Derek Hawthorne -Storm over Mont Blanc, Part 4

11. Death on Mont Blanc

Act III of Storm over Mont Blanc begins in the aftermath of the death of Hella Armstrong’s father. Hella and Prof. Armstrong had come to visit Hannes, the lonely Wetterwart, atop Mont Blanc.

The day after their arrival, Hella and Hannes go climbing, while Prof. Armstrong goes off on his own, collecting rock samples. While shifting positions atop one of Mont Blanc’s peaks, Armstrong loses his footing and falls to his death. Hella and Hannes do not witness this, and only discover the terrible truth later.

The opening scenes of the act are dramatic and moving. We see shots of the clouds pouring over Mont Blanc, as a grief-stricken Hella stands outside the hut. She does not weep and wail. Her head is held high, her face expressionless. It is a noble, Teutonic grief, like that of Kriemhilde for Siegfried. (And it is obvious that Hella worshipped her father.) These scenes are accompanied by an extraordinarily simple and dramatic funeral dirge by Paul Dessau. Inside his cabin, a solemn Hannes sits down at his telegraph machine and sends a message: “Professor Armstrong in fatal accident. Send people here immediately.”

As if in a trance, Hella begins trudging away from the hut and into the snow. Hannes runs after her and gently guides her back to the cabin. Inside, she sits down on a bench and goes completely limp, like a broken doll, as Hannes kneels before her and removes her boots. He props her feet on a pillow, handling them as if they were made of glass, and then lights the stove. Fadeout.

Hella and Hannes part, after her father's death

In the morning, men arrive at the cabin to remove Prof. Armstrong’s body, and Hella prepares to leave with them. Hannes takes her hand and says “If you feel lonely down there and need some company, I have a good friend, a musician. He’s a very kind person.” Hannes, of course, is referring to Walter.

It is clear by this point that strong feelings have developed between Hella and Hannes, so why does he suggest that she contact his young and unattached friend? It may be that Hannes does not regard Walter as competition (as we shall see, there are good reasons for this). Still, it is a rather selfless act. Hannes will not be able to leave his post for several months, and so any sort of “relationship” between him and Hella is really impossible for the moment.

However, what also seems to be true is that – like Dr. Krafft in Pitz Palu – Hannes now feels that he belongs in the icy remoteness of the mountain world. His soul has been elevated by the hard life on Mont Blanc, and consequently he feels alienated from those who (literally and figuratively) live below him. This is a constant theme in Fanck’s films. In The Holy Mountain, after climbing “the dreadful north face,” Vigo tells the Friend he wants to return, and the Friend responds: “Is there something you want with the rabble below?”

In Meditations on the Peaks, Julius Evola writes: “There is no real climber who is not able to experience mountain climbing, if only in a few occasional flashes, as something more than a mere sport. Likewise, there is no real climber who does not display, in the eyes or in the face darkened by the sun’s reflection on the snow, the mark of a race that has transformed beyond that of the people of the plains.”[1]

Fanck was completely in tune with such ideas, and his films struck a chord with climbers everywhere. At the time of Storm over Mont Blanc’s release, a commentator in a major Alpine journal wrote glowingly of the film and said of Hannes that he “would prefer to struggle with nature – would ten times prefer to struggle with the violence of the storm or the dangers of the avalanche, to struggle against hunger and cold, than to have to battle human weakness and the disillusionments of the wide world below.”[2]

Hannes is torn. He is now thoroughly a creature of the mountain, imbued with its spirit – but in his response to Hella he feels the eternal call of life and its continuance, which really can only take place below. As we shall see, the only way he can reconcile these conflicting tendencies is if Hella comes to him as a genuine woman, not as a “modern woman.” In testing his mettle against the mountain, he has forged himself into the embodiment of the Traditional Absolute Man (see Julius Evola’s Metaphysics of Sex for more information, and my discussion of Evola’s theories in my essay on The Holy Mountain).

The only way Hannes can return to life among the “rabble” without sacrificing his spirit, is if that spirit is complemented by an embodiment of the Absolute Woman. Such a pairing would not only leave his manhood intact, but allow it to fully and completely express itself. Pitz Palu, Fanck’s previous film, ended tragically, with Dr. Johannes Krafft (the Absolute Man of that film) unable to make a connection with the very modern Maria and to come down from his “white hell.” We will see whether Hannes fares better. At the moment, things do not look so hopeful, as Hella is even more truly “modern” than was Maria.

To return to our story, when the men arrive to remove Armstrong’s body, Hella leaves with them. As they depart, Hannes plants a cross on the mountain and contemplates it a few moments. Hella stands below on the glacier, studying him. Then, she turns to go. Hannes watches the party set off down the mountain then returns to his hut, now lonelier than ever. In a simple but meaningful scene, he removes her cup from his table.

12. Return to Earth

Hella is now back in her observatory, reclining languidly in an armchair as the great telescope swings into place before her. She looks into the eyepiece for a few moments then sinks back into the chair as if enervated. She has lost interest in her work. Her father’s replacement appears, a pleasant, heavy-set man referred to only as “professor.” He tells Hella (as if she did not know) to take down the telegraph messages from Mont Blanc every evening at 10:00pm. Suddenly, as he sits at the telegraph, one comes in. He listens for a moment and says with surprise. “Well, I never . . . .” Hannes is radioing to ask how Hella is. She quickly offers an explanation:“He was an old friend of papa’s.”

Matthias Wieman

The scene now shifts to the hallway of a rather decrepit apartment house in Charlottenburg (one of the boroughs of Berlin). Hella is standing outside a door on which has been affixed a sign that reads “Walter Petersen, Organist.” Hella picks up the milk that has been left by the door, knocks, and then enters. Walter is in bed apparently ill, striking keys on his piano with one hand and making notes on a score with another. Hella looks around his shabby and depressing apartment. Then Walter looks up and is quite surprised when he finally notices that a beautiful girl has entered. Matthias Wieman, who would later appear in Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light, plays Walter. His face stands in sharp contrast to that of Sepp Rist’s. His head is narrow, his chin weak, and his eyes shifty. This is Arnold Fanck’s image of the “sensitive” artist – sensitive to the point of spiritual and bodily weakness.

Hella introduces herself and brings greetings from Hannes. Then she immediately begins straightening up the messy apartment. Why is Hella willing to do these things for Walter, when she wasn’t willing to do them for the obviously superior Hannes? The answer, quite simply, is that it was precisely because Hannes is superior. Hella sees Walter as a poor specimen of manhood and feels superior to him. She can momentarily play the part of the “housewife” with him because he in no way threatens her image of herself as a modern, “liberated” (i.e., masculinized) woman. In fact, she is in complete control with Walter. To have played such a part with Hannes, however, would have constituted surrender. It is very clear that Fanck is aware of the psychological dynamic here. Significantly, he shows Hella lighting Walter’s gas stove – and then cuts directly to a shot of the fire on Hannes’s stove blazing away.

Hannes is looking into his microscope, and imagines that he hears Hella yodeling her little tune as she did when she first arrived at his cabin. Clearly, he is able to think about little other than her. He begins pacing, then starts flipping through the pages of his tear-off calendar. It is January now. On the page for April 20th (a significant day in the German calendar, of course) he has written “Tag meiner Ablösung” (literally, “day of my replacement”; the day on which he will be relieved by the next Wetterwart and can return to the world below). Hannes looks at the page and smiles.

Time passes. It is now April and we are in Walter’s apartment again. Hella enters just as Walter is writing a letter to Hannes:

Dear Wetterwart,

I am indescribably happy to have such a sweet being [liebes Wesen] around me and I hope to soon be able to tell you about my engagement to Hella Armstrong. . . .

Hella has apparently been visiting Walter quite often and nursing him back to health. Has he simply imagined that their relationship is more than a friendly one? What are Hella’s feelings? This is not made entirely clear. Walter receives a telegram from Hannes that reads “Arriving April 26th for long vacation. Your Wetterwart.” Hella seems ecstatic at this news and begins dancing around the room and playing the piano, singing the melody heard earlier (and that Hannes keeps imagining that he hears). Walter seems dismayed at her reaction. But again, it is not clear exactly what her feelings are for either man. Fanck here repeats a pattern he established in both The Holy Mountain and The White Hell of Pitz Palu, in which the woman (each time played by Leni Riefenstahl) divides her affections between two men, one strong and the other weak, and it is never entirely clear exactly where they stand with her.

In the observatory later that evening, she tells her boss that she might quit “to look after someone. Somebody or other who needs me.” But who is that? Walter or Hannes? Both, in a way, need “looking after.”

The professor says “Mont Blanc?” implying that he thinks she’s referring to Hannes. But of course she said “somebody or other.” And she does not reply to the professor. She simply begins dancing around the observatory and singing her little tune. It is apparent that Hella really has no idea what she wants. She does not know if she wants to continue to pursue her career as an astronomer, and she does not know which man she wants. Hannes has clearly awakened something in her. She is only dimly aware of this – and she fears it.

It is now April 20th and a group of three men on skis are coming up the mountain to help Hannes move out of his cabin and return to the world. In a charming sequence, Hannes yodels at them as they approach, and they yodel back. Then he pours out some schnapps for them as they enter. One of the men says to him “You know, the glacier beckons you, and you won’t be able to leave.” These prove to be prophetic words, for the men bring with them Walter’s letter, the one in which he says “I hope to soon be able to tell you about my engagement to Hella Armstrong.”

