Der Berg des Schicksals / The Peak of Fate (2022 FWMS restoration)

Arnold Fanck: Der Berg des Schicksals / The Peak of Fate (DE 1924). According to the photo data this is Hannes Schneider.  However, this scene is not about the character portrayed by Hannes Schneider but one of his rivals. From: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, Wiesbaden. Photomontage: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2023 Catalog.

Der Berg des Schicksals: ein Drama aus der Natur.

    [La montagna del destino] (DE 1924) regia/dir, scen, sogg/story, mont/ed: Arnold Fanck. photog: Arnold Fanck, [esterni/exteriors, locations: Hans Schneeberger, Herbert Oettel; interni/interiors: Eugen Hamm, Sepp Allgeier]. scg/des: Leopold Blonder. 

    cast: Hannes Schneider (lo scalatore/the climber), Frida Richard (sua madre/his mother), Erna Morena (sua moglie/his wife), Luis Trenker (suo figlio/his son), Hertha von Walther (Hella, sua figlia/his daughter), Gustav Oberg (l’amico dello scalatore/the climber’s friend), Werner Scharschmidt (montanaro/mountaineer), H. von Hoeslin (montanaro/mountaineer), Arnold Ernst Fanck. 

    prod: Arnold Fanck, Berg- und Sportfilm GmbH, Alpenfilm AG.

    v.c./censor date: 17.3.1924; 30.1.1930. uscita/rel: 10.5.1924 (Theater am Nollendorfplatz, Berlin).
    Unreleased in Finland.

    copia/copy: DCP, 86', col. (da/from 35 mm nitr., orig. 2432 m, 20 fps; imbibizione/tinting); did./titles: GER. fonte/source: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, Wiesbaden. Restauro/Restored 2022.

    Musical commentary: Mauro Colombis, Frank Bockius.

    Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM): Riscoperte / Rediscoveries, 12 Oct 2023

Luciano Palumbo (GCM 2023): " In 1913, 24-year-old Arnold Fanck, a German geology student in Zurich and a keen skier and free-climber, joined a group scaling Monte Rosa, filming and documenting the expedition. The experience sparked his passion for photography and filmmaking, and after the First World War he co-founded Berg- und Sportfilm GmbH Freiburg (Freiburg Mountain and Sports Film Co.), a small production company specializing in short information documentaries, honing his technical skills over the next few years. "

" In 1924 his first fiction feature, Der Berg des Schicksals, saw him taking on all the essential roles – photography, scriptwriting, direction, editing, production – while entrusting the acting to the Olympic ski champion Hannes Schneider (the climber) and the professional mountaineer Luis Trenker (playing his adult son). The female roles were given to experienced players: Erna Morena (Das indische Grabmal, Joe May, 1921) as the climber’s wife; character actress Frida Richard (Rausch, Ernst Lubitsch, 1921) as his mother; and Hertha von Walther (Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney, G. W. Pabst, 1927) as his daughter Hella. "

" Fanck began with images rather than a script. He first shot a huge amount of footage, guided solely by his aesthetic taste and his fascination for the practice of climbing and idyllic mountain settings. Then he used writing to create a narrative that would allow him to bring together as many images as possible. Here he was inspired by the true story of the climber Carlo Garbari (“Carbarie” in the film), who had died in a solo attempt to scale the Guglia (“spire”) di Brenta (now commonly known as the Campanile Basso) in the Dolomites. "

" Scenes shot in a studio by Eugen Hamm and Sepp Allgeier thus had a supporting function, enhancing the initial story and giving it a real dramatic charge. The result is a rich series of images, unique of their kind, with the leading roles played by the mountain, nature, and the elements. "

