Derek Hawthorne - Storm over Mont Blanc, Parts 1-3

Part 1

1. Introduction

Stürme über dem Mont Blanc (1930; literally, Storms over Mont Blanc) is my favorite of the Arnold Fanck mountain films. Fanck’s first “talkie,” Mont Blanc features some of the most striking images of his entire oeuvre, backed by a haunting, memorable score by Paul Dessau (one of the most significant music scores from the early years of talking pictures). The suspense at times is positively unbearable, and the action sequences top anything in Fanck’s earlier films. Mont Blanc features (who else?) Leni Riefenstahl, delivering a memorably zany performance as the female protagonist. She is perfectly paired with newcomer Sepp Rist, who proves himself to be Fanck’s ideal male lead. But there is more here than just action and romance on the peaks.

Storm over Mont Blanc is the third installment in a trilogy of films by Fanck dealing with the nature of man and woman, and how the state of their relationship affects the health of a nation. The main focus of The Holy Mountain (1926) was a quasi-Traditionalist account of the absolute metaphysical difference between the sexes, and their inherently tragic relationship. (I drew extensively on the works of Julius Evola in order to make this case, and I argued that Fanck had very probably been influenced by Otto Weininger’s masterpiece Sex and Character.)

The White Hell of Piz Palü (1929) also deals, in the form of an allegory, with the relation between the sexes — but this time in their degenerated, modern form. Piz Palü is about the inability of modern men and women to make any sort of satisfying connection.

In Mont Blanc, Fanck gives us the reason for this: the loss of the traditional understanding of sex roles. The film could not be more explicit on this point. Its conclusion is rich with symbolism, pointing the way toward a resolution of the modern war between the sexes.

(This essay is the fourth in a series dealing with the mountain films. See my review of North Face for an overview of this genre, its principal characteristics, and why it should interest readers of Counter-Currents.)

2. The Making of Storm over Mont Blanc

After completing The White Hell of Piz Palü, Leni Riefenstahl found herself in dire financial straits. This was not to last very long, however. The huge success of the film prompted AAFA to offer her twenty thousand marks to star in Fanck’s next film, which became Storm over Mont Blanc (released to the English-speaking world as Avalanche). She would co-star with Sepp Rist in his first film (in fact, it was Rist who received top billing in Mont Blanc, over Riefenstahl).

L to R Schneeberger, Riefenstahl, Angst, Allgeier, Fanck

Born in 1900, Rist had served on a torpedo boat in the First World War, then had worked in Nuremberg as a police radio operator. He was also an outstanding athlete, who competed in numerous ski championships. It was on a ski race in Gurgl that he was “discovered” by cameraman Sepp Allgeier, and subsequently brought to the attention of Arnold Fanck. (Riefenstahl later tried to take credit for discovering Rist, even claiming that she “forced” Fanck to hire him.) Rist went on to enjoy a long career in German cinema, especially in the genre of so-called “Heimatfilm,” and died in 1980.

The success of Piz Palü inevitably meant that Mont Blanc would be approached in a somewhat “formulaic” manner, the idea being to repeat (and to surpass) what had made the earlier film so successful. And so we find pilot Ernst Udet making another appearance, and saving the day as he did before. Once again we have a male protagonist who has chosen a life of isolation in a desolate alpine world of ice and snow. Once again the film climaxes in a daring rescue. Ernst Petersen even makes a cameo appearance. Fanck’s collaborator on the screenplay was an uncredited Carl Mayer, whose credits included The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Murnau’s The Last Laugh. (It is not clear exactly how much Mayer contributed to the project.)

The story involves a man named Hannes (last name never revealed) who works as a Wetterwart, or weather station attendant, atop Mont Blanc. (Significantly, Gustav Diessl’s character in Piz Palü was also nicknamed “Hannes.”) The highest mountain in Western Europe, Mont Blanc rises 15,782 feet above sea level, and lies between the regions of the Aosta Valley, Italy, and Haute-Savoie, France. Hannes lives for months at a time in a tiny cabin on one of Mont Blanc’s peaks, spending his lonely days checking readings on an anemometer and telegraphing weather conditions to nearby meteorological stations. In the evenings he keeps up a telegraphic correspondence with the beautiful Hella Armstrong, a budding astronomer who works with her father at a distant observatory. They have never set eyes on each other until one day she falls out of the sky thanks to Ernst Udet . . . (I must save the rest for later.)

Shooting Mont Blanc, Riefenstahl and Rist at right

Shooting began on Mont Blanc in February 1930 when all of the film’s skiing sequences were shot in three weeks in Arosa, Switzerland. The film’s skiing episode climaxes with a scene where Riefenstahl hops into Udet’s silver “Moth” (Motte) two-seater, which then takes off from the frozen surface of a lake. This was shot on Lake St. Moritz. The plane had no safety belt to secure Riefenstahl, and the mischievous Udet did loops in order to deliberately frighten her. Hans Schneeberger, who had severed his relationship with Riefenstahl not long before, flew in a second plane in order to photograph Udet in flight. (Fanck had hired Schneeberger at Udet’s insistence.)

Once these sequences were completed, in April cast and crew relocated to Bernina Hospiz, a lodge more than seven thousand feet up on the Bernina Pass. Nearby they constructed the interior of Hannes’s cabin, rigging it with lights and camera equipment (electric current provided by the local railway system). One end of the set was left open to the elements for the climactic scene in which the cabin fills with snow. There was no heat, and the cast suffered through these scenes (none more so than Sepp Rist, who had to appear practically buried in snow). These scenes took six weeks to film.