Hannes reads the letter and is devastated. Fanck conveys Hannes’s internal state by showing us shots of avalanches and snow cornices breaking up and falling. The sequence is highly reminiscent of the one in The Holy Mountain where the Friend, just after seeing Diotima together with Vigo, imagines that he sees his favorite mountain exploding. Here the situation is very much the same, as Hella and Walter are not engaged; Walter merely hopes that they will be. And like Vigo in The Holy Mountain, he seems unaware of his friend’s feelings for Hella, or her feelings for him.

The man who brought the letter now steps outside and tells his friends, “We might just as well go home again. I don’t know what’s got into him. Now he wants to stay up here.” Inside, Hannes sits at the foot of his small bed, staring at the letter. He crumples it up and buries his head in his hands.

The giant crevasses of Mont Blanc

The three men make their way back down the mountain. They cross a snow bridge – which suddenly collapses behind them. Then another collapses. And another. And another – all just after the men have crossed to safety. (One of the men does fall into the abyss, but he has a rope around his waist and the others easily pull him back up.) The viewer almost gets the feeling that Hannes’s grief is causing these events; that he and the mountain are so spiritually close, when he suffers it suffers with him, and then attempts to consume the men from below in a rage of despair.

At his apartment, Walter receives a telegram from Hannes: “I can’t come down until further notice. I wish you both the best. Your Wetterwart.” Just after he reads this, Hella enters carrying a number of packages. On the table dominating the room is a huge gift basket filled with what appears to be fruit and bottles of wine or champagne. There is also a live lobster on the table, sitting on top of a package! Hella enters and interacts with Walter almost as if she lives there. She says: “Is your friend here? It’s time he finally got out of that endless winter.” It is odd that she refers to Hannes as “your friend” rather than by name, as if she has forgotten the bond that formed between them months before on Mont Blanc (or does she want to conceal that bond from Walter?).

It is a decidedly curious scene. Are Hella and Walter now actually engaged? (What else would explain, among other things, the gift basket?) When Hella reads the telegram she appears stunned. Is this because she had been longing to see Hannes (whether she was consciously aware of it or not), or because she realizes that Hannes believes (incorrectly?) that they are now a couple? One almost feels as if some scenes have been omitted. Indeed, according to IMDB the German running time of the film is 110 minutes, whereas the Kino DVD is 95 minutes. I have not had the opportunity to consult any other prints of the film, or to read the shooting script. However, Arnold Fanck published a book at the time of Mont Blanc’s release telling the entire story of the film in still photographs. I own a copy, and it gives no indication of any significant scenes having been omitted from the Kino version. I can only draw the conclusion that whether or not Hella and Walter are engaged, Hella is terribly confused.

13. Storms over Mont Blanc

Up above on the mountain, the winds are raging. Hannes is at the anemometer again. He takes his gloves off for a moment to check the meter, leaving them on the rim of the device. All at once, a great gust of wind sends the gloves sailing off the mountain. Retrieving them is utterly impossible. (This happens so quickly in the version of the film that I have seen, some viewers may miss what has occurred.) The distance back to the cabin is far enough to make this a serious calamity for Hannes.

Hannes struggles to light a match with his frozen hands

By the time he reaches home, his hands are frozen. The fire has gone out, and Hannes is unable to close his fingers. How will he get the fire started again? He begins vigorously rubbing his hands with snow in order to try and restore the circulation. This is a trick we learned in Pitz Palu, at the conclusion of which rescuers rub Hans Petersen all over with snow. Here, however, it doesn’t work. Hannes tries and fails to grip a match and light it.

Time passes. As the winds roar outside, the hut and its lone inhabitant are freezing. By morning, icicles are hanging from the rafters and from Hannes’s telescope. At this point, the film becomes genuinely frightening. Hannes knows that he is in very serious trouble, and sees escape as his only hope. He puts on all of his warm clothes, even covering himself in blankets, and wraps his hands. The idea is to try to ski down the mountain – without poles, as his hands cannot grip them.

Just after Hannes leaves the cabin, and without his realizing it, the door swings open, letting in the wind and snow. With surprising dexterity (under the circumstances) Hannes skis down the glacier – but everywhere he turns he finds, as we saw earlier, that all the snow bridges have collapsed. There is no way down the mountain! Meanwhile, the wind blows the cabin door off its hinges and it sails down into the abyss. Just when things couldn’t look more dire, an avalanche occurs and Hannes must scramble to avoid it. He takes a tumble, and when he lands finds that the ends of his skis have broken off and are now useless. Hannes collapses in despair on the edge of a great crevasse. He is now completely trapped.

Riefenstahl describes shooting this scene in her memoirs:

Sepp Rist . . . had to ski down without poles. He had to concentrate hard to keep clear of the crevasses. While filming such a scene with Rist, we saw a gigantic ice cornice break away from the substratum of rock and, with tremendous force, crash over the rocks, towards our glacier. The cameramen, relentless and unflappable, kept cranking. They shot Rist fleeing the avalanche as it thundered towards him. For us it was too late to escape. Tremendous masses of ice rolled down the glacier towards us. We could only hope that the avalanche would halt before it reached us. Shrouded more and more densely in snow powder, no one dared to speak. The spell was broken only after several minutes of silence. Almost a quarter of an hour passed before the snow powder finished settling and we had some visibility. We stopped working that day. All of us had had enough of our adventures in the snow.[3]

Filming in Hannes's cabin -- with real ice and snow

Hannes’s cabin is now filling with snow and ice, blown in through the open door. The telescope also topples over, smashing a window. As noted in Part I of this essay, the cabin set was constructed outdoors in Bernina, Switzerland. It was rigged with lights and camera equipment (electric current provided by the local railway system), and one end of the set was left open to the elements. Fans and shovels were used to fill Hannes’s cabin with snow for these final scenes.

Realizing that there is no way down the mountain, Hannes laboriously makes his way back to the cabin, not realizing that it has now become a death trap. For some reason, he left the radio on in the cabin and choral music plays over it, creating a genuinely eerie effect. When Hannes finally reaches the hut he is horrified to see what has transpired. Everything inside is now entirely covered in snow, like the ice-covered summer house in the final scenes of David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, only less inviting.

Acting swiftly, his hands still almost useless, Hannes begins piling furniture in front of the door. But it is no use. There is not much to pile, and the wind simply keeps blowing it over. Hannes is not the sort of man who is eager to ask for help, but now he realizes that his life is in great danger, and that he has to call upon others for rescue. He sits down at the telegraph machine and begins tapping out an “SOS” signal with his elbow.

It is now around 10:00pm and Hella is in the observatory, hovering around the radio receiver, waiting for Hannes to call. When she hears the beeping of his Morse signal she is elated, and sits down at the machine. Her happiness turns to alarm, however, when she realizes he is sending a distress signal. Other outposts pick up the signal, and soon a group of rescuers sets out for Mont Blanc on skis. Getting across the great crevasses, however, proves to be a major problem. They try jumping across and pulling themselves up, but the snow is too soft. They try lowering themselves down and climbing up the other side, but this also won’t work. “We’ll need a ladder,” they decide. The idea is to place the ladder over the crevasses and to walk across.

We now see a train plowing through the snow, presumably carrying Hella. Then we see her waiting in the lobby of a hotel, wearing a long coat. (All of this seems to happen very quickly, though the journey from Berlin to Mont Blanc is a distance of more than 500 miles.) A bellman approaches her: “Gnädige Frau, two rescuers have just returned. They say they can’t go any further. They’re coming down to get a ladder.”

Hella's telegram to Udet

The scene now cuts to a shot of what are presumably Ernst Udet’s hands (though it could be anyone’s) opening a telegram addressed to him, at the “Grand Hotel.” It reads: “Wetterwart on Mont Blanc in mortal danger. Timely rescue possible only by plane. Hella Armstrong.” Then we see Udet in flight, heading for Mont Blanc.

Meanwhile, the rescuers are coming up the mountain carrying a ladder. And Hella is with them. This is a pattern that one finds again and again in the “mountain films”: the woman comes to the rescue of the stranded man. One finds it in The Holy Mountain, in S.O.S. Iceberg, and even in 2008’s North Face.

Hannes near death

I noted in my essay on North Face that this is a fundamentally Nordic motif: one is reminded, for example, of capable, action-oriented characters like Brunnhilde and Kriemhilde. (There is nothing inherently “feminist” about such women, by the way. The Traditional woman is not a helpless idiot.) Hella and the rescuers lay their ladder across a crevasse and we see Hella boldly walk across it. Fanck’s camera pans from the ladder to the abyss below. Riefenstahl recalls shooting this dangerous scene:

For the maximum cinematic effect the director had chosen a very deep crevasse. I was afraid of doing this scene, and wanted to get out of it. My comrades had already placed bets that I wouldn’t cross the ladder, and usually I would take such dares, for they knew I was more afraid of looking weak. . . . What can happen? I asked myself. After all, I’m roped up, so I can’t fall very far. But that little word “far” says everything. I could still plummet forty or fifty feet and shatter my head against the ice walls. . . . The time had come. The director shouted “Action!” Ignoring my fear, I started out, and felt the ladder swaying under my feet. This was something I hadn’t counted on. . . . To make things even more difficult, the script demanded that while crossing the ladder I had to turn back and shout something at the people behind me. I mustered every ounce of my willpower to keep from collapsing on the ladder in utter terror. Somehow I made it, and the final shot of me was completed just as Fanck wanted it.[4]

Udet now approaches in his silver Moth, but suddenly great bolts of lightning strike through the sky and the wind tosses the plane like balsa wood toy. Udet cannot land. The rescuers watch the plane above, and one of them shakes his head ruefully. It seems almost as if the gods do not want Hannes to be rescued. These scenes are extraordinarily dramatic and suspenseful, even though it is obvious that the lightning is an effect created in the studio. While all of this is taking place, Hannes sits in his armchair, covered in snow, near death from hypothermia.

