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)

"Delocating Mountains: Cinematic Landscapes and the Alpine Model" rethought how mountains have been imagined, filmed, and understood through cinema. Rather than treating Alpine films of the 1920s and 1930s as a closed historical genre, the project developed a new, expansive cultural and media history of cinematic mountains-one that is global, transnational, and urgently relevant in an age characterized by environmental crisis. The project explored how mountains function not just as scenic backdrops but as powerful cultural models that shape how societies understand nature, space, time, and human-environment relations. Mountains are sites where deep geological time meets visible, human-scale change (e.g., melting glaciers, collapsing ice, and extractive damage), making them especially meaningful symbols in the Anthropocene. Building on the concept of the "Alpine Model" (which frames mountains as spaces of tourism, leisure, risk, and more recently sustainability), the project introduced the idea of "delocation." "Delocation" describes the movement of mountain images, ideas, and practices across media, regions, and cultures. Cinema, with its capacity to transport landscapes and sensations across borders, has been central to this process. Research unfolded along three major lines. First, the project reframed mountains as cinematic models (material, perceptual, and conceptual) rather than as a single genre tradition. Drawing on film theory and media history, it showed how mountains have inspired new visual styles, camera techniques, and ways of thinking about space in cinema. Second, the project expanded the canon of mountain films by tracing transnational networks, from early European and U.S. cinema to contemporary films set in the Alps, Appalachia, the Andes, the Himalayas, and beyond. This work highlighted overlooked films, comic and satirical interventions, avant-garde experiments, and global mountain cinemas outside Europe. Third, the project challenged heroic narratives of ascent and conquest by focusing on descent, vulnerability, and extraction-from tragic climbing failures and Indigenous mountain knowledge to climate-driven ice collapse and mountaintop removal mining. The project's outcomes are substantial. It produced one monograph, one edited volume, four special journal issues, and around twenty peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, significantly reshaping debates in film studies, ecocinema, and environmental humanities. In addition, the team organized two international conferences and a series of workshops, fostering exchange among scholars, filmmakers, and cultural institutions. A growing internal archive of approximately 250 mountain films now supports ongoing and future research. Beyond academia, the project had a strong public impact. Its insights informed university teaching, summer schools, public lectures, film screenings, and collaborations with local cinemas and film festivals. By re-centering mountains as dynamic, contested, and globally connected spaces, "Delocating Mountains" offered new ways of thinking about cinema, culture, and environmental change at a moment when mountain landscapes are undergoing rapid and visible transformation.