Global Mountain Cinema

Kamaal Haque is Associate Professor of German and affiliated faculty in Film & Media Studies at Dickinson College. He is the co-editor, with Christian Quendler, of a special issue of Colloquia Germanica entitled “Beyond the Classical Bergfilm” (2023). He has published numerous articles on the Bergfilm, most recently, “Der amerikanische (Alp-)Traum: Der verlorene Sohn (1934) und Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (1936).” Christian Quendler is Professor of American Studies, Film and Media at the University of Innsbruck, where he chairs the Department of American Studies. He is the author of three monographs, including The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema (2017). He is principal investigator of the research project “Delocating Mountains: Cinematic Landscapes and the Alpine Model,” sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund. Caroline Schaumann is Professor of German Studies at Emory University and affiliated faculty in Film and Media, Environmental Sciences, and the Sustainability Minor. She has co-edited three anthologies and written two books, among them Peak Pursuits: The Emergence of Mountaineering in the Nineteenth Century (2020), which sheds light on culturally constructed notions of wilderness, masculinity and national identity.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsList of ContributorsIntroduction: Christian Quendler, Caroline Schaumann and Kamaal HaquePart I. Genre1. Cinematic Mountains: The World and Vision from a HeightTom Gunning 2. Ski Comedy: On the Light Side of Mountain FilmEva-Maria Müller  3. High and Low: Porosity in the Neapolitan Anthology Film I vesuviani (The Vesuvians, 1997) and Mario Martone’s Episode 'The Ascent'Daniel Winkler4. Inversions of Mountain Cinema: Post-Humanist Ethics and Aesthetics in Zhao Liang’s Behemoth (2015)Christian Quendler Part II. Nation 5. Creative Geography and Volcanic Mountains: Arnold Fanck’s Die Tochter des Samurai (1937) as Mountain FilmQinna Shen 6. Scaling the Mountain, Elevating the Nation: The ‘Golden Age of Himalayan Climbing’ on FilmHarald Höbusch 7. Unshaming Brokeback Mountain: Rocking Heimat in Transnational Coming-Out Mountain MoviesRalph J. Poole8. Transcultural Negotiations of Mountain Aesthetics in Tiger Zinda HaiSophia Mehrbrey Part III. Environment9. Leni Riefenstahl’s Mountain Films: Ecologizing the GenreKamaal Haque 10. A Glacial Pace? Mountain Cinema and the Imagination of Climate ChangeAlexa Weik von Mossner 11. From Locus Amoenus to Locus Absurdum: Skiing at the End of Nature in Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (2014)Caroline Schaumann 12. Festival Obscura: Gender in Festival-Driven Mountaineering DocumentariesJulie Rak Part IV. Media13. The Evening Rains in Bashan: Mountains in Chinese Cinema in 1980Mia Yinxing Liu 14. Film, Memory, and Intermediality: Exploring the Andes in La cordillera de los sueños (2019)Michael Fuchs and Anna Marini  15. Liberating the Captured Image: Bergfilm Legacies and Digital Technologies in Free Solo (2018) and The Alpinist (2021)Seth Peabody 16. Geological Platforms, Embodied Infrastructures: On the Mountains in Death Stranding (2019)Daniel ReynoldsIndex

The essays in this wide-ranging collection take readers from the peak of mountain cinema in the 1920s and 30s to the alternative political, affective, and aesthetic possibilities that emerge in their long shadow. Recruited into film genres of nationalist and imperial domination in which the visibility and majesty of mountains work to naturalize a political order, mountains are also the secreted spaces for resistance, endurance, and queer intimacy. What we learn from the diverse essays in this collection is how mountains shape our understanding of cinema and how cinema frames mountains to the measure of fantasies that span the 20th and 21st century globe.