The frozen Hannes is rescued

Finally, and with great difficulty, Udet manages to land on the mountain! He climbs out of his plane, a cigarette wedged between his teeth, and makes his way up to the snow-filled cabin. He sees Hannes in his corner, almost completely buried, and tosses the cigarette aside. Then Udet grabs a pick and begins clearing the ice and snow from the stove.

The other rescuers are now approaching the cabin, Hella in the lead. By the time she enters, Udet has dug Hannes out of the snow and cleaned him off. When Hella walks in, she sees Hannes sitting at the kitchen table, the beginnings of a beard visible on his jaw. A bright aura surrounds him; he seems renewed. They look at each other, but exchange no words. Hannes’s frostbitten hands are still bandaged, and instinctively he tries to hide them from Hella. She smiles at him tenderly and then sits down beside him at the table. Hannes turns to her and she strokes his bandaged hands, then lays her head on them.

Hella lights the stove in the final scene

Suddenly, Hella looks across the room and sees the dead stove. She gets up and, as Hannes watches her, lights the fire. Once more we hear the “revelation” music that first plays near the beginning of the film, as the clouds part and we see the world below. The film closes with more shots of the clouds below the peaks.

14. The Meaning of Mont Blanc

In the end, Hella saves Hannes in more ways than one. She saves his body by bringing Udet and the rescuers to the mountain. She saves his soul by lighting the fire on the stove. This is a symbolic act, and both of them know it.

Traditionally, there has always been a connection between woman and the hearth. Julius Evola writes in The Metaphysics of Sex:

In the sacred ceremonies of the family, the polarity of the sexes was played out, emphasizing their complementarity. Hence developed the part often played by woman in Indo-European household cults in connection with the fire, of which she was the natural guardian since, in principle, she had the nature of Vesta, the “living flame” or fire of life. In a certain way woman was the living upholder of this supersensual influence and thus acted as a counterpart of the pure male principle, of the pater familias. Thus it was the woman’s duty above all to see that the flame stayed pure and did not go out; she invoked its holy force when offering sacrifices in the fire.[5]

Of course, the flame has multiple meanings here, as does the woman’s role in keeping it lit. Among other things, it symbolizes the crucial role of the woman as foundation, really, of the household itself: as wife and mother; as the one who brings beauty and warmth into the home, and who brings forth life itself.

Hannes watches as Hella lights the fire

Hella, and modern women in general, have rejected this role. They have allowed the fire to go out – and the result is catastrophic both for them and for men. Women today flit from thrill to thrill, seeking “empowerment” and “having it all” – only to find that when childless, menopausal reality sets in they feel empty and unfulfilled. Why? Because they have been hoodwinked by high-testosterone feminist freaks into thinking that their Traditional role is a form of slavery. The result for men – especially for men like Hannes who have achieved the virtue of Traditional spiritual virility – is arguably worse.

In a 1923 newspaper interview D. H. Lawrence is quoted as saying “If men were left to themselves, they would rush off . . . into destruction.” And this is what is symbolized by the icy death of Dr. Johannes (called “Hannes” at times) in Pitz Palu, and the icy near-death of Hannes in Mont Blanc. Lawrence continues: “But women keep life back at its own center. They pull the men back. Women have enormous passive strength, the strength of inertia.” Lawrence uses here an image he often employed: women are at the center, the hub. Why? Because they are closer to “the source,” to what Lawrence called the “blood-consciousness,” than men are. Men seek some kind of purposive activity in life, and this involves moving out from the center, from home and hearth. But they draw their inspiration and strength from that source. The “blood-consciousness” in men is “activated” principally through their relationship to women.

Hella lays her head on Hannes's bandaged hands in the final scene

Without a woman, therefore, a man lacks a sense of being grounded. As I put it in my essay “D. H. Lawrence on Men and Woman,” men tend “to be so focused upon doing, that they miss out on being.” Their quest to achieve their purpose in life becomes something cold and barren. Ultimately, without a home and hearth and woman to return to for sustenance, they burn themselves out along the path. They feel a sense of emptiness, and drift into despair – as Hannes does in the final act of Mont Blanc. As for woman, without a man – a real man – she takes on the male role and tries to find fulfillment through some kind of busy-ness in the world, as does Hella. And then she too winds up bitter and dissatisfied.

As Evola notes, “Complementing the Waters as female principle [e.g., Diotima and the sea in The Holy Mountain], the male principle was often linked to fire.”[6] But this fire must be continually fed by the woman.

When Hella lights Hannes’s fire at the end of Mont Blanc, she symbolically accepts the Traditional female role. And she rescues him from his icy, hyper-masculine isolation. Through this one act, in which Hella transforms and actualizes her true nature, Hannes finds in Hella the perfect feminine complement to his spiritual virility. He is now able to return to the world below, while remaining a man above that world.

Notes

1. Julius Evola, Meditations on the Peaks, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1998), 6.

2. Quoted in Steven Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 64.

3. Leni Riefenstahl, A Memoir, no translator credited (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 86.

4. Ibid., 87.

5. Julius Evola, The Metaphysics of Sex (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1983), 174.

6. Evola, Metaphysics of Sex, 119.

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

Derek Hawthorne on "S.O.S. Iceberg"

1. Introduction: From Vertical to Horizontal

S.O.S. Iceberg is not a mountain film. It may have been conceived and directed by the great Arnold Fanck, but it is set in Greenland. The only bergs in the film are icebergs. Still, there is ample reason to include this film in my multi-part account of the “mountain film genre.” The principal reason, of course, is that it was directed by Fanck, but the deeper reason is that the film, as we shall see, displays a great many of the characteristics we have come to expect of the genre. Further, those who have read my essays on The Holy Mountain, The White Hell of Pitz Palü, and Storm Over Mont Blanc know that I have argued that Fanck is developing certain philosophical ideas through each of these films.

In brief: 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 Pitz Palü (1929) also deals, in the form of an allegory, with the relation between the sexes—but this time in their degenerated, modern form. Pitz 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.

S.O.S. Iceberg is the first significant Fanck film since Mont Blanc, and the first released under Hitler. The “problem of the sexes” having been solved in Mont Blanc, in S.O.S. Iceberg man and woman have come down from the mountain, and the shift is from the vertical to the horizontal. This is true in multiple senses.

On a literal level, the adventure of S.O.S. Iceberg does not, of course, involve literally “going upwards”: they merely go “up” North to the arctic. But this going upwards is by way of going outwards: out across the seas, and across the largely undiscovered land mass of Greenland.

On the metaphysical level, the dynamics here no longer involve the vertical conflict between the uranic masculine and chthonic feminine. The world depicted in S.O.S. Iceberg, in fact, is one without a hint of discord between the sexes, as well as one in which women are depicted as entirely feminine, yet also daring and brave.

No, the conflict in S.O.S. Iceberg is a horizontal conflict between man and man. The psychological dynamics in the film involve mostly tensions between men, and tensions within male friendships. In Mont Blanc, Hella must come to the rescue of Hannes; woman must, in some sense, rescue man.

In S.O.S. Iceberg, Hannes (the same name appears here as well), must come to the rescue of his friend Karl. A character named “Hella” appears here too (again played by Leni Riefenstahl), but her presence is almost completely superfluous, and, as we shall see, her attempts to rescue Karl (her husband) end in disaster, and she winds up having to be rescued as well. Just as before, Fanck’s film appears on the surface to be a completely straightforward and simple adventure story, but there is much more here than meets the eye.

2. The Making of S.O.S. Iceberg

Fanck during filming of “S.O.S. Iceberg”

Storm over Mont Blanc, like The White Hell of Pitz Palü, proved to be a great success at the box office. Movie goers were so captivated by its images that Fanck released a “photo book” of the film, telling the entire story in stills. But it would be a couple of years before he would release another film of comparable quality. Extensive planning went into a project called Die schwarze Katze (The Black Cat), a war drama in which Leni Riefenstahl would have played a Mata Hari-like spy. This never came to fruition, partly because (as Riefenstahl claims in her memoirs), Luis Trenker stole the idea and made his own film about a similar character!

Instead of Die schwarze Katze, in 1931 Fanck shot what was perhaps his worst film, Der weisse Rausch (The White Ecstasy). This was a wholly inconsequential and largely unfunny ski comedy, which told two parallel stories.

In one, Guzzi Lantschner and Walter Riml (who both appeared in small roles in Mont Blanc), play two bumpkins who learn to ski using an actual manual co-authored by Arnold Fanck and ski legend Hannes Schneider. The most amusing sequences in the film show these two (who were champion skiers) performing impressive feats on skis while simultaneously studying Fanck and Schneider’s book!

