Global Mountain Cinema

by Kamaal Haque (Editor), Christian Quendler (Editor), Caroline Schaumann (Editor)

Overview

This book is dedicated to the particular challenges and opportunities mountains raise for histories and theories of cinema. In German-speaking countries, the relationship between mountains and cinema has been largely reduced to a small canon of Alpine filmmakers whose work has been categorized as the Classical Bergfilm. However, from a transnational and transgeneric perspective, the field of mountain cinema is not only much richer and more diverse, but also addresses questions that are vital to film and media studies and inform postcolonial and environmental discourses in the Anthropocene. In this vein, our volume goes beyond national contexts to provide a timely and much-needed investigation into the generic innovations and intersectional negotiations of national, ethnic, and gender norms that take place in mountain cinema and its related media forms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399519977
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	05/31/2025
Series:	Traditions in World Cinema
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

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 Universityand 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.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Christian Quendler, Caroline Schaumann, Kamaal Haque

Part I. Genre

1. Cinematic Mountains: The World and Vision from a Height
Tom Gunning 

2. Ski Comedy: On the Light Side of Mountain Film
Eva-Maria Müller  

3. High and Low. Porosity in the Neapolitan Anthology Film The Vesuvians (I vesuviani, 1997) and Mario Martone’s episode ‘The Ascent’
Daniel Winkler

4. 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 The Samurai’s Daughter (1937) as Mountain Film
Qinna Shen 

6. Scaling the Mountain, Elevating the Nation – The ‘Golden Age of Himalayan Climbing’ on Film
Harald Höbusch 

7. Unshaming Brokeback Mountain: Rocking Heimat in Transnational Coming-Out Mountain Movies
Ralph Poole

8. Transcultural Negotiations of Mountain Aesthetics in Tiger Zinda Hai
Sophia Mehrbrey 

Part III. Environment

9. Leni Riefenstahl’s Mountain Films: Ecologizing the Genre
Kamaal Haque 

10. A Glacial Pace? Mountain Cinema and the Imagination of Climate Change
Alexa 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 Documentaries
Julie Rak 

Part IV. Media

13. The Evening Rains in Bashan: Mountain in Chinese Cinema in 1980
Mia Yinxing Liu 

14. Film, Memory, and Intermediality: Exploring the Andes in La cordillera de los sueños
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
Daniel Reynolds