Dr. Arnold Fanck (1889-1974) can be viewed as a significant pioneer of independent filmmaking and his film, The Holy Mountain (1926), as a landmark entry in the Bergfilme genre. The production, however, was riddled with problems. Unseasonably warm weather in the German Alps melted the expensive ice palace set constructed on a frozen lake; snow turned to slush; various injuries afflicted Riefenstahl, Schneider, and cinematographer Hans “Snowflea” Schneeberger; filming was delayed, and UFA threatened to abandon the project. Mimicking the film’s archetypical romantic triangle, affectionate rivalries boiled within the small crew. According to Riefenstahl (whose memoirs contain much melodrama), Fanck was deeply in love with her, but she wasn’t interested. Instead, she and Trenker were in love, a situation Fanck continually tried to undermine by privately suggesting to Trenker that Riefenstahl and Schneeberger were secretly having an affair. When the winds shifted and cold weather returned, it took great professionalism for everyone to sleep in the same winter cabin without chaos ensuing. Despite everything, the film was clearly a formative experience for Riefenstahl, who absorbed as much about filmmaking as she could. When Fanck was summoned to UFA to determine the film’s fate, Riefenstahl took it upon herself to film the flower-filled springtime scenes in Interlaken. (According to her, the high quality of the rushes convinced UFA to keep the production.) When Fanck was unable to shoot the nighttime scenes of the rescue party searching at night with their flares, Riefenstahl directed those scenes as well, even, according to her memoirs, after a magnesium torch burst beside her and singed half her face. (“I tried to put out the flames with my left hand and keep cranking the camera with my right hand until the scene was done.”) The visual power of the film is undeniable, with its monumental compositions emphasizing towering rock formations, natural light cascading over craggy surfaces, and the crashing waves of the sea. Although Fanck was known as a realist (he detested makeup or stunt doubles and insisted on shooting on location) the film boasts poetic uses of dissolves, superimpositions, silhouettes, time-lapse cinematography, and, of course, slow motion montages, the latter of which clearly anticipates Riefenstahl’s veneration of pool divers in Olympia (1938). The ice palace was reconstructed and its sequence is strikingly lit, a carryover of expressionist techniques. Fanck had obviously learned his craft in the preceding years; considerations of screen direction and consistency of movement from shot to shot are carefully maintained, while his use of irises and masking illustrate his eternal passion for nature photography.

by Doug Cummings (excerpted from the enclosed booklet essay in the Eureka disc)