The second plot thread casts Riefenstahl as a hopeless klutz desperately trying to teach herself to ski. Her clothes all bear large (very large) and garish “LR” monograms. And she spends most of the film saying “Oh, great!” to everything around her. Riefenstahl hated playing this part so much she actually wept. (Incredibly enough, Lautschner and Riml would play the same “lovable” bumpkins in three more films—none of them directed by Fanck, however.)

During the making of Der weisse Rausch, Riefenstahl was planning a far more significant film of her own: Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light). This would be, in its own way, a mountain film. “I yearned for the mountains, but without ice and snow,” Riefenstahl tells us in her memoirs.[1] Needless to say, Riefenstahl discussed the project with Fanck, who was her cinematic mentor. Fanck initially expressed great skepticism about her plans for the sort of visual quality she wanted to achieve. When Riefenstahl began sending Fanck the rushes from Italy, however, his attitude changed.

When she later had trouble editing the film, Fanck took on the job himself and produced a version Riefenstahl later described as “a mutilation.”[2] She suspected that Fanck was motivated both by envy and resentment over her romantic rejection. It is impossible for us to determine, however, exactly how Riefenstahl’s final cut differed from the edit produced by Fanck. (It is likely, in fact, that it actually taught her a thing or two.)

Around the same time, Riefenstahl received an offer from Universal to star in S.O.S. Iceberg, which would be shot simultaneously in German, under Fanck’s direction, and in English under the direction of the American Tay Garnett. The story was inspired in part by the tragic events of the Wegener expedition, which had made international headlines in 1930.

Alfred Wegener was a German scientist and the man behind the theory of continental drift (a controversial theory at the time, but now universally accepted). In the fall of 1930, backed by the German government, Wegener and a number of others set out for Greenland to monitor arctic weather year round. The success of their mission depended upon transferring supplies from one camp to another, and it was while making this journey that Wegener and another man died. Wegener is thought to have died of heart failure, but the other man’s body was never found. The plot of S.O.S. Iceberg would concern the search for a missing scientist in Greenland, written off as dead.

Riefenstahl claims in her memoirs that she turned down the part at first. However, both Fanck and the film’s American producer Paul Kohner claimed later that she desperately wanted the role. (Kohner even claimed that Riefenstahl seduced him.) In truth, Fanck did not want her in the film. However, Universal executives wanted to repeat the great success of Pitz Palü, by re-teaming Riefenstahl with Fanck, actor Gustav Diessl, and pilot Ernst Udet. Sepp Rist, from the equally successful Mont Blanc, would also play a major role (a larger role than Diessl’s, in fact).

Fanck, Riefenstahl, and Knud Rasmussen

Universal offered Riefenstahl $10,000, and she gladly accepted—whatever the truth may have been about her initial feelings. She was also excited by the prospect of working in Greenland. Fanck had secured the participation, in an advisory capacity, of the legendary half-Danish, half-Eskimo explorer Knud Rasmussen (who would die shortly after the release of the film). In addition, two of the surviving members of the Wegener expedition would serve as advisors: Fritz Loewe and Ernst Sorge. Loewe had not escaped the Wegener tragedy unscathed: his toes became so frostbitten they had to be amputated with a pocket knife and without anesthetic.

In February 1932, shortly after agreeing to appear in S.O.S. Iceberg (and about a month before the premiere of Das blaue Licht), Riefenstahl attended one of Hitler’s speeches at the Berlin Sportpalast. She gives an extraordinarily vivid description of her reaction in her memoirs. Suffice it to say that she was “hooked.”

A number of weeks later, and just before setting sail for Greenland, Riefenstahl wrote Hitler an admiring letter, mailing it to the headquarters of the NSDAP, the “Brown House” in Munich. She soon received a phone call from Wilhelm Brückner, Hitler’s adjutant, inviting her to meet Hitler in the northern German city of Wilhelmshaven, where Hitler was then campaigning for the presidency.

She immediately accepted this offer, even though it meant skipping a party sponsored by Universal to which members of the world’s press had been invited. (As others have noted, this indicates very clearly that Riefenstahl, who was a relentless self-promoter, was very seriously interested in Hitler and his party.) In an example of “synchronicity,” Brückner told Riefenstahl that just prior to receiving her letter Hitler had told him “The most beautiful thing I have ever seen in a film was Riefenstahl’s dance on the sea in The Holy Mountain.”[3]

Adolf Hitler and Leni Riefenstahl, 1934

On her arrival by train in Wilhelmshaven, Riefenstahl was driven to meet Hitler by his chauffeur Julius Schreck (the original leader of the SS, prior to Himmler). Soon she found herself strolling on the beach with Hitler, talking of many things.

Riefenstahl’s memoirs provide a detailed description of this encounter, and a later one on the same day, but some of what she reports strains credulity. Riefenstahl claims, for example, that at one point Hitler impulsively embraced her, then backed off saying, “How can I love a woman until I have completed my task?” He told her “I feel that I have been called to save Germany—I cannot and must not refuse this calling.”[4]

Whatever actually happened that day, it seems clear that Riefenstahl set sail for Greenland in late May an enthusiastic devotee of Hitler and the NSDAP. Hitler had Riefenstahl flown to the dock, where the British liner Borodino and the cast and crew of S.O.S. Iceberg awaited her.

The liner was packed with an enormous amount of equipment, including three airplanes (a small Klemm, Udet’s “famous Motte,” featured in Mont Blanc, and a seaplane), forty tents, two motorboats, a couple tons of luggage, and two polar bears from the Hamburg zoo. (Fanck realized, wisely, that they could not depend upon local polar bears to be available when needed).

Unlike previous Fanck shoots, this one featured a good deal more feminine company for Riefenstahl. Also on board were the wives of Loewe and Sorge, the two scientific advisers. Fanck also brought along his secretary, Lisa, whom he would later marry. Even Udet had his girlfriend in tow.

Fanck was angry with Riefenstahl for missing the party, and at first she kept the reason for her absence a secret—but not for very long. According to one account she carried with her an autographed copy of Mein Kampf and a framed photograph of Hitler. According to another account she carried several photos of Hitler, of different sizes, which she photographed against various backdrops at sea and in Greenland.[5]

She found that her shipmates held very different opinions of Hitler. Fanck was an admirer and either already was or would soon be a member of the NSDAP. Several of the men who regularly worked with him were also enthusiastic National Socialists. Riefenstahl later claimed to have discovered Hitler almost by accident and to have been completely ignorant of politics—but this seems highly doubtful, considering that her work on the mountain films since 1926 put her into almost constant contact with a number of men who ardently admired Hitler.

Before leaving Germany, Riefenstahl had agreed to write a series of articles on the making of the film for the magazine Tempo. These were also published later in book form under the title Kampf in Schnee und Eis (Struggle in Snow and Ice).

The voyage to Greenland took eleven days. Riefenstahl writes in her memoirs, “As mountain people, we found the ocean marvelous.”[6] This is a curious statement, which she does not bother to explain. Is it because they simply loved nature in all its forms? Did they find the contrast between mountains and ocean fascinating? The probable truth is that Riefenstahl and the others loved adventures of all sorts. The mountain films are, as I have argued, quintessentially Nordic. This expresses itself in their setting—but, actually, more importantly in the unquenchable desire of the participants to challenge themselves against nature, in myriad ways.

Unloading equipment from the “Borodino”

The Borodino arrived at Uummannak in western Greenland, where Knud Rasmussen had established the Thule trading post, and from which he had set out on in his many “Thule expeditions.” Riefenstahl describes the place as stinking of fish and overrun by hundreds of dogs. For the moment, cast and crew remained on the Borodino—for it took a solid week to unload all of their equipment and make camp. For the rest of the shoot—from June until September of 1932—they lived in tents, creating furniture out of crates. One tent served as a kitchen, and two small tents functioned as dark rooms.

Both the dogs and the bears would prove to be a lot of trouble. A pit was constructed to contain the bears, but they clambered out of it with frightening ease. One of the bears, called Tommy, managed to escape, and cast and crew spent a couple of restless nights until he was caught again. Of course, they didn’t need to worry about being surprised by Tommy in the dark, as the sun shone twenty-four hours a day.

In any case, the real dangers on this shoot were posed not but by bears but by icebergs. As much of the story involved the characters stranded on a huge iceberg, Fanck had to search for an appropriate one on which they could film. This proved extremely problematic. For one thing, the Eskimos who worked with them refused to kayak past an iceberg, for a very good reason: icebergs not only float, they have a tendency to capsize, dumping off anything that happens to be on them, and sometimes crushing anything alongside. All the icebergs Fanck encountered were far too unstable.

After awhile, the crew’s base of operations was moved further inland, to the fjords of Greenland. There they found icebergs which had just broken off from glaciers, and were therefore harder and more stable. Still, shooting on them was extraordinarily dangerous. One day an iceberg split in half while most of the cast were standing on it! There were a number of near-fatal accidents, in fact. In a case of life imitating art, Dr. Sorge went missing at one point and was found again after Udet flew off in search of him.

