Delocating Mountains:Cinematic Landscapes & the Alpine Model

This research project contributes to a cultural history of mountain cinema that extends beyond classical approaches to mountain film by investigating three types of delocations. In a first and general sense, `delocation` refers to the cinematic mediation of mountains, the transposition of mountains onto the film screen. This not only addresses the different ways in which cinema responds to art historical forms of the representation of mountains, but also the roles mountains play in probing the representational power or virtue of the filmic medium, what it should or manages to achieve (during different historical periods). The second way of moving mountains is geopolitical. It focuses on exchanges between European and North American ideas of mountains and mountain film traditions that shed light on the aesthetic and representational conventions of mountain cinema beyond the tradition of the classical German mountain film. The third form of delocation emphasizes filmic representations of mountains that shift their gaze from ascent to descent. While alpinist perspectives have often celebrated heroism, masculinity, and national glory, this change of perspective from ascent to descent allows the foregrounding of ecological, collective, and feminist concerns. The conceptual basis for these delocations is the Alpine model, by which mountain historians understand the formative role that the Alps have played in developing globalized forms of knowledge and representation of mountains since the Enlightenment. Cinema not only plays an important role in the modern dissemination of the Alpine model, it also shows its limits. By examining the Alpine model in these three ways, this project takes important steps towards a comprehensive cultural history of mountain cinema and offers new insights into film and mountain studies. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Christian Quendler (University of Innsbruck)