During this time, Riefenstahl practiced climbing with the Lantschner brothers to prepare for the film’s impressive (and arduous) climbing sequences. Gustav “Guzzi” Lantschner and Hellmut Lantschner were both Olympic gold medalists in downhill skiing. The brother’s appeared in the film’s “foxhunt” sequence. (Guzzi would also have an important role in Fanck’s ski comedy Der weisse Rausch, released the following year.)

Cast and crew later bivouacked at the Vallot shelter hut on Mont Blanc, which (so far as I can determine) served as the exterior of Hannes’s cabin. As always on a Fanck production, much of the danger was quite real. And this time the director himself came very close to losing his life. Riefenstahl writes in her memoirs:

The glacier changed every day. It was June by now, the snow was melting, and the cracks were opening appreciably. Just a few days earlier the ground had been covered with vast stretches of snow, but now crevasses were becoming visible, wide enough and deep enough to swallow Cologne cathedral or the temple at Karnak. Fanck, obsessed with capturing these unique images on film, paid scant heed to the dangers confronting us. And that proved to be a fatal mistake. The cameras having been unpacked hundreds of feet below the Vallot hut, he walked several steps ahead in order to find the best locations. All at once we saw him – only seventy feet away – silently vanishing. The glacier had swallowed him up. Our tiny group was deathly quiet, but only for an instant or two. Then I saw with what wonderful presence of mind the staff operated in such emergencies. Within seconds a rope was plunging into the fissure. As everyone listened and it dropped foot by foot, the faces of our men grew darker and darker. Half the rope had already uncoiled, seventy feet hung into the crevasse. Finally, a sound came up, and we breathed a sigh of relief. The men felt a tug on the rope and everyone pulled with all his might. At last, Fanck’s head popped up, his mouth still holding the cigarette he had clenched in his teeth when falling. Utterly calm, as if nothing had happened, he clambered out of the crevasse, and shooting resumed.[1]

Scenes were also filmed in the vicinity of the Dupuis hut, the ascent to which was particularly difficult. At one point, a camera fell more than a thousand feet and was smashed against the rocks. It was in the vicinity of the Dupuis hut that the crew shot Udet’s remarkable landing on the glacier – the first time it had ever been attempted.

Rist (top row, third from left), Riefenstahl and climbers in the Vallot shelter hut

An abrupt drop in temperature trapped the cast and crew on the mountain for days, and food supplies ran low. To make matters worse, the men were beginning to feel acute sexual frustration. According to Riefenstahl, they began trading lewd jokes and constructing “blatant sexual symbols of ice and snow.”[2] (The imagination reels.) Needless to say, Riefenstahl was bothered quite a bit. One of the younger members of the crew even fell in love with her and threatened to leap into a crevasse. Fanck was still obsessed with Riefenstahl, and kept handing her notes and poems which “grew more and more erotic.”[3]

The scenes where Riefenstahl appears in her observatory were shot on location at the Babelsberg Sternwarte (just outside Berlin), with the permission of its director, Paul Guthnick.

Mont Blanc was planned all along as a talkie, but for all intents and purposes it was shot as a silent film. Sound movie cameras at that time were very large and heavily padded so as to muffle the sound of the mechanism. It was simply unfeasible to haul these great behemoths up mountains and across glaciers, so silent film cameras were used throughout the production. (The introduction of big sound cameras proved a technical setback for films in general, as the mobility of the cameras was very limited. This is why early talkies often seem extremely static, like photographed stage plays.)

Sound effects, music, and dialogue were all added into Mont Blanc later. However, these were “layered” into the film in a technically primitive manner. Often, we hear sound effects or music or dialogue, but seldom any combination of the three. Music is often simply broken off when sound effects or dialogue is called for. Long stretches of the film are effectively silent, containing only music (this is not really a flaw, for Dessau’s score is one of the film’s great assets). Three years later, Fanck would use a similar process to add dialogue, music, and sound effects into Piz Palü, turning it – rather effectively – into a talkie.

In preparation for the film’s dubbing sessions, Riefenstahl had to train her voice. She hired a speech coach, Herbert Kuchenbuch, with whom she worked daily. At first, Riefenstahl had a great deal of difficulty, but reported that “Eventually I had no difficulties whatsoever in my first sound scenes for the Mont Blanc film.”[4] Others, however, have questioned her confident judgment in this matter. Her biographer Jürgen Trimborn writes that “despite the intense efforts of Herbert Kuchenbuch . . . her Berlin accent and pitch irritated many of the moviegoing public, who felt these qualities didn’t belong to the world of the mountain film or to the image of the mythical female that audiences had assigned to the young actress. So it is not at all true that Riefenstahl ‘easily’ made the transition from silent to sound films; rather, her voice became a disadvantage that further limited her opportunities with other directors.”[5] The truth is that her voice in Mont Blanc does sound uncomfortably like that of a cartoon mouse. Frankly, I found this rather endearing – but I can easily see why others might find it annoying.