By the end of the summer Fanck had shot almost nothing but footage of icebergs floating by his camera. Little of the scripted scenes had actually been shot. Very reluctantly, he decided to shoot a number of sequences in the Swiss Alps. These involved what Riefenstahl refers to in her memoirs as the “acting scenes,” and were probably scenes set on the iceberg and in an ice cave (more on this later). Production stills also show the use of a large studio tank.

Riefenstahl at the film crew’s camp

As I have discussed in earlier installments in this series, Fanck was a fanatic about realism, and his locations and “stunts” were almost always real, and involved the actors and not professional stuntmen. It must have irked him to have to employ such fakery (the American version of S.O.S. Iceberg, in fact, employs far more). Still, Fanck’s S.O.S. Iceberg contains enough real locations and dangerous stunts to satisfy almost anyone.

In September, Riefenstahl and a number of others sailed back to Germany on the Disco, a Danish freighter. By this point, she was suffering from a number of illnesses, including bladder colic and an ingrown toenail. Still, she was sorry to leave Greenland, which had had a peculiar effect on her, and the rest of the cast and crew. Riefenstahl writes in her memoirs:

What is the miracle that casts such a spell on this land without trees, without flowers, without vegetation, except for the swamp grass during the summer months? . . . The magic of Greenland is spun like a veil from thousands of invisible silk threads. We see differently there, we feel differently. Europe’s issues and problems lose their meanings—they fade away. In Greenland we were barely conscious of the things that agitated us at home. We carry a gigantic ballast of superfluous, unproductive things that can never make us happy, and that seemed to vanish in the ocean—no telephone, no radio, no mail, no car. We find we can do without all these things. And we had time. Our real lives were restored to us.[7]

Back in Germany, Riefenstahl found herself the object of the unwanted advances of Joseph Goebbels—who seemingly would not be deterred. It was with some relief that she relocated in December to Sankt Anton am Arlberg, in Austria, near where the “acting scenes” would be shot (by both Fanck and Tay Garnett). Due to the weather, however, shooting was delayed for weeks.

Hans Ertl

On January 30, 1933 Riefenstahl was in Davos in a hotel sauna with photographer Hans Ertl (her lover during the Greenland shoot) and several others. According to Ertl she left the sauna at one point, wearing nothing at all, to take a call from none other than Hermann Goering. He was calling to inform her that Hitler had just been appointed Chancellor of Germany.

Some days later, Udet arrived to personally fly Riefenstahl to Lake Bernina, where exterior “sets” had been constructed and iced over to simulate the surfaces of icebergs. The majority of the footage shot there wound up in Tay Garnett’s American version of the film.

On her days off, Riefenstahl practiced skiing. Her first teachers had been Luis Trenker and Hans Schneeberger, who gave her lessons during the making of The Holy Mountain. In the seven years since, Riefenstahl had become quite accomplished. While shooting the scenes on Lake Bernina—which were completed in June 1933—she entered the Parsenn Derby and won second prize. S.O.S. Iceberg would be Riefenstahl’s final film for Arnold Fanck.

She returned to a very different Berlin, with Hitler now consolidating his power. According to Riefenstahl, Hitler met with her privately and, in effect, offered her control of the German film industry. The catch was that she had to work alongside Dr. Goebbels. Riefenstahl declined, much to Hitler’s obvious annoyance. When she informed Fanck of this turn of events, her former director advised her that she needed to make some kind of peace offering to Hitler.

In the years since they first met and Fanck had been smitten with Riefenstahl, he had given her many valuable gifts. Amongst these was a complete edition of the writings of the philosopher J. G. Fichte, bound in white leather by Fanck’s sister. (Fichte, 1762–1814, was one of the great German idealists, as well as a fervent German nationalist and anti-Semite.) Fanck advised her to give the Fichte edition to Hitler as a gift, which she soon did—anxious to safeguard her relationship with the man who would prove to be her most important patron. Later that same summer, in August, Hitler invited Riefenstahl to film Der Sieg des Glaubens (Victory of Faith), the documentary of the 1933 NSDAP rally.

The German version of S.O.S. Iceberg premiered on August 30th, 1933 at the UFA Palast am Zoo. According to reports, Riefenstahl appeared on stage in a floor-length evening gown. Instead of bowing to the large crowd, she raised her right arm in a Hitler salute.

3. “At the end of the world”

Tay Garnett, the director of the American version of “S.O.S. Iceberg”

The synopsis and commentary which follow deal exclusively with the German version of S.O.S. Iceberg. Kino International has made both the German and American versions available on one disc—and the differences between them are no great surprise. Fanck’s film is replete with silences, accompanied by sublime images of the arctic landscape. In the American version, these are mostly gone.

The Universal executives felt that Fanck’s film was closer to a nature documentary than a drama, so they hired Edwin Knopf (brother of publisher Alfred A. Knopf) to provide new dialogue scenes, and more “plot.” The dialogue he produced is predominantly superfluous and awkward. A number of the German-speaking cast (including Rist and Riefenstahl, but not Diessl) appear in the film speaking English. Their voices were all dubbed, however, as were the voices of some of the English-speaking actors. And the dubbing is predictably awful.

Plotwise, a good deal of the American version makes things explicit that were only hinted at or referred to in Fanck’s film. For example, the German version only refers to how Dr. Lorentz managed to get lost; the American version shows us this. The American version is certainly an interesting curio for those who have seen the German—but it is unquestionably inferior.

Fanck’s film opens with a shot of hand operating an old telegraph straight key, sending the signal S.O.S. repeatedly. (This immediately reminds us of Storm Over Mont Blanc.) Then, the titles appear over a montage of icebergs. We are immediately informed that the film was made in cooperation with the Danish government, “under the stewardship [Protektorat] of polar explorer Knud Rasmussen, based on an idea by Arnold Fanck.”

The score is again by Paul Dessau, whom I discussed extensively in my essay on Mont Blanc. Being Jewish, Dessau fled Germany after Hitler became Chancellor, and before the premiere of S.O.S. Iceberg. His music for this film is very effective, but it is a much more conventionally melodic score than his work for Mont Blanc.

Udet is credited with “Flugaufnahmen” (aerial photography). And Drs. Loewe and Sorge are credited with “Wissenschaftliche Beiräte” (scientific advisement). Hans Schneeberger and Richard Angst are listed as cinematographers. Interestingly Fritz Maurischatt and Dr. Ernst Petersen are credited with “Bauten,” which essentially means “sets” or “set design.” Is “Dr. Ernst Petersen” the same Ernst Petersen who appeared in The Holy Mountain, Pitz Palü, and Mont Blanc—the nephew of Fanck? If so, then I was certainly relying on false information when I reported in an earlier essay that he died in 1930.

Gibson Gowland as Dragan

Riefenstahl plays “Hella Lorentz,” Udet plays himself, Gustav Diessl is “Dr. Karl Lorentz,” Sepp Rist is “Dr. Johannes Krafft” (Diessl’s character name in Pitz Palü). The rest of the cast list provides not just names but information about the characters. Gibson Gowland plays “John Dragan (American researcher).” Dr. Max Holzboer is credited with the role of “Jan Matushek” Finally, Walter Riml plays “Fritz Kuemmel (cook).”

The story opens in an ice-filled stone hut in Greenland. A man’s hands open a volume on which is written “Diary of Professor Lorentz.” The date on the first page is 4 October 1919. (It is not clear why the film is set at this time. Perhaps it is to assure us that it is not a depiction of the Wegener expedition. However, all the technology and clothing of the film is clearly from the 1930s.) An entry reads “At the edge of the world.” Another, dated 5 April 1920 reads “Day 187 on Karajak Glacier. The highest glacial wall in the world.” Fanck then shows us incredible footage of a glacier breaking up, as huge fragments go tumbling down into the polar sea. Lorentz writes in his journal: “What no man has seen before: The hour of a glacier’s birth.”

Lorentz’s entries grow increasingly more desperate: “Hunger! Hunger!” and “I want to see people again!” But the only living things in Lorentz’s world are seals and polar bears. And Fanck shows us the latter desperately pursuing the former, as well as many striking, exceptional shots of icebergs. The spring thaw has arrived and Lorentz is jubilant. “Freedom!” he writes in his journal. But huge walls of ice falling from the glacier destroy his kayak. Now Lorentz is trapped. “The road is too hard,” he writes.

The scene shifts from the icy wilderness to the center of civilization itself: Germany. A number of men have gathered to hold what appears to be a kind of inquest regarding the fate of Lorentz. The search for him has proved unsuccessful. Seated around the large conference table are the members of the search party: Dr. Johannes Krafft, John Dragan, Jan Matushek, Fritz Kuemmel, and Ernst Udet (again, playing himself). This is the first time in a Fanck film that we clearly hear Udet speaking.

They reluctantly draw the conclusion that Lorentz must be dead. Matushek, a thin man with a long face and noble bearing, states that it is impossible that Lorentz still lives, “but a scientist should not use the word impossible!” Dragan, the American, is a hairy, heavy-set man with a kind of wild and brutish appearance. He declares in broken German “Lorentz . . . tot” (“Lorentz . . . dead”).

When Krafft is called upon he immediately leaps to attention, as if he is the defendant in a criminal case. He was the leader of the expedition, and perhaps he feels that his performance is on trial here. Speaking of performances, Sepp Rist delivers a decidedly peculiar one in this scene. He is stiff and awkward, and though it is only three years since Mont Blanc, the bloom of youth seems already to have left him. His delivery is full of odd silences—indeed the whole scene is, and the effect is almost Bergmanesque.

