Call of the mountain: modern enchantment on and off the screen

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mountaineers faced mortal danger in vertical mountain walls, and imagined mountains as sentient, terrifyingly attractive foes. This agency formed the basis of mountain religion, in which enchanting mountains recalled notions of the sacred or holy, and mountaineering presented itself as a rite-of-passage outside disenchanted modernity. Such themes are on display in early and contemporary cinematic accounts of mountaineering. Death and fear were central elements in early mountain movies like Der heilige Berg (1926) or Der Berg ruft (1938), who used visual representations of verticality to incite bodily reactions, thus enabling audiences to experience their own commodified passage in the cinema. Recent climbing documentaries like Die drei Zinnen (2012) or Free Solo (2018) employ the same cinematographic techniques. As evidenced in these films, the cultural production of enchanting mountains relies on the agency of both mountains and cameras.