Kino International released Storm over Mont Blanc on DVD in Region 1 in 2005. Unfortunately, they relied upon a print with many problems (perhaps because no better print could be found). The first ten minutes or so are filled with scratches, pops, and jumps. Things improve considerably after the first reel, but there are problems throughout the film. Kino created a new opening credits sequence, apparently because the original was so badly damaged. These problems should not stop anyone from watching this truly remarkable film.

Notes

1. Leni Riefenstahl, Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir, no translator credited (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 85. Riefenstahl’s memoir is my primary source for information on the making of the film.

2. Ibid., 85.

3. Ibid., 86.

4. Ibid., 88.

5. Jürgen Trimborn, Leni Riefenstahl: A Life, trans. Edna McCown (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 33.

Part 2

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.) Once again, as in The Holy Mountain, the work of the great German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich springs to mind.

A rather different comparison was made by Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966), a Jewish film critic for the Frankfurter Zeitung whose highly influential 1947 book From Caligari to Hitler argued that Fanck’s films had helped pave the way for the Nazis. Kracauer compared the shots of clouds in Mont Blanc – which are truly spectacular – to the clouds seen at the beginning of Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, stating that in the latter film we find the final merger “of two cults, that of the mountains, and that of the Führer.”[1] This was too much even for liberal critics. Karlheinz Wendtland responded years later: “What do mountain films have to do with Nazi tendencies? What are the differences between National Socialist clouds and, say, Communist clouds? What do such pronouncements ‘prove’?”[2]

Paul Dessau

4. The Music

Thrilling music by Paul Dessau accompanies the opening shots of the film. As I have already said, Dessau’s score is superb – but he was certainly an odd choice on Fanck’s part. A German-Jewish Communist, Dessau was born in Hamburg in 1894 and studied violin at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory in Berlin, later studying composition with Max Julius Loewengard. After service in the First World War, he became Kapellmeister at the Cologne opera house under Otto Klemperer, and in 1925 became principal Kapellmeister at the Städtische Oper Berlin under Bruno Walter. Dessau was fascinated by the possibilities presented by the medium of film music, and composed his first score in 1926. In addition to Mont Blanc, he composed two more scores for Fanck: Der Weiße Rausch (1931 – which, in the main, reused themes written for Mont Blanc), and S.O.S. Eisberg (1933).

After Hitler came to power, Dessau emigrated to France and, in 1939, to the United States where he continued to work in film, sometimes in an uncredited capacity (e.g., on House of Frankenstein and The Paradine Case). After the war, Dessau settled in East Germany, where he taught at the Staatliche Schauspielschule and remained very active as a composer, producing several operas, symphonies, and choral works. He died in 1979.

The Trautonium

In Mont Blanc, Dessau makes prominent use of a Welte Philharmonic Organ and also an early electronic instrument called the trautonium. This was state-of-the-art technology at the time, having been invented in 1929 by Friedrich Trautwein in Berlin at the Rundfunkversuchstelle, the Musikhochschule’s music and radio laboratory. The basic mechanism involves a resistor wire stretched over a metal plate which is pressed in order to produce sounds. Dessau worked with one of the early prototypes; the instrument was not actually marketed until 1933, when a small series was produced under the name “Volkstrautonium” (no kidding). It not only plays a role in the music score for Mont Blanc, it also provided the sound of Udet’s plane and other effects. The trautonium was operated for the film by Oskar Sala, who became heavily involved in the development of the device after being introduced to Trautwein by Paul Hindemith. (Hindemith would later write several short trios for three trautoniums.) Many years later Sala used the trautonium to create the bird-calls
for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 classic The Birds.

Hindemith, Sala, and Trautwein with the Trautonium

Dessau would later reuse the combination of organ and trautonium in his Deutsches Miserere (1943–44). His score for Mont Blanc is “modern” – but the good, melodic sort of modern – very much in the style of Hindemith, who (under a pseudonym) had composed the score for Fanck’s 1921 film Im Kampf Mit dem Berge. Fanck was a National Socialist, but not of the knee-jerk anti-modernist variety. He enjoyed modern music and art, and collected drawings and etchings by artists like Käthe Kollwitz and George Grosz. (Fanck gave several Kollwitz sketches to Riefenstahl, advising her to take them down before Hitler visited her in her apartment. Fanck’s sound advice went unheeded: Hitler dismissed them as “too dismal, too negative.”[3])

Sepp Rist

5. Hannes and his World

To return to our story, we see Hannes in his cabin warming his hands over the open fire on the stove. This fire will appear again and again throughout the film: it plays an important role in the plot, and serves as an important symbol. Hannes lives an elemental existence on top of Mont Blanc: he lives with fire (the stove), water (the snow), earth (the jagged peaks), and air (the wind and clouds). Sepp Rist also has a strangely “elemental” face. He is quintessentially Nordic in type, but his face also has a kind of rough, brutal quality, with its great, high forehead and lantern jaw. He looks like some kind of primeval, Nordic ur-type. Someone once described him as looking like “a Dürer woodcut.”[4]

We see him making his breakfast: tea, cheese, and bread. His bread is so cold and hard Hannes has to put on gloves to hold it and cut it. A telescope dominates the cabin, signaling that astronomy is one of Hannes’s hobbies. A great pile of wood lies near the stove. On the kitchen table, we also see a wireless telegraph set and a microscope. As we shall discover later, Hannes is also interested in geology (Arnold Fanck’s doctorate, in fact, was in geology). At the back of the cabin is a large, comfortable armchair next to a radio equipped with a big gramophone horn.