Walter Riml

Krafft is absolutely adamant that Lorentz could not possibly have survived. Much to his shock, the chairman of the meeting presents him with the broken end of ski on which is written “Karajak Glacier, day 206. Stone hut. Position 77.3 lat., 68.6 long. Save my diaries. Lorenz.” The significance of this, which will become apparent later, is that the search party was looking in the wrong place. Sepp Rist reacts to this news with an odd grimace, revealing a set of crooked teeth.

The scene now immediately shifts to Lorentz’s home in Germany, where Krafft is meeting with Hella Lorentz, the explorer’s wife. Riefenstahl wears a dress with a wide, braided collar and stiff, braided shoulders. It looks vaguely Teutonic, like a costume left over from Lang’s Die Nibelungen. Riefenstahl seems more feminine here than in any of her other Fanck films. Behind her, on the mantelpiece, there appears to be a photograph of Udet and a small model airplane. There is the slight suggestion in this scene that Krafft and Hella are (or were) something more than friends. She calls him by the nickname “Hannes,” and they use the familiar du with each other.

“What was your husband doing at Karajak all by himself?” asks Krafft, who is clearly agitated. “Up there, at the end of the world [am Ende der Welt]. Without saying a word to us, he just left one day.” There’s a great deal of background that is simply implied in this film. We are supposed to understand that Krafft and Lorentz (and apparently some of the others depicted in this film) were part of an expedition, and that at a certain point Lorentz broke away from the rest and went off on his own—apparently because he wanted to beat the others to Karajak.

“Karajak was always his dream,” Hella says.
“And I had to pay for it, with my reputation as comrade [mit meinem Ruf als Kamerad].”[8] Krafft blames Lorentz for heading off to Karajak without him, but he clearly also feels that he is guilty of some personal failing. In the American version, Lorentz gives Krafft the option of going with him, but Krafft declines. What is clear is that the dramatic subtext to the German version involves a quest for redemption on Krafft’s part. And here we may say something else about the film’s meaning.

In calling Rist’s character “Dr. Johannes Krafft” and “Hannes,” Fanck is deliberately connecting the character to the “Krafft” of Pitz Palü and the “Hannes” of Mont Blanc. (Just as he is connecting Riefenstahl’s character to the “Hella” of Mont Blanc.) As I noted in the Introduction to this piece, Mont Blanc represents the climax of Fanck’s treatment of the “problem of the sexes”—and is thus the third in the “trilogy” that includes The Holy Mountain and Pitz Palü.

The Dr. Johannes Krafft of S.O.S. Iceberg is, in essential (but not literal) terms, the Krafft/Hannes of the earlier films come down from his icy, mountain isolation. And his problem is no longer one of relating to the opposite sex. His problem has become how to relate to other men, and to the masculinity in himself. In a sense it is easy to be a man—a real man—in the world of the mountains. It is much harder to be a real man in the modern world. And S.O.S. Iceberg is an allegory dealing both with the breakdown of Kameradschaft (comradeship) in the modern world, as well as men’s disconnection from the Traditional ideal of spiritual virility.

In The Holy Mountain, Luis Trenker plays a character very much like Krafft/Hannes, but he is known only as “the Friend.” The story centers upon the tragic conflict of the eternal masculine, represented by the Friend, and the eternal feminine, represented by Diotima (Riefenstahl). This conflict threatens to destroy the Friend’s relationship with his devoted comrade Vigo, whom he almost kills. In other words, the injection of the feminine element into his life almost negates the friendhood (if I may put it that way) of the Friend. But it is not to be. In the end, the Friend sacrifices his life for Vigo.

As I wrote in my essay on the film, “In the end, the ideal triumphs over nature; the uranic triumphs over the chthonic. His desire for Diotima, the call of nature and the eternal feminine, and even the instinct for self-preservation proved weaker than his love for his friend, for whom he gladly surrendered his life.” The film closes with a dramatic, final intertitle: “And so shines forth over his holy mountain, the greatest word that stands over humanity, LOYALTY” (Die Treue). Ultimately, what characterizes the Friend’s nature just is treue Kameradschaft (as implied by his very “name”).

S.O.S. Iceberg returns to this theme of comradeship. Only here comradeship is broken. This is not the comradeship of the mountain, but of the world below. Krafft and Lorentz are modern men. And they have both, in a way failed the other: Lorentz by going off on his own and bringing shame to his friend; Krafft by failing to find him—principally, it would seem, because of his stubborn refusal to believe in the possibility of Lorentz’s survival. This seems to represent both a failure of vision and a failure of will on Krafft’s part.

Lorentz’s going off to Karajak on his own is clearly a reckless act, but also one of vision and daring. And we must ask why exactly he decided to abandon the others. As we will see later, Lorentz notes in his diary that “I wanted to beat him [Krafft] to it.” But as the American version suggests, it may be that Krafft did not believe in Lorentz’s vision. If so, then Lorentz went off on his own because he knew that Krafft had chosen to play it safe (or safer—as one can hardly accuse any arctic explorer of lacking guts). Here, Lorentz embodies (at least in part) the Traditional conception of the spiritually virile man. Krafft represents man in a (relatively) degraded form. He is too prudent, too “sensible” to risk everything for a grand vision. Like Nietzsche’s Last Man, he “has a regard for health.”

And so Krafft’s quest to find Lorentz represents more than just the reparation of broken comradeship: it represents Krafft’s quest to reconnect with the masculine ideal. All men today are Johannes Krafft. All of us must lose our selves in order to find ourselves. We must lose the small, grasping, “practical,” socialized imp we call the “self” to find the true self, which is the reverse of all of this and is, as someone once said, “slim and lean, nimble as a greyhound, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel.”

To do this, furthermore, Krafft must go to “the end of the world.” He must go completely beyond the civilized world—much further than anyone went in any previous Fanck film. He must (and we must) go beyond not only the physical confines of modern civilization but beyond its degrading, emasculating spirit. And we, and Krafft, do this, of course, at a point in time that is also “the end of the world.”
To return to our story, Hella says “if only we could locate his diaries.”

4. “Lorentz lives!”

Riefenstahl and Udet

In an abrupt shift, the story advances three weeks into the future, and we see Krafft breaking Lorentz’s diaries out from under a layer of ice. He and his comrades seen earlier—Dragan, Matushek, and Kuemmel—are in Greenland, and all but Kuemmel have grown beards. With his beard, long hair, and outrageous furry breeches, Rist looks like something out of the Sagas. When he steps out of Lorentz’s stone hut, he finds his comrades outside with their dog, complaining. This is a constant element in the scenes that follow, as relations between the men grow worse and worse.

Krafft reads in the diaries: “Day 222. I wanted to beat him to it.” There follows a line which is hard to translate but may be rendered “Indeed, it was not treated [gehandelt] in a comradely [kameradschaftlich] manner. But my God, the road is too hard!” In other words, Lorentz is acknowledging that it was wrong of him to simply turn his back on Krafft and go off on his own. Krafft does not react negatively to this. Instead, he is pleased to find evidence in the next lines that Lorentz may be alive. He reads aloud from the diaries: “Day 283 at Karajak. My last hope. I’ll jump from floe to floe across the open fjord to the other side where Eskimos live in the village of Thule. Thirty kilometers of open water. Little hope of getting across. I might be pulled out into the sea if the tide sets in too soon. Therefore, I’m leaving my diaries here.”

Thule will be a familiar name to many readers. It is a name packed with many meanings, and many peculiar associations. To begin with the literal setting in the film, Thule (now known as Qaanaaq) is a town in the northern portion of a municipality in northwest Greenland called Qaasuitsup. Explorers gave it the name Thule, which has a long history dating back to the ancient Greeks.

The fourth-century Greek explorer Pytheas, whose writings have not survived, referred to a land (or area) which he called Thule. Polybius in his Histories (c. 140 BC) says that according to Pytheas Thule was a region where “there was no longer any proper land nor sea nor air, but a sort of mixture of all three of the consistency of a jellyfish in which one can neither walk nor sail, holding everything together, so to speak.” This may simply be a description of the Arctic Ocean.

Strabo’s Geography (c. 30 BC) states that Pytheas held that Thule was “six days sail north of Britain, and is near the frozen sea.” Pliny the Elder (23 AD–79 AD) again cited Pytheas, stating that in Thule “there be no nights at all, as we have declared, about mid-summer, namely when the Sun passes through the sign of Cancer; and contrariwise no days in mid-winter: and each of these times they suppose, do last six months, all day, or all night.”

Scholars have offered many conjectures as to the actual identity of Thule, including Iceland, Greenland, and some part of Scandinavia. And some believe it to be simply a myth. Western Esotericists, however, have long held Thule to be an actual place, though one that is not necessarily easy to reach. As some of my readers may already know, the Thule Society (Thule-Gesellschaft), formed in 1918, was closely associated with the rise of the NSDAP. The society believed that Thule was the capital of Hyperborea, home of the Aryan race.

