The Holy Mountain on DVD (1926)

Well worth watching.

HardToPlease from Herts , 27/04/2005

Disc 2 of the Holy Mountain is actually the documentary: The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.

It is a fascinating story, and tracks her career from beautiful young actress to the lauded director of Triumph of the Will and Olympiad, through the post-war accusations of Nazi-sympathiser and subsequent shunning by mainstream cinema, and to the filming of African tribes and underwater of her last years.

Whether you believe she deserved her ostracism - and I don't - there can be no doubt she had a great talent and passion for film-making, particularly documentaries. And you cannot but be impressed by a woman who took up sub-aqua diving (to over 100ft) when she was 70 years old.

The quality of her work is just spell-binding.

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Touching the (Nietzschean) Void

Steph2576 from SHEFFIELD , 20/12/2004

From naiad to naïf, Leni Riefenstahl plays an innocent attuned to the primal spontaneity of nature. Hers is an enchanting performance, evoking the raw power and rhythm of nature; dancing and climbing her way to a depiction of all that is good and true, but also tragic, eternal and unconquerable in the human condition. A Nietzschean ‘will to power’ informs a plot that is as remarkable in imaginative scope – especially in the final dream scene – as reactionary in intellectual underpinning. Nihilism and mysticism were never so convincingly portrayed.

As period piece, Holy Mountain captures perfectly the bizarre mix of heady idealism and moral confusion that gripped German high-society in the twenties. Whereas Thomas Mann, for example, championed reason in his seminal novel of ideas, The Magic Mountain (1924), Arnold Fanck (director of Holy Mountain, 1926) celebrated unreason. Anti-humanist reverence for nature is here rendered as epic mythology, as eco-ethic for the Ubermensch. Environmentalists beware; this is a movie where disenchantment demands an imaginative and tragic death, rather than organic banking and recycled misanthropy!

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One for the Connoisseurs

Cato , 19/04/2007

Definitely one for the connoisseurs of German cinema. Leni Riefenstahl (looking rather like a young Margaret Thatcher) plays a dancer who is attracted to a young mountaineer who has an older friend who is in turn smitten by her. The plot is pretty straightforward, if rather laboured, but Arnold Fanck's direction and the cinematography is really rather special, and obviously affected Riefenstahl, who in fact had a hand in the direction herself.

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Classic mountain movie

Savage from London, England [Highly rated reviewer] , 07/07/2006

Although Fanck's later movie, 'Die weisse Holle vom Piz Palu' might be better-known, this is the most iconic, and probably the best, mountain movie ever made. A genre that was popular throughout the decade with middle-European audiences, the plots always involved a small group of people battling against a mountain.

Here we have Leni Riefenstahl as a dancer (and a rather hilarious one - this is also a very easy film to mock), with whom a mountaineer (Luis Trenker) is particularly smitten. He asks her to marry him and she agrees (having always dreamt of such a man), but he won't take her up the mountain with him. So while she's waiting down below, she entertains herself with the winter sports and finds herself consoling a young skier, Trenker's best friend...

The plot is silly beyond all knowing, but what Fanck is intent upon doing is to show how small man is against the monumental backdrops - even the hotel seems to have been built on the grandest scale imaginable. Occasionally, as with Trenker's mother's cottage or the skiers' hut, normal scale is resumed, but then you get an establishing shot, showing how small the building is against the mountains.

It's all very beautiful to look at, an hugely impressive artistic achievement - but that doesn't, perhaps, mean you have to take it as seriously as it does itself.

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Classic mountain movie

Savage from London, England [Highly rated reviewer] , 07/07/2006

Although Fanck's later movie, 'Die weisse Holle vom Piz Palu' might be better-known, this is the most iconic, and probably the best, mountain movie ever made. A genre that was popular throughout the decade with middle-European audiences, the plots always involved a small group of people battling against a mountain.

Here we have Leni Riefenstahl as a dancer (and a rather hilarious one - this is also a very easy film to mock), with whom a mountaineer (Luis Trenker) is particularly smitten. He asks her to marry him and she agrees (having always dreamt of such a man), but he won't take her up the mountain with him. So while she's waiting down below, she entertains herself with the winter sports and finds herself consoling a young skier, Trenker's best friend...

The plot is silly beyond all knowing, but what Fanck is intent upon doing is to show how small man is against the monumental backdrops - even the hotel seems to have been built on the grandest scale imaginable. Occasionally, as with Trenker's mother's cottage or the skiers' hut, normal scale is resumed, but then you get an establishing shot, showing how small the building is against the mountains.

It's all very beautiful to look at, an hugely impressive artistic achievement - but that doesn't, perhaps, mean you have to take it as seriously as it does itself.

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One for the Connoisseurs

Cato , 19/04/2007

Definitely one for the connoisseurs of German cinema. Leni Riefenstahl (looking rather like a young Margaret Thatcher) plays a dancer who is attracted to a young mountaineer who has an older friend who is in turn smitten by her. The plot is pretty straightforward, if rather laboured, but Arnold Fanck's direction and the cinematography is really rather special, and obviously affected Riefenstahl, who in fact had a hand in the direction herself.

Read all highest rated reviews