Maria was still alive!” We see Krafft peer over edge, but he can see nothing. He ties his rope to his pick, sticks it deep in the snow, and climbs down into the crevasse. (more…)
Part 1 of 2
1. Introduction
The White Hell of Piz Palü (Die weisse Hölle vom Piz Palü, 1929) is considered by many to be the finest of Arnold Fanck’s mountain films. As pure cinema, this may well be the case. Though the film does not have quite the philosophical richness of Fanck’s The Holy Mountain, there is definitely more here than meets the eye. (more…)
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Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, the enfant terrible of modern or post-war German cinema, was born in 1935 of vaguely upper class stock. His father owned landed estates in Eastern Germany before the war, and his son lived in Rostock until 1945.
North Face is the English title of the film Nordwand, originally released to theaters in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in 2008. It is based on the true story of two German mountain climbers, Toni Kurz and Andreas Hinterstoisser, who in 1936 braved the dreaded north face of the Eiger. The only one of the film’s stars who may be familiar to American audiences is Benno Fürmann, who appeared in The Princess and the Warrior (Der Krieger und die Kaiserin, 2000). (more…)
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American actress-director-producer Jodie Foster has come under fire for not throwing her friend, Academy Award-winning actor-director Mel Gibson, under the bus. The two have known each other since they met on the set of Maverick (1994).
Gibson has been systematically hounded and maligned since he made the Christian motion picture The Passion of the Christ (2004). (more…)