To return now to our tale, Krafft decides that they will follow Lorentz’s path across the fjord. Matushek tries to talk him out of it, however. They survey the area, which is mostly open water dotted with small ice floes. And the distance to Thule is 30 kilometers. Krafft proposes that they make it there by jumping from one ice floe to another! Matushek worries, quite reasonably, that they will drift out to sea on one—and he believes that Lorentz is certainly dead. But there is no way that Krafft will succumb to such thinking a second time. He insists that Lorentz is still alive.

The scene now changes to an airfield in Germany. Udet is standing on the tarmac smoking a cigar and watching a biplane doing wild loops in the air above. With evident satisfaction, he says to a male colleague, “If only you were as advanced as this girl. Next time she’ll come to Greenland.” The other man replies, “She’s better at everything.” The plane then lands, and we are not surprised when Hella clambers out of it, clearly pleased with herself.

Superficially, the Hella of S.O.S. Iceberg is a lot like the Hella of Mont Blanc. But the Hella of the earlier film was a dysfunctional proto-feminist unable (at first) to give herself to the spiritually virile Hannes. There is nothing neurotic about the Hella of S.O.S. Iceberg. She is an archetypal Teutonic heroine: completely feminine and completely devoted to the man in her life (Lorentz), but no helpless ninny either. She is smart, brave, and capable.

Someone brings Udet a newspaper reporting on the latest news from the Greenland expedition: Lorentz’s diaries have been found, and he is believed to be “probably still alive.” Udet hands the newspaper to Hella. She glances at it then looks up and off into the distance. In a sort of dreamy tone she utters one word: “Lebt” (“He lives”).

Meanwhile, back in Greenland, the men are now carrying out Krafft’s plan. Linked together by ropes, they are jumping from floe to floe, using skis as paddles. The dog is still with them. There follow a number of harrowing and suspenseful moments.

(Dessau’s music for these scenes not only builds suspense, it effectively conveys arctic cold and desolation.) Krafft jumps onto one floe but slips into the frigid water, his bare hands clawing at the ice. At one point, the dog (who was called Nakinak) becomes stranded on a floe and the men have to rescue him.

After traversing a great distance on one relatively large flow, using a makeshift sail, the men realize that they are drifting out to sea. To make matters worse, they are menaced by a huge polar bear, who looks like it might jump into the sea and swim after them. Time passes. Using his binoculars, Krafft spots a flag atop a huge iceberg. It must have been planted there by Lorentz! They paddle over to the iceberg and climb onto it, carrying their equipment with them. But the bear boards the iceberg with them! Krafft hurls great pieces of ice at the bear until finally it jumps back down into the water and disappears.

All the while, Dragan complains. Kuemmel tries to cheer him up: “Work makes life sweet,” he says, and enlists Dragan’s aid in pitching their tent. Their troubles, of course, are far from over: though they have switched icebergs, they are still drifting inexorably out to sea!

Krafft soon discovers a “cave” on the upper part of their iceberg. Inside, he finds Lorentz wrapped in heavy furs. “Lorentz!” Krafft cries. And then “Karl! Karl!” Though he is alive, his condition is far from good. Krafft tells the others and, after they finish making camp, he has a long talk with Lorentz. “Look,” says Lorentz, pointing to his legs. “The punishment was harsh.”

“Too harsh. Too damned harsh,” replies Krafft. Although it is never made clear what injuries he has sustained, the suggestion is that he is suffering from frostbite.

Lorentz disagrees with Krafft’s judgment, however. “I deserved it,” he says. “Because you four are lost now.” In other words, Lorentz realizes that his recklessness has now put the other men at grave risk. They then hear a loud rumbling, as pieces of glacial ice crash into the sea. “This is the music you’ll have to get used to,” Lorentz says.

5. “S.O.S. Iceberg!”

Orginal German poster for S.O.S. Iceberg

The next day, Krafft listens on the radio for a signal, but gets only static. He then begins sending an S.O.S. Meanwhile, Dragan is setting out provisions for four, until Kuemmel reminds him that he is forgetting about the dog. Dragan responds that they could make five portions out of the dog. “I’d sooner make ten out of you!” Kuemmel shoots back. Dragan then announces that he doesn’t want to give any food to Lorentz. “Do you want Lorentz to starve?!” Krafft cries in astonishment. It seems that Dragan is becoming increasingly desperate and irrational. However, Kuemmel succeeds in saving the day by catching some fish. Yodeling, he climbs up into the cave with them and says, cheerily, “Let’s feast!”

At last, Krafft manages to pick up a signal on the radio. Some outpost is signaling to them, asking them to send their exact location. Krafft transmits: “Sixty kilometers south of Karajak.” However, what he hears in reply is: “We’re waiting.” They’re not picking up his signal! At this point, the men begin to despair. Krafft practically goes mad, frantically signaling “S.O.S.” over and over again.

The scene shifts, however, to the home of a plucky little blonde boy, probably in some Scandinavian country. He is a hobbyist, in the midst of building a toy. Nearby is a radio set. Suddenly, he hears a Morse signal and takes it down: “S.O.S. Iceberg.”

And now other radio operators pick up Krafft’s signal as well. Fanck cuts back and forth between the operators—French, German, Japanse, American, etc.—relaying the S.O.S. The cuts become more and more rapid until each image lasts a fraction of a second. And over it all is a cacophony of voices: “S.O.S. S.O.S. S.O.S.” Now the whole world knows. It is an extremely effective scene.

The camera then pans from a radio on a table across the room to show Hella, again very elegantly dressed, listening to a report that a signal from the Greenland team has just been picked up. Fanck then immediately cuts to Hella in a seaplane, donning her goggles. Yet again, the brave Teutonic woman is off to rescue her man! (Just as we saw in The Holy Mountain, Storm over Mont Blanc, and in 2008’s North Face, an homage to Fanck.) The scenes of her plane flying over Greenland are truly spectacular. Udet, of course, did the actual flying.

Meanwhile, with no idea at all that anyone is coming to rescue them, the men grow increasingly dejected. Lorentz says to Matushek, “Everything’s being pulled out to sea by this monster of a fjord.” Dragan now seems to go completely mad. He tries to harpoon the dog, only to be stopped by Kuemmel just in the nick of time. Dragan staggers out of the cave crying “To the light! To the light!” (All of this makes one wonder what exactly Fanck thought of Americans!)

Krafft now leaves the cave and goes below to the area where the tent has been erected. He kneels at the edge of the water and embraces the dog, “It would be easy for you to jump in, with your nice thick fur coat,” Krafft says. (One has to be impressed by the all the love and consideration shown to this dog—another quintessentially Nordic trait.)

This seems to give Krafft an idea—and suddenly he jumps into the water! He swims out to an ice floe, clambers onto it, then swims to another, and another. It seems as if Krafft has gone a bit mad himself. In desperation, with no hope of rescue, he has decided to follow Lorentz’s own plan: to swim from floe to flow across the fjord until he reaches Thule and can send help to his friends.

Then, however, he spots Hella’s plane. “Hella! Hella!” he cries, though it’s not clear how he knows that it’s her. She does not seem to see him and keeps flying around the area. Now Lorentz, deep in the ice cave, hears her as well and wakes the others. They rush out and begin building a fire and waving to her.

Hella and Lorentz are reuinted

Finally she sees them, and decides to land. At first things look good—but the seaplane skims along the surface of the water and collides with the iceberg! Hella manages to jump out just as the aircraft bursts into flames. The men quickly fish her out of the icy water. At this point, all concerned—including the audience—must be wondering “what now?”

Hella and Lorentz are now reunited. In a moving scene, he tries to stand up and come to her, but falls. She rushes forward and embraces him. Hella’s arrival, however, has only made the situation worse.

No one seems to have noticed Krafft’s absence, and he is still off on his own, hopping from ice floe to ice floe. Now he spots another plane in the sky—but the scene that follows is a peculiar one. Krafft desperately tries to signal to the low-flying plane. It is not clear whether or not the pilot sees him. Suddenly, however, the plane—which has no pontoons—simply goes smacking, nose first, into the water! The pilot climbs out and perches himself on the slowly-sinking aircraft. At the same time, Krafft is drifting on an ice floe. It is not even clear whether or not they see each other.

Nevertheless, Krafft continues on his way, swimming from floe to floe. It soon becomes apparent that he is growing increasingly exhausted and is likely suffering from hypothermia. It should be noted that there are no sound effects in these scenes, there is only Dessau’s music. As the wind and waves begin to become more violent, and Krafft’s situation more desperate, Dessau introduces a chorus (which is clearly supposed to represent the winds). The effect is dramatic, and an eerie and ominous pall hangs over the film at this point.

Back at the iceberg, Hella and the male friends she had intended to rescue have now run out of fuel for their stove. This means that they must eat their fish raw. The situation seems to present no problem at all for Dragan, who promptly bites the head off of his fish. Hella looks as if she is about to be sick, and we can hardly blame her.

Outside, two polar bears are fighting over a seal and creating a ruckus. When Mautshek goes outside to investigate, Dragan steals his fish! Matushek harpoons one of the bears. I have watched this scene over and over again, and either the actor actually does harpoon the bear, or some extraordinarily advanced trick (advanced for 1933) was employed here. Sadly, I think the harpooning is real.

The bear is only wounded, however, and it thrashes about, dislodging the harpoon—then both bears go after Matshushek! He screams for help, and Kuemmel rushes out to try to save him. But it is too late. Matushek is in the water and one of the bears has jumped in after him and is tearing him to pieces. At the same time, the iceberg begins to rock and ice comes crashing down from the nearby glacier.