Hannes above the clouds

Hannes’s environment is entirely, archetypically masculine. It is Spartan and utilitarian, like the quarters of a soldier or a monk. Hannes’s surroundings communicate, in a host of ways, mastery over the physical realm. Such mastery does not have to consist in the literal ability to manipulate matter. It also expresses itself in the drive to thoroughly know the realm of the physical; to make it completely transparent to the ceaselessly curious, penetrating, analytical masculine mind. Hannes is master of the stars. He is master of the stones. He is master of fire. And, of course, he is master of the latest technology. (As I shall discuss later, no other Fanck film contains as much technology, and it is presented here in a primarily positive, “gee whiz” fashion.)

Is Hannes also master of the realm of snow and ice? It certainly appears so – at first. He dresses to leave the cabin, wearing a heavy coat and hood, thick mittens, and hiking boots that lace up his ankles. As was de rigueur in this period (as one can see in any of the mountain films, including 2008’s North Face) he wears knee socks. To complete the picture, Hannes leaves the cabin with a jaunty pipe clenched between his teeth, just like Luis Trenker in The Holy Mountain. Although we tend to associate pipes with old geezers, they were popular with sporty young German men in this period.

Hannes at the anemometer

We now see the cabin perched high on a peak. Hannes boldly goes to the very edge and peers out over the clouds, smoke billowing from his pipe. Next we see him confidently scrambling down a snow-covered hill and up another in order to reach his anemometer. A device for measuring wind speed, the one featured in the film is a large cup-type anemometer on a vertical axis. Air flow causes the four cups of the device to spin around the axis, and average wind speed can be determined simply by counting the revolutions of the cups over a set period of time. In this particular case, the revolutions are counted by a machine and Hannes reads them on a meter at the base of the anemometer. At this point in the film, we hear for the first time Dessau’s eerie pairing of the organ and trautonium. This is music inspired by technology: there is no melodic line, and one could almost mistake it simply for epiphenomenal sounds produced by the operation of the anemometer itself. (Dessau’s use of the organ and trautonium links the various “technological” moments in the film.)

Hannes opens the box at the base of the anemometer and takes a reading. Back in the cabin, he sits down at his telegraph machine, dons a pair of headphones and begins transmitting via tapping on an old-fashioned telegraph straight key. His message in Morse code: “Mont Blanc Windstrength 4.” We then see a brief montage of different, uniformed men at various outposts in Europe receiving his transmission. The scene is actually somewhat annoying as Dessau’s music is abruptly cut off whenever the telegraph sound is heard (an effect that might also have been created using the trautonium). Later we see Hannes with headphones on, washing dishes with one hand (using straw to scrub them), and tapping out Morse messages with the other.

These scenes are meant to establish the nature of Hannes’s daily life, and to give us certain clues to his character. He is clearly highly intelligent and capable. He is tough, athletic, and fearless. As we will see later on, he is sincere, straightforward, and uncomplicated. Hannes seems to have adjusted well to his solitary life, but Fanck soon provides us with a hint that all is not entirely well with the young Wetterwart.

Hannes studies the valley below Mont Blanc

In the next scene we find Hannes outside the cabin again, training his telescope on the land below the mountain. The clouds part, and we see the valley and the town far below. Dessau’s music here conveys the feeling of receiving a revelation of some kind; it has a chilling kind of beauty that shades off into the sublime. But the grandeur of the full orchestra is soon replaced by the sound of a single violin, as Hannes – pipe clenched in his teeth – looks away from the telescope’s eyepiece and off into the distance, pensively. He is lonely. And the sweet sound of the violin suggests that he thinks of female company.

On what we suppose is the following day, we see Hannes perched high up on one of the jagged peaks of the Mont Blanc ridge known as the Aiguilles du Diable, again smoking his pipe. Suddenly we hear the buzzing of a propeller plane. It is Udet, of course. Hannes greets him joyfully. (Although it is never explained how they know each other, the suggestion is that Udet drops supplies to Hannes.) Udet cuts his engine and begins circling, as Hannes rises and stands on the narrow peak (anyone with acrophobia will squirm through this scene). And now we hear the first dialogue in a Fanck film: “Hallo Hannes!” cries Udet. He tells Hannes that their friend Walter in Berlin is playing the organ on the radio every Sunday night. He suggests that Hannes tune in, cries “See you at Christmas!” then re-starts his engine and zooms away. Fanck shows Sepp Rist ably scampering down the ridge. It is a brief but impressive sequence and serves to remind us of the courage and dexterity of Fanck’s actors.

Hella's observatory

6. The Woman and the Moon

The scene changes to evening, presumably the following Sunday. We see a man bent over, playing a church organ. This is Walter Petersen (played by Matthias Wieman). And then we see Hannes in his cabin, listening in on the wireless, stove ablaze. Later that evening he positions his telescope outside to study the stars, and the scene now shifts to the Babelsberg observatory. The great doors of the dome slide open and various mechanisms within the observatory are engaged as the telescope swings into place. Dessau again makes use of the organ in this scene, and the effect is genuinely eerie, as if we have suddenly been transported inside an alien spacecraft.

