Abstract
The article focuses on two cinematic representations of alpinism and its multimedia performance practice in the popular education programmes of the Vienna Urania in the 1920s and 30s: First on Arnold Fanck’s early mountain film Im Kampf mit dem Berge (DE 1921). I am not concentrating on Fanck’s film version, but on the version produced by the Urania for popular education, which was distributed throughout Austria as Urania-Kulturfilm. I ask how the Urania utilised Im Kampf mit dem Berge as part of a media package (consisting of films, lectures and slides) and which media-pedagogical methods and practices were thereby employed. How did entertainment and instruction relate to each other? The second film I will look at is the ambitious Austrian amateur film Mit Steigeisen und Eispickel (c. 1934) produced and filmed by a group of mountaineers. I investigate how this film relates an established repertoire of images to elements of educational films to introduce the audience to new techniques of ice climbing: What techniques of showing and instructing are discernible and to what extent are the film and its performance practice ‘educational’? To sum it up, I interpret the mountain and alpine film as educational film and investigate the role and qualities attributed to the medium film as a teaching tool for conveying and disseminating contemporary ideas of the mountain and alpinism.
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