The mad Dragan now seizes on this opportunity. He pulls out his knife and kills Kuemmel. Then he climbs up to the ice cave, knife drawn, and enters with a wild look in his eyes, menacing Hella and Lorentz. Just then, however, the iceberg shakes violently as more glacial ice plunges into the water. Dragan loses his balance and goes tumbling down the iceberg and into the water, where he is covered (and presumably killed) by huge pieces of falling ice.

Hella spots Udet

Now another seaplane appears in the sky not far from our heroes. It is Udet, at last! He lands near a two-masted schooner, which has apparently been searching the area. (Knud Rasmussen can be glimpsed briefly on deck.) Udet reports: “I haven’t seen anything so far.” He instructs them to search a different area, then takes off again. The footage of Udet flying through the Greenland landscape is truly thrilling, no more so than when he suddenly seems about to plow into a glacier, then pulls up at the last minute. He doesn’t realize it, but he is now quite close to what remains of Krafft’s party.

Hella hears Udet flying overhead. She rushes outside and begins waving frantically. Udet sees Hella and dips so low it looks like he almost hits her. He loops around the area in spectacular fashion, letting Hella know very clearly that she has been spotted. Then he lands next to the iceberg. Hella tells him to fly over Karajak and look for Krafft. “Get Eskimos for help!” she cries.

Udet among the eskimos

Udet takes off again and finds Krafft very quickly. He lands in the midst of the ice floes, and a water-logged and exhausted Krafft climbs aboard the plane to triumphal music by Dessau. Udet’s plane now flies over the village of Thule, mentioned earlier. The Eskimos pour from their huts to stare at the plane, accompanied by what seems like several hundred semi-wild dogs! Fanck has a great deal of fun in these shots, showing the Eskimos gawking awkwardly at Udet’s great iron bird. (No doubt this scene would be condemned as “racist” today.)

Udet lands, leaving Krafft to swim to shore while he has a smoke (not even the most dire of situations stops Ernst Udet from taking a cigarette break when he wants one—watch the final scenes of Mont Blanc). Krafft communicates with the Eskimos in their native tongue, and the only recognizable words are “iceberg” and “kayak.”

Eskimos to the rescue

The Eskimos now spring into action. They hop in their kayaks and begin rowing to the iceberg to save Hella and Lorentz. These scenes, which feature about fifty to sixty Eskimos in kayaks, are beautifully shot, exciting, and joyous. The earlier gloom has now lifted, as we know that our heroes are about to be rescued. Fanck shoots the Eskimos from above (though it is not clear from what vantage point—perhaps another iceberg). And he even puts a camera in one of the kayaks. The Eskimos also do an amazing trick where they “spin” 360 degrees in their kayaks, lolling to one side, going underwater, and coming up on the other side.

Hella and Lorentz are brought to Thule safely. In the final scene, we see the schooner sailing away from Greenland with the Lorentz’s and Krafft on board. Hella embraces her husband as Krafft looks on. (Is there a hint of jealousy in his expression?) They are sailing not far from the iceberg which seemed for a time like it would become their icy tomb. As they look on, it suddenly and dramatically capsizes. Nearby, Udet’s plane takes off and disappears into the sky.

Thus ends S.O.S. Iceberg.

6. Concluding Reflections on S.O.S. Iceberg and the Fanck Films

Hella and Lorentz menaced by Dragan

What we find above all in Fanck’s films is a tragic sense of life. Of all the films, The Holy Mountain comes the closest to an utterly negative, Schopenhauerian rejection of life. In the end of that film, only a moral ideal (that of loyalty, die Treue) is shown to be capable of redeeming our existence. The sense of life conveyed in The White Hell of Pitz Palü is hardly different. Storm Over Mont Blanc, however, ends on a far more optimistic note. In that film, “Hannes” achieves a kind of rapprochement with the feminine, and thus with life, that was denied to The Holy Mountain’s “Friend” and Pitz Palü’s Johannes Krafft.

S.O.S. Iceberg is an expression of the optimism that Mont Blanc ends with. The sense of life is still tragic, but the approach to life is now more Nietzschean than Schopenhauerian. No matter what dangers our heroes find themselves in, and no matter how many die, the mood of S.O.S. Iceberg is sunlit and joyous. It is a life-affirming and fate-affirming film.

Aside from Dragan’s rampage at the end (which, plotwise, seems largely gratuitous and unnecessary), the only human conflicts in S.O.S. Iceberg are all of the “man vs. himself” variety. And they involve instances of lingering guilt and self-doubt. Krafft feels that he has failed Lorentz not only by failing to find him on the first expedition, but also because he (apparently) did not believe in Lorentz’s dream of reaching Karajak. Lorentz feels guilty for going off on his own and making Krafft look bad. If I am right in thinking there is a hint of romantic feeling between Krafft and Hella, Krafft may wonder if he gave up on finding Lorentz too soon because he wanted Hella for himself. And Hella may have foolishly flown off to Greenland because her feelings for Krafft (if she has any) made her feel as if she has betrayed her husband.

The suggestion in S.O.S. Iceberg is that its characters are on a quest to redeem themselves. This is typified by Krafft’s mad, self-sacrificial attempt to swim from floe to floe in an effort to rescue the others. (And when he does this, of course, he is mimicking the reckless heroism of Lorentz, who also went off on his own without telling his comrades.) In the end, they all find redemption: Krafft proves himself to be a good comrade after all, and as brave as Lorentz; Lorentz is rescued and reconciled with Krafft; and Hella is reunited Lorentz, as Krafft stands aside and chooses not to come between them.

Past failings are redeemed in S.O.S. Iceberg, and one is left with the feeling that the road is now open and that anything is possible. And the old demons of earlier Fanck films are exorcised. Gone is the conflict between the masculine and the feminine. Gone is the archetype of the spiritually-virile male freezing to death (or almost freezing to death) in his mountain realm, unable to reconcile himself to the world. Gone is the contrast between the pure and noble Olympian world above, and the decadent world of man below.

One has the feeling that a new world is on the horizon, one in which the memory of past wrongs and failings will be cast aside, men and women will become truer to life, and values like honor, nobility, and loyalty will be revived. This was, of course, exactly the mood that prevailed in Germany when the National Socialists seized the day.

Arnold Fanck was not a philosopher, but he was a thoughtful and well-educated man. Fanck’s own views, as I have noted before, were decidedly to the right of center, and this comes out in various ways. But these are not “ideological” films. The ideas, attitudes, and inflections one finds in them are not there as a result of some didactic intent. These films are a largely unselfconscious expression of the Nordic soul. I made this point in the very first installment of this series: my review of 2008’s North Face.
What is it about the Nordic soul that gets expressed in Fanck’s films?

First of all, we have the joyfully tragic sense of life I have already just discussed, and which we find even in the Sagas. It is a sense of life that is tragic, but heroic. Its heroism expresses itself preeminently in testing oneself against nature—against “the regions where it is hard to live” (as Nietzsche put it); regions that are frigid, remote, and lofty; regions that repulse and terrify other races. There is a closeness to these regions that approaches a sense of psychic connection, and a love for natural phenomena and animals of all kinds. This closeness to nature and mania for physical challenge goes hand in hand with a deep distrust of cities and civilization.

The Nordic man makes an ideal comrade (Tacitus declared that no one surpasses the Germans in loyalty), but he is not a “lover of mankind.” He is loyal to his comrade, but his comrade is always “another self” who craves silence and solitude. The warmth of human bodies, especially in a mass, tends to repulse him—unless the unifying principle of that mass is devotion to some life-surpassing ideal.

Though he distrusts “civilized life” and the falseness and finery that go with it, Nordic man is drawn to technology, as an expression of his power to master and overcome nature. Hence, we find in Fanck’s films both anti-modern and pro-technology elements. One finds the same “tension” in National Socialism. There is no necessary conflict between the two, however, unless one believes that technology is inherently corrupting. Fanck’s films (especially Storm Over Mont Blanc) are archeofuturist: he clearly believes that what has corrupted the world is not technology per se, and that it is possible to live in a technologically advanced world that also honors and upholds Tradition.

And central to that Tradition, and to Fanck’s worldview, is the idea that life is about men actualizing themselves as men (the achievement of “spiritual virility”) and women as women. There are two paths here, not one unisex path. And while the path for woman always leads to actualization in attachment to a man, the path for man is two-tiered: leading to a woman, and to comradeship with other men, in some quest that goes beyond hearth and home.

There is, of course, much more that could be said here about the Nordic spirit. The mountain films give us a unique window into that spirit. It is impossible to imagine any other people having given rise to them. And only those with something of that Nordic soul within them will be able to see this and to love these truly beautiful and moving films.

Notes
1. Leni Riefenstahl, Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir, no translator credited (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 89.

2. Ibid., 95.
3. Ibid., 105.
4. Ibid., 107
5. Steven Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 93. I have to say that I find the latter account incredible.
6. Riefenstahl, 108.
7. Ibid., 122.
8. Kino’s subtitle translates Kamerad as “partner” – which fails to express the sentiment being conveyed here. Kino’s subtitles for S.O.S. Iceberg are generally reliable, but miss many nuances.