The machinery of the observatory seems massive, inhuman, and almost threatening . . . until suddenly we see a pair of delicate female hands reach up to grasp the eyepiece of the huge telescope. The hands belong to Leni Riefenstahl, playing the part of Hella Armstrong. Fanck photographs Riefenstahl in this scene through gauze, which creates a kind of halo effect around her, accentuating her femininity. Hella’s father, Professor Armstrong (Friedrich Kayßler), sits nearby at a radio transceiver.

Hella at the telescope, her father in background

Shots of the surface of the moon follow, accompanied by more organ music. And then we see that Hannes is also looking at the moon, through his own, much smaller, telescope. It’s around 10:00pm. He goes into his cabin and sits down at the transmitter to send a message. Back at the observatory, Prof. Armstrong receives the message with a smile. “Ah, Mont Blanc. Hella, your friend up there says one can get a great view tonight of the lower lunar edge. The Copernicus range.” As we shall see, Prof. Armstrong knows Hannes, and clearly suspects that his interest in Hella may be more than purely professional (though the two, at this point, have never met).

Fanck now intercuts the cabin, the observatory, and the stars. The stars connect Hella and Hannes, and technology connects them as well. As I mentioned earlier, there is more technology in Mont Blanc than in any of Fanck’s other films, and his attitude towards it is primarily positive. Technology serves in the film to connect individuals in important ways. Udet’s plane brings supplies to Hannes, and later on it will bring Hella and her father to him as well. The telescopes and telegraph connect Hella and Hannes – and at the end of the film the telegraph saves Hannes’s life. The radio connects Hannes and Udet to their friend Walter. In the end, however, the most significant item of “technology” in the film is, in fact, the most primitive: Hannes’s wood stove.

Notes

1. Siegfried Kracauer, Von Caligari bis Hitler (Hamburg, 1958), 168. My translation.

2. Karlheinz Wendtland, Geliebter Kintopp, Jahrgang 1929 und 1930, 2. Auflage 1990, 173. My translation. As Trimborn notes, “More recent publications treat the mountain film genre in a more balanced way than those of preceding decades.” See Trimborn, 37.

3. Riefenstahl, 125.

4. Quoted in Steven Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 63.


Part 3

7. Ascending and Descending

Storm over Mont Blanc

divides neatly into three acts. The first parts of this article covered Act I, which introduces us to Hannes (Sepp Rist), the lonely Wetterwart (weather station man) who lives in a cabin on one of the peaks of Mont Blanc, and to Hella Armstrong (Leni Riefenstahl), the budding astronomer who, with her father, helps run an observatory on the outskirts of Berlin. Hannes and Hella have never met, but they keep up an innocent correspondence by telegraph, discussing astronomical points of interest.

Act II opens with a shot of a sign pointing to Chamonix, which is situated in southeastern France. The scenes that follow, however, were not shot there, but a couple of hundred miles away in Arosa, Switzerland. Skiers woosh into view, and we see the terrain moving underneath them via cameras mounted on their skis (an Arnold Fanck innovation introduced in earlier films). These scenes are accompanied by joyful, catchy music by Paul Dessau which stands in sharp contrast to the stark and dramatic music that accompanies Act I (and to the extraordinarily somber music we will hear in the final act). The theme Dessau introduces here would be recycled for Fanck’s next offering, Der weisse Rausch (1931).

Composite publicity photo -- Rist and Riefenstahl on the peaks

A familiar face now skis into view, wearing a jaunty camp: Ernst Petersen, a nephew of Fanck who had major roles in The Holy Mountain

(1926) and in The White Hell of Pitz Palu

(1929). Here he merely makes a cameo. Apparently, Petersen died a month after completing these scenes, in March 1930.[1] (I have not been able to discover the cause of death.)

Here he is engaged in a Fuchsjagd or “foxhunt,” a popular ski game in which, quite simply, one skier plays the fox and others play the hounds. Fanck had filmed a foxhunt before, in a film he made with ski legend Hannes Schneider in 1922, variously titled Eine Fuchsjagd (auf Schneeshuhen) durchs Engadin and Das Wunder des Schneeschuhs, 2. Teil – Eine Fuchsjagd auf Skiern durchs Engadin (released to the English-speaking world simply as The Chase). Petersen is pursued by a couple dozen or so men on skis.

The scene then shifts to what appears to be the lobby of a local hotel or lodge. A Christmas tree dominates the room. Hella and her father, apparently now on holiday, are sitting nearby. He shows her a photograph of Hannes’s cabin. It is apparent that Prof. Armstrong wants to encourage Hella and Hannes’s interest in each other, but she is preoccupied with other matters. Looking out the window, Hella sees Petersen being pursued and cries “Look, papa! I must go and watch.”

“We’re eating in fifteen minutes!” he replies, but she insists she’ll be right back.

Autographed publicity photo of Sepp Rist in "Storm over Mont Blanc"

Grabbing her skis, Hella joins the foxhunt. Eventually, she runs into Petersen at a small hut and decides, mischievously, to help him evade his pursuers by exchanging clothes with him. He dons her skirt and hat and curtsies to her girlishly, then they ski off in opposite directions with the “hunters” now pursuing Hella (the shots of the skiers jumping over the hut are truly impressive). This scene is interesting for those who have seen Petersen in The Holy Mountain, for there he also playfully appears in “drag,” donning Diotima’s scarf and winking at her coquettishly. In both The Holy Mountain and in The White Hell of Pitz Palu Petersen plays characters who are portrayed as “soft” and somewhat unmasculine. For whatever reason, Fanck consistently cast his nephew in “androgynous” roles.