" However, the film’s unconventional quality clashed with the preconceptions of the distributors, whose fear of the lack of a solid screenplay led them to downgrade it to the status of a popular documentary, with low expectations for profit. With limited finances, Fanck compiled a negative from which he made a small number of prints, enriched with occasional tinting. He promoted the film as belonging to a genre of his own conception, a “Natur-Spielfilm” (“Nature-fiction film”), retaining this definition for all his subsequent productions. He entrusted the poster design to the celebrated illustrator Theo Matejko, and finally, at his own expense, rented a cinema in Berlin, the Nollendorf-Theater, where he had the film screened twice a day over the four summer months. Box office and critical reactions were extremely positive, and multiple sold-out screenings paid off Fanck’s expenses, finally attracting the attention of a proper distributor. "

" With improved financial support, Fanck worked on a new version of the negative, integrating originally discarded scenes and takes to meet the demand from both audiences and critics and thus create material for new prints. The original version of the film was revised, and now included entirely new shots, tinting, and intertitles, which ultimately led to a truly new version, which was submitted for approval by the Board of Censors in 1930. "

The restoration 

" The last two nitrate prints of the film surviving in Germany were digitized for the 2K restoration of Der Berg des Schicksals by the Friedrich-Wilhelm- Murnau-Stiftung, beginning in 2018. One had belonged to Gosfilmofond, Moscow, while the other, about 200 metres longer, formed part of the private collection of Leni Riefenstahl, and is now part of the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen, which also holds other nitrate fragments of the film. Both prints are now housed in the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. "

" Study of the edge codes made it possible to determine that both prints were made using material produced in the period of the film’s original release. However, the nature and form of the physical and duplicate (printed-in) splices indicate that substantial differences in editing between the two prints occurred at different times, contemporary with and subsequent to the film’s distribution. The editing of the longer print appeared to be more reliable, and in the absence of secondary sources that might offer certain confirmation, this version was used, in spite of various gaps in the narrative and inconsistencies, which were compensated for or digitally corrected using the other surviving print, which served as a guide for reconstructing the tinted scenes and their narrative function. "

" The complex processing was carried out with the support of the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien and the generous participation of sponsors from the Freunde und Förderer des deutschen Filmerbes e.V. The result is believed to be the most complete and accurate version of the film surviving between the post-war period and our own day. " – Luciano Palumbo

AA: I see Arnold Fanck's Der Berg des Schicksals for the first time.

It is a film that belongs firmly to the category of the sublime in the strict classical sense of Edmund Burke et al.

It is still one of the great mountain films, a foundational one, and also a breathtaking action film. Seemingly the extremely dangerous and thrilling feats are real, shot on location in the Dolomites - visible to us here in Pordenone and on display from above on our flights, including those of Air Dolomiti. Siegfried Kracauer in his Frankfurter Zeitung review on 9 April 1925 mentioned Cimone della Palla, Latemar and Rosengarten among the specific locations. I have visited the Dolomites only once, during my early visits to Pordenone, but not further than the highest bus stop.

Kracauer also registered novel and at the time unique features of visual aesthetics such as grandiose reflections on mountain lakes, clustered seas of clouds that billow and ebb, encircling peaks, heavenly apparitions never seen before. He also noticed the feats of the death-defying free climbers negotiating bare vertical mountain walls and wide chasms with derring-do.

Because the locations and the athletes are real, the movie is close to documentary, and key evidence to Bazin's ontology of the cinema and Kracauer's Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality.

Rugged mountains, mysterious mists, ravishing waterfalls, glowing clouds, tempests with thunder and lightning - and snowstorms and avalanches - convey the force of nature in a purely elementary way.

Learning from Nordic cinema, which in turn was influenced by Frenchmen (Perret) and Americans (Griffith, Hart), Arnold Fanck turns his mountain world into a soulscape. 

In the Bergfilm, the landscape is also a deathscape. Like in the three sailor dramas on display in this year's Le Giornate, there is also a sense of a call of death, of der Todestrieb, the death drive, an experience felt widely in countries that had endured the Great War. The term itself was coined in the context.

The restoration is wonderful, although occasionally cursed by the current sin of exaggerated tinting. The art titles are elegant. Image size varies, with pillarboxing, masks and vignettes. Silhouette images bring drama and style to the visual storytelling. The composition is tight and disciplined. 

Stunning.