Through Ice and Snow. Mountain Films as Educational Films in the 1920s and 1930s

The article focuses on two cinematic representations of alpinism and its multimedia performance practice in the popular education programmes of the Vienna Urania in the 1920s and 30s: First on Arnold Fanck’s early mountain film Im Kampf mit dem Berge (DE 1921). I am not concentrating on Fanck’s film version, but on the version produced by the Urania for popular education, which was distributed throughout Austria as Urania-Kulturfilm. I ask how the Urania utilised Im Kampf mit dem Berge as part of a media package (consisting of films, lectures and slides) and which media-pedagogical methods and practices were thereby employed. How did entertainment and instruction relate to each other? The second film I will look at is the ambitious Austrian amateur film Mit Steigeisen und Eispickel (c. 1934) produced and filmed by a group of mountaineers. I investigate how this film relates an established repertoire of images to elements of educational films to introduce the audience to new techniques of ice climbing: What techniques of showing and instructing are discernible and to what extent are the film and its performance practice ‘educational’? To sum it up, I interpret the mountain and alpine film as educational film and investigate the role and qualities attributed to the medium film as a teaching tool for conveying and disseminating contemporary ideas of the mountain and alpinism.

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