Just like The Holy Mountain, Mont Blanc features both skiing and climbing sequences. And in both films climbing is associated with the major male protagonist, who is portrayed as a spiritually-virile “lone wolf.” An aura of solemnity surrounds the climbing sequences, and climbing itself is portrayed as a solitary affair fraught with spiritual significance (see Part 2of my essay on The Holy Mountain). By contrast, the skiing sequences are situated near towns and always involve large groups of people. Fanck also treats them in a completely lighthearted way. (His films devoted entirely to skiing – like 1927’s Der große Sprung and 1931’s Der weisse Rausch – were usually comedies.)

8. Evola on Mountain-Climbing and Skiing

The “Ascending and Descending” chapter of Julius Evola’s Meditations on the Peaks: Mountain Climbing as Metaphor for the Spiritual Quest

is devoted to the spiritual contrast between skiing and climbing. Like Fanck, Evola is not opposed to skiing, and he acknowledges its practical value for health and well-being, but as a sport he also sees it as spiritually quite different from climbing, and as fundamentally modern.

He begins by remarking that skiing has acquired popularity with young Europeans only in very recent times. “Skiing’s rapid success, its universal appeal, the genuine interest and enthusiasm it induces in both sexes are so characteristic that it would be superficial to see in it something merely casual. Rather, it is something that ought to be explained as that which precisely typifies the contemporary spirit.”[2] He goes on to identify the essence of skiing as “the descent”:

Just as in elementary climbing, [where] the fundamental element and the center of interest is ascending, likewise in skiing this corresponds to descending. The dominant motif in mountain climbing is conquest. Once the peak is reached and the point beyond which one cannot go any further is attained, the phase most interesting to an ice or rock climber ends. In skiing, the opposite is true: the purpose of every ascent is descending. Hours of effort, which are necessary to reach a certain height, are spent only in order to be able to slide downhill.[3]

And recently, as Evola mentions, all effort to reach those heights has been eliminated at ski resorts by the introduction of lifts. Skiers need only relax and enjoy the ride and be carried to the top as many times as they like. The special thrill of skiing has nothing to do with going up, but with going down at great speeds. Skiing is thus emblematic, for Evola, of life in the Kali Yuga, in the Iron Age. The Germans have a useful expression for degeneration: geht zugrunde, which literally means “goes to ground” but has the sense of “perishes.”[4] In the modern age, we are all rapidly going to ground, but some, blissfully ignorant of what is really transpiring, find the speed of the descent quite thrilling.

Evola continues:

Paradoxical as it seems, skiing may be defined as the technique, game, and enjoyment of falling. In skiing we find a form of boldness, of courage (which for all practical purposes should not be despised), and yet it is a special form that is completely different from the boldness of a mountain climber and is likewise tied to antithetical meanings: it is an essentially modern form of boldness.[5]

And, further:

The fact is that in skiing, the modern spirit finds itself essentially at home; this modern spirit is intoxicated with speed, with constant change, with acceleration. Until recently this intoxication was celebrated as the spirit of progress, despite the fact that, in many regards, it is nothing other than a collapsing and a falling down. This exhilarating motion, joined with a cerebral feeling of control over the direction of these forces hurled and no longer really mastered, is typical of the modern world, in which the self achieves its most intense self-awareness.[6]

Skiing is the perfect sport for Hella for, as we shall see, Fanck portrays her as the quintessential modern woman. Aside from showing us Hella’s sporty and frivolous side, the “foxhunt” sequence is really just a long, entertaining digression.

9. Udet to the Rescue

At a certain point in the chase, Hella tears down the Chamonix sign seen earlier and hammers it, and its nails, into her skis as a brace to hold them parallel to each other. She then sends the skis tumbling down a hill and onto the surface of a frozen lake, while she climbs to the top of a nearby tree. The skiers come wooshing by following the tracks of her skis, while she stays perched in the tree, enjoying her clever little trick. The men then follow the tracks onto the lake, where they realize they’ve been had.

Then, all at once, none other than Ernst Udet appears, landing his silver Moth on the ice-covered lake! Hella rushes up to his plane, the skiers in hot pursuit: “Can you give me a ride?” she cries.

“Where to?”

“Just over there!” she says, pointing back toward her hotel.

Udet agrees, and Hella clambers into the forward seat of the plane (which, as Riefenstahl states in her memoirs, had no safety belt!). The skiers now catch up with them and actually try to prevent Udet from taking off. The whole scenario seems absurd and fantastic, but it is actually quite typical of depression-era films, which often completely eschewed both realism and logic for the sake of escapism.

Walter Riml's photograph of Leni Riefenstahl from "The Blue Light"

Fanck’s camera briefly focuses on two of the skiers watching as the plane takes off; one very tall, the other comparatively quite short. They are, respectively, Guzzi Lantschner and Walter Riml. They would reappear in Der weisse Rausch playing a pair of bumpkins who teach themselves to ski – in record time and with spectacular results – using an actual manual written by Arnold Fanck and Hannes Schneider. Riml later became a cameraman on Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light (it was he who took the most famous photograph of Riefenstahl as the witch “Junta”). Riml was also a cameraman on Triumph of the Will, and worked on several films with Luis Trenker. One of his last projects was the 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which involved a number of skiing and mountaineering sequences.

