The Holy Mountain

On the mountain, the dancer Diotima meets the climber Karl and the two become attached. Karl's friend Vigo is convinced she loves him instead. That misunderstanding poisons all three relationships, and the matter is settled high up, on the glacier, somewhere nobody comes back from. Arnold Fanck's film is among the best known examples of the mountain film, a genre particular to German cinema. Nature is not the backdrop here, it is the force driving the story; the shooting was done on real glaciers in the Swiss Alps and took roughly a year and a half. It was Leni Riefenstahl's first appearance on screen, and the script was written directly for her. What she went on to direct afterwards is a separate and still contested chapter.