As Udet whisks Hella over Mont Blanc, the tone of the film now shifts back to that of Act I – and so does Dessau’s music (returning to the theme heard earlier when the clouds part and the lonely Hannes sees the valley below – suggesting, perhaps, that Udet carries with him the cure for this loneliness). The aerial photography here is breathtaking. Riefenstahl writes in her memoirs:

Plunging through thick cumuli, we saw the French mountains down below and towering over everything was the peak of Mont Blanc. The snow-covered range lay beneath us like so many sleeping polar bears. In a single moment, however, the scenery changed. Violent squalls whirled us topsy-turvy like a piece of paper, past razor-sharp ridges. We flew over several glaciers and peered into the immeasurably deep, blue-black crevasses. A high jagged crest zoomed directly towards us. The icy wind storming down from the peak grabbed us and whirled us closer and closer to the rocks. I screamed as the walls of ice seemed to be collapsing upon us. I saw the sky over me and then, a second later, a chasm beneath. I could only close my eyes.[7]

Hella's flight

Meanwhile, Hannes sits at his door smoking, wearing a Gestapo-like leather coat. Udet buzzes the cabin and Hannes waves to him. Then, something falls from the plane attached to a small parachute. Hannes rushes down from the cabin to fetch the object, which turns out to be a little pine tree. It comes with a note from Hella Armstrong: her business card, on which she has written under her name “grüsst unbekannterweise” (roughly: “greetings from a stranger”). (All of this strains credulity: did Hella and Udet, who have apparently only just met, work out this little stunt on the plane? If so, how did they communicate over the sound of the engine and the winds? One simply isn’t supposed to think of such things in a Fanck film, in which plot elements are often as fantastic as the images and stunts.)

Hella now returns to her father, who is waiting for her impatiently in the hotel lobby. She behaves like a happy child, crawling into his lap and crying “Ten minutes ago I was on Mont Blanc! You and I will go up there!” Professor Armstrong beams at her. It is obvious that he is an indulgent father who loves his daughter very much, and the scenes between them are touching.

The scene now shifts to Christmas Eve. Hannes has turned the little pine Udet sent him into a Christmas tree and decorated it with candles. He seems pensive but content as he lights the candles and “Silent Night” plays over the radio.

Hella arrives on Mont Blanc

10. “Out of the Sky”

We next see Hannes making his morning ablutions, stripped to the waist and soaping himself up before a large basin of water. Nearby is a mirror, for shaving. (It is interesting that he continues to shave on Mont Blanc. Only near the end of the film, when he has lost hope, does he begin to let his beard grow.) Suddenly, we hear a female voice singing (almost yodeling, actually) the jolly theme heard earlier in the skiing sequences. Hannes does not believe his ears at first, then rushes to the door and steps outside, steam pouring off of him in the frigid morning air. He looks down and sees Hella far below on the glacier waving to him. Pulling on a shirt, he cries, “Hello! Where did you come from?”

“I fell out of the sky!” she responds. We assume at first this means Udet has brought her in his plane, but then his silver Moth appears and, amazingly, lands on the mountain. (The first time this had ever been attempted. Riefenstahl provides a thrilling description of the event in her memoirs.[8]) Udet has brought Professor Armstrong with him, so we must assume that Hella has climbed up the mountain. This is not as difficult as it sounds, if one happens to be in very good shape with good ice-walking skills. (Riefenstahl remarks “This climb is no major event, it is merely strenuous.”[9]) Hannes scrambles down to greet Udet, who then takes off again leaving the Armstrongs behind on Mont Blanc. As Hannes and his two guests climb up to the cabin, Fanck shows the fire in Hannes’s stove blazing away. There are shots of this fire throughout the film, and – as we shall see – it serves as an important symbol.

Hannes excuses his Spartan surroundings by describing his cabin as “a bachelor’s home.” It soon becomes apparent that long ago Prof. Armstrong worked as a Wetterwart atop Mont Blanc. Looking around the cabin, he is filled with nostalgia. Hella, on the other hand, is in a jolly and mischievous mood. She sits down at the telegraph machine and pretends to be Hannes tapping out a message: “Is Fraulein Armstong in the observatory?”

Her father smiles ruefully. “No, she’s here on Mont Blanc. And she’s up to no good.”

Hella then sits down in Hannes’s armchair and flips on the radio. Pop music blares from the great gramophone horn. This is, of course, the sort of music we would expect the very “modern” Hella to listen to. Soon, however, she spies the microscope on the table and eagerly peers into the eyepiece.

“Quite the housewife I brought you, eh?” Prof. Armstrong says. “What a girl! Skiing and science, that’s all she ever thinks about.”

She looks up from the microscope and says, without a trace of irony, “You men can clean up around here.”

“I’m at your command, Fräulein Doctor,” Hannes replies and then begins scrubbing the dishes while Hella continues to peer through the microscope.

Prof. Armstrong helps out, saying to Hannes, “Today’s girls aren’t much use anymore.”

“Mending socks is not exactly my specialty,” Hella shoots back.

Needless to say, this is some of the most significant dialogue of the film. Hella is Fanck’s portrait of modern woman. In The White Hell of Pitz PaluRiefenstahl portrayed a similar character (though not nearly as frivolous) who finds it impossible to “connect” with the film’s spiritually-virile male protagonist. In Mont Blanc this pattern is repeated.

Hella is an extraordinarily problematic character. She possesses a superficial charm, but she is burdened by the twin failings of modern woman: an ersatz masculinity, and a complete inability to commit, with true seriousness, to anything. She seeks constant thrills: the thrill of skiing (in Evola’s terms, the modern thrill of “descent”), the thrill of flying, the thrill of climbing, the thrill of surprising the lonely, reticent Hannes and invading his masculine world.

As we shall see later, she also derives a thrill (like Diotima in The Holy Mountain) from toying with the affections of two men simultaneously. She has no idea what, or who she really wants. She enjoys science but (as we shall also see), she is not seriously committed to it. The only thing that is consistent about her is her desire to rebel not just against convention but against nature itself. She is a feminist who sees herself as a “new kind of woman.” What she really desires, like all feminists, is to be a man. Since this is impossible, she winds up being nothing at all. Hella is simply chaos and the void.

Near the end of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, he writes of Gudrun Brangwen, his portrait of the “modern woman”:

Her tomorrow was perfectly vague before her. This was what gave her pleasure. . . . Anything might come to pass on the morrow. And to-day was the white, snowy iridescent threshold of all possibility. All possibility—that was the charm to her, the lovely, iridescent, indefinite charm—pure illusion. All possibility—because death was inevitable, and nothing was possible but death.

She did not want things to materialize, to take any definite shape. She wanted, suddenly, at one moment of the journey tomorrow, to be wafted into an utterly new course, by some utterly unforeseen event, or motion.[10]

There are many similarities between Gudrun and all of the characters Leni Riefenstahl plays in Arnold Fanck’s films (though Hella Armstrong is a good deal jollier than Gudrun Brangwen).

In the evening, Prof. Armstrong steps outside the cabin to gaze at the stars (each time Fanck shows us the stars above, we hear a chord from Dessau’s organ). Meanwhile, Hannes and Hella sit together awkwardly at the table. He smokes his pipe while she steals shy little sidelong glances at him, much as Maria does with Dr. Johannes in Pitz 

 Palu.

Hannes finds that Hella has failed to light the fire

In the morning, Fanck’s camera captures the dawn spilling over the glacier, as if bringing it to life. Hannes is awake, an axe under his arm, his guests still in bed. After awhile, Hella stirs and rubs her eyes. Hannes whispers to her: “Fräulein Hella, could you start the fire? I’ll go and chop wood outside. I don’t want to wake him.” But when he goes outside to chop the wood, Hella simply rolls over and goes back to sleep. When Hannes returns, he is chagrined to find that the fire is still out. (She is indeed “quite the housewife”!) “You can’t work up here without fire, Fräulein Armstrong,” he says, emphasizing her last name.

And it is, after all, a peculiar name for a German. The surname “Armstrong” is common to England, Ireland, and Scotland, but not Germany. (“Hella” is Scandinavian and German.) Why did Fanck pick this name for his heroine? Its foreignness is distinctive, suggesting that there is something alien about Hella; that she does not quite belong where she is. More importantly, of course, “Armstrong” is a very masculine name, suggesting muscularity and power.

Hannes takes Hella climbing in his world

Hannes, of course, winds up lighting the fire, after which he and Hella dress warmly and prepare to leave the hut. On her way out, Hella kisses her father very tenderly. (The pair are almost too close.) She and Hannes now go climbing around on the neighboring peaks, going up high onto the jagged Aiguilles du Diable ridge. At one point, Hannes extends his hand to Hella to help her up, but she waves it away. Later, he takes her to the anemometer where they linger awhile, looking out over the surrounding area, high above the clouds. She gazes at him admiringly, while he avoids her eyes, pipe clenched between his teeth. Hannes is not the sexual aggressor here. But neither is he weak. He is the Traditional, spiritually virile male whose virility has nothing to do with phallicism, and everything to do with a kind of isolated, noble detachment. His phallic aspect must be “awakened” by the feminine mystery.

"Hallo!" Hella calls to her father

While Hannes and Hella are at the anemometer, Prof. Armstrong decides to venture out onto the peaks to take rock samples. In a scene that is actually rather hard to watch, he slips and goes tumbling silently down the mountain to his death. The young pair are completely unaware of what has happened, but after awhile Hella becomes concerned for her father. She cries out to him across the peaks: “Hallo! Hallo!” When he does not respond, Hella and Hannes descend from their perch and learn the terrible truth.

Thus ends Act II of Storm over Mont Blanc.

Notes

1. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0676812/

2. Julius Evola, Meditations on the Peaks: Mountain Climbing as Metaphor for the Spiritual Quest, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1998), 44.

3. Ibid., 44.

4. In Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, Julius Streicher says “Ein Volk, das nichts auf die Reinheit seiner Rasse hält, geht zugrunde” (A nation that does not preserve the purity of its race perishes).

5. Evola, Meditations on the Peaks, 45.

6. Ibid., 46. Lest one think that Evola is condemning skiing, he goes on to say on the same page: “Let me repeat that I myself practice skiing, although I am not disturbed or distracted by these ideas. One should not shun any experience. What matters is to maintain openness toward all experiences and thus be always aware lest physical and emotional elements attempt to exercise a seductive influence upon higher domains.”

7. Leni Riefenstahl, Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir, no translator credited (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 82.

8. Ibid., 8

9. Ibid., 84.

10. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (New York: Viking Press, 1969), 459–60